Some news: I have a new podcast.
I love gadgets (you know this) and I love history podcasts (you may also know this), but it never occurred to me to combine the two. That is until I became friends with Christie Pitts. I first met Christie, who is a partner at Backstage Capital, at a VC dinner a couple of years ago, and instead of talking deals, we ended up nerding out and talking about old smartphones for most of the evening. Turns our Christie started her career selling phones at a Verizon store in the mid-2000's, which is right around the time I was spoiling consumer electronics company product launches at Gizmodo and then Engadget.
We had so much fun talking about the early days of smartphones whenever we'd meet that one of us (can't remember who) pointed out our conversations would make for a great podcast. So 0G: A History of Forgotten Phones was born. 0G is a limited-run podcast where we look back at how weird and wonderful smartphones were back in the days before iOS and Android took over and your only option became a rectangular slab running one or the other.
We've recorded seven episodes so far, kicking things off in our first episode with a look back at the smartphones of 2002, 2003 and 2004. I hope you'll check it out. If you lived through those years you'll get a kick out of revisiting that time, and if you're too young to have experienced it first-hand hopefully it'll be an entertaining look back at how wild mobile was back in the day!
You can find 0G wherever you listen to podcasts: