Tim Hamilton/Flickr

Surprise — part of his appearance actually made sense. Since leaving office, Clinton has been a major proponent of aiding the developing world, especially in disaster- and poverty-stricken nations like Haiti, where citizens don’t have the same access to the creature comforts of the first world.

That’s where the Samsung pairing comes in. The South Korean conglomerate sells hundreds of millions of smartphones globally each year, and has been one of the leaders in the race to dominate the low end of Android-powered mobile devices.

Efforts to get those phones into the hands of people in impoverished rural areas, Clinton said, should be a priority in world humanitarian efforts. For many, the cellphone is the first — and only — point of entry to having a bank account, or to standardize commodity food prices across their particular region.

Big business agrees with Clinton on focusing on the developing world for growth — just with a different incentive in mind. As smartphone tech becomes cheaper and more widely available, millions of first-time users will start regularly accessing the Internet via mobile device, especially in Asia and South America. While smartphone penetration continues to reach record highs in the U.S., international markets remain the major area for potential growth.

That wasn’t all the president wanted to talk about. In light of the recent Newtown, Conn., school massacre and subsequent assault weapon debates springing up in its wake, Clinton addressed the need for greater gun control in the U.S., especially considering the nation’s high death rate.

“I grew up in a hunting culture, but this is nuts,” he said, citing the gun-related deaths occurring since the assault weapons ban — which Clinton helped to pass in office — expired in 2004. “Why does anybody need a 30-round clip for a gun?”

So, yeah, it got a bit political. But he’s the 42nd president of the United States; tech conference keynote or no, he can pretty much do what he wants.

(Image Credit: Tim Hamilton/Flickr)

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But while sitting down with Acer President Jim Wong yesterday at CES, we discussed that other tablet maker. No, not Apple — Microsoft.

Acer, in case you haven’t been following this, has been one of the more outspoken hardware partners of Microsoft when it comes to the Windows 8 operating system and Surface tablet.

In October, Acer CEO JT Wang told Microsoft to “think twice” about its Surface tablet. Fast-forward to the end of the year, after Windows 8 had launched, and Acer was one of a few computer makers expressing disappointment in sales, saying, “There was not a huge spark in the market. … It’s a slow start, there’s no question.”

Now Wong believes that Microsoft’s promotion of the Surface has been “confusing to consumers.”

“The promotion of the product is really focused on the keyboard, and the users really don’t know how to maximize the touch experience,” Wong said. (Wong has said before that he believes that touchscreens have irreversibly changed — and will soon dominate — the PC market).

Wong went on to point out that when Apple launched the iPad, it was just the iPad — without a lot of talk about accessory keyboards.

Acer’s chief marketing officer, Michael Birkin, echoed this. “There was just a lot of messaging coming out at the same time: Windows 8, Surface, RT,” he said.

Still, Wong struck a (somewhat) hopeful note. “It was disappointing, but we have to work closely with Microsoft to get customer feedback on what works and what doesn’t,” he concluded, adding that Acer has set up “experience” booths overseas to educate consumers on the company’s Windows 8 products.

Microsoft has not yet responded to requests for comment on Wong’s remarks or Windows 8 sales.

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In yet another instance of a Silicon Valley venture firm bringing in big government guns to class up the place, Khosla Ventures said that it had signed the international consulting firm run by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “bring global and domestic insight to Khosla’s portfolio companies, helping them achieve their strategic goals in industries such as technology, energy, security and healthcare.”

In other words, strategery plus!

That will presumably be provided by Rice and her partners at RiceHadleyGates, which has offices in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., in an undisclosed financial arrangement with Khosla. RiceHadleyGates also includes former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former State Department official Anja Manuel.

In an interview yesterday, Manuel said that the goal was to help in areas that VCs might not be as familiar with, from Internet freedom laws in India to the challenges of moving into emerging markets.

“There are a lot of policy issues that entrepreneurs will be facing and we will try to be helpful as they sort through them,” she said. “We love working with innovative companies and want to make their global experience better.”

Khosla partner Samir Kaul said the firm was still figuring out how they will work together, but that Rice’s team would serve as “strategic advisers on an as needed basis.”

“What [RiceHadleyGates] does fits in very well with a lot of our themes as investors in energy and security, for example,” said Kaul. “We want to offer the companies we invest in as much help as possible and this is a real win in that regard.”

It’s certainly a high-profile move, although Khosla has done this before, signing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on as a strategic adviser in 2010.

In addition, Andreessen Horowitz brought in former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, as well as former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, to lend its portfolio companies additional expertise.

Rice’s firm certainly has a lot of that, especially related to thorny international issues. Rice, who was once the provost at Stanford University, was also the National Security Adviser in the administration of former President George W. Bush, before moving to the State Department.

Big Blue made the announcement today after the close of markets in New York. IBM shares are ticking up after hours, rising to $207.32, after closing at $204.98 during the regular session.

Ginni Rometty is a well-respected executive who took over as CEO on the first day of this year. She recently topped Fortune Magazine’s list of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business,” though it was Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer who made the cover. Rometty is generally credited with doing the heavy lifting to get PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting fully integrated following its $3.5 billion acquisition by IBM in 2002.

Earlier this year, Rometty was also an unwilling figure in a national debate over Augusta National Golf Club’s longtime policy of excluding women from memberships. The complication was that the club had always offered an honorary membership to the CEO of IBM. The stories caused a brief national kerfuffle that prompted both President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to weigh in. Ultimately, Augusta changed its policy and offered memberships to two women, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rometty’s appointment also marks an end to the IBM career of Sam Palmisano, who will remain as a special consultant until he officially retires on Dec. 1. His tenure will be remembered for, among other things, a 125 percent increase in IBM’s share price and for the then-controversial decision to sell IBM’s PC business to China’s Lenovo.

And while this is probably not the moment to bring it up, it bears mentioning that Rometty is 55, and IBM’s policy has typically been that CEOs retire around the time they turn 60. However, there’s nothing saying that practice can’t or won’t be changed.

Anyway, here’s IBM’s official announcement.

Virginia M. Rometty Elected IBM Chairman

ARMONK, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– The IBM (IBM) board of directors today elected Virginia M. Rometty chairman of the board, effective October 1, 2012. Mrs. Rometty succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who is stepping down from the board effective October 1, 2012.

Mr. Palmisano will become Senior Adviser to the company until he retires on December 1, 2012. As of October 1, 2012, Mrs. Rometty’s title will be IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer.

Mrs. Rometty, 55, is currently IBM’s president and chief executive officer. She succeeded Mr. Palmisano as IBM’s ninth CEO in January of this year, after holding senior leadership positions in IBM’s services, sales, strategy and marketing units. Mrs. Rometty led the successful integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting — the largest acquisition in professional services history, building a team of more than 100,000 business consultants and services experts. She became a director of IBM in January.

Mr. Palmisano, 61, became IBM chief executive officer in 2002 and chairman of the board in 2003. During his tenure, IBM transformed its product and services portfolio, exiting commoditizing businesses, including PCs, printers and hard disk drives, and greatly increasing investments in analytics, cloud computing and other high-value businesses and technologies. He has overseen the transformation of IBM from a multinational into a globally integrated enterprise. During Mr. Palmisano’s tenure as CEO, IBM created over $100 billion of total shareholder value.

In only a few election cycles, political campaigning online has changed dramatically, a fact underscored by President Barack Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on Reddit Wednesday afternoon.

President Obama is not the first well-known name to do an AMA on Reddit, which has hosted guests ranging from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Larry King to (infamously) actor Woody Harrelson.

With apologies to Larry King fans, though, he is easily the most powerful and influential person to do an AMA, and one of only a few American politicians (a group that includes former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who stopped by before his little Twitter scandal).

President Obama already has a strong track record with the Web, building a groundbreaking online campaign in 2008 that arguably secured his edge over competitors in both the primaries and the general election.

Only 20 years ago, a political campaigner reaching voters as President Obama did Wednesday would have been completely unusual. In 1992, the University of Southern California harnessed the pre-Web Internet to print out candidates’ speeches and position papers and distribute them to students.

The White House didn’t have a Web site at all then. In 1994, the Clinton-Gore administration debuted this official site, which looked like this by the end of Clinton’s second term.

By 1996, all major presidential candidates had at least some presence on the Web, posting static collections of speeches, position papers and so on.

However, despite a budding audience for news online, researcher Rita Kirk Whillock found that the Internet “did not have a significant impact” on former President Clinton’s re-election, with less than one percent of voters saying they got most of their political information online.

President Clinton won that election with a more than 8 percent lead over Republican candidate Sen. Bob Dole. And as the Senate Web site boasted, his 1997 inauguration was the first to be streamed live online.

With increased political activity online (not to mention an election without an incumbent in the race), the 2000 presidential campaign did not live up to watchers’ expectations for how candidates would use the Internet.

Perhaps the biggest tech story from that year was Sen. John McCain’s supporters contributing $2.2 million online to his Republican primary campaign.

(In 2008, in contrast, President Obama raised more than 200 times as much — or $500 million — from his online backers.)

Later that year, former President George W. Bush coined the term “Internets,” and there was much rejoicing. While he was in office, though, Bush’s footprint online was much smaller than that of potential rival politicians such as Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who raised twice as much early campaign money online as the Democrats’ eventual 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry.

Dean’s not-quite-successful use of Meetup.com to rally voters around his candidacy in 2004 foreshadowed President Obama’s more fruitful run at the White House in 2008.

By then, the social Web had come into its own, and his campaign used my.BarackObama.com to drive not just donations and rallies, but also online word-of-mouth buzz that propagated through supporters’ social networks.

It wasn’t until after President Bush left office in 2009 that his online profile went up slightly. Although he has kept fairly quiet in his time out of the Oval Office, he went on YouTube in 2010 to thank viewers with an “inaugural address” for his Facebook page.

At the same time, The Wall Street Journal also reported that Bush had joined Twitter. But even though Twitter rolled out the ability to verify celebrity accounts as authentic the year before, @George_WBush was never verified. Not that it matters, though, since Bush has used it just four times and didn’t tweet at all for more than two years.

Today, that sort of Web silence would be irresponsible for a major presidential candidate. As have many Republicans, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has found success on Twitter. But he’s still losing the numbers game, with fewer than 950,000 followers versus more than 19 million for President Obama.

Still, Romney hasn’t shied away from the Web in other arenas, pouncing on Apple’s mobile advertising service iAd, and attempting to announce that Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan would be his vice-presidential nominee via a campaign-branded mobile app.

Images: Obama, Official White House Photo by Pete Souza; Romney, Maria Dryfhout / Shutterstock.com

However, President Obama’s AMA — not-so-coincidentally timed during the Republican National Convention in Tampa — puts him out in front of the Internet popularity contest. As with his oft-derided online petition platform for the White House, what he said on Reddit doesn’t really matter. The act alone of reaching out to potential voters on Reddit (which served more than two billion page views in December) and other online communities is now imperative.

That’s because the Internet, for better or for worse, has become the new town hall for politics that many over-eager futurists said it would be in the ’90s. At long last, it’s now a place where current and future candidates have to stop, even if they don’t want to.

So the question is not if Romney should fire back at his rival’s Reddit stunt, but rather how he should do it. Control of the now-crucial online conversation is President Obama’s to lose.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Oracle’s statement yesterday called the appointment of Safra Catz as president and CFO “permanent.” While that’s clearly meant to convey that this is no interim appointment, which was the case in her first turn as CFO during a three-year period that ended in 2008, does it also imply that Catz has reached her peak on the management ladder?

At least one analyst has concluded that it does. Pat Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities tells Bloomberg that Catz’s appointment sets the pieces in place for President Mark Hurd, the 54-year old former Hewlett-Packard CEO, to take the reins from CEO Larry Ellison at some point in the future. Hurd, he says, gains more day-to-day control over the company, giving him a logical springboard to the corner office.

But is it really so clear? Before Hurd arrived on the scene, it was Catz who had always been described as Ellison’s heir apparent. She won her stripes primarily overseeing Oracle’s $10.6 billion takeover of Peoplesoft in 2005. At an Oracle event in 2005, Ellison said “If I dropped dead tomorrow, Safra Catz would be CEO of Oracle.” That implies that a formal succession plan saying exactly that was once–and may still be–in place. And by getting a title that begins with C, something Hurd doesn’t have, there’s a further implication of seniority that effectively makes Catz appear to be the second most powerful person at Oracle after Ellison.

Obviously there will be more tea-leaf reading to come from all this. And there will be more signals from Oracle that will be interpreted and re-interpreted again. Ellison is 66 years old and has been running Oracle since the days of the Carter Administration. He’s showing no signs of letting go of the pilot wheel just yet. (You just know he’s going to live to be 180.) Hurd is 54 and Catz is 49. Ellison likes them both. Time will eventually tell who gets the nod.

Sources close to Groupon, the social buying site, said its president and COO, former Yahoo exec Rob Solomon (pictured here), is stepping down from his job.

It’s not clear what the reasons for Solomon’s departure are, but the move seems to be sudden. It is also unusual given the fast-track trajectory of Groupon, which is currently considering an IPO at gigantic badillion-dollar valuations.

Nonetheless, CEO Andrew Mason just sent out a short email to staff about the move. BoomTown had sent him a query earlier today inquiring about the possibility of Solomon’s leaving.

In the email, sources said, Mason said Solomon was moving back to “‘God’s Country’ in Woodside, CA” from Chicago, where Groupon is headquartered.

Mason praised Solomon for his work in the lightning growth of the start-up and noted “he will remain a friend and advisor to the company into perpetuity.”

Apparently, though, from a faraway seat in God’s Country in Silicon Valley.

More to come, obvi…

Nestled within that amount was $350 million to draw a map showing a detailed, block-by-block inventory of the existing broadband infrastructure in the U.S. It took two years, but the results were unveiled by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration today on the Web site Broadbandmap.gov.

This is far from the first time someone has tried to tackle the problem of mapping existing broadband pipes in order to show where service is lacking. But prior attempts have generally been haphazard because service providers tend to carefully guard the precise maps of their physical plant as competitively sensitive. And prior federal efforts fell short because the maps were based on ZIP codes. If one person in some geographically large but sparsely populated rural ZIP code had access to service, prior federal maps showed that area as “served,” even if the majority of the population didn’t have access. The new map uses the far more granular census tracts.

The map shows some new data that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the saga of broadband in America: Anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of Americans lack access to broadband at acceptable speeds. Recall that the Federal Communications Commission last July set a benchmark of 4 megabits per second downstream and 1 MBPS upstream as what it considers acceptable.

Another key finding is that so-called “community anchor institutions” are going without adequate access to broadband. These are schools, libraries and hospitals, where different kinds of services are needed. As a rule of thumb, a school needs about 50 to 100 MBPS for every 1,000 students, and most of the schools surveyed had speeds of 25 MBPS or less, and precious few libraries reported speeds approaching that.

When residential service isn’t available, these are the institutions that people turn to when they need to use the Internet. A few years ago I visited a rural county in Tennessee where the local library had broadband and provided free wireless. If you watched the parking lot after the library was closed you’d often see people pull their cars up with laptops and use the Wi-Fi to work on homework assignments with the kids. Even the local sheriff’s deputies would pull up and use it to check their email.

There was some good news. Alongside the map, the NTIA released a separate report on broadband adoption. It found that 68 percent of households have access to a cable modem, a DSL line or a home fiber connection, up from less than 64 percent a year ago. The usual demographic disparities remain: People living on low incomes or with disabilities, along with seniors, minorities and those with low educational attainment, tend to lag behind other groups in home access. The city-country divide remains as well: 70 percent of city dwellers, versus 60 percent of rural residents, access broadband at home.

But here’s a stat that should surprise you: 28.3 percent of all the people in the nation do not use the Internet, period. That’s down about two percentage points from a year ago, but still means that out of every 25 Americans, seven don’t use the Internet at all. I don’t know about you, but that surprises me.

A 16-year Microsoft veteran, Weber held a variety of senior executive positions in sales, marketing and professional services before leaving to start his own consulting business.

His new gig as Nokia president and head of Markets, North America begins today as does Louison’s pursuit of “new career opportunities.”

COMPLETE COVERAGE:

• Nokia’s Stephen Elop Talks to Mobilized About the Big Microsoft Deal (Video)
• Massive Layoffs Expected at Nokia
• Nokia’s Microsoft Partnership: Does the New Strategy Add Up?
• Live From the Nokia-Microsoft Press Conference: It’s a Windows Phone World After All
• More From Nokia: Forecast Gets Cloudy, Plus Expected Executive Changes
• Nokia-Microsoft: What Steve Ballmer and Stephen Elop Have to Say in Their Joint Letter
• Nokia Confirms Microsoft Partnership With YouTube Video
• R&D Spending: Nokia Vs. Apple Shows Size Doesn’t Matter
• Not Seeing Much Return on That Massive R&D Spend, Are You, Nokia?
• Nokia: Big and Slow

Goolsbee makes a compelling case at first. The top five Internet companies are all American companies. The internet sector employs a million people. Go America!

He then talks about the problem at hand: The number of Americans using 3G wireless connections doesn’t even place the country in the top five? What?

The solution? Spectrum auctions, for one thing. Goolsbee makes it sound as if getting to that point will be easy, when in fact it won’t. Most of the 500 MHz spectrum he’s talking about is in the hands of TV broadcasters who don’t really want to let it go without being compensated, and some don’t want to let it go at all, and so there are numerous questions about that.

He also skips over the questions around the FCC’s legal authority to reform the Universal Service Fund in such a way that it can be used to help pay for this. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has argued that the commission already has the legal authority to act on this without the need for Congress to pass a law granting it, though he’s been burned on similar questions before.

Goolsbee makes it all seem so simple, but you just know that this initiative, even if it ultimately becomes a reality, is in for a serious dose of political reality.

After reminding the nation that “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” he went on to call for a national wireless broadband network.

Within the next five years, we’ll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn’t just about–(applause)–this isn’t about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

It’s the latest attempt by Obama to try to solve the difficult problem of broadband penetration in America. In many places, most of them rural areas with low population density, cable and telco companies can’t make back the investments required to build out network infrastructure, and so they don’t build at all. As I’ve said here before, for Americans in those places, the options for participating in the digital culture the rest of us take for granted are few, and it often means the difference between participating and not in so much of the daily discourse that occurs online.

Part of the answer lies in taking back some radio spectrum that’s used for other things. In June, Obama signed a memorandum calling for the freeing up of certain radio frequency spectrum in the 500 MHz range. This is a block of spectrum largely owned by TV broadcasters for free over-the-air TV transmission. Broadcasters have been under pressure–and so far they are resisting–to voluntarily give those licenses up so that the spectrum can be re-auctioned off.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, essentially telegraphed that this is going to be the commission’s major policy priority in comments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. He has said he’d like to offer broadcasters incentives to give up their spectrum, but this would require a new law passed by Congress, and those in Congress have their own ideas about how this should be done. You can expect a lot of debate about this in Washington this year, but probably not a lot of progress.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking records related to Hurd’s departure from HP in August, including a letter that accused him of sexually harassing Jodie Fisher, a sometimes-actress who worked as a contractor for HP. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is also looking into the possibility that Hurd told Fisher about HP’s then-confidential plans to acquire IT services firm EDS.

Hurd has been trying to keep the letter from being made public, and argued to the judge that since it is his personal property, he should be allowed to join the lawsuit as a party to that end. In the motion, Hurd’s lawyers argue that the letter was sent to “achieve private resolution of a potential dispute” between Hurd and Fisher.

In the video, Obama and Biden bemoan, “We arrived in ’09 on a rainbow of hope, but 2010 blew it all up in smoke” and “Oh 2010, we can’t wait for you to jet like that guy from JetBlue.”

The video is also a departure from JibJab’s trademark dancing cut-out faces style, dating back to its first hit, “This Land.”

After BoomTown broke the news earlier today that CBS Interactive President Neil Ashe was stepping down from his job, we had a little chitchat as to why and what’s next.

“We were at the end of a successful transition and integration with CBS,” said Ashe about the media giant’s $1.8 billion purchase of CNET Networks in mid-2008, in a phone interview with me. “And so it was time for a breath of fresh air for me.”

What that breath will be, Ashe would not specify yet, because he said he had not actually looked around for a new gig as his contract with CBS was nearing its end.

“I wanted to finish this first,” he said about his job at CBS Interactive.

And what this is, said 42-year-old Ashe, is a “unique combination of Internet native and the power of broadcast media.”

He noted that the “Internet is now electricity–always on and everywhere–which means it is not such a unique thing, and so you can do almost anything.”

When Ashe came to CNET in 2002, he said the company was losing tens of millions of dollars and had to prove to marketers that online ads worked.

“It has definitely not been a straight path from there to here, and we have seen as much confusion as you can throw at us,” he said. “And, if anything now, the pace of change is accelerating.”

Even without that freakish Thanksgiving treat, the Web is full of fun diversions on every topic, including the thankful, enhanced-patted-down long weekend of consumption Americans have ahead of us.

Read on for some of my Thanksgiving ephemeralia picks for this year:

Here’s a historical tidbit I became aware of after reading the National Archives online today: Did you know that in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday to be held on the fourth Thursday in November, but in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed it to the third Thursday to “to lengthen the Christmas shopping season and boost the economy which was still recovering from the Depression”?

The National Archives Web site also provides some documents from Thanksgiving throughout the years, including this one of President Richard Nixon and a turkey.

On to the food. Want to impress your guests with something less passé than, but still thematically consistent with, Turducken? You are in luck. Here are two fantastic alternatives, via YouTube:

The Cherpumple consists of three full pies encased in three full cakes (via @hunterwalk):

Or, there’s the TurBaconEpic (a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig):

“Good Morning America” tries, and fails, to demonstrate how to put out a grease fire (via Gawker.tv):

As for the other topic at hand on this holiday–the new widely derided U.S. airport security procedures–everybody’s favorite Taiwanese animators at Next Media Animation have prepared their usual insightful commentary (from last week, but still good):

For further reading:

• Engadget’s frequently updated list of Black Friday gadget deals.
• Boing Boing’s roundup of Thanksgiving science.
• The Wall Street Journal’s report on using your phone to find shopping deals. Google says there are 30 times more mobile shopping searches than three years ago (though that’s smaller than I would think given the growth of the mobile Internet in that time).

Here is a funny video sent to us of President Barack Obama, while at the Lisbon summit this past week, signing an Apple iPad using a touchscreen software program.

“I’ve done this once before,” he said, as he signed the tablet like a pro. And, indeed, Obama had put his John Hancock on one in Seattle just a month ago.

Despite all the unrealized hope for some more progress in the digital arena by his administration, I guess he is the Internet President.

Here are the two videos:

So why is Garriques, whom Dell recruited from Motorola in 2007 and subsequently tapped to run the company’s communications products division, leaving? Evidently that division’s being shuttered and rolled into other units. Seems new devices like the Streak–Dell’s Android tablet–and smartphones like the Aero and Venue Pro aren’t quite performing the way Dell had hoped. Said Dell spokesman David Frink, “He made a decision to look at other opportunities as we integrate the former communications solutions group into our core operating structure.”

Garriques leaves Dell with a $1.44 million severance payment and a promise of $6.3 million for future consulting services.

It’s worth checking out an article in the New York Times today that points to a very questionable, but–as it turned out–politically savvy angel investment made by former eBay CEO and now Republican candidate for California governor Meg Whitman.

The piece, by Michael Luo, alleges that Whitman’s $1 million investment in late 2008 in a Hollywood entertainment company called Tools Down! Productions was made to ease a prominent Republican strategist away from working for her rival for the GOP nod.

That would be Steve Poizner, who lost to Whitman in the recent primary and who was close to working with Mike Murphy. Instead, with a little help from the piles of cash Whitman made from eBay (EBAY) stock, Murphy never took the job.

Well, not the Poizner job, at least. After telling people he was sick of politics and then getting the Whitman money days later for his still credit-free movie production company, Murphy became an adviser to Whitman a year later.

The bigger story the Times is touting, but does not quite deliver, is the advent of super-rich candidates in races this round, including another tech exec, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. She won the California GOP Senate primary.

This kind of thing has happened before, of course.

But what’s interesting is to see Silicon Valley’s digitally enabled moneybags step up to the very stained political table and jump right into the game.

What’s next? Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin buying everyone in San Francisco lattes for life to become mayor? Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bid for president of the United States, via the leveraging of embarrassing photos from the social networking site?

And thank goodness Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) never wanted to run for office.

The Whitman campaign told the Times that the investment was disclosed and justified in that she had ample entertainment interest from her days as a strategic planning exec at Disney (DIS) and also as a board member of DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA).

Which is exactly what they would say, of course.

Thus, perhaps it is time to take a moment with Jimmy Stewart in a video clip from the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” of his most potent “Lost Causes” scene:

More interesting: Wouldn’t it be weird if the President of the United States gave a speech about the education gap, made a passing reference to technology’s ability to distract us, and then the short-attention-span media made it look like he was coming for your Twitter account?

Not weird, you say? Just kind of predictable?

Okay. So here, for the record, are Obama’s prepared remarks for his commencement address at Hampton University yesterday (below). They clock in at more than 2,000 words (the speech he actually delivered was a tiny bit longer), but if you slug your way through it, you’ll find that your iPad is probably safe.

Don’t like to read? No problem–you can also watch the 22-minute speech. The White House posted it on its Web site last night.

Good morning, Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms here today, and thank you for inviting me to share this special occasion with the Hampton community. Before we get started, I just want to say, I’m excited the Battle of the Real H.U. will be taking place in Washington this year. You all know I’m not going to pick sides. But it’s been, what, 13 years since the Pirates lost. As one Hampton alum on my staff put it, the last time Howard beat Hampton, The Fugees were still together.

Let me also say a word to President Harvey, a president who bleeds Hampton blue. In a single generation, Hampton has transformed from a small black college into a world-class research institution. That transformation has come through the efforts of many people, but it has come through President Harvey’s efforts, in particular, and I want to commend him for his leadership.

I also want to recognize the Board of Trustees, faculty, alums, family, and friends with us today. And most importantly, I want to congratulate all of you, the Class of 2010–I take it none of you walked across Ogden Circle.

We meet here today, as graduating classes have met for generations, not far from where it all began, near that old oak tree off Emancipation Drive. I know my University 101. There, beneath its branches, by what was then a Union garrison, about twenty students gathered on September 17, 1861. Taught by a free citizen, in defiance of Virginia law, the students were escaped slaves from nearby plantations, who had fled to the fort seeking asylum.

After the war’s end, a retired Union general sought to enshrine that legacy of learning. With collections from church groups, Civil War veterans, and a choir that toured Europe, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was founded here, by the Chesapeake–a home by the sea.

That story is no doubt familiar to many of you. But it is worth reflecting on why it happened; why so many people went to such trouble to found Hampton and all our Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The founders of these institutions knew, of course, that inequality would persist long into the future. They recognized that barriers in our laws, and in our hearts, wouldn’t vanish overnight.

But they also recognized a larger truth; a distinctly American truth. They recognized that with the right education, those barriers might be overcome and our God-given potential might be fulfilled. They recognized, as Frederick Douglass once put it, that “education…means emancipation.” They recognized that education is how America and its people might fulfill our promise. That recognition, that truth–that an education can fortify us to rise above any barriers, to meet any tests–is reflected, again and again, throughout our history.

In the midst of civil war, we set aside land grants for schools like Hampton to teach farmers and factory-workers the skills of an industrializing nation. At the close of World War II, we made it possible for returning GIs to attend college, building and broadening our great middle class. At the Cold War’s dawn, we set up Area Studies Centers on our campuses to prepare graduates to understand and address the global threats of a nuclear age.

Education, then, is what has always allowed us to meet the challenges of a changing world. And that has never been more true than it is today. You’re graduating in a time of great difficulty for America and the world. You’re entering the job market, in an era of heightened international competition, with an economy that’s still rebounding from the worst crisis since the Great Depression. You’re accepting your degrees as America wages two wars–wars that many in your generation have been fighting.

Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.

It’s a period of breathtaking change, like few others in our history. We can’t stop these changes, but we can adapt to them. And education is what can allow us to do so. It can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time.

First and foremost, your education can fortify you against the uncertainties of a 21st century economy. In the 19th century, folks could get by with a few basic skills, whether they learned them in a school like Hampton, or picked them up along the way. For much of the 20th century, a high school diploma was a ticket to a solid middle class life. That is no longer the case.

Jobs today often require at least a bachelor’s degree, and that degree is even more important in tough times like these. In fact, the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is over twice as high as it is for folks with a college degree or more

The good news is, all of you are ahead of the curve. All those checks you wrote to Hampton will pay off. You are in a strong position to outcompete workers around the world. But I don’t have to tell you that too many folks back home aren’t as well prepared. By any number of different yardsticks, African Americans are being outperformed by their white classmates, and so are Hispanic Americans. And students in well-off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban communities, no matter what color their skin.

Globally, it’s not even close. In 8th grade science and math, for example, American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country.

All of us have a responsibility, as Americans, to change this; to offer every child in this country an education that will make them competitive in our knowledge economy. But all of you have a separate responsibility, as well. To be role models for your brothers and sisters. To be mentors in your communities. And, when the time comes, to pass that sense of an education’s value down to your children. To pass down that sense of personal responsibility and self-respect. To pass down the work ethic that made it possible for you to be here today.

So, allowing you to compete in the global economy is the first way your education can prepare you. But it can also prepare you as citizens. With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe; to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. Let’s face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience with that myself.

Fortunately, you’ll be well positioned to navigate this terrain. Your education has honed your research abilities, sharpened your analytical powers, and given you a context for understanding the world. Those skills will come in handy.

But the goal was always to teach you something more. Over the past four years, you’ve argued both sides of a debate. You’ve read novels and histories that take different cuts at life. You’ve discovered interests you didn’t know you had, and made friends who didn’t grow up the same way you did. And you’ve tried things you’d never done before, including some things I’m sure you wish you hadn’t.

All of it, I hope, has had the effect of opening your minds; of helping you understand what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. But now that your minds have been opened, it’s up to you to keep them that way. And it will be up to you to open minds that remain closed. That, after all, is the elemental test of any democracy: whether people with differing points of view can learn from each other, work with each other, and find a way forward together.

I’d also add one further observation. Just as your education can fortify you, it can also fortify our nation, as a whole. More and more, America’s economic preeminence, our ability to outcompete other countries, will be shaped not just in our boardrooms and on our factory floors, but in our classrooms, our schools, and at universities like Hampton; by how well all of us, and especially us parents, educate our sons and daughters.

What’s at stake is more than our ability to outcompete other nations. It’s our ability to make democracy work in our own nation. Years after he left office, decades after he penned the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson sat down, a few hours’ drive from here, in Monticello, to write a letter to a longtime legislator, urging him to do more on education. Jefferson gave one principal reason–the one, perhaps, he found most compelling. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” he wrote, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

What Jefferson recognized, like the rest of that gifted generation, was that in the long run, their improbable experiment–America–wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn’t have their best interests at heart. It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged; if we held our government accountable; if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.

The success of their experiment, they understood, depended on the participation of its people–the participation of Americans like all of you. The participation of all those who’ve ever sought to perfect our union. Americans like Dorothy Height.

As you probably know, Dr. Height passed away the other week at the age of 98. Having been on the firing line for every fight from lynching to desegregation to the battle for health care reform, she lived a singular life. But she started out just like you, understanding that to make something of herself, she needed a college degree.

So, she applied to Barnard–and got in. Only, when she showed up, they discovered she wasn’t white like they’d thought. You see, their two slots for African Americans had already been filled. But Dr. Height was not discouraged. She was not deterred. She stood up, straight-backed, and with Barnard’s acceptance letter in hand, marched down to NYU, where she was admitted right away.

Think about that for a moment. A woman, a black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college degree. Refusing to be denied her rights. Her dignity. Her piece of America’s promise. Refusing to let any barriers of injustice or inequality stand in her way. That refusal to accept a lesser fate; that insistence on a better life is, ultimately, the secret of America’s success.

So, yes, an education can fortify us to meet the tests of our economy, the tests of citizenship, and the tests of our time. But what makes us American is something that can’t be taught–a stubborn insistence on pursuing a dream.

The same insistence that led a band of patriots to overthrow an empire. That fired the passions of union troops to free the slaves and union veterans to found schools like Hampton. That led foot-soldiers the same age as you to brave fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham and billy clubs on a bridge in Selma. That led generation after generation of Americans to toil away, quietly, without complaint, in the hopes of a better life for their children and grandchildren.

That is what has makes us who we are. A dream of brighter days ahead, a faith in things unseen, a belief that here, in this country, we’re the authors of our own destinies. And it now falls to you, the Class of 2010, to write the next great chapter in America’s story; to meet the tests of your own time; and to take up the ongoing work of fulfilling our founding promise. Thank you, God Bless You, and may God Bless the United States of America.

Google’s (GOOG) video site says it has collected 11,000 questions from its viewers and will ask a small fraction of them during a live sit-down with the president at 1:45 Eastern. No word on who’s actually going to deliver the queries to POTUS, but YouTube insists that “neither the President nor his staff will know which questions will be asked ahead of time.”

The YouTube part aside, there’s not a ton of novelty here: Asking citizens to send in questions for a political Q&A isn’t a new idea. The fact that the Q&A will be streamed live is more interesting to me, since it signals the site’s increasing interest in real-time events (see, for instance, U2).

Today’s Q&A did prompt me to scan YouTube for something apposite, but disappointingly, clips from Bill Clinton’s MTV “choose or lose” appearance are hard to find. And I can’t find any version of Tabitha Soren’s famous “boxers or briefs” query. Did turn this one up, though:

“I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don’t think Joe Biden could, either. But it is not the same as being the president or vice president of the United States. It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. To run a business, you have to have a lifetime of experience in business, but that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Barack Obama or Joe Biden are doing.”

– Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina

Her dreams of heading up the World Bank dashed, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina, the architect of one of the worst tech mergers in history, has turned her attention to the U.S. Senate.

After months of speculation, Fiorina officially announced her candidacy today. She’ll run as a Republican against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.). Of course, to do that, she must first win the Republican primary. Fiorina broke the news in an op-ed in the Orange County Register.

“Admittedly, I have not always been engaged in the electoral process, and I should have been,” she wrote. “For many years I felt disconnected from the decisions made in Washington and, to be honest, really didn’t think my vote mattered because I didn’t have a direct line of sight from my vote to a result. I realize that thinking was wrong.”

Reflecting on her personal history, Fiorina continues: “As I grew throughout my career, beginning as a secretary and eventually becoming a CEO, I saw how government impacted business. I learned more as a member of advisory boards at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. I now understand, in a very real way, that the decisions made by the Senate impact every family and every business, of any size, in America. This is what motivates me to run for the U.S. Senate. And so today I am announcing my candidacy to serve the people of California as your next U.S. senator….Together we can turn things around.”

Together we can turn things around? Not if Fiorina’s performance at HP is any indication. Before she was forced out of the company by its board of directors, she was so at odds with the uniquely Californian “HP Way” that her corner office could have been powered solely by Bill Hewlett spinning in his grave.

UPDATE: Here’s another Fiorina op-ed from earlier this year in which she discusses executive pay. Unsurprisingly, she is against President Obama’s efforts to restore “common sense” to CEO compensation. And why wouldn’t she be? After all, she walked away from HP with a $21 million severance package.

UPDATE: For those of you just joining us over at CNet, the headline is a joke referring to HP’s ill-starred merger with Compaq.

“On my birth certificate, under my father’s occupation, it says cowboy. So I will admit to being a cowboy, but not sue-happy.”

– Former SCO CEO Darl McBride, November 2003

Looks like Darl McBride, SCO’s “sue-happy cowboy” CEO, has seen his last roundup. In a new 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, the company reveals that under the order of a bankruptcy court, it has eliminated the chief executive officer and president positions and consequently sacked McBride.

Which means SCO’s seemingly endless legal campaign may have finally found its end. For though the company says it plans to pursue litigation against IBM (IBM) and Novell (NOVL), there seems little promise in it now. SCO is mired in bankruptcy. It’s evidently still unable to prove that Linux illegally contains its UNIX System V source code. And now it has fired the guy who devoted the past six years attempting to do just that.

And, frankly, SCO is better off for it. As Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eben Moglen once said, “As an amateur scholar of constitutional law, Mr. McBride is longer than he is deep.” And this does appear to be the case. Because despite vast swaths of evidence to the contrary, McBride always appeared certain that SCO had successfully defended its intellectual property in court.

“We’ve obviously overachieved on that objective,” McBride said of SCO’s efforts to defend against IBM’s alleged intellectual property infringements in 2004. “If I had to make this decision [to sue IBM] ten times over, the decision would be the same one ten times. Big Blue is no doubt a formidable opponent and we still expect to win. Keep your eye on the [court] filings. Over the coming year, one of the things that you’re going to see is that Big Blue has got big problems.”

Obviously, Big Blue wasn’t the one with the big problems.

In the ongoing game of Internet exec musical chairs, Greg Coleman (pictured here), who has been a top exec at both Yahoo and AOL, is poised to become president of the Huffington Post, as well as chief revenue officer, several sources said.

The deal for Coleman to come on board at the privately held online news site–which has grown significantly over the last year and just added well-known online media exec Eric Hippeau as CEO–came together only recently.

And it is not clear what the role of current Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith will be going forward.

The Coleman hiring is most likely the work of Hippeau, who has known him from Coleman’s days as head of ad sales at Yahoo (YHOO). Hippeau has been on the board of the Internet giant for many years.

Hippeau was also a key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

He has also been a director on its small board, which also includes co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer, as well as Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, which is headquartered in New York.

The money will be used to expand the site into the local arena, investigative news, and verticals such as tech, a section set to debut Sept. 21.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Presumably, goosing that revenue is what Coleman is being pegged to help do–and he certainly has a lot of online advertising experience, having made stops at a lot of Internet companies in the past few years.

He was head of advertising sales at Yahoo for seven years, after another long stint at Reader’s Digest. Yahoo’s ad business grew strongly under him.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzzsaw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

He was soon running a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focuses on ad targeting.

He then headed to AOL in February to run its Platform-A division.

But when new management was suddenly put in place by Time Warner (TWX) in the spring, Coleman left after only a few months on the job.

After taking the summer off, several sources said, he has recently been looking at a variety of jobs.

That included MySpace, where former Yahoo colleague Wenda Harris Millard–now with Media Link–was hired recently as an outside consultant to help the News Corp. (NWS) social networking site rejigger its ad business.

The Huffington Post spokesman declined to comment when BoomTown inquired about Coleman’s hiring.