Daphne Kwon, ExpoTV (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Posted on January 2, 2010 by lisapadilla

Please read my blog post as well.

You are listening to Lisacast on BlogTalkRadio.

Lisa Padilla: Hey good evening, it’s Lisa Padilla. I am Lisacast and I am back on BlogTalkRadio after a couple of weeks without doing a show truly; this is good news. With me today is Daphne Kwon who is the CEO and the co-founder of ExpoTV, and in a minute I will introduce her and we can get to a discussion with her. She is at the Dow Jones VentureWire Consumer Technology Conference today and I am sure she is going to tell us a little bit about that too; maybe she is doing some interesting things there. I have myself been to that conference and found it fascinating, interesting mix of technology companies and leading companies and large entertainment companies and all in all a pretty high caliber group of attendees and speakers and press and whatnot. Daphne has some experience in TV herself.

(Informal Talk)

Lisa Padilla: While I am doing that, I will tell you a little bit about her background. She was Chief Financial Officer of Oxygen Media which is very interesting in that she has done a lot of work with mergers and acquisitions and I think that combination of business experience as well as television industry experience is very interesting. Okay now I have got her back here. Daphne, are you with me?

Daphne Kwon: Yeah I can hear you.

Lisa Padilla: Great. Well thank you and welcome to BlogTalkRadio, we are excited to get to talk to you once more.

Daphne Kwon: Yeah it’s great to be here and currently I am so important that you pulled yourself out of a few weeks hiding just to come talk to me. So thanks for doing that.

Lisa Padilla: I did. You got me excited again about talking to people. We have been working so hard on our own site here, we launched a new homepage today also BlogTalkRadio has a couple of exciting announcements coming next week, and so I am ready to get talking again. You know let’s build and then talk about it. So tell me, your background Daphne nicely supports the work I am talking about that you have done with Oxygen Media and Disney and as you might want to tell I guess a little bit about ExpoTV. But then I would like to jump into sort of what you found most useful about your experience before this as applies to running ExpoTV which is a great site, I love your site.

Daphne Kwon: Thank you so much, thanks for saying that and congratulations on your own product development, I think that’s fantastic you are one of the entrepreneurs. I think that, and I appreciate your question actually about my background because it’s something that Expo is actually very proud of, are the type of people that we attracted to our company. Generally you know thumbnail of what we do is it’s a YouTube crossed with consumer reports. So basically we are very purpose driven on product information and what we say is we are dedicated to illuminating consumer experiences. So we have about 200,000 product video upload reviews that have been uploaded to us. So there are these 1 to 3 minute clips of people everyday Joes who are uploading video testimonials about products that they own and it can be positive or negative. And they are very authentic, very sincere because you have to show your face you know you create a profile page, you have to show the product, you have to demonstrate it. And these are products that these people spend money on so they have a very different prospective than an expert like a Di Fino and all of those perspectives they are really valid however we think someone who spent the money on it also has a really valid perspective.

Lisa Padilla: Right. Taking the time, has been inside the instruction booklet, went through the whole process of setting it up or testing it or what have you, right?

Daphne Kwon: And also saw how it sat on their kitchen counter you know that it was too big or that the keeper board was too little and their baby didn’t like that because the strap was in its way. And so there is lots of things that I think an expert misses because they are not using it on a day-to-day basis, they can only guess how someone might use it but they are not using it themselves and that’s a whole level that I think is only complementary to the experts that we go to for their advice as well. [Full articles]

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Elad Yoran, KoolSpan (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Posted on January 2, 2010 by lisapadilla

Recorded during an earlier interview.

I was lucky enough to interview KoolSpan at the RSA Conference. Elad Yoran, Executive Chairman, joins Lisacast to discuss TrustChip technology and recent financing of $7.1 million (What? I thought there was a recession!.) KoolSpan’s crypto engine is a self-contained authentication, encryption and key management platform. That’s right, I said ‘crypto engine’. Tune in to learn more.

BlogTalkRadio

Lisa Padilla: Hi, and welcome to the show today. This afternoon, we are broadcasting, we have this BlogTalkRadio at the RSA Conference in San Francisco where Elad Yoran who is from KoolSpan is going to talk to us a little bit about their technology and the crypto engine and a recent about financing that the company received that was announced this week I believe. And Elad, are you with me?

Elad Yoran: I am with you Lisa and delighted to be here.

Lisa Padilla: Thank you. I am sorry to cut you off as our show started. But we were talking a little bit just a few minutes ago about the significance of receiving some funding in this day and age when the economy is purposively a bit shaky or we are supposed to be concerned. I think we still see a lot of activity around technologies that really shows some values. So, maybe you can talk a little bit, Mr. Yoran, about your background and your post as a chairman of KoolSpan and about your recent funding.

(Informal talk)

Elad Yoran: First, there was an article on the front page of the business section in today’s new York Times that talks about Silicon Valley funding being impacted by the economy. And so, I think that getting funding today well may be a little bit impacted by the economies for companies with strong prospect. Funding is still available. And for us, in a personal sense, getting the funding was critically important and that it enabled the company to go forward and do the things that it needed to do in order to meet the demand for its product for the TrustChip. So, we raised $7.1 million. It’s a significant amount of money and the lion’s share of the funding will go towards things like demand fulfillment as well as of course to continued research and development.

Lisa Padilla: And so, if you get one step back anyway in this sort of way the groundwork for products, when it started and how it started.

Elad Yoran: Well, KoolSpan was founded five years ago by a gentleman by the name of Tony Fascenda. He is actually the company’s CEO and media visionary in the world of wireless and mobility. He has been an entrepreneur for the last 35 years and has developed paging systems and two-way paging systems and handheld forms long before our it became really a consumer market or a market in which every person really had a wireless handheld device like a cell phone. So he has been doing this for years. And sometimes I joke around with Tony and tell him that it took somebody with his background and his perspective on mobility and wireless to come up with a solution as innovative for the security industry. So it is really an out-of-the-box and creative thinker here.

Lisa Padilla: And give us one example of how like TrustChip would be implemented, what’s your case study about that.

Elad Yoran: So, if we think about what cell phones are today, they have evolved a long way. Cell phones aren’t just for making telephone calls, I mean they are really little computers. And we use them for today a wide variety of applications, obviously still to make telephone calls but also for e-mail and for all of the PDA functionality. And now, we see all kinds of other applications rolling out into the cell phones. Now, the thing to keep in mind is that cell phones were designed to be mobile, they were designed to easy to use, they were designed to be a lot of things, just not secure. And now that, we are using cell phones to do so many things, of course one of the most important of which is still making a telephone call that security has to be elevated and brought into the equation. So it’s not just about mobility and ease of use, all those things are still critical, but another critical dimension or characteristic that we have to add to that list is security. And so, you have to question what’s an application, I will give you a very simple one that we all do every day and that’s making a telephone call. When we make telephone calls on landline phones, we have very strong sense that the conversations we have are secure and we know who we are talking to on the other end and we know to a great extent that the conversations are not being eavesdropped. [Full article]

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Socializing on connections

Posted on October 6, 2008 by lisapadilla

Click to listen > Lisacast with guest Liad Agmon on Social Search

One entrpreneuer’s to do list

Serve in the electronics R & D lab for the military
Study computers, film and TV at the university
Build a start-up and sell it to McAfee in order to:
Fund Israel’s highest grossing film in the last quarter century
Move to San Francisco

Following your passion

Liad Agmon, co-founder and CEO of Delver, has 15 years of experience in the communication and security industries. He holds a BA (cum laude) in Computer Sciences from Tel-Aviv University, and is a member of Israel’s Broadcasting Authority Internet Committee. But that’s not why he ended up in the tech industry. He did it to raise money for another passion, film. See, Liad also studied film & television there in Tel-Aviv. This is Liad’s blog, by the way:

Liad was the assistant director at Israel’s top grossing film in the last 25 years – a French-Israeli co-production called “Turn Left at the End of the World”. He also produced and directed the DVD featurette “The Troupe – 25 years later” and he wrote for some of Israel’s top stand comedians. This impressed me, he says to himself: I need money for a film. Ok well I’ll just build and sell a company.

I mean here’s an interesting, creative kid. And it takes someone like that to create cutting edge software. It was Liad’s passion, his personal passion, that drove the creation of Delver.

Personal passions connect us socially too. In his interview on Lisacast, Liad talks about friendship coefficients and why he thinks the world could be ripe for social search.

[Social search] can happen only at a certain point when the market has matured and there is enough social content out there that you can index.

– Liad Agmon

What’s Delver look like?

Check it out yourself and click to listen to the interview, recorded and rebroadcast live on BlogTalkRadio > Lisacast with guest Liad Agmon on Social Search

Heartbreak to hero

Posted on July 23, 2008 by lisapadilla

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

Posted on April 12, 2008 by lisapadilla

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.