Heartbreak to hero

It can be said that Alan Levy is a good business man, a direct and effective negotiator. He retooled existing, large telephony infrastructure technology into a free, light-weight web service anyone with a phone can figure out. He makes money on both premium services and advertising, as well as backend US numbers procured by the phone company he also owns. But the service, again, is free. And long distance is included with virtually every phone service these days.

I said “hero”, because we’ll all see heartbreak at some point, but few of us create a mechanism by which anyone can communicate, build community, share, connect with friends, family, paranormal psychologists, authors who write about paranormal psychologists, actors who play them on TV and activists concerned for the pet portrayals played therein. Smart businesses will take the technology, like Dave Winer did and build cool sub-services. They can use these privately like recorded conference calls, or on the fly via cell-phone only from the ballpark or town hall meeting. Podcast on-the-go.

While I don’t work for the company now, I still love them and I respect what Alan did, coming back and building this for the world. He didn’t need the money. He needed to give back and he did that for thousands of people. Listen to the discussion with Alan.

Voting on political news

Join me at 5:30 pm PT today for a live discussion with founder of Skewz, a community of political articles posted by users like you and I. In this community, individuals rate articles as to how far left or right the view might lean and by doing so, offer some interesting statistics about media bias.

ProQuo.com’s CEO to talk about unwanted junk mail

We’re talking about the old school junk mail, the large atom-based material that comes to your door step, not the electronic kind. That’s another show entirely.

 

ProQuo is a company claiming to reduce paper mail you don’t want by anywhere from 50-90%. The service is free and solves two problems specifically.

1) Identity theft. I saw statistics on Current.tv this week which said that in 2006, 20 million people had reported identity theft and the number rose to 120 million in 2007. Paper mail is one way criminals get ahold of your information.

2) It’s green! I find myself throwing away paper junk mail every day. Somedays, it’s all the mail I receive. ProQuo told me that 100 million trees are used to send junk mail in the US each year.

Join me for a live conversation with Steve Gal, ProQuo’s CEO on Wednesday, April 2nd at 9:30 am PST (Or download it later)

Voxant’s new CEO

There is a storm of new media sites and Voxant is holding its own. Some serious work has gone into the process of playlists, high-quality content and virality. Last month I spoke with Jeff Crigler, former CEO of Voxant and now I’m speaking with Marcien Jenckes, appointed as the new CEO this month.

Marcien comes from AOL where he was SVP of Messaging, Community and Voice overseeing communities, AIM and ICQ. Running large media communities and understanding the importance of viral media are two points in favor of Voxant’s success, as well as the sophisticated tools they have in place for those wanting to take news with them and get paid for it from their own web sites.

Listen to the January 17th, 2008 live interview to hear where Voxant’s new leadership is going.

Voxant’s feed page

Videopinions from ExpoTV

Thanks to Daphne Kwon, infomercials and reviews have become personal. That is to say, that the person who lives next door to you might have useful information about a product you are about to buy.

Daphne Kwon is the co-founder and CEO of ExpoTV, the first and largest video-based social commerce network specifically tailored for the consumer in control, offering a fun, fast way for real people to connect, share and celebrate the products they are passionate about. The programming service launched in November 2004 and is distributed through partnerships with the world’s largest portals including Yahoo!, AOL, Google and YouTube; to leading ecommerce destinations like Smarter.com and Buy.com; and to more than 25 million digital cable homes through VOD (video on demand) partnerships with Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Verizon and other cable operators.

She was recently named as both a top 100 “Women in Cable” and “Most Influential Minorities in Cable” by Cable World magazine, and selected as a “Top 40 under 40” business leader by Crain’s New York Business magazine.

We are going to be live on BlogTalkRadio at 5:30 pm PT November 28, 2007. You can dial in to ask a question or make a comment at +1 (646) 478-4956. Or chat with me live here on Lisacast.com.

A musician online, Jon Hammond

Jon Hammond speaks with me while in town on the weekend of the SF Blues Festival. Jon is a sweet and talented musician with a convincted view supporting artists, unions and collaboration. He is great to speak with, down-to-earth and experienced about the changing world of broadcast. He has done public TV and radio for years and keeps regualr company on both east and west coasts of the US. He has travelled too, and lived in Germany and Paris.

For more on Jon visit http://jonhammond.vsocial.com

To listen to the show, including 4 of Jon’s tunes and our interview visit http://blogtalkradio.edgeboss.net/download/blogtalkradio/show_102139.mp3