Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Loren Feldman doesn’t want my opinion, but he’s going to get it anyway.

For those of you who don’t know Feldman, he’s a producer out of New York City who does a video blog called 1938 Media. He’s sarcastic, crude, and mean; he records video while he’s lying in bed half dressed. Hard to stop watching - like a traffic accident. A real personality.

A few weeks back Feldman took a poke at a good friend of mine, Shel Israel. I happen to like Shel a lot. He’s been a friend for some time, and he coached iotum to a DEMOgod in 2006. His business card reads “nice guy”, and it’s a pretty accurate descriptor. He’s the real deal.

So Loren Feldman is a guy who apparently has a mean streak, and makes videos for a living. He ripped Shel over the first videos that he made for FastCompany.tv as host of his Global Neighborhoods show. And to be truthful, they weren’t professionally made, and it showed. Big deal. This is the web. It’s not TV.

Feldman’s popularity soared, especially after he grabbed the domain ShelIsrael.com and started filming a puppet masquerading as Shel. Shel made some big mistakes in how he handled the situation as well, and after reflection realized that there wasn’t much he could do about it. So he swallowed hard, wrote about it on his blog and decided to put up with it.

The puppet was boring. Feldman’s parody of Shel didn’t work, mostly because he didn’t really know Shel. But in recent weeks it became much better as Feldman invited tech personalities to be “interviewed” by the puppet. In particular, the first interview with Jason Calacanis was riotously funny. I was chatting with a friend last night and saying that if Feldman was smart he could turn the puppet into the tech industry’s equivalent of the Spitting Image.

So what to make of the video below? Does Feldman have a self destructive streak? Or is he just a mean-spirited son-of-a-bitch who has run out of ideas, and can’t parlay what he’s done into new business?

My money’s on the latter, and I’m officially tuning out 1938Media.

The two topics we covered this morning were:

The contention that social networks may replace search.  A particularly interesting conversation given that the search results continue to decline in quality, and more and more people are now turning to social networks for information.  Will Google start to use social information to inform search results?

Skype’s great results.  This conversation quickly made a right turn into the territory of whether eBay would sell Skype, and to whom.  The leading contender in our minds was Google.

See you tomorrow for the inaugural BarCamp Radio.

 

 Squawk BOx April 17 [33:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The rumours have been circulating for some weeks about Truphone’s series B financing. Today Truphone announced a raise of £16.5m, or approximately $33 million, this after acquiring operator Sim4Travel a week ago.  The raise was smaller than some of the rumours intimated (numbers as high as $60 million were being bandied about), but is still a substantial amount of money.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the press release, though, was the final couple of paragraphs, which read

The company has developed a carrier-grade, global operator infrastructure including a global network of SIP gateways, a Nokia Siemens Networks mobile network Home Location Register (HLR) and a GSM identifier.  The infrastructure is capable of supporting 40 million customers worldwide.

This is all enabled by a series of global agreements with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers.

This odd bit of information, for a funding release, suggests that the company is planning to do much more than operate a simple WiFi voice service, and maybe more than providing low cost SIMs for travellers.

Popular Mechanics dropped a bomb on Techmeme this morning with an article titled How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It. The thesis — we’ll trust our friends more than we trust the search engine. We’ll take a crack at whether or not this is a credible claim or not.

In other news, Ebay reported their results yesterday afternoon. Aside from their other businesses — finance and auctions — the Skype business seems to be roaring. We’ll discuss the interesting stuff that’s happening at skype, and why that business is growing the way it is. With luck, we’ll get Skype Journal’s Jim Courtney on the line to discuss his detailed observations of the situation.