I’ve spent a little over three weeks with Google Glass, and I’ve noted that the utility aspect of the device is strong, but the fun isn’t there yet. It feels a lot like the original iPhone did, before it had the App Store.

In this video, we discuss some of the quick assumptions about Glass, warranted or otherwise, and give you a look through the eyes of the device in action. Stepping outside, pulling up an address, replying to an email and listening to the latest NYTimes headlines is a pretty seamless experience. Google calls the technology “calm,” since it doesn’t require you to pull a device out of your pocket, unlock a screen or tap any buttons.

The power of Glass will be unleashed once developers start building apps that consumers will love. Until then, have a look at some of the things I’ve been doing since I got the device. For those following along, I hope to have my recipe app available soon. It’s been a fun learning experience for me.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

From Yamtrader to Das Keyboard, the SXSWi trade show floor is a mixed bag. While not everything lent itself to a detail visit with the TCTV camera, we did find a few interesting companies in the mix.

The trade show is an interesting admixture of media companies (WordPress had a nice presence) and apps alongside hardware and software startups. Visiting the trade show is sadly often an afterthought for most of the SXSW crowd – the lines to get into the keynotes are huge this year and you spend most of your time in them – so it was nice to get away from the show floor and see what was up.

I don’t want to add any spoilers but let’s just say we get to meet a few weird characters including the aforementioned yam and a very lost interstellar traveler.

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Last month, we told you about a new service called Circa, which set out to redefine the way that you consume news on your iOS device. The app itself is beautifully designed and was based off of an idea that Ben Huh had and then shared with Matt Galligan. Galligan took the idea and ran with it.

Right now, Circa finds itself uniquely positioned in the news cycle for Hurricane Sandy and the upcoming Presidential election in a way that no other service is. Basically, this is the moment that you’re either going to fall in love with Circa, or figure out that it’s not for you.

I sat down with Galligan in our studio today to discuss how things have been going, where things will head in the future and how his service handles the avalanche of news to parse for its users with a human editorial staff.

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OK, so we’re not at Gangnam Style or Call Me Maybe viewing levels. Those videos have more than 274 million and 269 million views, respectively, on YouTube. But today, TechCrunch’s YouTube channel passed its own milestone: 10 million views.

Michael Arrington wrote the first post on TechCrunch on June 11th, 2005. Less than two months later, obviously recognizing that video was going to be important, he had signed up for a YouTube channel.

We’ve just completed a re-fresh and re-design of our YouTube page and have started feeding it with our TCTV videos, after a short hiatus. We’ve got more than 2500 videos available, plus featured playlists for our shows like TC Cribs and events such as Disrupt. Our recent Mark Zuckerberg interview is now featured on our YouTube home page.

You can join our 14,181 YouTube subscribers by signing up here.

Here’s a look at our all-time top three videos on YouTube:

If you are wondering about that last William Shatner video, you can learn why he loves TechCrunch here.

We will still use the AOL On player for TechCrunch videos on our site, but we are glad to have our videos available on the YouTube network as well.

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Yesterday at New York Tech Day we met with quite a few great companies including Digital Ocean. These guys are pretty established in the cloud space. They offer OS agnostic cloud servers and are giving away some service space for free to NYTD participants and their minimum package is $5 a month. Pretty basic stuff.

But what they wouldn’t do for a TC mention! One of their employees, Mitch, explained that he was the in-office push-up master so we asked him to do 100 push-ups while we interviewed someone else from the team. Two minutes later and Mitch was done, the pitch was complete, and we all realized that we should all be doing pushups instead of startups if we want to look as beefy as Mitch.

Thanks, incidentally, Mitch, for being such a good sport.

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Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” approaches springtime by welcoming a city college dropout who went on to found and sell a mobile network startup, began investing that windfall in some of today’s hottest e-commerce companies, and after a stint in fashion for Bergdorf Goodman in New York City, has now co-founded a new web startup focused on building a community around beauty.

Nils Johnson is a hard guy to hunt down. While he’s a seed investor in some of today’s hottest early-stage brands, such as Wantful, Everlane, Warby Parker, Orchestra, and Airtime, among others, Johnson keeps a very low profile relative to the celebrity we see all around us. He’s rarely out at industry events, he doesn’t blog (though he should), and barely uses Twitter. Despite this, nearly every e-commerce founder angles to score a meeting with him in the hopes of landing a seed check with his name on it.

This began to change last week, however, after Britney Spears was spotted at Johnson’s new startup, Beautylish. Over the past 18 months, there’s been an increasing incidence of web entrepreneurs heading down to Tinsel Town, and of Hollywood celebrities making their way to Silicon Valley and New York City to invest in, promote, and scout hot new startups. Whether it’s Shoedazzle, Mobli, or something related to another celebrity with a big social media footprint, new consumer technologies and applications provide attractive, direct-to-consumer branding and distribution opportunities too ripe for the savviest celebrity markers to miss.

In this conversation, Johnson discusses these trends with the precision of someone who has been following the space from within for years. We talk about the connection between e-commerce, the Valley, New York, and Hollywood, as well as external pressures on physical retail and how that is forcing entrepreneurs online to experiment with new business models. Johnson also discusses the challenges and opportunities about creating entirely new brands online, how to nail customer acquisition, the importance of branding, and trends around holding inventory versus manufacturing supply in a vertically-integrated manner.

If you’re an e-commerce founder, thinking of starting a new company in the space, or investing in e-commerce at the later stages, Johnson’s insights on this topic are not to be missed. E-commerce is certainly a hot category, but when you spend time with Johnson, you start to understand how long he’s been thinking about these trends, markets, and opportunities. And while he’s certainly enjoyed success on the investment side, Beautylish could present Johnson with his breakout hit as CEO.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CEO, Hearsay Social

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Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While the early history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of music start-ups, not all digital music companies have failed. Take, for example, Gracenote. Founded in 1998, the Berkeley based company was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million and is one of the real pioneers of the evolving digital economy. Gracenote has built its business out of maintaining and licensing a massive (currently 100 million tracks) database of information about music. And today, Gracenote – with its 350 employees in Europe, the US and Asia – is expanding into licensing digital data for video and television content.

Last week, at SFMusicTech, I sat down with Ty Roberts, Gracenote’s co-founder and current CTO, to learn more about his company’s past and future. The experienced data mogul was particularly wise on our uses and abuses of data, warning that a failure to respect user’s data (Path, Facebook, Google, Twitter et al) is not only immoral but also bad business practice. And Roberts also offered some sagacious advice to music executives, arguing that traditional, file based information no longer has much value and that there was a need to radically change the way in which music is both packaged and sold to consumers.

My conversation with Roberts is part of an extended series of interviews about the current state of the online music industry that I conducted last week at SFMusicTech. Other interviews include the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and Stageit CEO Evan Lowenstein.

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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new title format where the topic replaces the date of the show release (it’s in the URL). Today’s topic: what it always is, Apple’s relentless march toward encircling Windows in a sea of HD-quality iOS devices. In the latest update to OS X, push notification, the Twitter social bus, and AirPlay come to the TV by way of the full complement of iOSish devices, now including the Mac.

With iPad 3 just weeks away, Apple has made it retinal clear that the company has no intention of allowing anybody to catch up to the economic juggernaut where premium products sell out at prices that can’t be undercut. The realtime global social network fuels demand for the iOS pervasive screen architecture (and coopetive partners such as Android and Amazon) to such a viral extent that the resulting momentum keeps competitors from realizing Apple’s supply chain economies of scale.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch