Intel’s chairman on corporate social responsibility

The highlight of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for me was the sitdown that the Intel Insiders had with Intel chairman and former CEO Craig Barrett. (Disclosure: I’m a member of the Intel Insiders.)

At CES the next day, Barrett gave a keynote in which he announced a wide-ranging new initiative by Intel to support the philanthropic micro-lending efforts of Kiva.org and the nonprofit charity Save the Children all across the globe.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, Intel has been steadily reaching out across the U.S. border to advance education and literacy around the world. Barrett mentions the Intel Teach program to put technology in the classroom, which is especially popular overseas. He also discusses the larger role that technology companies — Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM (and Google, though he doesn’t name them) — are playing in the evolving field of corporate social responsibility.

Two quick quotes from Barrett:

• “Technology is not the answer. Technology is one of the tools you can use. The really important thing in education is that you have good teachers.” Without quality teachers, all the technology in the world won’t help.

• He told a story about schoolchildren in a rural village in India whose highlight of the week comes on Tuesdays, when a bus carrying a mobile computer station arrives. It’s had a significant impact on reducing truancy and dropout rates in rural India. “When you see that, you say, Wow.”

A week after we met with Barrett, he announced that he will step down in May — after 35 years with the company, seven of them as the CEO and almost almost four as chair. See the Intel release and the GigaOm story.

Video hosting woes

A side note on this video. We’re in the year 2009, folks. Uploading a 14-minute video interview should no longer be an ordeal. But this was.

• Blip.tv: I still like Blip a lot, but its embeds support wordpress.com but not wordpress.org, its transcoded Flash version is too subpar to use, and I can’t figure out if there’s a way to use their Show player to play the original .mp4 video using Flash.

• Vimeo: I still like Vimeo, too. But its thumbnail generator was down for about seven hours today. Again. And it wouldn’t take the thumbnail/screen shot I uploaded. Now, it’s working. So I’ve embedded it above.

• YouTube: The site still limits you to 10 minutes — even for high-definition videos — because of the founders’ insistence that no one wants to watch a video longer than 10 minutes. Is this contributing to the dumbing down of the culture? Yes. That may have been YouTube’s original reason, but now it’s a cost issue.

• Ourmedia: I still use Ourmedia, of course (which I co-founded in 2005 and left last December). But the open-source flowplayer embed code doesn’t work here. They’re in maintaining-the-status-quo mode until the economy recovers.

• Internet Archive: I still like archive.org, too, for long-term preservation, but the bitrate setting on its Flash player remains too low-quality for me.

• Facebook: Uploading works, but I like my works on the open Web.

• Viddler: The site worked, the embed worked, and you can see it above.

• Veoh: I’ve been leery of Veoh since they began embedding advertisements on top of videos, but perhaps they’ve stopped doing that?

Watch, embed or download the video

You can watch, embed or download the video on these sites:

• Watch video on Blip.tv

• Watch video on Vimeo

• Watch video on Viddler

• Watch video on Veoh

You’ll notice a bit of background noise but this was the quietest room in the entire CES tradeshow hall.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.