The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘make-everything’

We’ve already established that your favorite tech company, from Apple to HP to Nintendo, and everyone in between, is being pressured to go green. While some of the tactics may be a bit silly, I think it’s safe to say that you’d rather see these companies green than not green, right? It makes us feel good about ourselves, that even though we’re buying hunks of plastic and metal—Lord knows what chemicals are in these things—the company in question is trying to make everything as environmentally friendly as possible.

Original post: 
IBM developing zero-emission data center technology

Nokia has recalled several mobile phone chargers, manufactured by third-parties for the company, because of the chance of electrical shock. There’s been no reports of any injuries, so consider this a precaution.

Original post: 
Nokia recalls several mobile phone chargers over shock hazard

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.