Voxeo Talks

If you have been watching our main Voxeo blog portal or are subscribed to our “All blogs” RSS feed or are following us on Twitter, you know by now that I launched a new video podcast a few weeks back called “Emerging Tech Talk” or “ETT” for short. Now that the show has been going for a bit and I have most of the kinks worked out of the production process, I thought I’d take a moment to formally introduce the show here and talk about what I’m doing with it.

First, though, I should of course mention that you can follow “Emerging Tech Talk” and receive notification of new shows by doing any of the following:

• subscribing via iTunes
• subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
• subscribing to our RSS feed
• following us on Twitter

THE PREMISE

So what is “Emerging Tech Talk” about and what am I doing with the show?

Primarily the show is a way for me to use video to tell stories about new / emerging communications technologies that I find interesting. I thought about subtitling it “Chasing bright, shiny objects related to communication technology..” and while I may not use that sub-title, that’s basically what it is. A part of my role within Voxeo’s Office of the CTO is to look at the changes happening around us with regard to both the ways in which we communicate and the tools/technologies we use to communicate. I speak about those changes at conferences and write about those changes both here and on my external blogs – with Emerging Tech Talk I can also now speak about those changes in a video format.

Basically I want to share with you through video some of the exciting changes I see going on out there.

Note that this show is not necessarily about Voxeo. Sure, by nature of what I am doing on a daily basis, probably many if not most of the shows will have some bearing on what we do here at Voxeo, and certainly I’ll use ETT as a vehicle to talk about new Voxeo announcements (as I did with the VoiceObjects news) but in general my plan is for the show to cover a wide range of topics related to “emerging communication technologies” – the kind of topics you would see covered at a conference like eComm next March.

In fact, I expect to use conferences like eComm, VoiceCon, ITEXPO, etc. as places where I’ll be doing video interviews to run in the show. As you’ve seen with ETT already, I’ll undoubtedly do some shows from IETF standards meetings. Essentially I’ll just have my camera (or laptop) along with me as I travel to various conferences and see what video is interesting to record at those events.

I also expect to include some “screencasts” of various tools and services I find interesting. I’ll probably talk about some iPhone apps… social networking tools… new VoIP products… basically, again, whatever I find interesting and exciting.

Given that a secondary reason for doing the ETT show is simply to experiment with the video podcasting medium, I expect you’ll see some experiments along the way with different video tools and services. (And some may work well and others may not.)

THE DETAILS

Each show will be less than 10 minutes in length. I’m also uploading these shows to YouTube and the folks there restrict the length to roughly 10 minutes. (I know this all too well. Having successfully uploaded a show that was 10:56 long (ETT #011 on P2PSIP) I got a little cocky and tried to upload one over 11 minutes. Rejected.)

I’m not aiming to do much in the way of post-production / editing. The goal is to record shows that are less than 10 minutes (so I don’t have to do much cutting), pop them into iMovie on my MacBook Pro, do some very basic editing, add text overlays, adjust titles… and publish.

I’ll primarily be recording directly into iMovie using my Mac’s embedded webcam, recording with my small little JVC MG-330 hard disk camcorder or using ScreenFlow on the Mac to record the screen and also the video. (Which is actually how I did the Skype video recording I did with Michael Codini in ETT #010.) I’m sure I’ll use other tools as I come across them. Because of the different tools, I’m sure video quality may vary somewhat between shows.

As far as frequency of shows, I expect it to be highly variable. My goal is to have a new show up at least twice a month… right now I’ve had a couple up each week. I expect that when I go to conferences/events I’ll have more shows going up. I also expect that when I’m buried under some deadline I may not produce a show for some time. The net of it is that I can’t guarantee to you that it will be a weekly show, but you’ll see shows as often as I can create them.

THE INVITATION

So with all that said, I extend to you two invitations. First, as I noted at the beginning of this post, there are several ways that you can subscribe to the show and join in the journey. Please do! Let’s see what we can do with this medium to tell the story of the changes happening around us with regard to communication.

Second, you are definitely invited to contact me with topics you think I should discuss on the show. If you have questions about subjects I cover on shows, areas you would love to have more details on, or just cool new services you’ve seen (or are involved with) that you think I should talk about, please feel to contact me and let me know. You can email me, contact me on Twitter or identi.ca, contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn, or IM or call me on Skype (danyork). I can’t necessarily promise that I’ll fit everything in, but if I find it interesting and it relates in some manner to communication technology, I very well may.

[NOTE to PR people: Before you pitch me, please read the blogs on this site as well as my Disruptive Telephony and Disruptive Conversations sites to see if your clients' new whiz-bang product/service is even remotely along the lines of the things that I write about. Thank you. (Can you tell I'm really sick of being pitched by people who don't even bother to take 30 seconds to look over my sites to see if it is even appropriate to pitch me?)]

Now, let the journey begin…

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