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Posts Tagged ‘Ambitions’

TEDxSV: Reid Hoffman On Philanthropic Movements On The Web

We’re at TEDxSV, a Silicon Valley outpost of TED’s conferences on innovation, which is taking place today at Stanford University. First up is LinkedIn founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman, who is addressing the concept of iMovements on the web. I’ll be live-blogging his remarks.

Hoffman says that one of his ambitions is to be a public intellectual, to be able to influence millions of people with innovations and change. Hoffman thinks that the internet, which is scalable and low-cost, is the optimal platform for cause-based organizations. The web is more about people than technology, Hoffman asserts.

When Hoffman invests in a startup, he looks at three things: scalability, margins and the structure. These three attributes are the same things that make web-based causes or philanthropic movements more effective. Three types of cause-based organizations have developed on the web because of this potential, which are non-profits (Hoffman highlights micro-lending platform Kiva.org as an example of this), hybrid infrastructure organizations such as Mozilla or Creative Commons, and companies developing their own cause-based movements on the web.

One of the things that Hoffman finds interesting is that corporations, because they have the reach of millions of people, they can make cause-based initiatives part of their web based platform. This is exemplified by Facebook’s Causes application.

The causes that success capitalize on the internet “peer play” says Hoffman. So how do you coordinate the actions of millions of people in the world to make social change? Hoffman says that micro-groups on the internet can help organize these causes effectively.

The key part of the future of cause-based movements will be the boiling up of problems and issue and the coordinated intelligence and collective ideation on how to tackle these problems. There is a value in the crowdsourcing of ideas to help make social change, concluded Hoffman.

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Pandora sets its sights on in-car music streaming
Pandora has already come a considerable way from its rather modest beginnings, but it looks like the company unsurprisingly has some even grander ambitions for the near future, including a variety of options for in-car music streaming. That word comes straight from Pandora’s Chief Technology Officier, Tom Conrad, who told attendees at the SF Music Tech Summit that the company is now working with various car manufacturers (including Ford) to better integrate Pandora music streaming into vehicles. That will apparently first come in the form of in-dash or hands-free controls to let folks use a docked device running Pandora and then, “within a few years,” evolve to include full-fledged Pandora services built right into various in-car entertainment systems. Details are otherwise a bit light, but Conrad reportedly hinted that he’d have more to say at CES.

Pandora sets its sights on in-car music streaming originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support

Even if you don’t have a favored fighter in the browser wars, you have to admit Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been looking mighty unfit over the last few years. Younger and fitter contenders like Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have arguably overtaken the old stalwart, and now Microsoft is making some much-needed noise about fighting back. The software giant has been giving developers and curious journalists a very early peek into its IE 9 progress at PDC, with its stated ambitions including faster Javascript (see table above), HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration for web content. By harnessing DirectX and your graphics processor, the new browser will offer improvements in text readability and video performance, as well as taking some of the load off the CPU. Development has only just got under way, mind you, so there’s still plenty of time to screw it all up. Or make it awesome.

Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pioneer shoots for the moon with its Entertainment Tap concept

What do you get when you take every single source of audio and video content, including Blu-ray with Managed Copy, online streaming content and everything else you can think of, and then combine it with control and remote viewing capabilities? You guessed it, the Entertainment Tap. We understand that Pioneer is shooting for the stars with this one, but it most definitely falls under the category of it sounds too good to be true. Of course Pioneer is just trying to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks, which is great, but the anticipated release of 2010 seems ambitions considering everything included in the demo. We could go on and on listing the media sources and control devices, but Pioneer wasn’t exactly giving us any negative responses. Lets just say the new ET concept is a do it all media server as well as a client client that plays nice with everything. For example, the ET can connect to a HR22 DirecTV HD DVR via USB and using the data from the DVR, it’ll build its own version of the interface. Of course the whole video part is hard to integrate, so the ET simply instructs the TV to switch inputs at the right time to give you a seamless experience. At this point none of these features are finalized so don’t be bashful with your ideas in the comments, because who knows, Pioneer might actually include them.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Pioneer shoots for the moon with its Entertainment Tap concept originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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