Posts tagged with Social media
I’m No Social Media Expert, but Dig Our New Blog Platform
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 10:33 AM
(8 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
Loading ...So if I am not the in-house “social media expert”, web guy, or IT guy, why do I care about our new blog platform the team is rolling out next week? Well, I am a strategy guy and social media has been invaluable to have real-time conversations with some real smart folks in the community. I have also used social media to create new relationships and make existing ones stronger. Plus it’s real time and productive, I love the efficiency of 140-character ideation.
So I am excited about some new features in our blogs we are rolling out for readers like you and authors like me. Here is a run-down of the feature highlights you should see next week.
For readers (You):
- Post rating - Ability to rate each post. You can tell me if you like the post or if you think it stinks.
- Polls – Tell us quickly what you think. Participating in polls helps us out, too.
- ShareThis – allows you to send a post to the social network of your choice.
- Look & feel – New look and feel that’s easier to read and navigate
- Video content inside posts – No we didn’t have that before… shame. (head shaking). Look Mom, a real video:
- Threaded comments - Comments are still easy to submit and with threading, you can now see where the conversation is going more easily. There’s a “reply-to” option that notifies you if you want to hear about all replies to a post.
- Easy comment authentication – If you are already signed up on OpenID and Gravatar, login and you are commenting. Asking people to exclusively sign up for your site is “so 2008”.
- Improved smartphone view – View the blog better from mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch. OK, I wanted it optimized for Bold, Storm, and G1 Android too, but maybe later.
For Authors (You and I):
- Posting flexibility- I want to blog the moment I get that “big idea”- no matter where I am.
I get increased flexibility of where I can post, doing it through ping.fm, iPhone, etc. without a SecureID dongle which I needed on our old system. This means I can more quickly start conversations and blog more often and spend less time doing it. I used to go from a)Word to b)LiveWriter to c)LiveWriter and fix broken content to d) old platform tool to e) fix broken content in old platform tool to f) publish. This removes most of those steps.
- Improved rich media tools- I won’t even bore you with how many steps I would need to go through to post media. Don’t get me started. I can do it now and do it fast. You want videos and audio, we got it.
- Comment SPAM filtering- I used to get 50 per day. That’s real productive. I’d hate to look at my inbox in the morning. For the last time, no, I don’t want Cialis or oil paintings.
- Robust tracking & measurement- Let me know what interests you and what doesn’t. Simple. You don’t care, I don’t write.
So we hope YOU like the new blogs and features. Please tell us what you think; we’ve made it much easier to do so.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
The Netbook Web Spectacle
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 2:01 AM
You would think that with the volume of controversy on the web last week that there was some juicy new development with Britney Spears instead of not-so-innocent little netbooks (aka mini-notebooks). But netbooks were indeed the controversy of the week following comments reportedly made by Intel executive Stu Pann (with whom I worked in the mid-90s) at the Raymond James IT Supply Chain Conference.
Like reports of Spears latest performance, the net burst open with opinion, conjecture, and even a bit of paranoia. Folks took sides and even attacked each other over these devices that are not a smartphone, not yet a notebook.
According to Brooke Crothers at CNET.com, who broke the story on Nov. 28, Stu reportedly said,
- “We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids, and there is some of that. It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook.”
- “We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market.”
- “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out.”
What ensued was a web melee as charged as a Chris Rocker YouTube video. Is it time to “Leave Netbooks Alone!”? Here’s a sample:
“Three Reasons Why Netbooks Just Aren’t Good Enough”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/three-reasons-why-netbooks-just-arent-good-enough/all-comments
“Ten Reasons to Hate Netbooks”
http://www.t3.com/news/ten-reasons-to-hate-netbooks?=37421
“Why Netbooks Aren’t There Yet”
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/mowi/article.php/3787471/Why+Netbooks+Arent+There+Yet.htm
“Are Netbooks Headed the Way of the Dodo Bird?”
http://www.inquisitr.com/10131/are-netbooks-headed-the-way-of-the-dodo-bird/
“Sony claims Growing Netbook Market is ʽConfusingʼ ”
http://www.pcretailmag.com/news/30831/Sony-claims-growing-netbook-market-is-confusing
“Can Apple Save the Netbook?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802449.html
“The Time is Ripe for a Rip by Netbook PC“
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/28/BU3E14BCHU.DTL
“Intel: netbooks are OK for an hour or so, that’s all”
http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/11/intel-netbooks.html
The interesting thing about the headlines is that when you actually read the full spectrum of articles, there were some very positive stories on netbooks that sat along with the negative ones. I have been on the receiving end of “less than accurate” headlines, so I can empathize.
The comments are as entertaining as the articles. A poster actually insinuates that one tech blogger has business ties to a competitive platform. Posters go back and forth describing why they love or hate netbooks. Others draw the iPhone/Touch into the debate saying netbooks AND notebooks stink and that Apple has the only true solution that meets everyone’s needs.
Whatever happens with Britney this week, I’m sure we’ll read of it ad nauseam in the entertainment pages. In the high-tech arena, netbooks are supplying all the drama. Does anyone outside the tech bubble really care? I don’t know, but would love to hear your comments on this “unfolding drama.”
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. 
Guest Blogging on Notebooks.com
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 2:59 AM
For my next blog post we are going to branch out into guest blogging, which I think is a good idea and worth a try. Not as aggressive as our Computex 2008 experiment, but hey, everything doesn’t need to a level 10 risk to be valuable! :>
We received an invitation from Xavier Lanier who runs a website called www.notebooks.com. I think Notebooks.com serves as a solid resource for prospective buyers of notebook PCs. If you are ready to buy your next notebook PC, I recommend you check it out first for insight and perspective on the options, features and overall value in terms of price/performance of the wide variety of choices consumers have in the mobile computing market. I do want to emphasize that the guest blog opportunity is nothing more than an invitation to share an opinion and doesn’t represent or reflect a sponsorship or formal business relationship between AMD and www.notebooks.com.
“Mini-notebooks” and “netbooks” remain a very trendy topic in the space, one I’ve blogged about previously. Certainly worth a closer look. Here’s a short excerpt of my next blog you can find in its entirety here.
After testing seven netbooks (Asus Eee PC 4G, Asus Eee PC 900, MSI U100, Dell Inspiron 910, HP 2133, Geode reference design, Asus Eee PC 1000H), over the last five months, I now know what I want to see in future designs. This may not be the same for all 6,699,999,999 people on earth, but perhaps for a handful or two of like-minded people.
One caveat: I don’t expect a single mini-notebook design to be able to meet both my usage models:
* One inside the home focused on entertainment
* One outside the home focused on portability…….
Find the entire blog here.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Web 2.0 – A New Server World Order?
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 4:55 PM
You may have seen recent blogs from me on the topic of social networks and their growth. I even subjected my Computex blogs to these media. Why do we spend time with this stuff – we don’t sell software! In the end, it’s because trends in our industry are important for AMD, and personally satisfying to me to stay up to date on these. The creative minds in our industry continue to find new ways to use technology and it’s a challenge just saying current. But what’s equally surprising is the speed that the “under 30” crowd adopts these new media/social networks. This new social model is one of the emerging Internet use scenarios that has come to be known as Web 2.0.
I find a great deal of satisfaction in this fast growing market especially in light of some recent announcements that AMD made regarding the AMD Opteron processor’s web performance. AMD recently announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2356 and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8356 now hold the top x86 web performance records for both 2P and 4P servers, as measured by the SPECweb®2005 benchmark. This means that the AMD-based server architecture is able to process and manage more data over a period of time than competing solutions and therefore keep the media rich social networks operating at ever faster speeds. As I was writing this blog, I read a related blog from Nigel Dessau on the subject of workloads and balancing loads. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to enable and optimize these new networks but we did not stop there. I blogged recently on 2nd generation notebooks and highlighted the new features that we have enabled through our ATI acquisition including our UVD (universal video decoder) which is optimized to consume rich media such as web video.
AMD continues to focus on solutions. Just to be clear, what this means to us is power and performance optimized silicon, platforms optimized with partners and customers to deliver real benefits. These benefits are provided on the server side as a web backbone and on the notebook and desktop as power/performance optimized clients. So AMD is again leading and enabling major transitions in the industry by leveraging our unique capabilities to create, process, serve up and consume this new-fangled thing called Web 2.0.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Live From The Post-Computex Social Media Decompression Chamber
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 3:19 AM
Back safely from Computex. Even though this was my tenth trip, this one will stand out for a long time for the high spirit of adventure it produced as a result of implementing many social media tools at once.
We picked a place thirteen time zones away to dive into the deep end of the social media pool. Metaphorically speaking, it felt like being in a tin can going to the moon. We were implementing lots of new capabilities at the same time that ultimately required lots of troubleshooting on the fly. It produced some early headaches and challenges but it turned out to be memorable, spirited, and a lot of fun.
Here’s the rundown on the experience, or should I say experiment, of all these activities.
First, the Nokia N95 phone, in my opinion, was a bust using it the way we wanted to use it. We wanted to be able to automatically capture, upload, and broadcast video with minimal delay. Amazing functionality, for sure, and I’m sure we’ll continue to use it in North America, but couldn’t get it to behave with the 3G networks in Taiwan. This made us dependent on unreliable Wi-Fi signals from the show floor and even back at our hotels. We resorted to using my Flip video camera, uploading that content into our YouTube account vis-à-vis the old reliable PC and using the help of the Flixwagon folks to back load the new content into our Flixwagon account. Two of our videos are still stuck in Flixwagon and won’t load into YouTube! (Check out “Pat Chats with Theo” & “Gigabyte’s Spider”).
We had to implement the same kind of workarounds with the Flickr account using the Nokia N95 phone as well. Frankly, the early troubles with the video impacted the attention we gave to Flickr, which deserved more. But we Flickred, it works, and we’ll do it better next time.
The live Mogulus broadcast of our press event also had mixed results. We implemented an up-rezzing transcoding engine on the live feed from a company called Kulabyte – a very promising technology. Feedback from the audience was mixed – I am told many were amazed by the high quality video streaming through their computers from half a world away. Some experienced a jittery picture. Clearly looks dependent on the capabilities of the end user PC, their network, their WAN, and we will continue to work with these companies to provide a reliable solution for our audience. You can check it out for yourself as the recording on-demand feature is available now. It looks great.
Twitter is still kind of an enigma to me, but it I think it has its place, and I am intrigued. It was kind of a like cross-breed between a mass phone text, a mass IM, and the Truman Show. Like many first-time cross-breedings, it was ugly at times. The Twitter network was down a lot, users were habitually complaining, and there is even a Twitter blog on the issues and reasons for the outages. Even with all the issues, we are starting to build a following. Translating that capability into an on-going business practice will take time and more experimentation.
Next, I didn’t need to spend much time following our Facebook page because it already integrates content from YouTube, FlickR, and Twitter. It is growing by itself and we’re hearing from many long time AMD fans from around the world expressing their feelings about why they like us…..and what they think we need to fix.
Finally, none of this “rise of the machines” stuff above worked without awesome “humans” ;> . I particularly want to thank Scott Carroll, our social media manager and Matt Davis, our PR manager for making everything work when the tech didn’t.
Here are quick & easy summary links to much of this content:
- YouTube AMD@Computex 2008
- FlickR AMD@Computex 2008
- Flixwagon AMD@Computex 2008
- AMD Unprocessed Facebook Page
- Follow AMD on Twitter
- AMD on Mogulus
Community-inspired innovation is awesome. I’m looking forward to continuing the use and implementation of these tools but doing so while playing for the home team in the states for a while… at least a few weeks
This is AMD@Computex 2008, signing off!
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Day 3 @Computex: The Innovation Cycle Continues
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 8:45 AM
Day three at Computex comprised of more 1:1 regional press interviews and spending more time, maybe too much time, on the show floor given security booted us out of the facility.
Although I had spent a good part of time interviewing some of our technology partners, it was now our turn to give interviews. The first one was with Bloomberg, and while they would have liked to dig deep into AMD’s financial matters, we confined our discussion to AMD’s products and competitiveness. We also talked with IDG on a variety of corporate areas. I have been meeting with Sumner for years and it’s so nice to catch up with familiar faces.
We also hosted a Japanese press contingent that freelanced for publications including PC Watch and MYCOM Journal The discussion focused on our “Puma” platform, the rationalization behind our AMD GAME!™ and AMD LIVE! ™ programs, and the benefits we believe they provide to different sets of customers. I personally like to think of AMD LIVE! and AMD GAME! as guiding posts to deliver a superior technology platform for mainstream gamers and media mavens. Some may disagree and call it just a sticker program or marketing ploy, but if it can help simplify a confusing buying decision, it’s easy to see the benefit. Again, we in the PC industry tend to lose perspective on the ocean that separates enthusiasts and mainstream customers in how each of them approach a solid buying decision. AMD LIVE! and GAME! fill a void in information availability and help save time and effort for the consumer looking for a great all-around digital media and gaming PC.
The final interview was with Hardware Zone out of Singapore. We chatted a lot about the future, or in my opinion, the questionable future for UMPCs and a lot about the mini-notebook spin and hype at this year’s show. As you know, I spent 30 days at home with a lot of different mini-notebooks, comparing full sized notebooks at the same price point, and blogged about my results here. I just hope that consumers get full disclosure when deciding between a mini-notebook and full-sized notebook at the same price point.
After our 1:1 interviews we met up with GearLive for a chat. These guys are awesome in that they sift right through the spin (B.S.) to get to the heart of the technology and the benefit it provides the end user. I absolutely LOVE that approach and wish more folks would adopt this. You can check out our interview with GearLive here:
…as we discuss the next generation notebook platform.
Jake Ludington from GearLive has great insights on the entire Computex show and he shares these insights on his blog here.
Finally, we met up with AMD’s Jacky Wong to talk about ATI XGP™ technology. This is AMD’s new external PCI Express® (PCIe) 2.0 graphics platform, designed to deliver enthusiast-class desktop graphic performance and true multimedia upgradeability to notebooks. The concept is real simple: If you have a notebook with an ATI XGP Technology external PCIe connector and you want some real incredible gaming performance, plug your notebook into an independently powered and cooled graphics “booster unit”, and you are on your way to gaming heaven. Jacky talks more about it here:
…and shows us a notebook connected to three additional monitors playing some cool games.
As we were giving our final GearLive interview of the show, the lights turned down and security entered our realm, a pretty good sign that it was time to leave. Matt Davis, my AMD compadre of the show, just flipped on the camera and we just started walking and talking, trying to summarize what we saw during the show. You can catch that conversation here.
What a Computex 2008 show…… Puma has been let off the leash and the industry’s cycle of innovation rules over anything else. It rules over spin and the giant blue hype machine… the truth always comes out in the end, or that’s what my grandfather the milkman and Christmas tree farmer told me when I was a mere four foot tall…….
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Day 1 @Computex: In The Beginning….
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 1:17 PM
Day 1 was uneventful, with the exception that I somehow managed to lock myself into my bathroom. Some people may have said, “Someone doesn’t want me going to Computex” and stopped while they were ahead, but I am a man on a mission and cannot be deterred. I am no longer in the bathroom, in case you wondered. Thank goodness for bathroom phones. :> 
The Computex show floor didn’t open until 9:30 am and Day 1 for me was mostly about show planning and press interviews. I met with Bloomberg, CNET Asia, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Ming Pao Daily News, and the Hong Kong Economic Times for about an hour each. We talked about a variety of items, but one item that we continually discussed was the present and future of mobility. There was a lot of interest in the AMD platform codename “Puma”, but since it isn’t scheduled to launch until June 4th, I couldn’t divulge too much so we could save something for the grand announcement.
We talked about the concept of these expensive mini-notebooks a lot. It’s so interesting how, in my opinion, every trade show needs to have the “shiny new red wagon”. The irony is that many never gain market traction and either die or are reformed as something else. I was around for the first tablets released on Windows in the early 90’s and someone reminded me about diskless and wireless web tablets (Miro). For this show I am witnessing the feeding frenzy around inexpensive, low performing (versus full size) mini-notebooks. See my comments on those here. Last year at Computex, the big new thing was UMPCs…… and it was very hard for me to find many of them on the show floor this year.
So I did get the chance to walk the show floor for a few hours and it was interesting. It’s like system builder heaven…… chassis, motherboards, cooling solutions, memory, new storage…….. running out of breath just thinking about it.
At this year’s show, among many things, we are bringing out our new AMD LIVE!™ Home Cinema, which in simple words, is a cool reference design for a living room home theater PC. The specific configuration we’re demonstrating at Computex has a couple of cool features, specifically a digital audio amplifier from D2Audio (which hits what some would call audiophile specs) and a new liquid cooling solution we worked on with NoiseLimit Inc. We’re showing how the digital amp and a quad core AMD Phenom™ processor can all live like a happy family together in a VCR-sized chassis. Check out the interview here on the overall specs and benefits. We also were pleased to have NoiseLimit swing by the booth to tell us how they have innovated for the AMD LIVE! Home Cinema program. You can check that out here.
Finally, I took a look around another booth. I will leave it to your imagination as to who’s booth it was. What I saw there was a demo of Second Life and HD running on their new integrated chipset which was too jittery for me to enjoy. I was yearning for an AMD 780G chipset system with a quad or triple core AMD Phenom™ processor around that time. At my house at least I can run full Blu-ray movies with no hiccups at 1080P splendor and play some really good games like HL2 at decent frame rates.
Doing all this on a mobile platform could be even better…..and that’s what tomorrow is about…. i.e.: our next generation “Puma” platform. I will keep you posted…..and as I requested last time and you came through, let me know what you would like to see and I will try to get it on film.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.