Entrepreneurship and imaging with Guy Kawasaki

Back in 2008, Gary Pageau interviewed entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki at the Ice Oasis ice rink, just prior to Kawasaki's ice hockey match. The audio was never published but, with Guy's permission, we're now publishing it. In 2008, the tech world was a very different place, so some of the company names and technologies may seem outdated and quaint, but the conversation covered broader topics that I think are still interesting to consider.

Today, Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and the creator of Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People podcast. He has written 15 books, including Wise Guy, The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, and Enchantment.

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Transcript

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Erin Manning  0:02  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and GotPhoto. 

Gary Pageau  0:10  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. Today we have a different show for you a blast from the past, if you will. In 2008, I was in San Mateo, California to interview entrepreneur and author of Guy Kawasaki. The interview was held in the ice Oasis ice rink just prior to Kawasaki ice hockey match. The audio was never published them. But with guys permission we're now publishing it. In 2008, the tech world was a very different place. So some of the company names and technologies may seem out of date and in quaint but the conversation covered broader topics which I think will still be interesting to consider. Today. Guy Kawasaki is the Chief Evangelist of Canva. And the creator of Guy Kawasaki. He's remarkable people podcast, he has written 15 books, including Wiseguy The Art of the Start 2.0, the art of social media and enchantment. So without further delay, let's travel back to the year 2008. And our interview with Guy Kawasaki. Okay, we're here at the lovely ice Oasis talking with Guy Kawasaki prior to his big hockey match this morning. And we're gonna be talking about a little bit about the future of entrepreneurship and social media and the internet. So guy, first of all, you've been, I think everyone in our audience probably knows you very well through your apple evangelism days. And some of the times you've spoken at our various events. How has entrepreneurship changed over the last, let's say, five or 10 years? What? What's changed and the type of people who are looking to your VC company for investment and support?

Guy Kawasaki  2:00  
Well, I don't think there's been big changes in that sense. The people, the type of people, what they're looking for, at any given point, it's usually the young people, because they have nothing to lose, nothing to do. They don't know what they're getting into. Whereas older people know what they're about to get into. So I don't think that's changed very much. The biggest change that I've seen recently is that it is much cheaper to start a company. And this is because of MySQL and rails and PHP and open source and offshoring and WordPress, and you name it, right. So now, you really can't start a web company for 20,000 bucks, something like that, that number used to be a million bucks, it will take you a year have two or three people programming. Now that takes three months. It's a very different world. And I happen to be a believer in the law of big numbers, which is, the more monkeys trying companies, the more likely there'll be a great company. And before if you took a million dollars for a monkey to try, that's one thing, but if it takes 20,000, you know, 1/50 of that. I think there'll be more monkeys, therefore more companies. So life is good right now for an entrepreneur

Gary Pageau  3:26  
actually wants to jump ahead and talk a little bit about starting a company for 20,000 hours because you've kind of done that. Yes. Can talk a little bit about tremors.

Guy Kawasaki  3:33  
Yeah, I started. Well, the company's name is NoNoNina. And it has two properties, Truemors and Alltop. Truemors was started as in a way for us to democratize information. The trend has been from, you know, rich people, with scribes to rich people with printing presses to, you know, less rich people with Macintoshes and laser writers, to websites to bloggers. But even at that last point, bloggers, you still had to own a blog, he had to run a blog. And frankly, the hardest part of a blog is coming up with content day in and day out. So we wanted to make it even easier. So you didn't have to own a blog. But you could just post news to a site. And so tumors was a wide open place where you could post me that you could post news through various channels onto a site that you know, 1000s of people come to we have subsequently made it less democratic. Honestly, we found that if you make it wide open, you get a lot of crap. So now we have sort of two systems going on one if one is if we know you and you've become a tumor arrest, you have an account and you can post anything. But if we don't know you, you can still post but we hold those posts in a pending sort of stack. So until we double check it, and it's done well is a good way to think of tumors is NPR for your eyes, as opposed to your ears. So we try to find these human interest stories from all over the world and put them in one place. And that company was started for about 12,000 bucks, we probably have 20,000 into it now. All top, which is part of the you know, it's it's sister site, if you will, is a series of feed aggregations about various topics. For your audience, we have photography.alltop.com, and that photography.alltop.com. We have feeds and sources from the most popular photographic blogs and sites. So if you want to follow photo news, you come to photography.alltop.com, you'll see all the last five headlines from the most popular sources. And if you mouse over the headline, you'll see the first paragraph of the source. So this is a way to keep track of all the review sites, all the news sites in one place.

Gary Pageau  6:08  
So these were you chosen to spend time of all the things you can spend your time on, on what are essentially media companies? Do you think that's the destiny of most of these companies to become sort of some sort of media conglomerate? Because even if you look at the old style companies, no, they all have their own blogs have their own media, they have their own channels where they're trying to communicate their own message seems like everyone, everyone regardless of their business is becoming immediate?

Guy Kawasaki  6:31  
Well, I I don't know. You know, will Harley Davidson become a media? I think they already are? Well, I mean, truly, Harley Davidson has media and social networking and all that kind of buzzwords around it, including the Harley's Owners Club, but fundamentally sells motorcycles, right? I mean, it's a motorcycle company that has great marketing. It's not a marketing company that oh, yeah, we also make motorcycles if you want to buy something. So I don't I think it's too strong to say that every company is going to be a media company. I think every company will have an aspect of media to it in its marketing fold, but chewers and Alltop are media companies. And Digg is a media company. Delicious, is immediate flickers, a media company, but Apple, I don't think is a media company.

Gary Pageau  7:24  
iTunes, yeah,

Guy Kawasaki  7:26  
that is a media aspect of a hardware company. I don't see the day where they create a reference design for iPod and Macintosh, and they no longer ship hardware. That's, you know, unlikely, right,

Gary Pageau  7:38  
exactly. But like, for example, if you look at what's happening with Microsoft, and going after Yahoo, which is a form of media companies, right, exactly. So it certainly is somebody there's this great desire among established players to become a media company, which is fast. And

Guy Kawasaki  7:53  
the irony is that I don't know if it's true everywhere. With particularly in Silicon Valley, you always want to be something you're not right. So all the hardware companies, they say, God, if we could be a media company, look at Apple, right? They sell us off for 99 cents, what's their cost of goods sold? Some royalty? Is there any inventory carrying charges? No. Is there any? Can you ever be out of stock of a song? No. Imagine the margins we just people just download bits, and we sell that what a great model. And then I can tell you that probably there's somebody inside Sony Music saying, wow, wouldn't it be great to be apple? I mean, we could sell something solid and people would, you can't steal it. You can't rip it off. You can't illegally copy it. You have to go to the Apple store and you have to buy an iPod. There's no, there's counterfeit iPods, I suppose. But not in the sense that they're stolen music, right? But,

Gary Pageau  8:52  
but if you're looking at I mean, just I don't wanna dwell on Apple, but certainly Apple would say their hardware company. They're all about selling hardware. They want to sell Apple TVs, they want to sell Macintosh, they want to sell iPods. The software enables the sale of the hardware.

Guy Kawasaki  9:03  
Yeah. So they're both Yeah, but I can tell you that. I've been at media companies which they could sell something that can't be ripped off. And, and many hardware companies sell something that they wish had no cost of goods sold. No inventory carry issues, right.

Gary Pageau  9:20  
So so what's the advice then for someone who has?

Guy Kawasaki  9:26  
The advice is, the advice is, let's take your best shot.

Gary Pageau  9:30  
So let's say for example, you are a professional lab and you service professional photographers, and you help them with their business. Okay, now know, by posting their images and selling their prints and helping so what would then be you know, what would then be, you know, maybe they're, they're tempted to maybe hire their own photographers and become vertical integrated to get more volume. What would you think of that?

Guy Kawasaki  9:59  
Well, In a way that would be describing becoming a vertically integrated Getty. Right? And there's a lot of people who look at Getty and saying, Wow, would you want to be Getty? Right? I mean, there's there's only several 1000 professional photographers, they're trying to make this trying to sell a photo for 300 bucks. Meanwhile, Getty buys iPhone iStockphoto with, you know, prosumers. And they're trying to sell a photo for three bucks. Wow. We just learned from 300 to three. And that's within the same company. Right, right. So if I were a professional photo lab, you know what I want to be? That's, that's a hell of a transition. I don't have to think about that. I don't, I don't know if we'll certainly certainly be fire professional photo lab. I don't think that you should look at and say Facebook is the answer. Right? We need to be a Facebook, because they don't understand it. Facebook, their business model is dubious, right? They have 50 million eyeballs. And Facebook is trying to figure out how to monetize that too. Right. So just because, you know, Silicon Valley, many companies are very high valuation. That doesn't mean they have high revenue. Right? Because certainly doesn't mean you have high profit. Exactly.

Gary Pageau  11:32  
A point you've made in the past is, you know, one the reason why YouTube is so successful is part of the reasons is Google Barnum. Well, yeah, kind of save your bacon,

Guy Kawasaki  11:41  
right? I mean, that happens time and time again, in Silicon Valley, you know, Pay Pal wasn't exactly kicking butt on eBay bought it, right. And so now, I don't think your listeners should therefore conclude, well, let's just create a dumbass company with no business model, and somebody will rescue us. Because, you know, hope is not a strategy. But, you know, wow, it's hard to explain some of these things. And let's take the case of YouTube. So if YouTube had come to us, and and I'll be the first to admit, we're not proven as a venture capitalist. But if YouTube had come to us and basically said, We need infinite server space with infinite bandwidth, so that people can rip off copyrighted video and upload it. And probably what's going to make us successful is a couple of guys dropping Mentos into Diet Cokes, you know, we probably would not have written the check. Now, if YouTube were not bought by Google, and it would just be out there. It would be interesting because they would be burning through servers and burning through bandwidth. And they would be burning through legal costs. And they would be one of you know, 25 of these video sites. And they will be trying to figure out well, can we run an ad next to the Diet Coke and Mentos for Diet Coke, you know, this bought that with Pepsi want to buy that slot? You know, they'd be having this discussion.

Gary Pageau  13:18  
So they kind of dodged the bullet

Guy Kawasaki  13:20  
they dodged the bullet. And you know I don't think it's a palatable strategy to say our our corporation is based on the the concept of dodging bullets, that's typically not the way you want to go. So I'm on the inside of this valley. And I tell you, even if you're on the inside you look at it you say well, wow, and this last exactly, so I just I just hope that your listeners don't think that we know what the hell we're doing here because we don't don't separate don't confuse luck

Gary Pageau  14:01  
luck and timing. So what are some of the errors you would definitely think of avoiding in terms of you know, you know, the bullets you better dodge?

Guy Kawasaki  14:11  
Well I think many making any kind of hardware device is very difficult. And we get pitches all day long. While we want to build the ultimate photo frame, right, so this frame will be have 802 11 built in and people can just bring your camera in and the camera will sense the photo frame and automatically downloaded wirelessly and all that and and then you say well, but you know there's these two $300 ones from 10 different companies and target and they say yeah, what we're going to be better than them because we're going to have better integration and then we're going to integrate Facebook like quality so you download your photos but then you can share them with your friends and you build up your profile and then you can add music to your photos and all that and and wow All that is like wishful thinking, right? So

Gary Pageau  15:03  
because you got to be able to evolve the product well and ship it and then change and then and then refresh

Guy Kawasaki  15:09  
all that Wizzy stuff that you think is so obvious why it's better than the $100 one that Seiko was making? Or who makes these things? Is everybody everybody, right? So you walk into Target, there's a shelf full of photo frames right now, right? And but the you are an entrepreneur, and you believe because you have social networking tied into it, and it's going to update your Flickr feed automatically, or whatever. And

Gary Pageau  15:33  
that can be easily copied to

Guy Kawasaki  15:35  
Yeah. And fundamentally, you have to make this thing as cheap as you can. Right. And then you believe that you have such a compelling story that you're going to call up Best Buy and Best Buy's going to just clear the shelf for you and put you up there.

Gary Pageau  15:49  
And good luck, but but backwards, then to 83 and 84, the driving the driving, the driving force probably was I am going to change the world, I'm going to come out with this device that is going to change how people work and behavioral rehab, we reached the point where it that's not a realistic anymore, there is no device out there, that's gonna I think many people

Guy Kawasaki  16:11  
will change the world, it's just not clear to me that it's going to be by doing a slightly better device that you believe. You know, I can't tell you how many companies coming to us and they say, Well, you know, the photo frame that. Who picks one who makes one? Correct? Okay, codec, the photo frame that Kodak makes, it doesn't have the right integration doesn't have social networking time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we believe that we'll be able to have lower manufacturing prices than Kodak. So there's two guys in a garage who have not built their first one yet. And they're saying they're going to, they're going to have a lower cost of goods sold and Kodak, and what they're doing is they're saying, well, because everything is so neat, we're going to sell 100,000 a month and 100,000 a month. Because we have these friends in Taiwan, they say for commitment of 1,000,002 units a year, you know, they'll get they'll get really low costs, right? So we're gonna beat Kodak's price. Okay. There's only one problem with that theory that assumes you're building a million to a year, right? Probably you're going to build 10,000 In the first year. Rob, is that and your prices cannot be as good as Kodak's? Right. So you're taking this best case future against sort of Kodak's reality today? How often does that best case future happen?

Gary Pageau  17:30  
Usually by accident?

Guy Kawasaki  17:31  
Yeah, certainly not

Gary Pageau  17:33  
certainly not in the mass market, right? Because Because I'm in the uptake of these things in the mass market, you're sitting there not intrigued by the whiz bang features.

Guy Kawasaki  17:40  
I don't even know how you communicate the whiz bang feature. If you run a TV commercial that says we have 802 11 N Not a and yeah.

Gary Pageau  17:50  
Well, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, it's very difficult to communicate, to make complex technology simple. And then to communicate the benefits of that, that's even harder. Exactly. And

Guy Kawasaki  18:04  
I've come to believe that it's as a venture capitalist, you know, we assume that the innovation that technology can be done. That's not always a good assumption, but we assume that and then the question becomes, let's assume it is done. Does anybody care? Right? And if anybody cares, can you get to those people? Right? Those are the harder parts of the question,

Gary Pageau  18:28  
right? Because at some point, you have to get a return, and you got to get to the customer. So if you're talking about something on the web, we're talking about, you know, very, very short attention spans very, very short, in a very, very little

Guy Kawasaki  18:40  
loyalty and a big noisy environment. Very little

Gary Pageau  18:43  
lonely. Look at look at the Exodus, from people going from MySpace to Facebook, and certainly somewhere out there. There's the next Facebook, and certainly out there who no one's seen it yet, but it's gonna kind of cop. Yeah, so the question is, is, you know, what's going to happen with, you know, the next thing and the ease of that transition, she's made, for example, in the web 2.0 space, the big appeal is you're not, you're not committed, I can take these mashups and he's different, you know, and like, the Alltop type thing. I can read all the best versions of the cluster, all the best reviews, all that actually having to go there.

Guy Kawasaki  19:16  
All right. All right. And, and, you know, the, the beauty of something like all top is that we're not creating the media. I mean, we're not creating those contracts, right? So we have a, call it a partnership, or you could say, a mutually parasitic relationship. So with someone like imaging resource, or, you know, digital preview, or Steves digicams, or any of our favorite sites, they could look at us and say, Well, so, you know, they're getting traffic for taking our feet that we paid money for to create the feed and the content in the feed. That's one way of looking at it. The other way looking at it is if they have hundreds of 1000s of people going to photography dot all dot.com Some of those people are going to come to us We'd never would have gotten so it's more traffic. We're putting the feet out anyway, hallelujah. It's crazy.

Gary Pageau  20:05  
Well, you're not quite at those numbers yet.

Guy Kawasaki  20:06  
Yeah. That's the dream, right?

Gary Pageau  20:11  
So but here's the interesting model. I mean, thinking discussion is okay, if you throw these aggregators out there that digs, all those folks out there, and all types who are pulling it, somebody somewhere has to create real content. So, so if if the advertising pie is let's say, you know, this big, alright, and it's becoming more and more fragmented, where is the money going to come from to pay for the original content?

Guy Kawasaki  20:40  
I don't know. It's tough to get some? I don't know.

Gary Pageau  20:47  
It's a big question. Because at some point here, because what I think we're seeing, you know, as a journalist, journalists looking at these things I look at, you know, you know, that at some point, you know, everyone's voice can have the same authority, right, you know, you know, the crackpot in his basement, who doesn't want his house to as an opinion on some sort of political thing, doesn't have the same authority posts as the Washington Post, and maybe actually, as a reporter in the room. So but the point is, you know, everyone's feed, however, is

Guy Kawasaki  21:14  
lucky. Let's see. Cool. Yeah, exactly. And

Gary Pageau  21:18  
maybe maybe the future of Alltop is to actually lend some authority to some of these people, that'd

Guy Kawasaki  21:22  
be scary. But the future of Alltop is that you'll be able to hide the fees. You don't want to see the crackpot Yeah, what I'm afraid of is that, I don't know how you decide on quote, authority and goodness. And I'm not convinced that Digg is the way because Digg can be gained. And Digg, also, I must say that I just am not that enamored with the wisdom of the crowd.

Gary Pageau  21:52  
To mean, I know a dig is can you kind of go over it because dig is the preeminent company,

Guy Kawasaki  21:56  
is a company where people, you register, you get a data cow, and then you sort of vote thumbs up or thumbs down on any given article. And enough people vote Thumbs up for the right people are the right people. Yeah. Which is why it's game over if the right 50 or so people vote thumbs up, then it goes to the dig homepage. And once you go to the D homepage, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Because the dude homepage has a lot of people there. So more people read it, some more people, give it a thumbs up, so it stays there gets higher, whatever. And so it's kind of a real time polling popularity contest on a per article basis for a very select crowd, for roughly, you know, a million people who are nerds, basically. So as a photographer, would I go to dig every day? It's unlikely that any photography related story will be there, right? It's more likely there'll be something about PHP or MySQL, or Ron Paul. All right. So, but that is a method. And now if if someone if your mom or dad said to you, well, I'd like to find out, you know, what's the most recent hot topics and news on the Internet? I doubt that it's the right thing to send them to dig. Right? Because they're gonna figure out that, wow, you know, what the hell is all this stuff about

Gary Pageau  23:22  
but the founder of Digg was on the cover of Businessweek? Because they thought it was the next big thing that was about a year. Yeah. And,

Guy Kawasaki  23:27  
you know, they need 52 people a year? I don't know. It could be I don't know, I'm just

Gary Pageau  23:35  
saying it's like he's getting all this attention. But then it gets to the question of authority, it gets to a question value, because like you said, it is scalable. It is, you know, questions? I mean, if you spend any time I dig, one of the big questions is, you know, why is this getting on the front page with 12? Things?

Guy Kawasaki  23:51  
You'd have to ask that question. Oh, they will never tell you. Right. Well, it's not because it's it's one man one vote, right? Obviously. So. So, by contrast, that all top we just take the stuff we like, right? So I'm a one man dig, if you will, right? And

Gary Pageau  24:11  
so what you've got as you have like triggers you've got

Guy Kawasaki  24:14  
lots of human filter. It's a very subjective human but with things like

Gary Pageau  24:18  
mahalo coming on the scene, which is a human generated search question is, do you think that sort of the future is that maybe maybe we've taken the AI and the automation a little too far and you kind of need a human element?

Guy Kawasaki  24:29  
Mahalo skills, if you think about it, it's infinite topics, right? So we have 60 topics and that's hard. But

Gary Pageau  24:40  
But under some, I mean, they could eventually evolve into a niche where maybe it's more of a you know, Tesla and things Jason Calacanis likes as opposed to you know, broad thing they maybe there's a mahalo type for various topics.

Guy Kawasaki  24:52  
My issue was mahalo is you know, how does it scale? How does it become? Because the first time you go to Mahalo, let's say you tie You know, I go to Google and I say, Well, how do I roasted turkey? And Google will give you cooking.com recipe Doc, you know, whatever. Yeah, exactly. food.alltop.com. And if I go to Mahalo and I say, How do I roast the turkey? And I don't find something. I'll never go back again. So now, roasted turkey is pretty obvious, especially around Christmas. But, you know, if I go to Google and I say roast a pheasant, I'm gonna find something if I go to mahalo was the pheasant? I don't know, maybe maybe at this point. So that that would be the question. And then, you know, with Mahalo. And I guess, to extend every company, you're changing behavior, right? Like, let's just face it, everybody in the world or three quarters of the world, when they want to search for something. It's like in their brain already go to Google. Now you have to train people to go to someplace else. And you know, to some extent, Galta Alltop has less of that problem. Because when you think about what I want to find all this news about a topic. I guess you could take photography news in Google. Right? That would be the first reaction. The good news is that is it'll find a lot. The bad news is, is it'll find a lot. Yeah. So my challenge is to slightly change behavior to where people say, Well, I'll go to all top and click on photography. And in a perfect world, when you go to Google, and you type in photography, news, all top photography.alltop.com will be in the first page right there. I have both worlds. But I think it's been easier for me to change behavior that way than Mahalo to go to a different search engine. Right. Wow.

Gary Pageau  26:59  
All right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it's gonna be hard to overturn the Google model. Yeah. So

let's see. One of the issues that comes up with, like, you're talking about what what stock photography and maybe some of these other issues is, you know, the combination of professional and amateur content, and you know, and in our segment that is, that is something that that has appeal, when you talk about, let's say, for example, you go to a major theme park pick when in your head, yeah, and let's say they had a selection of professional quality images you integrate into the photo book you make from that experience, from your own personal pictures and integrated and they combine it or, or your your childhood, you their high school yearbook, they take pictures from the yearbook staff, along with your own pictures, and combine that into a combined experience and produce something you can actually sell, which I know it's a crazy concept. But it's we're working on it as far as the industry goes. So you know, do you think they do you think there will with some of the challenges that everyone has with DRM and rights and certainly think that that's going to be changed? Or become easier as it goes? Or, you know, that tsunami is coming? Or, you know, I mean, it's hard to have a walled garden, for example?

Guy Kawasaki  28:21  
Well, I guess there will always be a market for this $300. You know, absolutely perfect picture of Brad and Angelina on the red carpet and right, God forbid, but I don't know, we'll be their pocket. And maybe it's only TMZ. And Perez Hilton, and D listed are going to buy that from Getty. Right. On the other hand. The beauty of Getty is they have they figured out that there's a $300 market, and there's a $3 market in both covered, right. Wow, I would if I had a choice between which part of that equation I'd be on I'd the other $3 market. And you could make the case even in the $3 market, what happens if someday somebody says All right, we have beautiful photography, and, and stock photography, right? Royalty free, unlimited use, and it's free. But our model is, when people are looking for those photos, we're going to sell ads next to it. So can someone leapfrog iStockphoto? I don't know.

Gary Pageau  29:33  
But it's, you know, but that's the trend. Right? Well, that's what everyone becoming any media company was we're talking about I know, that's, again, is sort of the you know, the old school look at you know, at some point someone's gonna have to either produce something or, you know, authority on something, you know, it all can't just be advertising.

Guy Kawasaki  29:51  
Well, the same thing is happening with user generated news, right. So the theory is that, like, when we in this interview, if you go out there and you see that, you know, There's a there's a, what could happen, it could be like a, you know, huge explosion and you'd be the first person on it and you have your, your digital camera or your cell phone camera, you take a picture, and you send it to CNN, you know, this is like 30 seconds ago, there was an explosion in Redwood City. And here's a picture of it. Whereas by the time a piece, or Reuters or UPI sends a photographer down here, it gets it up there, you know, that could be two, three hours, right? So the theory is user generated, media user generated journalism, is going to just clean the clean cloth of all these other established things. I haven't seen that yet. You know, like, first of all, not that many people potion. The first person on the London, you know, bust. The terrorism attack. Yeah, that's International. But you know, a Fire City. Yeah. So,

Gary Pageau  31:00  
I mean, that's what happens all the time. And somehow we managed to survive without knowing these things. Yeah. I mean, granted something major, like, you know, probably the most covered event ever was, you know, the trade the World Trade Center. I mean, there were so many cameras, so much coverage, and that warranted that, yeah, the fire in Redwood City, probably not so much.

Guy Kawasaki  31:19  
And, you know, user generated report about the fire in that city, I have to say that user generated content is a lot of times, it's just not that good, right.

Gary Pageau  31:30  
Now, certain theater certain gym once said, you know, 80% of everything is crap,

Guy Kawasaki  31:35  
right? But I gotta tell you that. On the other hand, if you look at iStockphoto, I use iStockphoto. A lot for tumors, and for my speeches. And it has never been the case where I went there and could not find a photo that I used to illustrate what I wanted to illustrate. That's it $3

Gary Pageau  31:56  
For how many how many pictures are on the network?

Guy Kawasaki  32:00  
On my cell phone, okay, how many?

Gary Pageau  32:03  
5 million? Yeah, exactly. I mean, they've got that breadth to do that. So it's likely you're gonna get a hit. But, you know, not everyone's gonna happen.

Guy Kawasaki  32:13  
Yeah, but 10 years ago, he would say, well, we're gonna do is we're gonna start this company, we're gonna let these amateurs with digital SLR upload photos, and we're gonna pay them 50%. And the price point will be out, well, at that point, it was two bucks or a buck or whatever. And someday, webmasters and designers and marketers and speakers, they're going to come to iStockphoto and they're going to take the flowers and they're going to you know, get a photo of a flower. A yellow flower. Yeah, yellow flower, instead of hiring a professional photographer. Would you have said yeah, that's gonna happen. I don't know. I mean, it's easy for us to say now I can pretty much guarantee that somebody and get a back then laughed at it. So this is a bunch of crap.

Gary Pageau  33:00  
Because it has to be a tip and

Guy Kawasaki  33:04  
shot and rod has to have the proper lighting and you know

Gary Pageau  33:08  
it's interesting because I think the first iteration of digital was really about replicating digital photography was about replicating the film experience. And I think now as we're entering the next phase of digital it's like said all these other things about replicating the film experience and extending it but

Guy Kawasaki  33:25  
the truth is that my oldest son's are 12 or 14 I'm sorry. I don't know if they if I said this film. I don't you know what I'm saying? Right? Like it's not like they ever used a typewriter or film them it's foreign right? It's also interesting is complete aside but interesting stories. For me. Microsoft was this guy or this company I have to compete against antitrust me the operating system. Evil, control the world to them. Microsoft is the company that makes Halo three exactly. I don't have any prejudices against Microsoft 360 is a great 360 degree thing. They love Halo. They love Guitar Hero Life is good. No, I don't care a bomb was not there. They could care less. It's very interesting. So there's not going to be anybody tendon, you know? 10 Let's see anybody 16 and younger. Do not gonna think about while you know particles of silver inherently give me better.

Gary Pageau  34:39  
Dynamic range.

Guy Kawasaki  34:42  
In the same sense that there are two still to this day. There are photographers who shoot in the eight by 10 You know, pull up the thing hands a lot of style, right? They thought that 35 millimeter was a joke. Right? Exactly. But now Now that people 35 millimeter thinking. Digital is a joke, right? I'm

Gary Pageau  35:02  
so windy, I guess my thing is, is that you know, like you said with the sock photographers and no one anticipated that model. So there's me things with photography, their post capture, whether it's, you know, Scene Recognition or facial recognition or these types of things that are really good. I think Dr. geotagging is the hot buzz thing now, you know, I've yet to find real useful. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, people love it. But yeah, how does it improve your photography?

Guy Kawasaki  35:29  
It's only if you really mean you'd have it'd be a special case where I could see if you're crossing America, by motorcycle. And I could see where GPS built in. It's interesting. Now I'm in Louisville. No, I'm in Tennessee not? Let's face it, probably 99% of the photos taken by amateur digital photographers are within like, a mile of 52 degrees north and 56 degrees less than 57.1 degree West? I can't

Gary Pageau  36:15  
fathom news for that. On the

Guy Kawasaki  36:17  
other hand, you have to say that Google Map opened up a whole new world. So you never know. You never know. Exactly.

Gary Pageau  36:24  
So it seems to me like a lot of what's happening with the web these days is to take these massive amounts of information like, you know, GPS, and, and the and, and making a comprehensible. invisibly, you know, trying to make these things. I think one of the things that for example, you mentioned Google Maps, Street View side of it was fascinating. And when most people have no idea how difficult that was probably to do

Guy Kawasaki  36:49  
that. Have you used it twice? Not really. I'd say a very interest I call my house. Yeah, right. Everybody was at their house. And they say, Okay, so that's what my house looks like, it's amazing. And, okay. I'm gonna have a party in my house for Blogger, and the person who's going to help me with the party is in Houston. So I sent her Google Map on my house, so she could see this is kind of the physical setting of my house. So you can see where we could have the party. Right? So I don't have you know, obviously, I'm not gonna rent the helicopter to take a picture of my house. So there was this the second time I've used Google ever,

Gary Pageau  37:29  
not just for directions, when you say, No, I mean, not, you mean the Street

Guy Kawasaki  37:33  
View kind of Street View thing, and you know, the satellite photo thing, or whatever, taking that photo, but I will tell you, I've read a review of a new GPS system for your car, that communicates with other GPS systems of its kind, and communicates that, you know, I'm at one on one and 92, and I'm moving at five miles per hour. And so if you are another one with the system can tell that, oh, my brother and I are stuck in a traffic jam or one on one and 92, maybe I should go to 80 instead of one, one. So that kind of makes sense that these GPS systems are communicating with each other over a network telling each other that oh, you know, you've got really slow here you might want to avoid but is

Gary Pageau  38:20  
is that one of the major GPS vendors or somebody somebody with a new device, or device, so it's a new company. So they so for that to work, you need a lot, you need a lot of them in the same areas.

Guy Kawasaki  38:32  
But just like with iStockphoto for that to work, you needed 5 million photos, right? When you have 50,000 you type deal or flop doesn't mean anything. Also this GPS system is cool, because I'm maybe others other systems can do it now. But you know, I don't know about you, but I never start entering the GPS system till I mean, the car moving right,

Gary Pageau  38:52  
which was the wrong thing. And

Guy Kawasaki  38:55  
this this, I think there's a natural linkage between Google Maps so you say I so I'm gonna go to 30 You know, Smith road. And then you could just tell Google Maps to send it to the GPS system, rather than having to go you know, city streets. Just goes in. It's like with TiVo. Now TiVo has a web interface. So you can say for this TiVo in my house record the sharks game tonight. You don't need to be at the table typing in shark, this.

Gary Pageau  39:28  
Thanks, the answer that sounds reasonable. Yeah. But there's really nothing there that a Garmin or or somebody couldn't I don't think

Guy Kawasaki  39:34  
Garmin has the thing where these they're talking to each other and telling each other that there's a big traffic jam here go the other way.

Gary Pageau  39:41  
But it could certainly be an upgrade. Yeah, unless it's heavily patent protected. Yeah. So let's kind of wrap this up, because you've got some ways to go. Where do you see then, you know, in terms of having to make decisions, you know, at a at a higher level, you're looking at down the road, you know, three to five years right? No one's crystal ball is remotely being clear. This that standpoint. You know, what, what are some of the signposts people should be looking for insurance? No major, major trends. I mean, just things, you know, the tried and true that never change.

Guy Kawasaki  40:16  
It's kind of mission impossible, but I think this case is sexist as this is, should ask your wife because pretty much mothers and wives No, man have no clue. So if you tell your wife that you have this great new thing that has 802 11 in and that's why it's gonna be, you know, this kick butt product and Best Buy's gonna give us shelf space and you're gonna smoke Kodak because you're gonna build 1,000,002 of them and come back is only building 100,000 of them. And if your wife says you're nuts that's the best case.

Gary Pageau  40:58  
And why why do you think that is?

Guy Kawasaki  41:00  
Because I think that men have this deep seated need to kill things. So whenever they have an opportunity to to kill a company or a product or service or a person or a plant or an animal, they're predisposed to doing it, whereas women don't have that need to kill things. So they're more objective. That's my theory. practical, practical. Yes.

Gary Pageau  41:24  
Oh, yes. Awesome. Well, thank you.

Erin Manning  41:29  
Thank you. Thank you for listening to the dead pixel society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www the dead pixels society.com