The Verge interviews
We do a lot of interviews on The Verge. For your reading (and sometimes viewing) pleasure we decided to pull them all together in one convenient place. Yes, every single interview is collected right here. Grab a root beer or some mineral water and your reading glasses, and enjoy.
Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas talks apps and self-driving cars at CES 2013
Ten years ago, automakers didn't have CES on their minds, but it's a very different game today — there are more than half a dozen of them exhibiting here in 2013, a product of the smartphone revolution and an ever-growing list of computing systems embedded in modern cars. Ford has been here longer than just about anyone in the business, so we sat down with the man at the top of the company's tech scene, CTO Paul Mascarenas, to get an update.
Can Ford really turn AppLink into a standard?
S...
Gaming
Exclusive interview: Valve's Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming
By T.C. Sottek and Tom Warren
We just sat down for a rare and wide-ranging interview with Valve CEO Gabe Newell, who opened up to The Verge with details about the company's upcoming "Steam Box" gaming hardware, the future of the Steam digital distribution platform, and even gaming itself. For starters, Valve isn't just attacking the living room; the Steam Box will be designed to work across multiple screens in the home using networking standards like Miracast, ideally allowing users to...
'Steve Jobs is gone. Now there is a lack of innovation' says Huawei's consumer CEO
"The best smartphone is from Huawei. Not from our competitors."
Bold words from a bold guy. Huawei's head of consumer electronics Richard Yu didn't leave much room for doubt over his intentions when announcing the Ascend Mate and Ascend D2 smartphones today — the company truly believes its new products can compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung on quality while offering lower prices. But US carriers have so far been reluctant to accept the prospect of high-end smartphones from Huawei;...
Samsung USA president Tim Baxter: 'I do not have a 4K TV in my house... yet.'
Samsung just announced a host of new TVs at CES, including an extremely beautiful 4K set with an angular, easel-like stand and a new smartphone-inspired gesture UI for its smart TVs. That's a lot of moves towards the future of TV, and I grabbed a few moments with Samsung USA president Tim Baxter to talk things over. Tim told me that he doesn't have a 4K TV in his house just yet, but that he will soon — and from there we talked about the future of television delivery. Can the internet...
Leikr's GPS sportswatch: how a group of ex-Nokia triathletes are innovating on the wrist
The Leikr GPS sportswatch launched on Kickstarter last week, and we just had a chance to sit down with head of US product development Ryan Krems to take a look at their prototype and learn about how the company got its start. The team behind Leikr all previously worked at Nokia's now-closed Copenhagen office, and are all avid athletes. That focus on athletic usage shows up in Leikr's design — the watch is more functional than stylish. It features a two-inch color display with Gorilla Glass;...
'Life of Pi' editor Tim Squyres on the pains of creating CG tigers and shooting in 3D
Tim Squyres is a film editor, and director Ang Lee’s partner in crime for the last two decades, having edited all but one of his films. Among others, Squyres edited Hulk, Sense and Sensibility, Lust, Caution, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best film editing. He most recently edited Life of Pi, an adaptation of the best-selling book that follows the tale of an Indian boy struggling to survive inside a lifeboat drifting at sea. He shares...
MetaFilter founder: Reddit's 'creepy stuff' shows how hard it is to run an open community
MetaFilter (or “MeFi”) is a web community from another era, founded before the days of Digg, Reddit, and Facebook. Created in 1999 by Matt Haughey, the site’s run with just a few employees, but has grown into a fantastic place for conversations that you could spend hours digging into and surfacing links that the rest of the web just wasn’t seeing. Or whether Roadrunner says "beep beep" or "meep meep." MetaFilter is still going strong today, and Haughey took some time to talk to The...
The Yes Men Kickstart a revolt
During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the mysterious, satirical website www.gwbush.com appeared on the web. The criticisms of George W. Bush on it gained media attention worldwide, culminating in a mention by the Presidential candidate at a press conference. The Yes Men were born. Since then, Andy Bichlbaum (real name: Jacques Servin), Mike Bonanno (Igor Vamos), and an ever-revolving gang of comrades have created amusing actions like printing a fake edition of The New York Times in hopes of...
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom: 'I’m not really one for ritual. Life’s more interesting that way.'
Kevin Systrom is the CEO and co-founder of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing and filtering app for iPhone and Android. His company sold to Facebook for close to a billion dollars back in April. Prior to Instagram, he interned at Odeo under the future Twitter co-founders, and worked on consumer products like Gmail at Google for two years. Systrom took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about his favorite people to follow on Instagram, the longevity of image filtering, and his first memory...
Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell: 'Cable companies are at the mercy of content companies'
Michael Powell — yes, that’s Colin Powell’s son — has been a driving force for change in the telecom and TV industry for years. After serving as an FCC commissioner under President Clinton, he was appointed Chairman by President Bush in 2001, beginning an active and controversial four-year run. As Chairman, Powell pushed to leave the exploding broadband market free of legacy telephone regulations while still maintaining support for net neutrality and fining internet providers for...
The Iconfactory's David Lanham on what it takes to build home screen-worthy icons
David Lanham is an illustrator at The Iconfactory, where he designed many of our favorite icons for apps like Twitterific, Acorn, Fantastical, and Coda. His unique style, which combines juicy color palettes with imaginative shapes and creatures, has made him one of the most sought after icon creators today. Lanham took a few minutes to talk The Verge about the art of crafting great icons, the best apps to get stuff done, and what makes Sword and Sworcery so damn good. You can find him on...
New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum: 'Social watching just sounds like wishful thinking'
Somewhere in the past two decades, TV evolved from a wasteland rotting our minds into the premier medium for truly groundbreaking comedy, drama, and storytelling. Series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Oz, and The Sopranos showed that TV could stand on its own against the creativity and vision of movies and novels. Now TV’s experiencing its own golden age with Louie, 30 Rock, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and dozens of other ambitious series competing for our attention. We’ve come a long...
Vizio CTO Matt McRae: 'What's the difference between a tablet and a portable TV?'
Vizio has long been one of the bestselling TV brands in the US — the biggest brand in the country until April of this year when TV sales began to decline overall and Samsung took the lead spot.
Searching for ways to grow Vizio’s business and find new markets falls to CTO Matt McRae, who’s always been blunt in addressing challenges for the tech industry. McRae presided over Vizio’s entrance into the Android tablet market in 2011 and a line of Windows PCs earlier this year — moves...
NBC's Vivian Schiller: social media has made live TV essential again
The war for the living room will ultimately be won not by gadget manufacturers, but by content companies — the people who make and distribute TV itself. But it’s a two-way street: the internet is changing how even the largest producers of television think about their products.
Vivian Schiller has been on the front lines of change for years. She was the first general manager of what has become the Investigation Discovery channel, then the senior vice president of NYTimes.com, and then the...
Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman: 'We better be the ones to cannibalize ourselves'
Bob Pittman’s parents always found it strange when he would crank up the volume on his AM radio to listen along to his favorite shows while doing his homework. "Some people have always been multi-taskers," says Pittman, with a smile, during an interview last week. "People talk about how we’re always checking our smartphones or tablets these days while we watch TV, but really, human behavior hasn’t changed. It’s just new gadgets giving it a different expression."
Pittman’s passion...
Boxee CEO Avner Ronen: 'I'm not sure people want everything on demand'
Boxee CEO Avner Ronen has been trying to reinvent TV for years now — first by building software for hacked Xboxes and PCs, then with the funky Boxee Box media streamer, and now with his first mainstream product, the Boxee TV. With each iteration, Boxee’s gotten closer to the ultimate goal: making it simple and fun to watch TV. We spoke about the future of the industry — and the future of Boxee.
Putting a computer in the living room has been the holy grail in one form or another for...
The Glitch Mob’s Justin Boreta on Mirrogram and merging music and apps
Justin Boreta is a music producer and a founding member of The Glitch Mob, a Los Angeles-based electronic group. But when he isn’t helping to create tracks like "Derezzed (The Glitch Mob Remix)" and "Drive It Like You Stole It," he moonlights as an app developer, dreaming up new ways to compliment music with technology. His first effort, Mirrorgram, debuted on iTunes in early October, enabling users to capture mirrored images with Instagram-like filters. You can find him on Twitter at @...
Losing it at the movies with Film Crit Hulk
Hopefully by now you've run into Film Crit Hulk's Hulk-sized essays around the web on everything from film and video games to the Girls backlash and how to best portray Hulk on film. Or checked out the big green guy on Twitter. Once you get over the all-caps thing — let it wash over you for at least 1,500 words, it's worth it — you'll find yourself digging into the archives for hours, digging up gems like his his meeting Quentin Tarantino or trailing Rian Johnson and the Looper crew at...
Microsoft's chief patent counsel Bart Eppenauer: ‘We believe our patent laws have served the country very well.’
Bart Eppenauer is Microsof't Chief Patent Counsel — the man who oversees the company's enormous portfolio of 20,000 patents. That's a big job at a time when technology patents are under increasing scrutiny — especially patents on software and mobile technologies, which have sparked billions in litigation around the world. We spoke for a few minutes about how he sees the landscape changing, and how he's shaping Microsoft's policy for the future.
So what does the Chief Patent Counsel at...
Warren Ellis on futurism, the New Aesthetic, and why social media isn't killing our children
Warren Ellis is a sardonic English comic and book author who has attracted a cult following through dark, smart classics like Transmetropolitan, a cyberpunk take on gonzo journalism and The Authority, a bold superhero comic marked by wide panels and cinematic violence. The "beloved internet curmudgeon," as Vice dubbed him, also maintains a vocal presence on Twitter, Tumblr, and his personal website, as well as in places like Vice, Reuters, and Wired. His pet subjects include space travel and...
Day One journal creator Paul Mayne: 'expressing things without filters is liberating'
Paul Mayne is founder and designer at Bloom Built, a Salt Lake City company that produces Day One, a journaling app for iOS and Mac. With Day One, Mayne has become known as one of the rare developers who can effortlessly create a powerful yet minimalist and refined user experience. Mayne took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about why we should journal, his first memory of the internet, and the app most important to his daily productivity. You can find him on Twitter at @paulmayne.
Path co-founder Dustin Mierau: 'an app without design is like a good story printed on a dot matrix printer'
Dustin Mierau is co-founder and Chief Designer at Path, a journal and social network for Android and iPhone. Before Path, he co-founded Macster, which eventually became Napster for Mac. Mierau took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about the finer points of designing great software, how to stay focused, and about remembering the internet before it was filled with ads. You can find him on Twitter at @dmierau.
Lonely, but united: Sherry Turkle and Steven Johnson on technology's pain and promise
Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, and Steven Johnson, author of Future Perfect, joined forces at the New York Public Library on Wednesday night to discuss their respective books — his new on shelves, and hers new in paperback. Turkle described Johnson as "provocatively utopian," and herself as "provocatively pessimistic." She was kind to describe their two books as a matched set, because at first glance there isn't much in common between the two titles: Alone Together is a dense,...
Frog's Mark Rolston: the 'Minority Report' interface is a 'terrible idea'
Mark Rolston holds the title of chief creative officer for Frog, the venerable design company responsible for the look of Sony Trinitron televisions in the seventies and Apple's minimalistic "Snow White" design language of the eighties. In 1999, it was Mark who personally drove the creation of Dell.com to become the top-grossing e-commerce site in the world. Now, as a C-level executive with 18-years at Frog, Mark's responsible for driving the global creative vision for the 43-year old...
Box CEO Aaron Levie: 'I thought Google Wave was the future of the Internet, but I was wrong'
Aaron Levie is the 27-year-old cofounder and CEO of Box, a cloud computing company leading the charge against Microsoft to modernize the workplace. He's Jack Dorsey's favorite entrepreneur, and a guy known for his keen ability to elicit both laughs and investments. Levie took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about the best tennis shoes to wear with a suit, tweeting uncensored, and if "the cloud" as we know it will exist in a decade. You can find him on Twitter at @levie.
'Attackers will follow the users': an interview with F-Secure’s Mikko Hyppönen
Mikko Hyppönen is the Chief Research Officer at F-Secure, where he’s spent the last two decades tracking, dissecting, and disabling malware, from viruses to trojans to worms to botnets. His long time in the field gives him a sense of history: last year he documented his search for the minds behind Brain, released in 1986 and considered the first MS-DOS based computer virus. Via email he discussed how malware has changed over the last twenty years, the future of smartphone viruses, and just...
Meat, metal, and code: Stelarc's alternate anatomical architectures
In 1972 the man born Stelios Arcadiou took on a new name. He refashioned himself as the artist Stelarc, whose work often explores what he calls “alternate anatomical architectures.” He’s probed his body with cameras, creating films that lay bare the visceral inner workings of his stomach, lungs, and colon. He’s deprived his body, spending five days with his eyes and lips sewn shut. He’s manipulated his body with electricity, connecting electrodes to his muscles and letting others...
Film without words: the 70mm story of life, death, and rebirth in 'Samsara'
With blockbusters focusing on CG spectacle, and high-profile filmmakers rushing towards the latest digital innovations, one cinematic option often gets left behind: the grandeur of 70mm. Hollywood’s own high-resolution alternative to 35mm film, the format was used to shoot the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson have created a new film shot entirely on the format: Samsara.
A follow-up to 1992’s Baraka, the film eschews...
The Awl Music's Eric Spiegelman on streaming music: 'Algorithms don't take risks'
Trying to recapture the spirit of MTV's golden era of music videos, Eric Spiegelman recently launched the Awl Music App for iPad, a companion app for The Awl's Awl Music Tumblr site. It's a simple idea: what if your favorite writers and editors had a way to play the role of online VJ, picking the best music and videos available on the web? Eric took a few minutes to talk about the advantages of Tumblr, the failure of algorithms to create great recommendations, and his favorite music videos....
An interview with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop
I had an opportunity to sit down with Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, to discuss the company's announcements of its latest smartphones and accessories. The polished and professional Elop was visibly excited about the newest crop of hardware and software headed out of the Finnish phone-maker's doors, and he was eager to share that excitement. Most of our conversation stayed on-message with what was discussed at the event today — the Lumia 920 and 820, City Lens, and those colorful docks — but...
Cosmonaut stylus creator Dan Provost on how two guys make a living building hardware
Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt are Studio Neat, the two-man outfit behind the Cosmonaut stylus and the Glif iPhone tripod of Kickstarter fame. They also launched a stop-motion film app for iPhone called Frameographer, but Studio Neat's most recent endeavor is "It Will Be Exhilarating," a new book about indie capitalism and the trials and tribulations of building hardware as a small company. Provost took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about his new book, and about why people today more than...
Apple v. Samsung jury foreman: only the 'court of popular opinion' can change the patent system
When the Apple v. Samsung jury handed in its $1.049 bilion verdict last week, the man that delivered the form itself was jury foreman Velvin Hogan. We recently spoke with the 67-year-old engineer, who described his time participating in the trial as a personal high point — while also cautioning that those who were unhappy with the US patent system should look to public debate to change the situation, not a jury.
"Except for my family, it was the high spot of my career," Hogan said about the...
Lenovo's Gianfranco Lanci on the PC Plus era and the threat of Microsoft's Surface
Fresh off his company's manifold Windows 8 device announcements at IFA 2012, Lenovo's Gianfranco Lanci sat down with us for a few minutes to discuss the present state of the PC industry. It's become something of a nebulous term these days, the PC industry, what with the definition of the personal computer undergoing a transformation into new form factors and types of functionality, but Lanci appears unfazed by this period of flux. He defines the PC world in terms almost equivalent to the...
Noir to near-future: 'Looper' director Rian Johnson talks sci-fi, Twitter, and the fate of film
Rian Johnson almost didn’t make it into film school.
I first met the writer / director in 1993 at the University of Southern California, where we lived in a row of dorm rooms colloquially termed “The Cinema Floor.” The goal of nearly all the students residing there was to attend the university’s renowned film production program — the same one that produced a young George Lucas — but getting in was notoriously difficult, even for those already accepted to the university itself.
J...
Sony's Phil Molyneux: 'consumers weren't embracing' split-screen Tablet P
Sony held a big press event at IFA in Berlin today, but we spent also got to spend some time with Sony Electronics America COO Phil Molyneux in New York. What's interesting is that Sony isn't announcing the intriguing VAIO Duo or Tap 20 Windows 8 PCs in America just yet — Phil told us that SEA wants to announce those later in a more focused way. But we did get to talk about Sony's updated Tablet S, which looks quite nice.
"We put our focus and our energy into creating a beautiful new...
NextDraft's Dave Pell on why email is still the killer app
You may know Dave Pell from his excellent collection of essays over at Tweetage Wasteland, but he's also been hard at work recently with NextDraft, an email newsletter summarizing the day's most important news. Last week, the newsletter made the jump to app form with the launch of NextDraft for iOS. He took some time to talk to The Verge about email's stability and appeal over the years, the need for smart aggregation, and how he fulfills his role as the "Internet's Managing Editor."
Neal Stephenson interview: Kickstarter, swordfighting, and the big novel's staying power
The first line in any story about Neal Stephenson will reference his massive, massively complicated, and massively successful novels. And for good reason. In Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and others, the author has written genre-defining (and genre-busting) fiction. But Stephenson is more than a novelist; he's also a thinker and a doer.
Two recent projects exemplify these qualities. Some Remarks, a remarkable collection of essays, interviews, a brief work of fiction, and a...
EveryBlock's hype 'definitely faded,' says founder Adrian Holovaty, but it's more popular than ever
Adrian Holovaty is the co-creator of the popular open source web development framework Django. He's also the founder of EveryBlock, the five-year-old network of hyperlocal news sites that was acquired by MSNBC (and is therefore now owned by MSNBC's acquirer NBC). EveryBlock was founded in 2007 with a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, which funds journalism projects. Holovaty and his team received accolades for a clever site that plundered public data to create...
Under new management, Oculus intends to commercialize the virtual reality headset
Three months ago, the Oculus Rift was the pet project of a virtual reality enthusiast, literally held together with duct tape and hot glue. Yet as of today, it's raised over $1.6 million on Kickstarter due to thousands of similar virtual reality enthusiasts who want one too. Next year, though, you may not have to be a hobbyist or fund a grassroots project to experience what gaming luminaries like John Carmack are calling "the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen." That's because...
IBM's VP of Emerging Technologies Rod Smith talks pre-crime divisions
Rod Smith's job is to make sure IBM is focused on the nascent technologies that will change the world a decade from now. So perhaps it's no surprise that he has a special place in his heart for the big data projects IBM is running in partnership with police departments across the nation, crunching massive amounts of public information to try to predict where and when crimes will occur. The project, known as CRUSH — Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History — has proven very...
Web & Social
Good design is invisible: an interview with iA's Oliver Reichenstein
Oliver Reichenstein is the founder and director of Information Architects, the Tokyo, Zurich, and Berlin-based design agency. iA's usual trade is website design and consultancy along with the odd concept like the Twitter strikethrough, but the company has also found recent success in iOS and Mac app development. Writer for iPad is a pioneering minimalist text editor, and its focus-enhancing combination of sparse visuals and refined typography has since made the leap to OS X and the iPhone.
R...
Apps & Software
5 Minutes on The Verge with Fantastical creator Michael Simmons
Michael Simmons is co-founder of Flexibits, the company behind our favorite calendaring app for Mac, Fantastical. In building Fantastical, he has become something of a mentor to the app community, embodying simple yet effective design principles. Simmons took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about about building a calendar that understands your words, skeuomorphism, and when / if / how iOS and OS X will converge down the road. You can find him on Twitter here, and find Fantastical half-off...
5 Minutes on The Verge: Matt Novak
Matt Novak writes about history, futurism, and technology for The Smithsonian on his blog Paleofuture, BBC Future, The Daily, and Pacific Standard. He has also contributed to The Verge with a feature on the history of the future of television. He lives in Los Angeles and he recently took some time out of his very busy schedule to answer my (and some of his own) questions. Follow him on Twitter at @paleofuture.
Apple
Sonic mayhem: 'Mass Effect' composer Sascha Dikiciyan's favorite iPad music creation apps
Sascha Dikiciyan, a composer who has contributed to a number of noteworthy video games including Quake II, Borderlands, Tron: Evolution, and Mass Effect 3, has made a living off of using experimentation and unconventional tools in his music over the last 15 years. Therefore, it’s not too surprising that the iPad caught his attention when it launched in 2010; since then the iPad quickly found a place in Dikiciyan’s vast array of music-making tools. However, while in pre-production for what...
Mobile
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins interview: 'we have roughly 80 million users today — Nokia doesn't have that'
I just had a chance to sit down with Research In Motion's recently appointed CEO Thorsten Heins to discuss the current and future states of the company he's now tasked with rebuilding. While there wasn't much new ground to cover given all of the recent news surrounding RIM, he did have some interesting things to say about his business, BlackBerry 10, the competitive landscape, and what happens next for the struggling phonemaker.
"We want to support [current customers] very strongly."
For...
Rhapsody's Rob Reid: 'Copyright law is like doing archaeology in the Mediterranean'
If you're a music or tech fan, you've probably noticed that the current arms race over patents and copyrights has gotten more than a little out of hand. Rob Reid, author and founding father of pioneering digital streaming service Rhapsody, knows a thing or two about the music business' unfortunate state of affairs. Having already explained the art of Copyright Math™ in a recent TED talk, he posits a fantastical scenario: Aliens have been unwittingly pirating the human race's music since the...
Android
Matias Duarte on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and the Nexus 7 (video)
At Google I/O, we sat down with Android's head of user experience, Matias Duarte, to talk about Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Nexus 7, and the premiere Google Now feature. It was a casual conversation where Duarte gave us the skinny on Google's philosophy behind its new products this week. It's Friday, come chill out on the couch with Josh and Matias for 20 minutes of design, insight, and laughs.
'Sword & Sworcery' composer Jim Guthrie: 'If you can think it, you can make it work in a game'
Jim Guthrie got his start within Canada's thriving indie music circuit, where he's rubbed elbows with the likes of Feist, Owen Pallett, and Broken Social Scene. But with the success of his first collaborative video game project, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, he's suddenly found himself a respected and active figure within the indie gaming community. He's been keeping himself fairly busy ever since.
When we met up with Jim last month at Verge headquarters, he was in town supporting...
Apps & Software
Google's Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz on the future of Google+ (video)
Google wants to revolutionize real-world social life with its new Google+ features, including pre-event "Cinemagraphs" and "party mode," which lets users automatically share pictures taken during the get-together. But how does Google plan to build engagement with the network, and what does this mean for the rest of its web tools? We sat down with Google Senior VP of Engineering (and formerly of Social) Vic Gundotra and Product Management VP Bradley Horowitz to discuss where Google+ is going.
"...
Tumblr lead designer Peter Vidani: 'Are we the things we share?'
Peter Vidani is lead designer at Tumblr, which means he has his hands on everything from the dashboard icons to overall design aesthetic of the site. He's also a very active user, as you might expect, with a deep understanding of what makes viral content on the web so contagious. Vidani took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about how we create identities online, why GIFs are so great, and where BMW is failing at design. You can find Vidani on Tumblr here, where his blog's favicon has a...
AMD's mountain: how the second-place PC chipmaker hopes to build cheaper, better laptops
"Think about the mountain," says AMD's John Taylor. He's talking about ultrabooks. "As you get up to $799, $899, $999, you've got 50 SKUs sitting up here, at this place. They're going to fall off." He shapes his fingers into a pyramid, so I can visualize the metaphor.
The fact that Intel has over 110 design wins for its proprietary laptop platform doesn't seem to phase AMD's director of product marketing very much. In his estimation, Intel's ultrabook initiative isn't just driving quality,...
Gaming
Inside Gaikai: how to make cloud gaming as easy as watching YouTube
It's a beautiful day in Aliso Viejo, California, as long as you don't mind a cloudy sky. On this particular occasion, though, the overcast horizon seems fitting, because I'm about to spend the day with Gaikai. Four years ago, video game industry veteran and outspoken prognosticator David Perry imagined that graphically immersive games could be streamed to any computer from the cloud, and early last year, his company Gaikai was one of the first to deliver on that promise. Now, nestled amid the...
Web & Social
'Safe is bad': Andrew Keen on Digital Vertigo
Silicon Valley isn't completely without its critics, but to the outsider's eye, it seems to be a fairly insular environment with its own rules and codes of conduct. Increasingly, however, Silicon Valley makes products which are pivotal to many of our lives, and the characters — the investors and the CEOs — determine how our online lives are managed, stored, and even displayed.
Enter Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur and host of an interview show, Keen On, for TechCrunch,...
Color's Bill Nguyen: 'We're headed toward the singularity, right? Brains in a jar. Teleportation.'
Bill Nguyen is the mad scientist behind Lala, which Apple bought in 2009, and most recently Color, a video broadcasting app for smartphones that lets you share what you're doing with friends no matter where you are. Color got off to a rough start when it launched last year, and even supposedly turned down a $200 million offer from Google, but Nguyen is far from discouraged. He took some time to talk to us about building big things, failing at other things, and even the benefits of owning a...
On The Verge Interview
Damon Lindelof extended interview - On The Verge, Episode 006
Joshua Topolsky and Damon Lindelof speak at length during this extended interview from On The Verge, Episode 006. Watch full episodes at On.TheVerge.Com.
Gavin Purcell: 'people always say I'm gonna be the first cyborg'
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has drawn younger viewers by mixing the usual late night tropes with a smart mix of music and technology — our very own Joshua Topolsky is the resident tech expert — and we talked talk to the one-man "TV producer + nerd + dad" keeping it all running: Gavin Purcell. From his midtown New York office, Gavin spoke with us about his formative gaming experiences, how technology has changed the job of producing for television, and what he's been reading lately. You...
Nicholas Thompson, newyorker.com editor: 'our capacity to absorb information is growing'
Nicholas Thompson's a busy guy. He's the newly-appointed editor of newyorker.com, the website companion to The New Yorker. He's also co-founder of The Atavist, an ASME-nominated company experimenting with new ways of publishing and selling long-form journalism. He's a former senior editor at Wired, a contributor to Bloomberg and CNN, and the author of a book about the Cold War. Thompson spends his time dealing with the intersections between people, journalism, media, and technology, and has...
The Verge Interview: Ford CEO Alan Mulally
For the second time this year, we had a chance to sit down with Ford CEO Alan Mulally — this time in the penthouse of the Hotel on Rivington in New York City. In the half-hour conversation, we discuss the CEO's time at Boeing as a airplane cockpit engineer, alternative energy sources, and how President Kennedy's focus on space exploration inspired Mulally to work in aerospace technology. You'll also hear Alan's thoughts on how to get jobs back in America, what Ford thinks about...
Web & Social
Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email: 'I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned'
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was a recent MIT graduate hired to help build the earliest components of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor to the internet. Tinkering on his own, he decided to build a networked messaging program. Most computers at the time allowed users to message one another, but as so few computers were networked, there was little reason to send messages across computers. Tomlinson hacked together a solution, using the now-ubiquitous @ symbol to...
Web & Social
5 Minutes on The Verge: Edgar Wright
A few weeks ago, we saw the launch of The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator, a new series of web-based short animations created by Edgar Wright and graphic artist Tommy Lee Edwards. At its launch we were given the opportunity to talk to the famous English writer-director (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Spaced, among other geek favorites) and ask him what drew him to Brandon, his feelings on digital media, and why Cornetto ice creams keep getting a cameo role in his films. Follow him on...
Web & Social
Turntable.fm co-founder teases Android app coming 'pretty soon,' is working on international expansion 'as fast as we can'
We had a chance to sit down with Turntable.fm co-founder and chairman Seth Goldstein (sitting center in the above photo) following his appearance at the Berklee College of Music's Rethink Music event this week, where he spoke on a panel about what the musical ecosystem may look like in 2015. In both our short interview and his appearance onstage, Goldstein was a little cagey about what Turntable.fm has planned — when asked about where Turntable.fm was going, he simply said "it'll just be...
Web & Social
5 Minutes on The Verge: Robin Sloan
You may know writer and media inventor Robin Sloan from his writings on media and technology at Snarkmarket with Tim Carmody and Matt Thompson, or more recently from his fascinating Fish tap essay for iOS. He previously worked at Twitter and Current TV, and will publish his first novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore this fall. Sloan took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about the making of the Fish app, dealing with the web's endless flood of content, and more. You can find him online at...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Emily Gould
Emily Gould (pictured right) is 1/2 of Emily Books and the author of an essay collection, And The Heart Says Whatever. She was previously an Associate Editor at Hyperion Books, and an Editor at Gawker.
Sergey Brin: Project Glass feedback 'very useful' so far, 'give us time' to release
We managed to catch up with Sergey Brin tonight, following the charity event where he was spotted wearing Google's Project Glass augmented reality glasses. The Google co-founder told us that the glasses are still very much at the early prototype stage. While he said the company doesn't usually like to announce products so far in advance, Google had done so in this case in order to collect feedback on what people think of the concept, and how they would like to use the product itself —...
The Verge Interview: Ambient Devices CEO Pritesh Gandhi on 'glanceable' data
We're perpetually bombarded with information, 24 hours a day. That's just our connected reality now, and there's very little hope of escaping it. On Valentine's Day, I penned an editorial on how I believe that the secret to distilling this information — the key to preventing humans from collapsing under the ever-growing weight of this data — has been right under our noses for years.
They're called "glanceable" devices, and Massachusetts-based Ambient Devices has been developing them...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Evernote's Phil Libin
Phil Libin is the CEO of Evernote, a cloud-based memory assistant and "second brain" app for keeping track of photos, text, links, and other digital ephemera. He took some time to talk to The Verge about his favorite apps, what he's reading, and the future of the "quantified self." Follow him on Twitter at @plibin.
PlayStation digital content boss Jack Buser: 'never say never' on IPTV and cable partnerships
Microsoft's Xbox 360 has made quite an impressive play to be your living room entertainment companion this year, adding cable partnerships and video services left and right, but Sony's PlayStation 3 got a genuine win today by becoming the first game console with Amazon Instant Video content. We jumped on the phone with Sony this morning to discuss the app — it's a timed exclusive for PS3, by the way, so you won't see it on Xbox anytime soon — and had the pleasure to chat with Jack Buser,...
The Verge interview: David Carr on curation, crowdsourcing, and the future of journalism
David Carr has written about media for over 25 years, from his early days in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Washington, D.C., to his current post at The New York Times, where he’s been for almost a decade. His weekly column, "The Media Equation," covers all aspects of journalism and culture, especially the always-evolving world of online news; his recent work has questioned the rise of Twitter activism, investigated the failure of Tribune media, and mused on Louis C.K.'s successful experiment...
Apps & Software
Paper: the next great iPad app, from the brains behind Courier
Georg Petschnigg throws his hands into the air as he traces the ages of human evolution that led us to develop the fragile wrists we need to use tools. Petschnigg locks his wrist into place and pretends to scribble on an imaginary piece of paper, in the process lamenting the user interfaces we've come to accept from computing platforms. "How do we get back to creating?" he asks. "Developing ideas began as just dragging a stick in the sand."
Today, we mostly use our fingers to interact with...
On The Verge Interview
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson interview part 2
In the second part of their interview Dr. Tyson talks to Josh about why NASA has to take us to Mars, space lasers, killing Pluto, and the iPhone. See the full episode at on.theverge.com.
On The Verge Interview
Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson interview part 1
In part one of their interview Dr. Tyson talks to Josh about life as a meme and why science is important. Watch full episodes at on.theverge.com
Web & Social
5 Minutes on The Verge: Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter is the man behind Tweetie, arguably the best Twitter app ever built. The app was so good that Twitter bought Brichter's company, Atebits, in April 2010 and turned the app into Twitter for iPhone. In this way, he has directly or indirectly inspired many of our favorite apps, and even advises the Sparrow team. Brichter took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about what he's been up to since he left Twitter, how he solves complicated problems, and why the world has gone app crazy....
5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman
The web aficionados among you may know Shaun Inman from his web design site experiments, the Mint analytics package, Fever feed reading app, or more recently, iOS games like The Last Rocket. He took some time to talk to The Verge about the difficulty of implementing touch-based controls, why Super Mario Bros. still works so well, and his favorite pixel art designers. You can find him online at shauninman.com and on Twitter at @shauninman.
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Irin Carmon
Irin Carmon is a journalist and commentator whose work has appeared in publications including Jezebel and Salon, where she's a staff writer. She was kind enough to take five minutes (give or take) to talk to me about the panel she moderated at SXSW, "Curing a Rage Headache: Internet Drama & Activism," as well as the general theme of changing the world in the age of trolls. Her most recent article for Salon, "White Male Nerd Culture's Last Stand," addresses the ways that the conference has...
Apps & Software
Rdio's Wilson Miner: 'iTunes is just a fancy CD changer'
At SXSW 2012, I met with Rdio's head of design Wilson Miner to talk about the music service's new redesign launched yesterday. He explained the redesign has been in the works since the current version launched, and that the team started in earnest about a year ago. I asked about the shift from music apps of the past, like iTunes, that offered full control over metadata, ratings, and smart playlists. Miner said, "my collection is bigger than the iTunes Store was when it launched," and...
5 Minutes on The Verge: Techmeme's Gabe Rivera
Gabe Rivera is the founder and editor of tech news aggregator Techmeme, which he started in 2005 as a one man operation, and which now has a staff of 10 people who also help to run its sister site, Mediagazer. Originally from New Jersey, he now lives in San Francisco with his two Weber grills and four monitors. You can follow him on Twitter here.
MWC 2012
The Verge Interview: Nvidia GM Mike Rayfield on Tegra 3 and LTE
Tegra 3, Nvidia's new quad-core chip for smartphones and tablets, has been the most talked-about new processor at MWC 2012. Its popularity continues a habit the company established last year when almost every phone maker had a Tegra 2 handset to show off. Today's a little different from yesteryear, however, in one very important aspect: America's top two carriers demand LTE in their high-end phones. That poses a conundrum for Nvidia as Tegra 3 is most evidently a high-end part, but without...
GameStop CEO: 'Sony and Microsoft could have cut us off a long time ago'
Today, GameStop announced that it is selling refurbished iPhones, iPads and iPod touch media players at over 1,000 brick and mortar stores. Actually, GameStop CEO J. Paul Raines tells me that there are technically 1,175 stores with iOS devices, as of our interview yesterday morning. It seems like a strange business for a video game retailer to be in, but to Raines, it makes perfect sense: he's got a 200,000 square foot facility in Grapevine, Texas employing 1,700 people to refurbish Xbox,...
5 Minutes on The Verge: Nicholas Felton
Even five years ago, personal data tracking was mostly a fringe activity, something you'd read about in Wired articles profiling lifeloggers that were forever coming up with new ways to gather and analyze data about their own lives. As those sensors shrank and came together in modern smartphones and sports gadgets like Nike+ and mixed with a flood of new, easy-to-use apps, data tracking has become increasingly mainstream. You've probably seen Nicholas Felton's gorgeous Personal Annual Reports...
Mobile
Sony: Android 'doesn't eliminate us from examining other opportunities'
Just days after the closure of Sony's deal to buy out Ericsson from their decade-old Sony Ericsson joint venture, we've sat down with US product marketing manager Stephen Sneeden here at Mobile World Congress to discuss the phone brand's past, present, and future.
The Verge Interview: Qualcomm's Raj Talluri on why you need a Snapdragon in your life
The battle for mobile processor supremacy is heating up in 2012 as core count inflation takes hold and everyone starts gunning after quad-core chips. Qualcomm, however, is perfectly chilled out about it all. Its dual-core Snapdragon S4 chipset showed off some terrific performance in a benchmark run through the AnandTech labs recently and has been featured on a number of marquee devices announced here at MWC. Today I spent a few minutes with Raj Talluri, the man in charge of the whole...
The Verge Interview: Stephen Elop 'more confident than ever' about Windows Phone
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is on hand at MWC this week to help spread the company's message to business partners, carriers, and the press. Ever gregarious and approachable, Elop gave us a few minutes of his time today to discuss the first year of Nokia's transition, which got started with the announcement of a strategic alliance with Microsoft in February 2011. He was candid about the downsides of this fundamental change in strategy, noting the number of jobs Nokia has had to cut in an effort to...
MWC 2012
Nokia's Stefan Pannenbecker on design: 'thinness isn't everything'
Stefan Pannenbecker is the Vice President for Industrial Design at Nokia, where his job consists mostly of trying out a variety of crazy new ideas in search of the one or two that would help Nokia maintain its edge in design. The company's fiercely loyal fanbase has grown at least in part due to some iconic designs (remember the 8110?) and a consistently excellent build quality in its phones. Those are the hardware design department's chief competencies and the things Pannenbecker has been...
MWC 2012
The Verge Interview: Nokia's Damian Dinning on the 808 PureView's history and future
Nokia rather blew the doors off MWC 2012 this morning by announcing a 41-megapixel camera sensor ensconced within the confines of a smartphone, the 808 PureView. The product of five years of development work, the collection of technologies under the PureView umbrella is only starting off with the Symbian-based 808 and should make its way to other devices and platforms over time. Nokia is promising amazing image quality from this camera thanks to some oversampling wizardry — taking data from...
The Verge Interview: Kieron-Scott Woodhouse, Head Designer at ADzero
Last week we sat down for a chat with Kieron-Scott Woodhouse, the designer behind the ADzero bamboo phone. Still an undergraduate at Middlesex University, Woodhouse tells us how he managed to get noticed, how it feels to see his work nearing production, the designers that influence him, and why he chose bamboo.
We also got a chance to see prototypes of the ADzero in both bamboo and rosewood — it's striking how well the natural materials work, with the design comfortable to hold and the...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Khoi Vinh
New York-based graphic designer Khoi Vinh has routinely been blogging at Subtraction.com for over a decade now, offering well-crafted, insightful posts on design, architecture, writing, film, and more. Formerly the design director at NYTimes.com, he recently launched the Lascaux Co. and the Mixel social collage app for iPad. He offered up a few moments of his time to answer some of our pressing questions on the visual web, Pinterest, Android's design choices, and more. Follow him at @khoi.
M...
The Verge Interview: Marty Cooper, father of the cellphone
Marty Cooper quite literally invented the cellphone during his tenure as a division manager at Motorola, demonstrating it for the first time in April of 1973 when he famously called his chief rival — Bell Labs' Joel Engel — to personally deliver the news that he'd been beaten. In the years since, he's been a successful entrepreneur several times over, most recently working with his wife on GreatCall, the company that offers the simple Jitterbug phone targeted at seniors. We had the...
On The Verge Interview
Jimmy Fallon interview part 1 - On The Verge
In part one of our interview, Jimmy Fallon talks about the White House, the Super Bowl and a camera Josh recommended him.
Apple
5 Minutes on The Verge: Growl's Christopher Forsythe
While most major mobile OS's come with an integrated notification system these days, it's a different story on desktops. An essential install for many Mac users, Growl adds customizable notifications to your desktop, saving you from the need to constantly switch apps to see new emails, incoming chat messages, and even download completion updates. Houston, Texas-based Christopher Forsythe created the app and runs the team behind it, and has also worked as project manager on other well-known...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Yiying Lu
Aside from being a talented artist and the author of Twitter's iconic "fail whale" graphic, Yiying Lu happens to be a pretty awesome human being to just sit down and talk to. We managed to secure a few moments from her busy globetrotting schedule for a chat this week, so strap yourself in and enjoy!
How did the "fail whale" graphic come into being?
The piece that would eventually become the Twitter ‘Fail Whale’ was originally called ‘Lifting a Dreamer,’ and was a personal work – a...
Mobile
The exit interview with Jon Rubinstein: 'What we accomplished has been amazing'
We just had a chance to speak to departing HP / webOS exec Jon Rubinstein about his time at Palm and HP, and what he plans to do down the road. Jon was already in Mexico taking what seems to be a much needed break from the mad dash that's been his life for the last four years or so. We touch on a wide range of topics, from Jon's thoughts on an open source webOS, his experience with four different CEOs, and his plans for the future (hint, he's not retiring). It's a pretty candid interview, so...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Jason Kottke
With the launch of Kottke.org in 1998, Jason Kottke helped create a blogging style — a one or two line introduction followed by an excerpt, video, or interesting link — that's shown remarkable staying power over the past fifteen years. (See Tim Carmody on Kottke "link, pull, response" approach). Aside from blogging and working as a developer in New York City, he's also known for creating the Silkscreen typeface and designing the Gawker logo. He's recently been working on Stellar.io, a web...
Culture
An interview with William Gibson
William Gibson famously coined the term "cyberspace," and gave us a singular vision of the future in early cyberpunk novels Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. In the three decades since, his fiction has crept closer to a recognizably contemporary setting; the gradual change isn't surprising, given his belief that "cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical."
Along the way he's taken on the occasional nonfiction assignment, with the results...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music
Peter Kirn is a composer / musician, media artist, educator, technology writer, and the creator and editor of one of our favorite websites, Create Digital Music. When not busy making music (and writing about it for various publications), he's somehow found time to author Real World Digital Audio from Peachpit Press and edit our current favorite airport read, Keyboard Presents: the Evolution of Electronic Dance Music (Backbeat). We'd like to thank him from taking time from his current move to...
CES 2012
The long road to BlackBerry 10
Last week at CES, RIM unveiled new features and functionality in PlayBook OS 2.0, which is due for a public release in February. Although much more polished than the initial release, we found that it still lacks certain features — including core advantages like BBM — that we would expect to see on a RIM tablet.
Yet the most important feature that PlayBook OS 2.0 lacks is a wide variety of quality apps. To find out how RIM plans to fix that, we sat down with the man tasked with ensuring...
CES 2012
ARM, Inc. president Simon Segars interview on Intel and Windows 8: 'Medfield isn't a surprise to us'
Though it didn't have any announcements of its own at CES 2012, ARM is always a major thrust of the show — its processor designs can be found in a staggering percentage of the world's phones, tablets, and embedded systems. This year was no different. We sat down with ARM, Inc. president Simon Segars today to discuss some of the developments happening in the industry: Intel's Medfield, for instance, which looks to go head-to-head against the upper end of ARM's range later this year. Check it...
Vizio CTO Matt McRae: Internet-based TV provider with 50-100 channels coming within 18 months
I sat down with Vizio CTO Matt McRae yesterday to talk over the company's huge number of CES announcements, from its CinemaWide 21:9 TVs to the $99 VAP430 Google TV media streamer to its entirely new lineup of laptop and desktop PCs. We also talked a lot about smart TV and the challenges of integrating live television with internet content, and Matt said something particularly interesting — he believes that a full internet TV provider that offers 50-100 channels to consumers will launch...
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on SOPA, Reddit, and the future of the internet
I caught up with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski here at CES for a quick chat — he gave a speech yesterday arguing for speeding up spectrum auctions by implementing incentive auctions. I wanted to start with something a little closer to the ground though: the general outcry over SOPA and the planned Reddit blackout on January 18th. Surprise: Genachowsi is a Reddit reader, and he says he definitely hears the frustration — and while he thinks intellectual property need protection, he...
CES 2012
Nokia US president Chris Weber interview: 'now it's about great execution'
Clearly, Nokia's getting a lot of attention at CES this year, and for good reason: the Lumia 900 is in the first batch of LTE-enabled Windows Phones and the Lumia 710 launched on T-Mobile just this week, marking the company's reentrance into the hardscrabble US market. That puts Chris Weber, president of Nokia's US business, in the hot seat — and we sat down with him this week to get his thoughts on the prospects for success.
Lytro's Eric Cheng on a video Lytro: 'there's no reason we can't'
Alright, the Lytro light field camera technology is pretty impressive and emergent all by itself (it will be shipping in about a month), but I can't help wondering what's next: what about video? Eric Cheng, the Director of Photography at Lytro, was surprisingly forthcoming. Without promising any products in the pipeline, he described the exact technical requirements, and the exact technical feasibility. What's really interesting, and was helpful in me actually understanding how Lytro works,...
Mobile
Joe Belfiore interview: Windows Phone will compete on quality, not specs
Microsoft's Joe Belfiore, VP for Windows Phone, dropped by our CES HQ this week to discuss Microsoft's mobile future. He was classically reluctant to reveal the specifics of that future, though he did say that the words Tango and Apollo "sound nice." He did share his thoughts on how Windows Phone differs from iOS and Android, positioning it as the happy balance between the two leaders in mobile software. You get the greater variety of Android with the reassurance of tighter quality control...
Microsoft
Microsoft's Aaron Woodman on Windows Phone: 'We feel really good about the trajectory'
Josh just grilled Aaron Woodman on camera about Windows Phone here at CES 2012. With the Nokia Lumia 900 finally announced, Aaron was able to rave about the phone, and expertly skirt Stephen Elop's proclamation that it's "the first real Windows Phone." Still, there was some good insight to be gained about what it will take for Windows Phone to succeed in the market. Theoretically, at least. Check it out.
CES 2012
iRobot's Mark Chiappetta on robots in the home: 'There needs to be a practical problem to solve at a price we can solve it'
After running the iRobot Ava ragged in The Verge trailer, I sat down with the robot's creator, Mark Chiappetta, for a chat. His team has been working on Ava for roughly two years, building the prototypes by hand, and making incredible progress in navigating environments safely and autonomously. There's still more work to be done, specifically in working with developers to help them build apps on top of the platform, but iRobot seems to be the closest to bringing a practical, do-it-all servant...
CES 2012
Google TV product manager Rishi Chandra: 'Android is going to be a successful operating system on TVs'
Google's playing CES 2012 pretty low-key, even as Google TV products from major manufacturers like Sony, Vizio, LG, and Samsung have become one of the major stories of the show. We caught up with Google TV product manager Rishi Chandra to talk about what's going on with the platform, how Google's going to succeed this time around, and what he thinks of other Android-based TVs like the Lenovo K91. Oh, and buddy boxes — that's a thing now.
CES 2012
Ford CEO Alan Mulally and CTO Paul Mascarenas at CES 2012: The Verge interview
We just had an opportunity a few minutes ago to catch up with Alan Mulally and Paul Mascarenas, CEO and CTO of Ford, who are once again in Vegas to show off some of Detroit's finest steel at CES. In fact, this is Ford's fifth consecutive show — a telling sign that the auto industry's trend toward high-tech feature lists is very likely here to stay.
At this year's event, Ford debuted the 2013 Fusion Hybrid, which features a pair of geeky (and popular) features that have become ubiquitous...
CES 2012
Interview with Ubuntu TV's Pete Goodall
I got a chance to sit down today with Canonical's product manager for Ubuntu TV, Pete Goodall. In addition to talking about what's in Ubuntu TV right now, and where Canonical is headed with it, he gave some insight about how the company approaches its for-profit endeavors, while still serving the open source community, and working with a large amount of volunteer developers on its various products. Next up for Ubuntu is a tablet and a phone version of its OS, but unfortunately Pete was much...
CES 2012
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop at CES 2012: The Verge interview
Our own Joshua Topolsky just sat down with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop to discuss the company's big announcements at CES 2012. Between the Lumia 710, 800, and now the LTE-powered 900 for AT&T, the company is suddenly very much back in the public eye, and we wanted to hear from the man leading the charge on just what the next stage of Nokia's life was looking like. Check out the video below and see what Stephen had to say.
Apple
Interview: Samsung's David Steel on Apple, the future of TVs, and what's next
David Steel, Executive Vice President of Strategy for Samsung North America. Yeah, it's a long title. He's responsible for Samsung's marketing strategy, and he just sat down with our own Joshua Topolsky. As a marketing guy, he hews pretty close to the company line, but he's still a fun guy to talk to — and obviously a primary source if you're looking for Samsung's "official" word on anything. This is a huge show for Samsung, and there was a lot to cover, including Samsung's interesting...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Sparrow's Dom Leca
In the past two years, Mac users got a great desktop email client alternative in the form of Sparrow, an elegant app with a unified inbox, full range of keyboard commands, Gmail labels, multiple account support, and Growl compatibility. The Sparrow team is at work on a dedicated iOS app, set for release this winter. Based in France, co-founder Dom Leca spared a few moments of his time to answer some of our pressing questions on apps, technology, design, and much more. He currently blogs at d...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge:
R. U. Sirius
Ken "R. U. Sirius" Goffman first gained substantial notoriety as the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Mondo 2000 in 1989. Since then, he's been in movies, a band (Mondo Vanilli), podcasts, and authored a number of books (including Counterculture Through the Ages and Design for Dying with Timothy Leary). He also ran for president in 2000 as the candidate for The Revolution Party — sadly, he lost. Currently you can find him at Acceler8or, a website that bills itself as "your thoroughfare to...
Policy & Law
The Verge Interview: Senator Al Franken on privacy, location tracking, and Carrier IQ
Senator Al Franken was right in the middle of the Carrier IQ smartphone tracking controversy: a pair of scathing letters from the Minnesota senator are what ultimately shed the most light on how Carrier IQ was being used. Every major carrier save Verizon has now responded to his questions and admitted some use of the software or similar tracking software on their networks. (Verizon simply denied any use of Carrier IQ at all.) It now appears that such software is pervasive throughout the...
Culture
5 Minutes on The Verge: Robert Scoble
Anyone who's waded into the world of startups, Facebook, and Twitter has probably stumbled on tech evangelist and Rackspace employee Robert Scoble. With enough dedication that he's inspired the term "milliscoble," Scoble enthusiastically tries out and writes about nearly every new service, and has gathered hundreds of thousands of followers across Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and his blog Scobleizer.
He spared a few moments of his time to answer some of our pressing questions on apps,...
Microsoft
Microsoft's design lead Steve Kaneko on unification and Metro: 'We're not looking over our shoulders'
While Windows 8's Metro overhaul goes a long way towards completely reinventing the OS, in some ways it hasn't gone far enough — there are still places where the classic Windows interface resurfaces. So why hasn't Microsoft fully adopted Metro yet? Microsoft design director Steve Kaneko sat down with our own Joshua Topolsky for an interview (see the full video at the bottom), and he says that while the company is committed to Metro's design principles, there are challenges that have made...
5 Minutes on The Verge
5 Minutes on The Verge: Sarah Lane
Sarah Lane is a host and producer at the TWiT network and appears on the daily show Tech News Today and weekly shows iPad Today and The Social Hour. She received her Broadcasting and Electronics Communication Arts degree from San Francisco State University and began her career producing and directing local news television. Sarah eventually moved into technology-based programming and hosted shows such as The Screen Savers on TechTV and Attack of the Show! on G4. In 2006 she got sick of the...
Meg Whitman and Marc Andreessen on webOS: 'We will use webOS in new hardware... in tablets'
We've just had a chance to sit down with HP's CEO Meg Whitman and board member Marc Andreessen to discuss the future of webOS given today's announcement. Both Meg and Marc were eager to talk about webOS not as a dead end, but an active platform which the company would continue to put resources and cash against. Most surprising of all? The company plans to create new webOS hardware... including tablets. We've transcribed the full conversation — so read on below.
Will HP be creating any new...
Microsoft
5 Minutes on The Verge: Paul Thurrott
Reporter, editor at Windows IT Pro, and the brain behind SuperSite for Windows, Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) has been a longtime Microsoft enthusiast. He took five minutes to talk about his top Windows apps, phone preference, and who should be running Microsoft. The exchange is below, and we think you'll enjoy it.
Mac or PC (and all-time favorite computer, make and model)?
Amiga. My favorite was the Amiga 3000, but I could never afford one. So I had a tricked-out Amiga 500. Which, in retrospect,...
Carrier IQ interview: inside the brave new world of carrier phone tracking
By Sean Hollister and Dieter Bohn
You may have heard of the "internet of things," a vision of the future where cheap sensors are everywhere, and they allow machines to automatically track everything at all times. Over the last few days, we got an eye-opening look into that future thanks to a company called Carrier IQ. Founded in 2005, Carrier IQ provides remote tracking data to cellular network operators including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, and its software has been loaded on over 141...
5 Minutes on The Verge
5 Minutes on The Verge: Nokia's Richard Kerris
Formerly VP of HP's Worldwide Developer Relations, Richard Kerris left the webOS team recently to join Nokia as Global Head of Developer Relations. He's been at the job for just over a month now, and he spared a few moments of his time to answer some of our pressing questions on life, technology, and a handful of items in between. The exchange is below, and we think you'll enjoy it.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on meeting the great Nokia teams, learning the company...
Carrier IQ speaks: 'We'd like to be as open as we can' after independent testing
We just set foot inside Carrier IQ's offices in Mountain View, California, and spoke face-to-face with Andrew Coward, the VP of marketing for a company currently embroiled in a scandal of senatorial proportions. If you've been anxiously awaiting a formal comment from the company, we've got good and bad news. When we asked, Carrier IQ would not directly address security researcher Trevor Eckhart's alleged video evidence of the Carrier IQ agent's worrisome behavior, but Coward told us the...
Interview: HuskyStarcraft, professional e-sports commentator
After wrapping up my glimpse into the world of pro StarCraft II, I took a trip the MLG Providence last weekend, where the year-end MLG e-sports finals were held. I spotted some great games, and met some sweet gamers, but I was majorly starstruck by my original StarCraft crush, HuskyStarcraft (or "Mike Lamond," to his parents). Husky's YouTube channel turned me onto watching StarCraft II instead of just playing, and has offered countless hours of entertainment since then. He's been making a...
5 Minutes on The Verge
5 Minutes on The Verge: Limor Fried
Limor Fried is an Engineer and Founder of Adafruit Industries. Adafruit makes and releases DIY electronics kits to help create the next generation of scientists and engineers. Adafruit is a New York City-based company (it's 2 blocks from Wall Street) and has been around since 2005. Limor won an EFF pioneer award for her work in open-source and sharing knowledge, she was named one of the most "Influential Women In Technology" by Fast Company and was on the cover of WIRED magazine in 2011.
What...
5 Minutes on The Verge
5 Minutes on The Verge: Anand Shimpi
Anand Shimpi is widely recognized as one of the most authoritative voices covering the PC industry today. Having started the eponymous AnandTech.com as a teenager, he has now been informing the computer-buying world about CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, SSDs, and other acronym-friendly technology for over 14 years. Today, he was kind enough to chat with us for a few minutes — to discuss trends, technology, and trends within technology.
You started your website way back in the 90s. What has been the most...
Infinity Blade 2: Chair's Donald Mustard on the killer app's future
There's no handheld gaming system quite like the iPhone, and there's no iPhone game quite like Infinity Blade — since the day that its jaw-dropping tech demo became an gorgeous sword-swinging dungeon crawler, the game has raked in $20 million for publisher Epic and developer Chair Entertainment. We're hard-pressed to think of any game that looks as good on a phone. Now that Infinity Blade 2 is set to show off the power of Apple's A5 chip on December 1st, we spoke to to Chair's co-founder...
Microsoft
5 Minutes on The Verge: Microsoft's Frank X. Shaw
Microsoft's head of corpcomm (official title: Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications) isn't just a mouthpiece for Steve Ballmer and other execs at the Redmond-based company. The representative is not only known for being one of the nicer — and more honest — PR folks in the industry, but he's also not shy about voicing his opinions on Twitter or his personal blog, Glass House, when necessary (which we love, of course).
We sat down with him for quick conversation about the...
5 Minutes on The Verge
5 Minutes on The Verge: John Gruber
John Gruber is a man that really needs no introduction. As the regularly-snarky voice behind Daring Fireball and one of the foremost experts on all things Apple, he's carved out a mini-empire for himself on the internet (and taken his fair share of heat as a result).
He spared a few moments of his time to answer some of our pressing questions on life, technology, and a handful of items in between. The exchange is below, and we think you'll enjoy it.
What are you doing right now?
Literally? I...
Microsoft
Nokia’s Kevin Shields and Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore talk Windows Phone, N9, and more
This week, members of The Verge team sat down with Kevin Shields, a Microsoft (and Windows Phone) veteran who enthusiastically helped introduce the Lumia 800 on stage at Nokia World's day one keynote session after having recently joined Nokia as the company's senior vice president of programming and product management for smart devices. Microsoft's Joe Belfiore - vice president of Windows Phone program management, and a guy you might call the very face of Windows Phone - unexpectedly dropped...
Mobile
Jo Harlow Interview: US Lumia launch, Nokia tablet strategy, and what's next for Symbian
When I last spoke to Jo Harlow in November of 2010, the former captain of the Duke University women's basketball team was heading Nokia's Symbian Smartphone division. My, how things have changed. Amongst Nokia executives, Jo has probably seen the most upheaval following Stephen Elop's directive to abandon Symbian and MeeGo for a Windows Phone future. Yet even with all that change, I'm told that Jo has undergone the most dramatic transformation over the last eight months, reenergized by the...
Mobile
Marko Ahtisaari interview: Nokia Senior VP of Design
Deep conversations about user experience and iconic forms come easy to Marko Ahtisaari. The son of Finland's tenth president (and winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize) studied philosophy at Columbia University before being elevated to the position of Senior VP of Design at Nokia. His most notable achievements thus far are the MeeGo Swipe interface of the N9 and the polycarbonate monobody design shared by both the N9 and newly unveiled Lumia 800.
I had the chance to interview Marko in London...
Mobile
Stephen Elop interview: US Lumia launch, tablets, and the Android controversy
I had the chance to sit down with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop after the launch of its first series of Windows Phone products — the Lumia 800 and 710 — in London. These are devices that Stephen likes to call "the first real Windows Phones." The reveal is only a small but important step, he assured me, on a journey to reinvent Nokia.
The former Microsoft exec turned Nokia CEO shared his thoughts in his customary honest, deliberate, and eloquent manner. He’s clearly a master of the material and...
HD & Home
John MacFarlane prepares Sonos for AirPlay assault
On a cold and blustery day that the people of Hilversum call "summer," I caught up with Sonos’ affable CEO, John MacFarlane. He was visiting the company's European HQ, located about 20 minutes outside of Amsterdam, to make final preparations for launch of the Play:3, a new, stylish addition to the company's successful line of music-playing devices and accessories.
John was refreshingly candid for a chief executive, whether discussing Apple’s competitive AirPlay technology or the...
Interview: HP's Stephen DeWitt and Jon Rubinstein on webOS, the death of Palm, and partnering with Amazon
As you may have read over the past few days, there's a new sheriff in town when it comes to webOS at HP. Stephen DeWitt, a man formerly responsible for the company's Personal Systems Group, has stepped into the role of senior VP overseeing the "webOS Global Business Unit." Jon Rubinstein, on the other hand, has moved into the less specific job of "product innovation" inside the PSG, meaning less direct input and control of the Palm group and webOS.
But executive title swaps don't tell you...
