The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘keynote-address’

Here’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote address at Carnegie Mellon’s 112th commencement ceremony, held yesterday. (Via @CarnegieMellon)

Schmidt’s talk to the audience, which he refers to as the ‘Facebook and Google generation’, is basically about the past, present and future of technology, how quickly and profoundly cultural habits change and how important it is to ‘live in the future’. Surprisingly, Schmidt seems to mention services like Twitter and Facebook more often than Google products.

Key quotes:

“We got our news from newspapers, your generation gets it from blogs and tweets, and for those of you who don’t know, that’s not what you hear in zoos.”

“We thought ‘friend’ is a noun, you think it’s a verb.”

“You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.”

“How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us.”

“You’ll find today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change, to make everything happen.”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

That’s right: many of us have been alive as long as the Black & Decker DustBuster vacuum, a cleaner that I remember fondly from my ill-spent youth. Remember the first models? The tan color scheme? The incessant whirring? The sad majesty of the dying DustBuster as its battery slowly drained over a pile of Cheerios or sawdust?

Say what you want about Dyson and his ilk: the DustBuster is the Hitachi Magic Wand of home cleaning devices, dedicated to performance, fun, and, most importantly, the improvement of our lives in general.

Santa Cruz, CA-based UserVoice is taking a couple of steps to break its product free from the in-crowd of early adopters that have increasingly turned to using its service for streamlining internal and customer feedback aggregation.

In addition, the startup had announced that it has raised an extra $800,000 from a well-known group of investors, led by Baseline Ventures and joined by FF Angel (the seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund), Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Net Discovery and Howard Lindzon.

UserVoice is essentially a hosted way for businesses to intelligently process the feedback it gets from employees and customers, acting as a social idea generator of sorts. This has proven to be a great way for software companies and web application developers to incorporate the tool into their product websites, basically extending their existing product feedback channels with a way for users to voice their opinions on new features, roadmap, etc.

But UserVoice rightly recognizes that there are a lot of corporations and institutions (think education, healthcare, government bodies, etc.) that can benefit from such a service too, and aims to package its main product somewhat differently in order to cater to those as well.

For that reason, it’s today releasing a white-label solution that enables its customers to embed branded widgets and communities into their websites and facilitate the streamlining of the aggregation and moderation of incoming suggestions, voting, and user feedback. These widgets can be fully customized with the ability to change the CSS, templates, language files, and more. Along with this, UserVoice is introducing ZeroLogin, a method for users to sign in to UserVoice with the same username and password as the company website that deployed its solution. To see such an integration in action, check out this feedback page on Animoto’s website, which is entirely powered by UserVoice.

Last but not least, UserVoice let us know that it has attracted a very knowledgeable advisor to help the company gain more traction: Bob Pearson, who spearheaded IdeaStorm at Dell as the company’s former vice president of communities and conversations.

Expect to hear more from this company in the future.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

It’s now just about May and there’s still been no official word from Palm when it comes to an official launch date or pricing for the Pre. All we know is what we’ve known for a long time — it’ll launch the first half of 2009; a window that is quickly closing. But a few pieces of new evidence today point to an actual specific date. And it’s a very intriguing one — June 7: The day before a likely Apple keynote address at its WWDC conference.

That is of course interesting because Apple could very well use that keynote to unveil the next version of the iPhone, just as it did last year for the iPhone 3G. A public launch of the Pre the day before could suck some of the wind out of Apple’s sails. But it’s also pretty risky, as it means Palm only has one day to convince everyone that its product is better then the latest version of the iPhone which is likely to have some substantial improvements. And no one knows for sure what all those improvements are — it could very well blow the Pre right out of the water, one day into its young life.

In a bid to retain its role as a pop culture staple, MTV has announced plans to a launch a show that taps into the power of social media, tightly integrating with Facebook and Twitter to maximize fan interaction. The show will be hosted by British celebrity and model Alexa Chun and begin airing this summer, with plans to move it to the network’s coveted after-school timeslot depending on its performance.

Back in the late 90’s, an MTV show called Total Request Live was a staple in dictating what was hot in popular music. That show gradually lost steam over time (it was finally canceled in late 2008) and while MTV has maintained some succcessful properties, it’s lacking a flagship show that its audience tunes into on a daily basis. According to this AP report, viewership is down 18% for the first three months of this year.

The new show will include MTV’s standard variety of celebrities and musical performances, but will also include real-time conversations taken from Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to interact with the show as it airs. According to this report, beyond basic interaction on Facebook and Twitter users will be able to upload their favorite videos (including those they’ve filmed themselves) through a RockYou application.

Audience interaction isn’t anything new to MTV - even in the TRL days it often featured messages sent in by fans, and the videos that appeared on the show were dictated by audience voting via phone and online. But Twitter and Facebook offer the network a way to stay directly connected with fans day and night, broadcasting frequent updates even when the show isn’t on the air. And it’s likely an approach that will play extremely well to MTV’s core demographic.

Below, a video of Alexa Chung doing an interview totally unrelated to the MTV show.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0