Listening in on Kevin Rose and Gary V

Last night around 10:40 p.m., I saw an update on Twitter from Gary Vaynerchuk asking,

I want to stream live with a friend we are in 2 locations we want u to see both of us, is there a platform? how do we do?

I shot back a quick reply,

@garyvee Have you guys tried Tokbox.com?? What do you think?

A little while later, I saw this update from @UstreamTV come through my preferred Twitter app,

Q&A ALERT – Kevin Rose and Gary V cohosting on Ustream – Hurry over there with your questions! http://bit.ly/z2SJ

The link took me to Kevin Rose’s channel on Ustream, where I was one of 700+ viewers listening in on a really casual conversation between these two tech/business moguls. It was a rather surreal experience to listen to them talk about everything from the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm to the Flip Mino HD camera to SXSW to the future of Apple in the post-Steve Jobs era. (Gary thinks Apple is “in trouble”; Kevin thinks Jon Ive should/will be the next CEO and will CRUSH it, as Gary would say.)

I thought it was kind of funny that these high-tech, industry guys were using a standard webcam sitting on top of a candle pointed at a computer monitor where Rose was videoconferencing with Gary V via Apple’s iChat software. But, hey, this was pretty impromptu and low-key—even though the conversation was fascinating!

Inside Dish
Mid-way through the webcast, as the chat screen just flooded with questions submitted by the hundreds of online viewers, Rose invited David Prager from Revision3 (an Internet TV network) to join the videochat, which he did. (I felt somehow comforted and vindicated, in some strange way, when Prager blurted out that he had “30 tabs open in Firefox,” and he was opening the Ustream channel in Safari because Firefox was running too slow!)

The three then started to share “insider” information and tech/business ideas, as well as answer questions from the audience (myself included). Rose shared (for the first time anywhere apparently) a rumor that Apple’s next iPhone will have a built-in FM radio tuner. He called his source “75% reliable,” but apparently Rose’s personal track-record for Apple rumors is not so hot. Still, this was fascinating stuff to watch.

They each dished one business idea they’d like to pursue: Prager proposed a simple iPhone case that would hold a few credit cards and cash; and Kevin Rose suggested an online book discussion club with a videochat/social networking component to it. (Sorry, I completely forgot what Gary V’s brilliant business idea was. Can you believe that? Seriously. I should’ve taken notes …)

Twitter Talk
Here’s the discussion that I found the most fascinating, though: Twitter. Gary V said he’d just done an interview with the Wall Street Journal about Twitter. He’s on NPR’s Weekend Edition tomorrow, talking about Twitter. In fact, Gary V and Kevin Rose both basically said that all of the buzz right now is around Twitter, and it’s only going to get bigger and bigger over the coming months. (More vindication of my own predictions about Twitter.)

The big question, though, was: How is Twitter going to make money? When these guys finally fielded this question, which had been coming up over and over in the chat stream, they were almost laughing at the ridiculousness of it. Rose commented, “If they need the money …” they have a killer platform ready to exploit. Gary V offered, “I think they have 4 or 5 business models,” and started to rattle them off and debate them with Rose—targeted advertising was one of them. Offering a “premium” version (and other value-added services) to businesses was another approach that both agreed could be successful for Twitter. They also agreed that the data Twitter has from (and about) its users is “sick” (meaning, really really good—and valuable).

The conversation went on until about 1 a.m., which is when Gary V called it a night, followed shortly thereafter by Kevin Rose and David Prager, umm, and me.

TokBox Take 2
So this morning at work, I noticed a re-tweet (RT), passed along by my friend DJ Chuang,

RT @dbillian: @kevinrose The Tokbox video conference is probably best with 20-25 folks (more possible); can have indiv perf. issues w more

I thought to myself, “Hmmm, that’s interesting. Kevin Rose tweeting about TokBox. I wonder* if that has anything to do with …”

So I went investigating, and here’s what I found from Gary V’s Twitter feed from Thursday night:

@kevinrose and I are chilling in here, come and hang http://bit.ly/153QZ

And on Kevin Rose’s Twitter feed:

about to live video w/@garyvee, not sure how many people this can support: http://bit.ly/5W8MS

Both links went to a TokBox videoconference, and when I opened it on Friday morning out of curiosity, this is what I saw:

In case you can’t tell, that’s 450 squares representing 450 people on either audio (the white boxes with text) or video (the black boxes) in the TokBox conference room—on Friday morning, hours after the tweets had gone out the night before. Pretty wild.

Note to TokBox: Add a “webcast” feature, where two or more people (like Gary V and Kevin Rose) can broadcast a videochat between themselves and have a large number of listeners/viewers who can text chat but their individual audio/video boxes do not show up in the main window (unless allowed by the initiator of the webcast).

*I probably wasn’t the only person to suggest TokBox to Gary V when he asked for suggestions on Twitter, but it’s pretty cool to think that I might possibly have been then one to suggest a new technology to these two techno-savvy guys (even if it didn’t work exactly right for what they were trying to do).