Hidden Radio and Bluetooth Speaker
Early in the days of GeekBrief.TV, when we had quit the day job to produce the show full-time, I had a need that wasn’t being met by any available technology. I used the show to lobby for wireless speakers that could be placed around a house or an apartment so whatever podcast I played in iTunes would fill the place.
I designed this cube inspired by Tivoli Audio’s Model One as the form factor I wanted.
And then when Griffin Technologies had their Evolve wireless speakers ready, they invited us to preview them at their HQ in Nashville.
We learned about the problems engineers had to overcome to make wireless work without lag and asynchronicity. Those issues have been conquered and now wireless speakers work great. My favorite wireless speaker technology is made by Soundcast. Good stuff.
Industrial Designers, John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen and Vitor Santa Maria have surpassed a goal on Kickstarter to manufacture a gorgeously designed Bluetooth wireless speaker and radio where the whole top is a giant volume knob. About the size of a giant coffee mug, the hidden speaker has a rechargeable battery providing 30-hours of streaming audio.
latakoo … this is important
When Luria and I launched GeekBrief.TV in 2005, we bumped up against a lot of limitations. Bandwidth was only as good as we could get. The first batch of shows was in standard definition, and I wanted us to be HD. Even when we started shooting in HD, the show couldn’t be delivered in anything like real HD.
Here’s the dream for any new media producer. When we’re able to shoot in 4K and get that video to anyone who wants to watch it on a mobile phone or IMAX sized screen within minutes (even better live), then we have a real revolution.
I read about a company today on Techcrunch called latakoo. The story is a group of journalists joined some tech guys to fix a problem. We’ve got gear to shoot amazing footage. Moving that footage from one part of the world to another without lots of quality loss or lots of time to wait makes what we do frustrating. Latakoo says they’re solving that problem.
The best way I can explain how cool this is is to give you a hypothetical case study. With GeekBrief.TV, we never covered CES by going there. It’s expensive to go, and I’m a cheapskate. I was only willing to go if we could get the expense sponsored, but that wasn’t possible because of our deal with Mevio. We covered CES by making several short episodes of GeekBrief.TV based on news coming out of CES.
Here’s the deal, though … there were lots of people attending CES that would have gladly served as GeekBrief.TV corespondents. There was no way to get high quality video from Vegas to Dallas in an amount of time that would have been good enough to make the kind of show I wanted to make.
Latakoo has built a system for moving great quality video from source to production quickly.
I haven’t tried latakoo, but what I read about them sounds like just what wasn’t possible when we were covering events remotely. I hope to have an opportunity to work with this company on a future product because they’re meeting a need in a really important way.
Read MoreWhat I Did on my Summer (NOT) Vacation
On January 15, 2010, the woman I married almost twelve years ago left home and my world turned upside down. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it’s turning out to be the best. No doubt I loved her. I poured every bit of my talent and energy into creating an uncommon, life and career for her. It took six years to get that right, but once I did, she took it and ran with it.
The first part of the year, I worked on trying to save my marriage. I went to counseling, support groups, read books, watched videos. There is nothing I wouldn’t have done to fix it because I didn’t believe in divorce or giving up. I don’t think there was anything I could have done to change her heart, mind or focus. When fixing it didn’t change anything, I started working on me.
I grew up in church and for me nothing feels like home like when I’m in church. I was a close-minded fundamentalist who loved the story of Jesus. As a teenager, I fell in love with the charismatic experience of worship. There is a mystical thing that happens in a charismatic church as the music starts on a high and transitions into a tender, peaceful rest. I wanted to grow up to lead worship because I loved those feelings I got in church.
After I was married, that girl seemed perfect. I couldn’t name a sin she was guilty of, and if she was sin-free, what did I really need with a God I couldn’t see? We stopped going to church and I started worshiping her. I thought she was all I needed. I didn’t think I needed friends. I didn’t think I needed family and I didn’t think I needed God. I gave up on God and gave up worship
It wasn’t fair to her though. It might feel nice to be worshiped a little, but no human can stand to be worshiped with the intensity I worshiped her. When she couldn’t supply the spiritual and emotional needs I used to get from worshiping God … that joy unexplainable and peace that passes all understanding … I began to slowly fall apart. I broke and I wanted to die.
This Summer, I worked on healing. I reconnected with friends and family in beautiful ways. I went to Budapest, Vienna and Prague. I ate, prayed and wondered about the possibility of love. Friends and family sustained me. When I fell apart, they grabbed me and held me back together. I confessed my sins to them and they didn’t run away. They helped me heal. They saw me weak. They saw me cry. They saw me want to give up. The saw me through.
This year, I became a worshiper of God again. I’m not a fundamentalist any more and I can’t come anywhere near thinking you would get the same thing I get from faith, but I know it works for me. I feel like me again. I have joy and peace in the middle of the decimation of my hopes and dreams. My church has a thing called Freedom Ministries and it has been the most transformative experience of my life, on both cognitive and spiritual levels. It’s helped me with depression, fear of rejection, selfishness and I’m just getting started. Freedom classes are available online.
In her book, Mosaic
So I thank God for the mountains
And I thank Him for the valleys
I thank Him for the storms He’s brought me through
’cause if I never had a problem
I wouldn’t know that He could solve them
I wouldn’t know what faith in His Word could do
This year has been the hardest of my life, but it’s brought depth and meaning like I’ve never had before. I’m starting to build something new and this time it won’t be a frivolous quest for fame and fortune. I want what I do next to be a tool than generates resources to help hurting broken people. It will be just as shiny, happy and fun as GeekBrief.TV, but it will have a deeper purpose.
This last week I was in the home of a dear friend, Pastor Randy McCain. He preached the funeral of Tammy Faye Bakker. There were two things I remember Tammy Faye saying over and over again.
- You can make it!
- God loves you! He really, really does!
I have a lot to do! My goal is to build an amazing new media production company that entertains, inspires, funds charity and maybe even changes the world a little bit.
Stay tunned…
How We’re Doing GeekBrief.TV from Two Locations
I’ve said all I’m going to say about the personal part of what’s happening, but I thought it would be kind of cool to share how we’ve been producing the show from two locations.
Writing the show hasn’t changed much except that Luria writes much more than she did when she was here. It’s been interesting to see the different types of stories she chooses than me. I tend to write about gadgets. She tends to write about tech news and Web services like Google Docs. The Brief we will release today is about stuff we both wanted to cover. I wrote some of today’s show yesterday, some this morning and she wrote some to. Because of Google Docs, it’s always been easy to collaborate on a script.
After the script is done, Luria shoots it herself. She has our lights and the camera and the teleprompter. She shoots in front of a green screen in one take with one fixed shot and then she transfers one HUGE file to me, via FTP. The uncompressed footage is typically 4-8GB per episode. Sometimes it takes five hours, and really, that’s the biggest downside of the setup.
I have all the editing gear. As I download the file, I do preproduction graphics that will be used in the episode. When I have the file, I drag it into Final Cut Pro. It usually takes less than an hour to edit. Occasionally, when there are unusual graphics or video features in a particular episode, it takes longer.
I compress the show into three formats using Sorenson Squeeze. It does an excellent job, but it’s slow (and expensive). Then I upload the four formats to Mevio and post to the GeekBrief.TV Web site.
Except for news that needs to be more timely the workflow has worked well. It’s always fun to trouble shoot our way through new challenges.
Read MoreHow to Succeed in New Media
I ended my last post with a question: What can I do for you? Shamir Katsu asked what he could do to reproduce the “Geek Brief miracle.” If you already know the GeekBrief.TV Story, jump down to the last paragraph.
My wife and I used to do Web design and development during the time Internet culture was starting to bloom (before the dot com bubble popped). Tech TV was a cable channel about technology that drew geeks together, and for the first time, geeky people started to feel like we could be cool too.
After the bubble burst, we kind of burned out on tech. We stepped away completely and took a job in the glamorous world of self storage. The company we worked for was called Extra Space Storage and although we thought it would be a temporary job, they treated us well and let us open new stores so we could move around the country. Before we knew it, we had been there almost five years. That was 2005, the year podcasting started to gain attention.
We loved the idea of podcasting for the same reasons we were drawn to the Internet. We listened to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, then Dawn and Drew and the list just kept growing. When Dawn and Drew quit their job to Podcast full time, we decided that would be our goal.
Around the same time, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod with video. It seemed like there was room for new content. Everyone always said podcast about what you love. The thing Cali and I love in common is technology. We loved Engadget and Gizmodo so we decided to create a gadget video blog.
My idea was that Cali Lewis would be the International Head of the Geek Intelligence Agency and she would issue regular “Briefs” about gadgets and technology. We had no experience with video production, but we were laser-focused. We wanted to make the best looking show we could make and improve it every day. We also wanted to make it a business that would succeed.
It has been very successful, from our perspective, but it has been hard work. The first two years, as we were really learning how to get the show done, we often worked 14-16 hours a day at least six days a week. Mevio, our partner for distribution and advertising, has been an unseen force in what we’ve been able to do too. They made it possible for us to do the show full time and have connected us with advertising dollars that have kept Cali in T-Shirts and both of us in gadgets. It’s been good.
To me, three things all successful new media projects have in common is compelling content, professionalism and a sense that they all just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. Constant content production plus laser-focus is what seems to work.
UPDATE: Shamir Katsu asked two follow-up questions…
(1) How did you get hooked up with Mevio?
It’s easy now. Anyone can sign up for an account and launch a show on the network. They look at shows that perform in terms of audience growth and they reach out with advertising opportunities. Jeff McCord, the host of the Moxie Mo Show is a perfect example. He watched GeekBrief.TV, wanted to do a show of his own, asked us for advice, launched his show and he’s making extra money from it.
(2) How do you maintain that focus and drive to keep going when things are not going well?
There are two different ways to go with that. Some pursuits aren’t worth the effort. If you start something and it doesn’t ever start clicking, it’s probably best to let that go and move on to something else. If you start something with merit, you’ll see some signs of success and you’ll want to focus on what works and abandon what doesn’t.
When things aren’t going well it’s time to be as objective as possible. Sep back and work to understand the problem. Make adjustments a pay close, close attention to the things that bring positive results and do more of those things!
Read MoreEquipment Advice
We get asked all the time for advice about equipment. New media production, even using professional equipment, is far, far less expensive than broadcast production. Even still … better, more expensive equipment can set a new media producer apart from someone using equipment purchased from a local, consumer electronics store.
We started GeekBrief.TV with an inexpensive consumer camera and a relatively expensive professional microphone. It was clear a couple shows in that the inexpensive consumer camera wasn’t getting the job done, so we upgraded. It was a massive financial challenge for us and we sacrificed a lot to pay for it without going into debt, but we bought a high-end camera. I think it gave us an advantage.
The next episode of GBTV will be shot on our sixth camera. We moved immediately from consumer to “prosumer” and in the prosumer space, we moved from SD to HD. Our new camera is our first professional camera and it was freaking expensive. The costs are covered by the value of all the equipment and past cameras we’re selling, but still, it feels like a big investment.
We love giving equipment advice to anyone interested in working in new media, but the one thing we never advise is to go cheap. We recommend making sacrifices to purchase the best equipment a sacrifice will enable.
The hardest questions we get are related to price. We often get asked to recommend an HD camera below $300 or a wireless microphone system below $200 and our answer is we can’t! There are HD cameras below $300 and wireless microphone systems below $200, but we can’t recommend them because they just aren’t good enough for professional looking and sounding production.
The first year of GeekBrief.TV, we spent approximately $30,000 on equipment. We had to sacrifice a lot to pay for it, but we were passionate about our goals. We still sacrifice to buy better and better equipment because this is our life.
The best advice we can give about equipment is to not go cheap. Go cheap on your clothing. Go cheap in your food and drinks. Go cheap on everything in your life, but invest everything you can, without going into debt, on your equipment.
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