If you’re a hacker, you’ll probably like our show 
TechZing is an informal chat show hosted by Justin Vincent & Jason Roberts. We release two shows per week.
- Weekend Show – We have a ‘no agenda’ style discussion ruminating on tech, startups and other HN-like topics, we’ll even on occasion take a risk and venture into the unknown. We also talk about the progression of our businesses Pluggio, AppIgnite & Swarm SG.
Here’s some of our shows that we recommend as a crash course in TechZing!
Interview Shows
Discussion Shows
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Justin and Jason speak with Rob Walling, founder of the Micropreneur Academy, author of Start Small, Stay Small and co-host of the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, about how to dramatically increase your odds of success when bootstrapping a microISV. Some of the topics discussed include the love of making things and the drive to create, how to pick a product niche and why not to create a horizontal offering, why the freemium model doesn’t work for bootstrapping startups and whether Justin should discontinue free accounts for Pluggio, the difficulty of competing against venture backed startups, how to create a landing page and build an email list, possible marketing and pricing strategies for AppIgnite, Google’s SEO guidelines, why software as a service is a better business than software as a product, how to buy websites and build a portfolio of web investments, outliers and why it’s better not to try to emulate them, the time, effort and talent required to create a personal platform (ala 37 signals and Joel Spolsky) and why email lists are so valuable.
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Justin and Jason discuss possible referral models for Pluggio, Sebastien’s progress on the Swarm AI, using WebWorkers (the HTML5 spec for multi-threading) vs setTimeout or setInterval, Jason’s ideas for his machine learning library and business intelligence platform QuantFire, the benefits of collaborating on projects with friends, the status of AppIgnite, developing locally vs using a development server, ambient thinking, growing your willpower and managing your time, how not to lose your enthusiasm for a project, what can’t be stolen from you and why clones seem to almost always fail, the new iPad news app Flipbook, launching an app per week using AppIgnite, AppInventor as the VB for Android and a comparison between the Android and iPhone developer ecosystems.
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Justin and Jason speak with UFO historian, Richard Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941-1973, The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991 and a third and final volume which has not yet been released, but which will cover the history from 1991 up to the present day. Some of the topics discussed include the top twelve government documents on UFOs and how they were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, The Black Vault as a source of released government documents, a provocative UFO encounter at an Air Force missile base, why an alien race might find us interesting and whether there could possibly be more than a single species, the rapid advancement of human technology and the Singularity, some interesting statements made by Ben Rich, former director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, the possible transfer of recovered alien technology from the hands of the military to aerospace contractors, the black budget and special access programs, how the National Reconnaissance Organization, the NSA, Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project all remained secret from the public for many years, possible reasons for the government’s desire for secrecy on the subject of UFOs, Nick Cook, the editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly, and his book on the Nazi effort to develop Zero-point energy, Katherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of HUD and her amazing revelations about the Arlington Institute’s work on the topic of aliens, investigative journalist Leslie Kean and her upcoming book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, the possibility that aliens may have been here for thousands of years, NASA Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s revelation that there exist deep black programs within the US government to study alien technology, the history and controversy surrounding the Majestic 12 documents, the intelligence community’s use of disinformation and it’s corrosive effect on democracy, NICAP – the leading civilian UFO organization of it’s time and how it was infiltrated by the CIA, how Richard was able to make a career for himself as a UFO historian and some advice on being a writer and publishing your own work.
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Justin and Jason discuss the show’s new schedule, the Teddy principle, using setTimeout as a way to circumvent the long running script warning, Jason’s Javascript machine learning library, the use of AI in medical diagnostics, Jason’s idea for a web-based business intelligence platform, how Appcelerator compiles Javascript to Objective-C, the relative speeds of the various Javascript engines, Swarm’s sales statistics, the importance of targeting your niche, Justin’s strange question of the week and Jason’s quote of the week, Guyon’s suggestions for Swarm, the iPhone 4 controversy, the dramatic fall in IPOs, the benefits of a lifestyle business and the the importance of the existence proof.
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Justin and Jason speak with Chris McCann, co-founder of StartupDigest, about how he’s turning a weekly email of local tech events into a fast growing and profitable business.
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Justin and Jason speak with Sebastian Arnaud about how to build an AI for Justin’s iPad game, Swarm SG.
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Justin and Jason speak with John C. Dvorak about his life as a writer and podcaster and how he got started as a tech pundit, how he arranges his work day and why he likes having a lot to do, the advantages of the listener supported business model and how to do it right, the importance of contention in a podcast and how much of his grouch persona is natural versus cultivated, the benefits of being Internet famous, how his various podcasts came into being and how they’ve evolved, how long it takes him to prepare for a show and who produces them, his learning curve in broadcasting, how to promote a podcast and how it seems to take at least eighteen months for a podcast or blog to gain traction.
