Podcast #44 – This Should Have Been #43

Welcome Back!  Our guest today is the one and only Robert Scoble - blogger and video maker extraordinaire.  He's joined by the usual Stack Exchange crew for a packed hour of fun.

• Robert is a geek who gets around and meets startups and tech innovators. He's calling from Flipboard's headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. Joel wonders if Flipboard is just kind of an echo chamber, but it certainly is not! As with much of the internet, your experience with Flipboard depends on who and what you choose to Follow and Like on your social networks.

• Facebook Graph Search seems cool so far, but you can't quite yet search for single friends who are Ruby programmers, or programmers at all. (You also can't do that on Careers, but that's because you can't use marital status in hiring decisions.)

• Stack Exchange maintains its own servers instead of hosting all our stuff on Amazon or something. Why? How? We walk through the reasoning.

• Robert is writing a book with co-author Shel Israel. (They published another book previously called Naked Conversations.) It's called Age of Context. The number and quality of sensors and wearable computers and databases and social media activity is increasing wildly these days.

• Tempo is a smart calendar from the lab that created Siri (and other amazing projects). Apps like Tempo (and Google Now) are the future of getting you all the information you need before you even know you need it.

• What else is new? Robert is waiting for Google Glasses, and he's got theBasis watch. Tempo and Mailbox have reservation systems to combat the huge scaling problems that arise when things get tens of thousands of users in the first hour after launch.

• What else is going on? There's a new Chromebook coming out, but Robert is saving his money for Google Glasses.

• Apple doesn't have the best-of-breed apps anymore. They don't have the right software people, and they don't know enough about us. Is this Tim Cook's fault? Unclear! Apple's secrecy is putting it at a disadvantage against the Amazons and the Googles of today.

• We have a user-submitted question! Steven who wants to know how many edits a normal answer typically gets.

• By the way, if you want to submit a question for an upcoming podcast, hop over to s.tk/podcastquestions. The best picture of a Siberian Husky gets a t-shirt!

• That's all, folks! You can find Robert as Scobleizer on probably any website in the entire world.  Make sure to tune in for the next episode when we have even more fun guests!

• Also, This is a really important twitter account that you should check out.

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