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 works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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