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…)

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.”

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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…)

I had the great pleasure of talking with Loic Le Meur, a French blogger, serial entrepreneur, and founder / CEO of Seesmic for The Social Nerdia Show! last night.

I didn’t only get to ask Loic a few questions, but I also got to do it on his 37th birthday and Le Quatorze Juillet so I am very grateful for the time he took to chat with me. I had no idea that it was Loic’s birthday (or Bastille Day for that matter), but I quickly found out through Twitter.

If you’ve ever used Twitter, chances are that you’ve heard of Seesmic and its very popular Seesmic Desktop (or its Twhirl predecessor), which is not only a fantastic Twitter and Facebook client/app, but also “a tool to manage your community,” as Loic explained to me. Seesmic has been working hard to launch a brand new web-based in-browser app called Seesmic Web that is not yet as good as its Adobe Air brother, but is catching up (in terms of features) and will do so probably sooner than later.

Loic told me about the importance of “not rushing things” and the value of Team Seesmic, a group of 52,000 members that provides Seesmic with feedback. “We build as much as we can, obviously based on demand.. but we have a lot of surprises coming that no one suggested.”

A Seesmic iPhone app is coming soon (and Loic said it has surprises as well) so I asked him about a potential Palm Pre app. Loic didn’t give me a clear yes or no, but he did say they are “doing other platforms.”

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Seesmic is the company behind the widely used Twitter + Facebook Adobe AIR client Seesmic Desktop.

Johann Romefort is Seesmic’s CTO and an influential leader in the construction of the future of the open, real-time, and very social web.

I am sure you will find his thoughts (sent all the way from Bucharest) to be very interesting, fun, and insightful.

Please make sure to check out all the fantastic stuff that Seesmic is doing, and don’t forget to follow Johann on Twitter.

1. How did you first get involved with Seesmic and what does your role as CTO consist of today?

I met Loic when Seesmic was still 2 pages on a notebook. At that time I was searching for a challenge, so I began to work with Loic right away, and built the first version with another developer in Bucharest. My role as a CTO has been evolving a lot since I started, as we now have 12 engineers around the world which require some management as you could expect. Apart from managing our amazing tech team, I’m also involved in the product process, and I’m creating prototypes to validate ideas or technologies.

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Following our post “The Future of TV is Online“, here’s a video that’s a bit less serious..