Sam Talks Technology

Sam and Faisal talked about his recent tenure as CEO of Blippar. Why now is the right time for an Augmented Reality (AR) rebirth and what are his expansion plans globally for Blippar.

We also talked about his amazing career from the early days in Ofcom and his role in the Premier League football rights. Working with Niklas Zennström and a young Daniel Elk at Skype on their proprietary Peer to Peer platform called Jolted, before he joined Daniel at Spotify as International .

Faisal also gave a surprise answer to my suggestion that Spotify and Netflix need to merge to compete with Apple and Amazon.

Shortly after this interview Blippar’s AR platform was used to deliver the world’s first product launch event entirely in AR for OnePlus; the latest smartphone from premium technology brand OnePlus.

Sam talked with Mukul about how this very early beta project fits into the wider BBC strategy across multiple services to act as a trusted public service voice assistant to the vast array of content on TV, Radio and Sounds (podcasts), be it local, national or international.

Mukul also talks about why Beeb today is a northern male and like Dr Who is genderless and could regenerate into a female voice in the future.

We also talked about why Beeb is not going to compete with Alexa or Google but how the BBC plan to partner with a wide variety of companies to extend the role and reach of Beeb.

Sam Sethi had the pleasure to interview Martin Steers the station manager at NLive Radio and Chair of Community Radio Awards.

We talked about how NLive is continuing to run their station through COVID and what software Martin is using to enable remote broadcasting.

We talked. about the upcoming Community Radio Awards and what has changed and whether there will be an awards ceremony later this year.

We also talked about the newly formed UK Community Radio Network that Martin has formed with a number of station managers across the UK to lobby government on our collective behalf.

We ended up talking about some of the hot topics in radio. Bauer making 260 presenters redundant this September and what that means for local radio. Will DAB+ ever come to community radio and finally are podcasting and streaming services a challenge to radio audiences?

Sam talks with Nigel Eccles about his new company Flick. A companion app for sports fans who want to watch a game while chatting online with likeminded fans and friends.

Nigel talks about how Flick has raised £4m and was growing nicely until Covid-19 put a stop to all live sports. He believes Flick will return to growth once live sports like football return. In fact with stadium bans it could see ever greater demand for Flick as fans try to recreate the stadium atmosphere while at home.

Prior to Flick, Nigel, his wife and three engineers started Hubdub that soon pivoted into FanDuel. Nigel recalls how a WebMission to Silicon Valley in 2008 helped Fanduel grow. Some of the other companies that joined them included edocr, huddle, skimlinks, mydeo, WAYN and TrustedPlaces.

Nigel talks about how FanDuel went on to raise $450m+ and experienced hyper-growth in customer acquisition. Sadly the story did not end up with Nigel and his wife growing a Unicorn, selling it and riding off into the sunset. Nigel talks at length about how the Private Equity company engineered to remove him, the executive team and all the staff who held ordinary shares from benefiting from their growth and success. In fact they ended up with zero while the board that consisted of the PE Equity partners engineered it to make themselves millions.

The story does not end there. Nigel and 90 of his original staff have filed a class action suit against the PE company. We await the outcome.

Sam talks with Jay LeBoeuf about Descript’s latest version 3.4 which now includes live transcription, overdub and publishing to the web.  This is on top of its already powerful realtime audio and text synchronised editing.

Sam Sethi talks with Tommy Nagra about the BBC Big Night In and how in less than three weeks it managed to put on a live show that raised £70m. 

We talk about how Tommy started in the BBC and how he helped discover comedians like Sanjeev Bhaskar. 

Both Tommy and I are Liverpool FC “Superfans” and we talk about our passion for the reds and why so many Asians and people of colour support Liverpool more than any other team. 

Tommy was also at Hillsborough and we touch on the events of that momentous day. We finally discussed the modern day role of the BBC in term sof its diversity and in light of the competition from Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Sam Sethi talks with James Minter about the story of his club, Adam Street in London which not been told.

James is as self-effacing as he is charming, recounting with warmth the role it played in the dotcom boom.

“Adam Street was absolutely amazing,” he recalls. “It was a first, unique, and I met the most wonderful bunch of people there. No one has ever directly copied it.”

Now sadly defunct, the venue off The Strand – with its bar, restaurant, library, gallery, and event space – became the go-to place for London’s tech entrepreneurs as they rallied after the bubble burst.

Originally established as serviced offices by James after a career in the navy, Adam Street became a magnet for dotcom start-ups with few assets and little capital. The club itself opened in 2001 in an old watering hole for actors propping up the building.

What would become the first entrepreneurs’ club in London was seeded when James noted the then itinerant nature of Julie Meyer’s First Tuesday networking club.

“Back in those days it was still the case that if you went into a club you weren’t allowed to talk about business – it was not done and was meant to be a subtle under-the-radar thing,” he explains. “So I thought you have got all these people together, First Tuesday moving from venue to venue, why isn’t there a fixed place where entrepreneurs hang out?”

These were the heady days of a gold rush.

Nonetheless, like all roller-coaster rides, the dotcom era was marked as much by the founding as by the spectacular failure of new internet-based companies, with the Lastminute.com IPO in 2000 signalling the bursting of the bubble.

“By the time we opened the club in 2001 it wasn’t such an auspicious time. It wasn’t really until 2003 that we got up to about 1,000 members, but by then a number of characters had helped gather together the bomb-burst and we had a whole layer of true entrepreneurs who came back together after the dotcom highs and lows to rebuild the tech community.”

These included such characters as Michael Acton Smith, creator of Moshi Monsters; Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, who introduced James to the term “podcast”; and Richard Duvall, the man behind the first internet bank, Egg, and co-founder of peer-to-peer pioneer Zopa.

The key to the club’s success was ambience shaped by an enthusiastic staff helping to select the right members in a niche that morphed from a shared workspace during the day into a nightclub for hothousing ideas at night.

“There was no music during the day, but at about 5.30 we put on a little bit – and by 10.30 people were dancing on the tables. I also like to think that we introduced the espresso martini into the London cocktail scene!”

Adam Street’s glory days lasted until 2008, but faded amid the global financial meltdown and the migration of tech entrepreneurs to Silicon Roundabout in East London. At that time James also had music on the mind, reopening Notting Hill’s famous Tabernacle.

Although it played host to battalions of iconic digital pioneers, James believes Adam Street was not just about tech – but primarily about entrepreneurship and making connections, a skill he has taken to the digital leadership experts Hannington Tame.

Sam Sethi talks with Sarah Frier about why she wrote the book, how Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg clashed from the start and eventually what led to Kevin leaving instagram.  We also talk about the threats to Facebook from Snapchat, Tiktok and Instagram.