Justin.TV visits PodTech HQ
As promised, Justin showed up at PodTech HQ today, he was here from 11:30am till about 2pm. You can go to his site and look at the archives. I video interviewed Justin at STIRR before he went live, it’s a good summary. There’s an archive of him coming here, it will be at this URL (but doesn’t work yet)
We started to Twitter it, and Scoble Twittered it (he has over 2000 friends, most which are bloggers) and then Justin’s chat room started to have problems (related to the visitors, dunno?) I started to get Text messages and phone calls from folks that were watching, it was pretty cool.
Justin TV Factoids I learned today
-I learned Justin is a graduate of Yale, and him and his former college buddies came up with this idea.
-Justin has a very serious battery pack of lithium ion batteries in his backpack, and they heat up real well (I had to hold his backpack while he drove).
-He’s also sponsored by Bawls energy drink, and Zipcar, he’s hoping to land more sponsors.
-He’s getting called by major media, newspapers, and we expect him to get invited to Oprah show, and other mainstream shows.
-He’ll prob need to upgrade his platform to handle the load. He’s using Amazon EC2 Web Services for computing power.
-It took him and his team a few months to build the backpack platform.
-Justin moved here from Seattle a few months ago
-He’s single
-Got his first ‘on screen’ kiss this weekend, followed by others
-Seeking a GF that’s an inspiring actress
-Is 3rd generation Chinese
-Can only go places where the EDVO card can reach
-Is invited to many parties
-The camera is on him 24/7
-There’s a 15-30 sec delay
-He tilts the camera up when going to bathroom
-There was a false alarm prank call made to the police, which brought them over to his house
-The police are aware of these false alarms and will be cautious going forward, they won’t be tricked again
When we went to eat at a local med wraps place on California Avenue, people who were watching Justin TV in the area figured it out, and one photographer showed up to take pics. Eddie and Irina showed up and then invited Justin to go film a show for LunchMeet.
Things are starting to happen in real time, people are sharing on the net.
Social Media is going from Asynchronous to Real-Time.
I posted this less than 30 minutes after he left…I can’t keep up!
Update:
Justin is on CBS5, a local news firm, see video. I wonder if the news industry realizes this could be a threat.
Update March 27th
Jeff Yang of SFGate covers the Justin.TV story. He even watched me live in the video, and referred to me as “Asian Guy”. Now he knows, it’s me Jeremiah
7 Comments so far
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In order for Justin.tv to achieve any kind of mainstream success they need to either create a moderated chat room or turn that thing off. It’s full of trolls saying really nasty and hateful things. Aside from that aspect of it I think it’s a really interesting thing that they’re doing with a lot of potential.
This is a good idea, although I wasn’t able to view the video. I kept getting an error saying the server was busy. =/ Maybe too many people were on it at the same time?
Maybe next time.
Justin acted on an idea that most people would think of and then discard a few seconds later.
I hope he gets some mainstream attention.
Mike.
The chat room recently went to “login only” to participate, I’m sure they will clamp it down over time. Many communities start wide then narrow as a way to spur on conversation. Justin told me they’re considering some type of moderation.
Chris, keep on trying, the servers got a lot of attention after we blogged and twittered it.
Chris R, he’s on mainstream TV tonight, see my updated link in the post
Jeremiah,
Yes, I saw that the chat room now requires a log-in. It has gotten a LOT better since they implemented that. Amazing how badly people behave when they can hide behind anonymity.
Regarding the mainstream attention, AP ran a story today which is getting picked up by a number of news sites today.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070327/ap_en_ot/on_the_net_2
-Mike
oh man… someone should have told him
[…] Earlier this week I had Justin TV come to the office, that was an interesting real-time experience. […]