AfterTV

Karl Ryser Jr

There are few companies better positioned to understand the online media ecosystem as All Media Guide (AMG). This is the company that provides the professionally created content about media for many leading websites including iTunes, Yahoo,Sony PS3, Amazon and AOL. Music fans know AMG through their incomparable All Music Guide, movie buffs rely on All Movie Guide and gamers are becoming familiar with All Game Guide. AMG's CEO is Karl Ryser Jr and he has some provocative ideas on the value of professional content, the real significance of the Long Tail and the future of the music business.

LISTEN to RYSER and KEEN

George Dolbier and David Laux

Do they play games at International Business Machines? Yes, they do and, like most other things at IBM,  they are pretty good at it. We caught up with George Dolbier (photographed), the Chief Technology Officer at IBM's Gaming Division and global executive David Laux to talk about IBM's gaming business. So what, exactly, does playing electronic games mean at IBM?  According to Dolbier, it means recognizing beautiful things at odd angles.

LISTEN to DOLBIER and LAUX

Mary Francia

Few companies are better placed than Philips to navigate the chaos of today's global media business. So it was with relish that we caught up with Mary Francia, Philips' quintessentially cosmopolitan VP of Sales and Marketing to discuss VOIP, IPTV, the future of broadband, the convergence of hardware and software and, last but not least, the anthropology of identity in the modern world.

LISTEN to KEEN and FRANCIA

Keith Richman

What do young men want? When it comes to their media, Keith Richman, CEO of Break.com, has as good an idea as anyone. Break is one of the new breed of "verticalized" user-generated Web 2.0 sites catering to the a very specific demographic. And Break users are mostly men in the 18 to 30 age range. According to Richman, young men want...

LISTEN to RICHMAN and KEEN

John Rauh

Just six dollars. According to John Rauh, President of the public interest group Americans For Campaign Reform, that's all it will cost to establish a fully publicly funded Congressional and Presidential election in America. Rauh believes that these publicly funded elections would reform much of the special interest bias of contemporary American politics. And Rauh is for real. Americans for Campaign Reform has got thousands of members and the backing of political heavyweights like ex Senators Warren Rudman and Alan Simpson.

LISTEN to RAUH and KEEN

Hoftun and Stang

Finally there's a good book about electronic gaming. The Book of Games was written by two Norwegians games experts -- Erik Hoftun and Bendik Stang. They are both officers in the Norwegian based games consultancy group GameXplore as well as gamers themselves. Maybe it's those long winter nights in Norway that has turned Hoftun and Stang into such oracles about every aspect of the electronic gaming world.

LISTEN TO HOFTUN AND STANG

Richard Edelman

Who is the true master of the universe in the age of Time magazine's YOU? A technologist like Larry Page or Sergey Brin perhaps or maybe a marketer like Tim O'Reilly or John Battelle? Or could it be Edelman, Richard Edelman, the ubiquitous CEO of the even more ubiquitous Edelman PR agency, the largest private PR firm in the world. Edelman gets the Web 2.0 revolution better than anyone. He understands that there are no absolutes in this world, that everyone is self-created, that we -- individuals and corporations alike -- are all responsible for establishing our own version of the truth.

LISTEN TO EDELMAN and KEEN

Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright's magnificent The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 has rightly been included as a best book of 2006 by The New York Times, The Washington Post and was nominated for a 2006 National Book Award. Wright -- whose day job is as staff writer on the New Yorker -- spent five years researching The Looming Tower and conducted hundreds of interviews for the book. The result is an pristine story about the furtive world of Al-Qaeda and American counter-terrorism. If you read one 9/11 book, this should be it. So it is with particular honor that we welcome Lawrence Wright to afterTV.

LISTEN to WRIGHT and KEEN

Fred Turner

What is the connection between the cold war establishment, the Sixties counterculture and cybercultural icons like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson? According to Stanford University professor Fred Turner, the connections are intriguingly fecund. In his excellent new book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Turner shows how Stewart Brand's libertarian cyberculture grew out of the Cold War defence military-industrial complex and then San Francisco's hippie counterculture. The end product, Turner says, is digital utopianism -- an ideological idealism about computers now articulated by Silicon Valley companies such as Google.

LISTEN to TURNER and KEEN

Tim Draper

Tim Draper might not be superman. But he is a super venture capitalist -- at least in terms of some of his legendary investments (Skype, Hotmail, Baidu & Overture.com). He's also a Silicon Valley eccentric with provocative (even wacky) ideas about politics, culture and society. He's good on mega trends, good on counter intuitive thinking, obsessed with all things viral. When everyone goes one way, Tim Draper goes the other.

LISTEN to KEEN and DRAPER

David Hornik

It's rare for a venture capitalist to be smart. And it's even rarer when a smart venture capitalist doesn't use every opportunity to show off their intelligence.

So David Hornik, a partner at August Capital (the firm which made the original investment in Microsoft) and the founder of Venture blog, is one rare venture capitalist. He's also one of the few venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who invests in companies and then lets the management team run the show themselves.

LISTEN to HORNIK and KEEN

George Lakoff

Are American values a monopoly of angry right-wing conservatives on talk-in radio? Not according to George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and founder of Berkeley's progressive Rockridge Institute. According to Lakoff's provocative new book, Thinking Points: Communicating our American Values and Vision,the real political debate in America is all about language. In Thinking Points, Lakoff turns the culture wars on their head and transforms American patriotism into a liberal virtue. Lakoff wants us to think about language and then act politically. He's definitely worth a listen.

LISTEN to LAKOFF and KEEN

Larry Sanger

Is Larry Sanger a historical footnote or a future headline? He certainly began life as a footnote -- being employee #1 at Wikipedia before falling out with Jimmy Wales and leaving before the user-generated encyclopedia became one of the biggest Web 2.0 stories of all. But Sanger wasn't finished. He's back now with his own start-up, an information business called Citizendium which, in contrast with Wikipedia, relies on acknowledged experts for its information. Sanger's Citizendium seeks to merge the best of old style knowledge media like Britannica with the simple publishing technology of the Web 2.0 revolution. So footnote or headline? You decide...

LISTEN TO KEEN and SANGER