O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) was formed in partnership with O'Reilly Media to make seed and early stage investments in companies founded by technology innovators called "alpha geeks". Bryce Roberts joins Phil, Matt, and Scott in a discussion of technology trends, including those supported by OATV.
The group first discusses the Ultra-Mobile PC, the newest portable technology that serves as a bridge between a PDA, the tablet PC, and the laptop. They also talk about the Chumby, another new hardware device. They also chat about DRM and how consumers are becoming more aware of its shortcomings and how rights owners continue to fight to protect their property.
Roberts then gives more background about OATV, its creation, its philosophy, and its activities. He chats about the whole concept of venture capitalism and how the company chooses its projects and finds investors.
Bryce T. Roberts, is a Managing General Partner for OATV. Bryce is an active early stage venture investor, most recently investing through Wasatch Venture Fund, a Draper Fisher Jurvetson affiliate fund. As a private equity investor he has been involved with technology-enabled companies at all stages of growth from seed and early stage to growth and buyout transactions. In addition to his work as an investor, Bryce is a co-founder of the Open Source Business Conference (sold to IDG) and was a member of a small team at vertical search pioneer Whizbang! Labs (WBL). While at WhizBang!, he helped define and launch the FlipDog.com division (sold to Monster Worldwide). He is an advocate of open technologies and standards.
Co-host Matt Asay is vice president of Business Development for Alfresco, the leading open source Enterprise Content Management company. Prior to Alfresco Matt co-founded Novell's Linux Business Office, founded the Open Source Business Conference, and ran embedded Linux vendor Lineo's Network & Communications division. Matt earned a JD from Stanford Law School, where he spent two of his three years studying open source licensing under Professor Lawrence Lessig. He serves on the advisory boards for SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Bungee Labs, MuleSource, and Specifix, and on the board for OSI.
Co-host Scott C. Lemon is CTO of MediaForge - a next generation viral marketing and web enhancement company - and founder of HumanXtensions - an Internet R&D company. Scott's recent history in the computer industry include several small start-ups, along with being Chief Technologist at SCO, Chief Strategist at Vultus, and holding numerous positions during his four tours of duty at Novell. Scott's expertise ranges from computer and wireless hardware technologies, to networking and distributed software applications. As a futurist studying the patterns of evolution, his past experiences in operating systems - CP/M, DOS, Windows, OS/2, NetWare, UNIX, Linux and others - is allowing him to explore the new levels of abstractions provided by the Internet.
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This free podcast is from our Technometria with Phil Windley series.
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