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Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

Reporters' Roundtable: JOBS Act makes crowdfunding the law

Crowdfunding is one step from becoming the law of the land. The JOBS Act, which has passed the House and the Senate in slightly different versions, is soon to be voted on again in the House for final approval, before it goes to the President, who has indicated he will sign it. This new law will make it possible for entrepreneurs to raise money from anyone they want to. It will also make it easier for new companies to go public, or to delay going public if they wish.

When JOBS becomes law, the landscape for technology startups will change dramatically. If you want to know how, and why it's happening, and what could go wrong when it does, watch this episode of the Roundtable.

Our guests today are:

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Reporter's Roundtable: The Mike Daisey retraction

The January 27th Reporters' Roundtable episode, Apple's China problem, features Mike Daisey, the writer and performer of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. I found about about Daisey when I heard the episode of "This American Life" that featured him, Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory. As you probably know by now, "This American Life" recently retracted that episode after producers discovered that many of the incidents underpinning Daisey's monologue were embellished or fabricated.

Daisey's monologue contains fiction and should never have been presented as fact. It is not journalism, even though he uses some more

Reporters' Roundtable: New tools for inventors

The game is changing for inventors. It costs less than it ever has to build a technology product or launch a company to sell it. There are new marketplaces to sell your goods, too--even if you haven't yet built a single unit.

Securities laws in the U.S. are also about to change, which will dramatically expand the funding possibilities for new companies. So get ready to be barraged with requests to help build small new companies, and prepare to be tempted to do it yourself.

Today we're talking with two real innovators who have built companies that make it possible for anyone with an idea to pre-sell products, learn how to design and build them, and manufacture prototypes and even the first batch of units. Our guests:

Our episode, in two acts, is below:

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Reporters' Roundtable: The Apple TV is a big fat deal

Of the two products Apple launched this week, I think the more important was the Apple TV update. Because it's in the living room where Apple has the more interesting battle going on. This "hobby" of a product is still imperfect, but it's making major waves with consumer electronics companies, content producers, and cable firms. Why? Because with an Apple TV (or a competing product, like a Roku), you can bypass the old-line media economy.

Or can you? We're discussing today how Apple is trying to rewrite the living room entertainment experience. We have two great guests on the show:

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Reporters' Roundtable: The couch potato, version 2

Next week, on March 7, Apple will introduce the next generation of iPad. Why is the tablet form factor working so well? What is it about a machine that is best used on the couch?

One growing use case for tablets is the "second screen." It seems we aren't satisfied with just watching TV anymore. Now we need a second screen to keep us engaged. Businesses are growing up to build second screen apps, and programmers are starting to take the multiscreen user seriously.

Related reading

Today I have two guests who are working on these apps who will discuss the emerging market space:

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Reporters' Roundtable: Mountain Lion and OS X's evolution

It's time for what's becoming the annual look at the Mac operating system, OS X. A week ago, Apple announced its latest update, Mountain Lion, and the announcement reveals how the operating system battle is evolving.

Two key trends: Smartphones are influencing desktop/laptop OS designs. And the cloud is becoming integral to the OS.

We're going to talk about Mountain Lion today and the future of the computer OS with two great experts:


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Reporters' Roundtable: LightSquared and the spectrum mess

How do you throw away $4 billion? Buy spectrum you can't use. That seems to be what LightSquared did. The company bought access to a chunk of spectrum, and planned to create a new wholesale wireless network.

But the FCC this week said, sorry, your planned use of your spectrum intereferes with GPS. The FCC withdrew the waiver it had previously given LightSquared to allow it to operate, and now LightSquared is sitting on what appears to be a toxic asset: Not only can it not use the spectrum, but the FCC ruling means no one else can, either.

Or can they? What's happening here, and how will it affect you, the user of mobile devices who just wants more bandwidth?

We're discussing this today with two experts from CNET News:


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Reporters' Roundtable: Failure is always an option

This week's failure to communicate, from Path, was hardly a unique event. Companies--especially fast-moving startups--screw up all the time. The issue is how they react to their errors. Can Path recover, as Facebook and Google have from their privacy flaps, or will this flub hurt the company over the long term?

And how can you prepare for your own inevitable, and public, failures, if you're running your own company?

I have two guests today well-versed in the art of failure and graceful recovery:


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Reporters' Roundtable: What's Facebook going to do with that money?

Facebook filed to go public this week and the entire tech world turned its attention to the filing document, the S-1. It revealed some impressive numbers: 845 million monthly users on Facebook, about half of them on mobile devices.

It also showed that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook's revenue.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter embedded in the S-1, also took pains to tell potential investors that Facebook would try to maintain its "hacker culture," as well as its focus on connecting people to each other, as opposed to connecting shareholders just to revenue.

There's a lot to unpack in the Facebook filing, and we have two great guests to help us walk through it:

  • Josh Constine, a writer at TechCrunch and fomerly the lead writer of Inside Facebook, and...
  • Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist in Menlo Ventures and an entrepreneur

Bonus: Shervin was an early investor in Klout, so I asked him some questions on that product, after the main show. The video is embedded at the end of this post.


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Reporters' Roundtable: Apple's China problem

NOTE: Please read our update on this episode: The Mike Daisey retraction. Also see the editor's note below.

Apple is the most valuable U.S. company there is, and the most powerful and influential consumer electronics company by far. It is obscenely profitable.

This amazing success is built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of factory workers, almost all of them in China, who assemble iPhones, and other products from other vendors, in giant, science-fiction-scale plants that never stop.

These plants take their toll. On workers in China. And on jobs here in the United states.

Two recent pieces of outstanding journalism highlight the issues. First, there's a series developing in The New York Times, co-authored by Charles Duhigg, that kicked off in the Sunday edition: "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work." A follow-on piece, "In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad," ran Wednesday.

Second, a "This American Life" episode, "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," has reignited interest in monologuist Mike Daisey's report of his trip to visit the birthplace of his iPhone, the Foxconn plant in China.

Today we have both Charles Duhigg and Mike Daisey on the Roundtable, and we're going to talk about Apple's muscle, how it works with Chinese manufacturing companies, if there's any chance that manufacturing could return to the U.S. And if it would be a good thing if it did.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has responded to the emerging reports on working conditions at Apple's device manufacturers. I discussed this response with Duhigg in a separate interview, which is at the end of this Roundtable (at the 24-minute mark, if you want to go straight there).

Editor's note, March 19, 2012: "This American Life" announced late last week that it's retracting a story it did recently about working conditions at Foxconn that included an interview with Mike Daisey as well as an excerpt from his monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." It said it was doing so because of "numerous fabrications" it found. CNET's Josh Lowensohn has the details in this story. Daisey's own statement is on his Web site. A recent investigative report by The New York Times looked at working conditions in Apple's supply chain in China.


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