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Phil McKinney, the talkative chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s PC division, announced he was retiring from HP today by year end.

He said in his own blog post he will spend his time promoting his new book, teach workshops on Killer Innovation, and hopefully take on board seats and advisory roles at startups “since I will no longer have to worry about conflict of interest or other corporate restrictions.”

While McKinney’s post was positive, his departure will probably be another blow to the executive ranks at HP, which also is losing its longtime chief strategy and technology officer, Shane Robison. HP is in a state of turmoil thanks to a botched CEO hire that resulting in Leo Apotheker getting replaced by Meg Whitman. HP just recently confirmed that it will keep its PC division.

But it’s not surprising that such turmoil at the mother ship is going to shake a few things loose from the tree. It’s not clear what McKinney’s departure will mean for any particular technology directions at HP, but McKinney was certainly a passionate techie.

At VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2010 conference (pictured), McKinney touted plastic display technology that HP Labs had created. Now McKinney says he will “help innovators get better at innovating.

McKinney will stay on through the end of 2011 to meet a number of customer obligations. Carlos Montalvo, who previously reported to McKinney, is the interim CTO for HP’s Personal Systems Group.

HP’s PC division faced more repercussions from recent months on Monday as its Personal Systems Group’s CTO Phil McKinney said he would be retiring from HP. He planned an active retirement and would be an advisor to others without conflicts of interest or other “corporate restrictions,” he said. The exit from HP was on friendly terms, but he wanted to “help innovators get better at innovating.”

There would be a transition period to help fill out deals, but the executive would leave the company at the end of 2011. During nine years at HP, McKinney said he worked on technologies including the Blackbird high-end gaming PC, the Firebird, Envy 133, Gabble, Twynergy, Pluribus, Vantage, TouchWall and DreamScreen.

Filed under: VentureBeat

A new Trojan horse distributed as part of existing Mac OS X applications can steal sensitive user data and take control of the computer’s GPU to generate Bitcoins, a form of currency used online.

Everybody tosses around the word “innovation” these days, but it’s hard to nail down what it means, and even harder to bake into the culture of big companies since, generally speaking, big companies like to double down on what they know already works, rather than try something scary and new that isn’t proven.

Then there are different sorts and sizes of innovation: operational innovation, where you do what you already do better; departmental innovation, where one part of the company does something nifty and new — and a lot of marketing innovation happens only within the marketing department and doesn’t touch anybody else; and then there’s cross functional innovation, where stakeholders come from different departments, and where partners like agencies, media companies, and technology companies might have a stake.

At next month’s ad:tech New York, we’ll enjoy a keynote address about brands and innovation given by Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s senior VP, integrated marketing communications and capabilities, who will be joined by Renny Gleeson, Wieden + Kennedy’s global director of interactive strategies and the co-founder of PIE (The Portland Incubator Experiment).

Brad Berens: What is your working definition of innovation? Did I miss something big in the three sorts I laid out? What are your goals for innovation within Coca-Cola, both in the marketing department and on a wider basis?

Wendy Clark: The Coca-Cola Company has a one-page document that represents our ambition for our company and system called our 2020 Vision. Written clearly as a mandate for the marketers of the company, that document is our remit “to develop the world’s most innovative and effective marketing.” That’s easy to say and harder to do. In a system so scaled (we’re in more than 200 countries), innovation can take the form of margin-dilutive complexity if we’re not careful. So we have to be focused.

We start thinking about innovation for our business in terms of our products, our packaging, our equipment, and our consumer engagement. For consumer engagement, we’re really looking at consumer trends, and how we’ll continue to recruit future generations of teens into loving our brands.

What has much of our attention right now is mobile. Mobile is impacting our total business — certainly consumer engagement, but it’s not limited to that. Mobile commerce (m-wallet) and mobile vault will have profoundly positive impacts on our business.

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The number of 3G users in China has surpassed the 100 million mark with one analyst dubbing the country as a “land of enormous opportunity” for Apple.

If that fancy new pair of shoes is giving your feet a hard time, you can break them in quicker than usual with a bit of rubbing alcohol. More »

Er is behoorlijk wat verschil tussen de manier waarop iPhone-gebruikers en Android gebruikers toegang hebben tot hun social media applicaties. Dat betekent ook dat het gebruik per applicatie en mobile device nogal verschillend is.

In onderstaande infographic van Onavo kun je deze verschillen duidelijk aflezen. Zo staat Facebook op 90% van alle iPhones tegenover slechts 63% op Android toestellen. Twitter is iets meer populair op Android (25%) dan op de iPhone…

That wild, wonderful thing that is Wikipedia has changed our lives in all sorts of subtle ways. Gone are the vast bookshelves of leather bound tomes that held me in thrall as a child – and in their stead is a white page, an empty search field and a button.

Amazingly, as Clay Shirky reminds us, Wikipedia was built by a global collective donating 100 million hours of time to its grand vision. But this cognitive surplus is just a drop in the ocean of time that is spent by Americans watching television each year – estimated to be many times that number.

Now, while this is fascinating as a data fact, what I am more interested in is the substitution that is taking place. You see, for 100 million people to donate one hour of their time – a deliberate choice is being made. The choice is to create rather than to consume. And the thing is – as humans, we seek the pleasure of consumption over the cold choice of decision. We have to be driven to act. Compelled. Consumption, after all, is the easy way.

Now think about the current debate in Australia around the regulation of gambling. Clubs across Australia are claiming that these regulations will impact their ability to employ people and to support the community through their charitable giving and community support programs. But as Ben Eltham points out, most clubs direct a miserly proportion of their revenues into such programs:

Or examine the Rooty Hill RSL, also in Sydney’s western suburbs … Poker machines raked in $43.2 million of the club’s total operating revenue of $64.7 million … [with only] $601,000 [spent] on donations.

What would happen if INDIVIDUALS actually chose where to invest their “community support” programs? I’d actually be keen to see some small percentage being funnelled into a microloan style service or even an insurance fund to help problem gamblers (but that is a whole other blog post).

Today, on Melbourne Cup day, the folks over at DebtConsolidation.com.au have put together this infographic that images what could be done with all those wagers being made at the track and at betting agencies across the country. Makes you think – what good could we do if we made better decisions? What indeed.

Today, Google released a major update to Google Reader, its popular online RSS reader. Google Reader shed its old skin and received the new Google design just like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar.

In addition to the facelift, Google Reader is now sports a shiny new Google+ button. But this new button comes with a high price for longtime Google Reader users. While the new design may take some getting used to, integration with Google+ is something that many cried for since the launch of Google+. Did Google get it right or should you prepare to find another RSS reader?

Google Reader’s New Look

They call the new look “cleaner and nicer”, but really it’s just the new Google look that’s been popping up all over the place. Google Reader feels less cluttered with the new design, but it’s not perfect. More space was dedicated to seeing content in the previous design.  Now, the search bar and subscribe options take up space that I wish was occupied by content.

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Google+ Button Replaces Everything

When the new look arrives, Google offers the option to export your Activity Stream (likes, shared items, starred items, etc.). The reason they’re offering this option from the beginning is because Google retired a lot of features within Google Reader today.

Most of Google Reader’s social features have been replaced with the Google+ share button. The +1 button is the gateway to your new shared links list and commenting means posting to your Google+ profile. You can still access the “send to” feature to share with your other social networks and starred items for those articles you think you’ll come back to.

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Even with the option to export your data, longtime users in left in the dark. Data portability means nothing if you can’t take that data somewhere else and USE it.

What The Update Is Really About.

Don’t mistake this as an attempt at making Google Reader more social. This is not about Google Reader at all. In fact, it’s all about sending traffic and activity to Google+. Google Reader has a very active and loyal base of users, but they’re more interested in converting them into Google+ users.

I’m happy about the integration with Google+, but it’s very limited. At the moment, Google Reader is without a social component. Adding a share button to a website doesn’t make it social. I’d like to see a social component reintroduced into Google Reader in the future. Also, it would’ve been appreciative of Google to transfer previously shared items from Google Reader to Google+ accounts. This could’ve easily served as an incentive to get Google Readers more excited about the integration with Google+ and served as a reward for users who have paved the way for a product like Google+ to exist.

It’s hard to call this a disappointment, but if you were looking for something spectacular from this new Google Reader update, you will be disappointed. If you use Google+ a lot and you use Google Reader, you’ll appreciate the integration. I’ll be sticking with Feedly as my default RSS reader. If you don’t use either product, then this post is completely irrelevant to you.

What do you think of the new Google Reader look? Are you happy about the integration with Google+? Are you upset about the features that were removed? Share your thoughts in the comments!

London’s Metropolitan Police Force has bought a digital surveillance system used by the U.S. Secret Service and other governments to spy on its citizens’ cell phone activity, the Guardian is reporting.

The system is known as “ICT hardware,” and it comes from a Leeds-based company called Datong. In essence, the device masquerades as a mobile phone network, intercepting communications from individual’s cellular phones gather data and allowing police authorities to remotely shut off phones in a targeted area, the Guardian writes.

The device is a the size of a suitcase, and emits a signal which can blanket an area of roughly 10 square kilometers, causing cellular phones to automatically broadcast the owner’s international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) and international mobile equipment identity (IMEI), as well as the owner’s whereabouts, reports CNET. The device then picks up this data, giving the authorities information on cellphone users’ whereabouts.

“It raises a number of serious civil liberties concerns and clarification is urgently needed on when and where this technology has been deployed, and what data has been gathered,” said Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, in The Guardian.

Others wondered whether such invasive technology made it possible to individually identify suspected criminals based on their mobile phone behavior, when hundreds of transmissions are being intercepted simultaneously.

Datong is selling the snooping device to governments in more than 40 countries in the Middle East, South America, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, and the U.S. Secret Service, according to the Guardian.

Attached image is not the device being used by Scotland Yard.

[Image Credit: x-ray delta one/Flickr]

Filed under: security, VentureBeat

A new trojan on OS X will co-opt your machine to mine Bitcoin, Amazon updates the Kindle app for OS X to include social-reading features, and the think-tank behind Microsoft’s sci-fi short film discusses the details behind the technology. More »