Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

Reporters' Roundtable: Holiday tech buying update

We are in the middle of the holiday buying season right now, between the first rush of gift-buying that happened on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the "Oh, crap, I need to start buying presents!" feeling that happens in about a week.

This is the most important month for the consumer tech economy, but this December will be different from all the ones that came before it.

Why? Mobile devices, online shopping, social networking, improved analytics, changing tax laws, and changing behaviors among both buyers and sellers, among other reasons. Today we are talking about how the gadget economy is evolving.

My guests are: Claire Cain Miller, a reporter at The New York Times who's been writing about this topic, and a returning guest to the Roundtable; and Mike Fridgen, CEO of one of my favorite tech startups, Decide.com. This company runs a service that can tell you if the price of a tech item you're looking at is good today and if it will be going up or down in the near future.

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Reporters' Roundtable: The rise of the connected consumer

We're in the middle of a revolution in consumer commerce. The connected consumer (all of us) no longer relies on catalogs for prices or salespeople in stores for advice. Now we use our social networks to get advice from friends and friends of friends, and we have access to scanners and price comparison engines on our smartphones that are turning retail stores into showrooms, not necessarily places you go to buy.

There's a smart guy who's been tracking these trends for years, and he's my guest today. Brian Solis is author of The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution.

Brian was on the Roundtable about a year and a half ago discussing social media. Currently, Brian is principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm.

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Reporters' Roundtable episode 100: 11 predictions for 11/11/11

It's 11/11/11 and it's episode 100 of Reporters' Roundtable. Sounds like an excuse for a predictions show. So here, without further hand-waving justification, are me and Tom Merritt of Tech News Today on TWiT going through 11 categories of tech predictions for the next 11 years. Or 11 months. It varies.

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Reporters' Roundtable 100 is coming up on 11/11/11

I'll bet you didn't know when I launched the Reporters' Roundtable podcast in 2009 that I secretly planned for episode 100 to air on 11/11/11, the Nerd New Year.

OK, I just got lucky. Although I do have to point out that the topic of Roundtable Episode 1 was Steve Jobs' 9/9/09 return to the public eye as he announced several updates to Apple products.

Yes, we are all geeks here. Numbers are important to us. So for Episode 100 (important milestone!) of a tech podcast airing on 11/11/11 (just plain cool), … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: RIAA defends SOPA in fight over content rights

Today we're discussing what's been called the end of the Internet. And the Great Firewall of America. Or, technically: SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, aka HR 3261, a law now wending its way through the House of Representatives.

This is a very controversial bill that would provide new powers to copyright holders and the government to sue, and take offline, sites that host legally protected content. The content industry says it's required to protect rights holders and their jobs. The technology industry says it will break the Internet and cost high-tech jobs.

To discuss, I have two guests. First, in the studio with me, our commentator Larry Downes, who writes on these topics for CNET and elsewhere. Larry has taught IP and computer property law at UC Berkeley.

And dialing in from the other side of the country, and the debate, is Mitch Glazier, senior executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Can Nokia come back from the dead?

What happened to Nokia? This company once ruled the mobile phone business. But it never made a successful smartphone for the U.S. market. Instead, RIM and Treo grabbed the first ground in that market. And then Apple launched the iPhone. And then Google launched Android. And then Nokia sank into irrelevance as a major revolution in computing--the smartphone/tablet revolution--took off.

Earlier this week, Nokia released two Lumia smartphones running the Windows Phone OS, not its traditional Symbian OS, as well as three Asha smartphones running Symbian for less affluent countries. Can Nokia claw its way back to being a leader in mobile?

We're discussing that today with three great CNET experts: Jessica Dolcourt is from the CNET Reviews team, and has seen and used the new Lumia phones. Jay Greene covers Microsoft and Google for News.com. Roger Cheng is our mobile reporter and wireless expert.

Bonus: Click past the jump for a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to record this episode.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Frontiers in search

Go ahead and raise your hand if when you want to search for something on the Web, you think of Google. Yup, it's most of you. But upstarts are always trying to chip away at Google. From Microsoft to MC Hammer, search is the holy grail for many startups.

Yes, that's right, MC Hammer has a search startup, called WireDoo.

Today we're talking about different approaches companies are taking to take on search, with:

Paul Sloan, the executive editor in charge of startups for CNET. Harry McCracken, editor of Technologizer and a columnist for us and for Time. Jim Lanzone, president of CBSi and therefore the boss of everyone else on this show. Jim is also former CEO of Ask.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Bring your own computer to work

Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics: how to sneak personal technology into your workplace. Or, put more respectably, the "Consumerization of Information Technology," or CoIT. Yes, there's an acronym for that.

For end users, CoIT is great. It means you can use your iPhone for company e-mail instead of the crappy 3-year-old BlackBerry the company wants to give you. But for IT managers? It can be a nightmare of security problems and support headaches. Or, if managed right, it can be a big cost saver and a giant morale booster.

Today we're talking about this topic with two experts. First, Fritz Nelson, editorial director of Information Week and editor at large at Byte on the Web. We also have an interview I did previously with Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's security technology group.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Guy Kawasaki on what we learned from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO of Apple and of Next Computer, and the CEO of Pixar, passed away this week. So for this Roundtable, we will start with that, and look forward from here. There are several life lessons in the way Steve Jobs started Apple, then left, came back, ran the company, launched products, and disrupted several industries. All of us in technology--or indeed in any business--can learn from them. The good and the bad.

To have that discussion, I can think of no better person to talk with than my guest for the Roundtable today, Guy Kawasaki.

Guy was an early employee at Apple, and he worked on marketing the original Macintosh in 1984. He's best known as a tireless tech evangelist. Still a venture capitalist at Garage Ventures, he brings that zeal to his portfolio companies. Guy is also a well-known speaker and the author of 10 books. His latest is Enchantment, The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. He has made his first book, The Macintosh Way, available as a free download (PDF link).

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