It’s CES time again, and this year, Samsung is going all out with several firsts, a lot of ICES Innovation awards (23 actually!), and a commitment to creating the future of home entertainment.
              
Home entertainment continues to get increasingly exciting with slimmer and cooler televisions and blu-ray players, but the basic experience of watching a movie from your couch hasn’t changed much in many years. Not to worry, in 2010, the 3D experience will make its way from theaters to your homes.

While the first 3D film premiered back in 1922, the technology that is used today is much more advanced and has finally made in-roads to work with the content Hollywood is producing. With widely distributed and popular 3D movies and a lot of curiosity around the idea of in-home 3D viewing, Samsung will deliver a complete 3D home entertainment solution to bring a truly immersive and memorable experience to consumers.

Samsung is not a stranger to 3D; it actually introduced 3D DLPs beginning in 2007 and 3D flat-panel Plasma HDTVs in 2008. At this CES, Samsung in partnership with DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, announced that it will soon offer a complete out-of-box 3D experience including 3D HDTVs (not just LCD and Plasma, but also LED!), a 3D blu-ray player, and an exclusive promotion that includes a first-time feature-length, 3D Blu-ray version of DreamWorks Animation’s 2009 release, “Monsters vs. Aliens,” created and produced by Technicolor. So, just for a second, imagine watching “Monsters vs. Aliens” in 1080p, at home with your whole family, in 3D, on a very cool looking LED HDTV. And then just imagine all the great content that will come out in the coming year, and you get the picture. Home entertainment. Transformed. (more…)

I’ve been thinking about the idea of crowdsourcing a lot this year. Last month, I wrote about giffgaff’s unique approach of crowdsourcing not just marketing and R&D, but also customer service. And, for the 33rd and last “The Social Nerdia Show!“ of 2009, I spoke with Robbie Hearn, the Chief of Member Experience at giffgaff to learn more about how this MVNO from the UK operates. Prior to joining company, Robbie was Head of Retention at Be Broadband, a O2/Telefonica subsiduary where he first realized just how powerful it was for a company to have a very engaged community.

Listen to the entire conversation with Robbie on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

giffgaff officially launched on Nov 23rd. “The project as a whole started to take form 9 months ago,” Robbie told me. “It’s gone from nothing to full launch in that period of time, which is very quick for a mobile company.” At first glance one might assume that giffgaff is just a regular MVNO, but giffgaff is truly changing the way a mobile company interacts with its customers.

I asked Robbie to explain what makes giffgaff so unique. ”We see a need and a gap in the market for a new model. We’re what we call people-powered,” he said. “In essence, we’re trying to really leverage all the great new trends and technologies around crowds; we want to engage our members more than any other mobile network in the UK.” Unlike other companies that try to control everything related to their brand, giffgaff lets its ‘members’ interact with the company and with each other online, and allowing them to be part of the company’s “marketing, R&D, and customer service; recruiting members and especially helping answer questions.”

Crowdsourcing Customer Service

Thanks to Wikipedia and companies like Doritos and Starbucks, we’ve all come to know about various forms of crowdsourcing, especially when it comes to marketing and R&D. But crowdsourcing customer service? Now that’s a new idea.

“Crowdsourcing customer service is almost like a misnomer. You don’t need a huge crowd, just a small group that’s absolutely motivated by helping other people; they are the super users,” Robbie told me. ”We don’t have a call center,” he added. “You go online, you type in whatever question you have, and the integrated search identifies an answer based on information giffgaff has submitted as well as information provided by users on the forum.”  (more…)

Jonathan Crowley is the co-founder of Black20, a multi-platform digital studio that operates out of Long Island City, Queens. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen or at least heard of one of their viral videos or award-winning web series, which have been viewed by over 60 million people. A recent partnership with 15 Gigs means their entertaining content is going to reach even more people. Prior to co-founding Black20 in 2007, J. Crowley was a part of NBC Digital Studios developing comedy programming for the network’s digital initiatives. You can check out more of their programming at Hulu and Black20.com.

1. Black20 recently partnered with Fox TV Studios’ 15 Gigs to produce Web-based pilots like “Heart Felt.” What kind of relationship do you have with FTVS and how has it been working with them?

We partnered up with FTVS to create innovative and cheap-to-produce content for the web, and always with an eye towards its extension to other platforms like television.  We view it as both an opportunity to develop stories and formats that can really speak to a Web-video-consuming audience and also as a chance to play around with a much more cost-efficient development model.

“Heart Felt” is merely one example of a digital pilot we produced to gauge our audience’s appetite.  In this case we wanted to test whether people wanted to watch a comedy about relationships between people and puppets. The viewership and feedback were very strong, so we now look at how to shape this series for both online and television platforms.

2. Black20 seems to focus on the content instead of spending money on marketing. What are some of things you need to do when creating content that is meant to be spread by the online masses?

We’ve never paid a single cent for marketing or promotion. We’ve relied on our content to virally spread itself. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s tricky predicting what videos will go viral, but we’ve realized content focused on nostalgia or topical events tend to spread much faster. Oh yeah, or anything related to Star Wars. (more…)

Web 2.0 tools and technologies, things like blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS, are changing the way companies communicate and collaborate, both internally and externally with customers, partners and suppliers. In last night’s The Social Nerdia Show! I was able to speak with Michael Chui about how companies can successfully leverage Web 2.0 and social media. Michael, a McKinsey & Company consultant serving technology and telecom clients, has been co-leading research on emerging long-term technology trends and their impact on clients and some of this research can be found on studies published by The McKinsey Quarterly, including “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Michael on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to our shows on iTunes, stream from mobile phones on Stitcher, and listen LIVE on blogtalkradio.

For the past 3 years, Michael and his McKinsey team have been surveying over 2000 executives on their use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. “There has been an evolution; the number one thing that has changed over the years is continuing adoption and usage,” Michael explained.

As more and more enterprises experiment and deploy the tools, it seems like more of them are starting to realize their real value. Michael explained that the results are impressive because “two thirds of respondents actually reported driving real business benefits from the use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, which is quite a powerful result.”

Some of the benefits discovered include an “increase in speed to access knowledge and expertise, increase in cost-savings related to communication and travel, increase in employee satisfaction, and increase in the effectiveness of marketing and customer satisfaction.”

(more…)

People-powered. Those two words joined by a dash immediately remind me of Wikipedia. And Wikipedia might be the biggest inspiration for GiffGaff, a new MVNO in the UK running on the O2 network, that promises to change things in the mobile world. MVNOs have come and gone for many years, usually with little more than clever branding and low prices.

However, we already established that GiffGaff was inspired by Wikipedia, remember? And Wikipedia is a very social site… that’s, well, powered by people. So maybe this MVNO has something new that’s worth looking into.

GiffGaff, whose name comes from a Scottish expression  that means “You give something, I give you something back,” claims to also be powered by people. They haven’t launched  (the plan is to become available before Christmas of this year) and no customer phone calls have been made, but the company is already leveraging the wisdom of the crowds. GiffGaff’s in-the-making community has already provided ideas such as “copy to Twitter” functionality for text messages. So GiffGaff is not crowdsourcing ideas, but that’s only the beginning. They are also going to crowdsource their marketing (again, not a huge deal). But more importantly, they are going to crowdsource customer service.

There are a lot of intelligent and passionate people helping each other out on forums and blogs all over the web, from cell phone geeks to home improvement DIYers, so it makes sense to think that people could help each other out in such a way that a company no longer needs a call center. I can imagine that PowerPoint presentation going something like this: 1) Customer service is difficult. 2) Customer Service is expensive. 3) Let’s make customers serve each other. (more…)

It’s been more than 3 months since I first got my hands on the Palm Pre. Yes, I’m technically a blogger, and yes, I received this awesome phone from Palm so stop worrying FTC. As one of 10 winners of the “Real Reviewers Program,” Palm provided me with a Pre (along with an unlimited plan) for 6 months! Palm did not tell me to blog about it, but I can’t help myself. The truth is that I was a believer since the day it was announced and I am totally a fan. Popular Mechanics ranked the Pre as one one of the 10 most brilliant products of 2009 so I don’t think I need to tell you that this phone is amazing.

Palm has made some really interesting announcements recently, including the Palm Pixi, the second WebOS device on the roster. The Pixi is a more affordable, more artistic version of the Pre that should be released soon. Palm is also releasing the Palm Pre in various countries and networks, including a GSM version in Spain on October 14th.

In addition, paid apps are now available and Palm is going to allow open and closed source version of Pre apps to be distributed (which is drastically different better from Apple’s app approval process). With over 120 apps and soon to grow exponentially, Palm is finally able to say that it has a good quantity of apps on its catalog. And the quality of the apps is great so far (see below for examples).

Also exciting is the fact that Adobe Flash might be coming to the Pre much sooner than I expected. Yes, you heard that right. Flash Player 10.1 tailored for the Palm Pre. That means Hulu, YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, etc. Sweet. Double Sweet.

But, what’s it like having a WebOS phone? Good question…

Here’s a summarized example of how I use the Palm Pre on a regular basis:

7:00am- Wake up. I’m not very good at waking up so I have 5 alarms that go off every 5 minutes with different songs.
7:25am – Check my Gmail account, which is beautifully integrated with the device.
7:28am – Check my Hotmail account, which is integrated almost as nicely, but with 5 times the spam. (more…)