The Beautiful Life will air five episodes on YouTube – and if it's popular enough, it could live on. Photo: Jan Thijs / The CW.

We know that the Internet can build a TV show’s buzz, and sometimes even keep it from getting canceled. But can it bring one back from the dead?

We’ll soon find out: A recently canceled show has come to YouTube.

The Beautiful Life, a drama about the New York modeling scene, met a swift end on the CW early this season. The show had the misfortune of going head-to-head with Glee, the Golden Globe-nominated breakout hit on Fox, which competes for the same young demographic. After managing just 1.4 million viewers for its first episode and 1.1 million for its second, the CW gave The Beautiful Life the ax.

But here’s the twist: One of the show’s producers is Ashton Kutcher, a.k.a. the most popular guy on Twitter. (He has 4.1 million followers.)

Kutcher is determined to bring the show back. It helps that he’s more connected than the average producer, and those connections have given The Beautiful Life another shot at, well, life. With some funding from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and distribution help from YouTube (GOOG), Kutcher’s Katalyst Media plans to post a total of five episodes of The Beautiful Life online and keep them there for six months. (Three episodes are up already, with two more coming next week.) If the show draws enough engaged viewers, it could live on – either as an online-only show or back on TV.

“We spend months if not years on a product. We put it out on the television, we let the viewers vote, we get our ratings. If it doesn’t work, we throw it away and start over with something completely different as opposed to tinkering and tweaking and changing the program,” Karey Burke, head of television for Katalyst, told FORTUNE. “What’s exciting is to think about taking a program like this that has a very short shelf life and giving a chance for the brand to live.”

Why did HP underwrite the project? Larry Nelson, HP’s director of digital strategy, said the non-traditional approach is a good fit with HP’s technology brand – and HP is already spending half of its marketing budget on digital. It helped that HP was launching its “Create Change” program that allows shoppers to donate 4% of the purchase price to a charity when they buy directly from HP.com – The Beautiful Life offers HP a chance to see whether it can get fans of a broadcast-quality online show to buy HP products, visit HP websites and generally engage with the HP brand.

If HP can figure out how to make all that happen, it’ll be a beautiful thing.

With its “Give It A Ponder” campaign, the handset maker walks the line between lecture and laughs

LG's viral marketing campaign is using humor to get teens to think before they text. Image: Facebook.

One in five teenagers have received a naked picture in a cell phone message. That's one scary stat that LG marketing executive Ehtisham Rabbani uncovered while researching how teens use mobile technology.

Most interesting, though, is what Rabbani did with the information. Rather than ignore the trend – or engage in a lot of hand wringing about the problems with kids today – he set out to change it. To that end, he and his team built a unique yet risky marketing campaign about bad mobile manners like sending racy pics, bullying and spreading rumors. Called "Give It A Ponder," it embraces YouTube (GOOG) videos and Facebook networks to spread its message virally online, and tries to convince teens to think before they text.

The risk? Well, as any parent will tell you, teens don’t like being told what to do – so Rabbani and his team had to be sure and get the tone just right, or they’d end up alienating the very audience they are trying to influence.

“There was a certain amount of nervousness about having this conversation with teens and how well it would be received,” Rabbani says. “So we did a bunch of research.”

To figure out the right approach, LG set up a series of mini focus groups, interviewing young people in groups of three so they’d be more comfortable saying what they really thought. Fortunately, the teens really opened up.

Ehtisham Rabbani, vice president of marketing for LG Mobile Phones, set out to talk to teens about their behavior without sounding preachy. Photo: LG.

“What we heard over and over again was, this is a message that teens are ready to talk about,” Rabbani says. “But it was important that whoever led that discussion didn’t talk down to them. And it had to be somewhat humorous, entertaining, and at the same time provide kids with a guiding principle.”

What they ended up with was an edgy video series starring James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio. Though Lipton isn’t the obvious choice to reach a teen audience – he’s 83 – he has established his comedy chops in stints on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. In LG’s “Give It A Ponder” videos, Lipton removes his beard and lends it to teens so they can stroke it as they think twice about sending risqué messages. There's nary a BlackBerry (RIMM) or an iPhone (AAPL) in sight – all of the teens in the commercials, of course, use LG phones.

The videos seem to be a hit so far. Since the campaign launched late last month, the Ponder Beard Facebook page has snagged more than 1,000 fans, and the YouTube videos have pulled in nearly half a million views. And that’s just the online audience – LG is also showing the ads on the Channel One network in high schools and in movie theaters before teen-centric movies like The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

The early success is a source of satisfaction for Rabbani, who has a personal connection to the campaign. At a recent family gathering, one of his teenage nephews left the room upset after receiving an intimidating message from an acquaintance – an example of mobile bullying, which LG’s survey found is even more common among teens than sending naked pics.

So Rabbani hopes LG’s message about mobile manners continues to catch on – and, he insists, not just because it’s good brand exposure for LG. “We have literally seen the traffic since the day we launched it go up 10x every single day,” he said earlier this month. “I’m hopeful that as the word gets out it will become a destination for kids to have a conversation.” It’s too soon to say whether LG can convince teens to change their mobile manners. But it's certainly built some nice buzz.

Cisco CEO John Chambers and strategy chief Ned Hooper address analysts. Photo: Jon Fortt.

Cisco has its swagger back.

When the networking provider hosted Wall Street analysts at its San Jose headquarters Tuesday for its annual update on the state of the business, the most striking thing was the full-scale return of confidence. After a year in which most of tech has struggled to regain its footing in a global financial crisis, CEO John Chambers and his lieutenants told the financial community that they’re poised to grow sales faster than big companies typically can.

To be specific, Chambers says that in normal economic times Cisco (CSCO) can deliver annual sales growth of 12-17%. Off of his current revenue base of $36 billion, that translates into a promise to find more than $4.3 billion in new revenue this year alone.

Chambers believes he can do it because a fresh set of Internet technologies is changing the way we communicate – and giving Cisco a chance to grab a greater share of the spoils. Chambers has outlined three opportunities he believes will reap big rewards: video, collaboration and virtualization.

In the simplest terms, Cisco is betting that video will continue to grow its share of overall Internet traffic as carriers use the Internet video to deliver movies and TV, businesses use it to help employees share ideas and close sales more quickly, and consumers use it to express themselves on the go.

All of that new video traffic should create demand for Cisco’s highly profitable networking gear. It should also create new openings for someone to sell communication systems, back-end servers and management software to run it – and Chambers is positioning Cisco to make that sale.

Skeptics point out that Cisco has stronger competition than ever. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) sell their own packages of virtualization technology. Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM have their own collaboration suites. Each has resources to rival Cisco’s – and it would be foolish to count any of them out.

So can Chambers deliver? More than a few analysts think he can. They point to Cisco’s cash hoard that’s approaching $40 billion, its track record for successful acquisitions, and its knack for spotting trends early enough to get a jump on rivals. He’ll probably need to use all those tools – and some new ones – to meet his own lofty growth targets.

Seagate's Pulsar drive uses single-level cell NAND flash, and is the first of what analysts expect will be many solid-state products from the storage giant. Image: Seagate.

Flash memory – the stuff that stores data in consumer gadgets like phones and digital cameras – is also finding its way into more corporate data centers. It turns out that while flash is still far more expensive than trusty old hard drives, it uses less power and serves up information quickly. That makes it well suited for tasks like data mining, business information and any other situation where time is money.

That’s why Seagate (STX), the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives, is getting into the flash game. Seagate today is expected to unveil Pulsar, a new flash-based storage product that looks like a hard drive and holds up to 200 gigabytes of data. The drive is designed for a mainstream server – the kind that handles e-mail and basic databases – and is the first of many flash-based products Seagate hopes to release soon.

Seagate has one big advantage as it breaks into the enterprise flash market: it’s already the big dog in data center hard drives, selling to the likes of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and EMC (EMC). Because Seagate’s sales folks know how businesses buy storage, they’ll be able to quickly muscle their way to the front of the flash supplier line.

But there are also challenges. For one, smaller companies like Fusion-io have been selling enterprise flash drives for quite a while – and from what I’ve heard, some of them arguably have edgier technology based on the SAS and PCI interfaces. After my chat with Seagate sales exec Dave Mosely, I asked Gartner storage analyst Joe Unsworth for his take on Pulsar.

“The Seagate drive is a decent start considering that they are indeed late to the game,” Unsworth wrote in an email. “However, the product itself does not differentiate itself compared to what is out there – after all, it is really only targeted at the server market and is based on the SATA interface.”

There’s also the question of where Seagate’s going to get the flash for its drives, and for how much. In its hard drive business, Seagate rules the supply chain. In flash, not so much. Top flash manufacturers Samsung and Toshiba sell most of their stash to companies like Apple (AAPL), which gobble it up for gadgets like iPods and iPhones.

Seagate at least won’t be buying the same kind of multi-level cell flash that’s in most consumer devices; instead it will use the lower capacity but higher-endurance single-level cell variety. Still, though, flash prices can swing wildly, and by getting into this market Seagate will be increasing its exposure to that volatility. That’s not much of a concern for now, but over time the company will have to ink deals that guarantee its flash supply at manageable prices.

So bottom line: It’s good to see Seagate out there with its own enterprise flash storage, and it’s sure to do fine out of the gate. But to have the kind of success here that it’s had with hard drives, Seagate will have to get busy innovating – and maybe also acquiring smaller outfits that specialize in flash.

(MSFT) (AAPL) (GOOG)

The chip giant settled with AMD. But another rival is making noise about anticompetitive behavior.

Nvidia's Huang is gunning for Intel. Photo: Nvidia

You’d think Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang would be happy.

After bumping along as low as $7 a share at the beginning of the year his stock is up near $14. Several months ago Apple (AAPL) began using his graphics chipset – a group of circuits designed to work together – across nearly its entire line of Macs, giving him a very high-profile endorsement. And in the white-hot netbook segment, his Ion processors have won raves for turning underpowered laptops into HD video machines.

Problem is, both of these acclaimed Nvidia (NVDA) products might be dead in the water.

Why? Huang blames chip giant Intel (INTC). Nvidia’s graphics chipsets, which Steve Jobs liked enough to buy by the boatload, aren’t allowed to work with Intel’s latest offering, code-named “Nehalem” – and in the computer world no Intel compatibility means no mainstream future. Nvidia’s Ion chip is designed to work alongside the chip giant’s Atom processor, but lately it’s been priced out of the market by – you guessed it – Intel.

Feeling AMD's pain

All of this has piqued the interest of the Federal Trade Commission, which is looking into whether Intel has improperly used its power in the computer chip market to choke rivals. For those who are handicapping the chances that the FTC will bring charges, Nvidia’s gripes have recently taken on new importance: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which had been Intel’s main critic, recently settled its antitrust complaints with Intel for a tidy sum of $1.25 billion. That leaves Nvidia to bang the anti-Intel drum.

“I’m sympathetic to what AMD had to go through over the years,” Huang says.

Intel says it’s a tough but fair competitor, and that Nvidia has caused its own problems. To wit: The two companies signed a limited patent-sharing deal five years ago, and Intel says that if Nvidia had read the fine print, it would have noticed that designs like the current Nehalem chips weren’t covered in the agreement. And the Ion dispute? Well, Intel says it just lowered prices on its Atom chipsets to stay competitive. What’s wrong with that?

Nvidia tells a different story. Executives there say they’re a victim of the same kinds of tactics that got Intel into antitrust trouble in Europe and Asia. Nvidia believes it should be authorized to make Nehalem-compatible chipsets under the 2004 agreement; it claims Intel is just getting litigious to stop a competitive threat. And with Ion, Nvidia accuses Intel of unfair pricing that locks it out of the market. Intel says Nvidia just doesn’t understand the incentives it offers customers.

(The two companies are battling in court over the chipset agreement. Intel has asked a Delaware court to clarify whether Nvidia has the right to build Nehalem chipsets, and Nvidia has countersued for breach of contract.)

The courts will ultimately decide who’s right – that is, unless Intel decides to ink a settlement with Nvidia, too. Even then, that probably won’t be the end of Intel’s legal headaches. Maybe that’s the trouble with being a giant. There’s always some kid with a slingshot gunning for you.

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Will tomorrow’s PC be a nimble netbook or a high-def laptop? Google and AMD recently offered opposing views.

If Google has its way, the mainstream PC of the future will be a lot simpler than the one you’re using right now.

Like a TV, it will turn on almost instantly instead of taking nearly a minute to boot up. It will do everything through a web browser, pulling down most programs and data from the Internet. It’ll make do with a low-cost processor and will carry a cheap price tag – kind of like today’s stripped down netbooks, only with even fewer frills.

That’s just Google’s (GOOG) vision. A few miles down the road from the search giant’s Silicon Valley headquarters, the folks at chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices have a very different idea.

AMD is wagering that the majority of tomorrow’s shoppers will want more performance from their PCs. It is putting the finishing touches on a new chip that combines a microprocessor and a graphics core in one – a trick it hopes will attract consumers who want smooth high-def video and rich 3D gaming in a slim, low-cost package.

Who’s closer to the mark?

Of course, it’s too soon to tell. But before long shoppers will get to vote with their wallets.

Last week Google engineers showed off an early version of their browser-based Chrome operating system, what they call “a better model for personal computing.” (When it’s broadly available, Chrome will come pre-installed on netbooks that are specifically designed to run it.) A few days earlier, AMD announced that its Fusion processors would arrive in 2011. If all goes as planned, the two technologies will be duking it out on retail shelves in a little more than a year.

The contrasting ideas from Google and AMD come at a turbulent time for the computer industry.

Sales have slowed in the global recession, pressuring the PC revenues of stalwarts like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL). Hardware profit margins have also suffered as bargain shoppers shun higher-priced machines in favor of netbooks with small screens, modest horsepower and low price tags. (The exception is Apple, which has somehow managed to keep selling premium PCs in a historic recession. Go figure.)

The big question is where the industry’s next stage of growth will come from. Will consumers shift their dollars toward wireless computing devices that resemble Amazon (AMZN) Kindles, Apple (AAPL) iPhones and Google Chrome-powered netbooks? Or will they find reasons to keep buying full-blown computers?

Google argues the former. While Windows PCs won’t go away, Google’s thinkers believe a lot of folks would be happy with a simpler, more affordable computer that just gets them online. Considering how netbooks have become the hot ticket in the PC business lately, Google may have a point.

But there’s also evidence that consumers aren’t ready to give up our software-packed PCs anytime soon. As we continue to accumulate gadgets like Flip video cameras and iPhones, we’ll need more powerful computers to manage the digital content – something a basic Chrome OS device won’t be able to do.

Brisk sales of Windows 7 and Apple’s (AAPL) Snow Leopard operating system also prove that the PC-buying public can still get excited about slick-looking operating systems that use 3D effects and animation to help users get things done. That’s a welcome sign for a company like AMD, which has bet its future on the notion that the world will keep its healthy appetite for computers with some horsepower.

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The crowd gets ready for the Chrome OS announcement. Photo: Jon Fortt.

I'm at Google (GOOG), ready for the Chrome OS press event to begin. Refresh this page for updates.

They're telling us they're getting started a little late because attendees got caught in traffic. That's nice of them, I guess.

Sundar Pichai is at the lectern. He says Google is a year away from launching Chrome OS, but they want to show off what they've done so far. (Big disappointment here; blogs had spread rumors that this was a launch.) They're open sourcing the project, and the code will be totally open.

He starts off talking about Chrome, the browser. He calls it the foundation of everything Google is doing with Chrome OS. One year after launch they have 40 million users. Google claims its Javascript performance is 39 times faster than Internet Explorer 8. It has had 19 stable releases or updates, and HTML5 is making the web more powerful.

Chrome for Mac will be ready before the end of the year, he says, plus Chrome for Linux. There are also Chrome extensions coming. He claims the extensions won't slow down the browser and that Google will automatically update them.

Google is trying to figure out a way that web applications can take advantage of the same computing resources that mainstream client apps have. He says Google is trying to make sure web apps have access to graphics processors so 3D games can run in the browser. Google is also working on multithreading, real-time communication and a database API for local storage.

Now he's talking about a "perfect storm" of converging trends that he argues are creating demand for something like Chrome OS. Consumers are flocking to netbooks because they're a cheap way to get online. More people are "living on the cloud," or running most of their programs through the Internet, not their local machines. Phones are getting smarter, laptops are becoming more like phones with all-day battery life and thin, lightweight designs.

Google is asking whether there's a better model of personal computing. Google is focused on three things:

Speed, simplicity and security.

Google wants Chrome OS-based machines to be instant-on, like a TV. Google's Chrome browser will be especially fast. "Chrome on Chrome OS is blazing fast," he says, immediately raising questions about whether they need to change the name of either the browser or the OS.

Every app in Chrome OS will be a web app, he says. The data will live in the cloud, so if you lose your machine you can get a new one and just pull down all of your data and preferences.

(A nit here: Google says every app will be a web app, but they also say they're working to make web apps act just like desktop apps – so it's a little unclear exactly what this means.)

Now he's showing it. The OS looks just like a browser. He says the final version won't look exactly like it does today, but some features will carry through:

APPLICATION TABS: Just like the Chrome browser, this OS has tabs for navigation. You can put favorites up there, and they always stay in place. (I hope there's a full-screen mode to make these go away, or games won't work well.) There's also a menu showing all of the apps.

PANELS: There are little windows that pop up, like Gmail chat or Facebook chat, that persist across applications. All data will live in the cloud, so everything you put on the screen will be instantly available anywhere.

Now he's pulling up a chess game that's written in Flash. Now he's pulling up a book, Alice in Wonderland. (There is a full-screen mode, which answers my question about those persistent tabs.)

He's pulling up a Youtube video to show that flash works, and he's showing how you can navigate between different windows. Looks pretty intuitive, but he's plowing through it so fast it's tough to tell.

Now he's showing that Chrome OS works on the web, and that if you have an Excel file but don't have Excel, it opens just fine with Microsoft's Live Office web-based software. "Microsoft just launched a killer app for Chrome OS," he jokes, and quickly clarifies that he's a Google Spreadsheets user.

He shows that PDFs open very quickly from the web, right there in the browser.

Now Matt Papakipos, who heads the Chrome OS engineering team, comes up. (The Google folks in the corner clap wildly, which is a little weird. All of the journalists are typing.)

Speed is a big focus, he says. He repeats that they want it to feel more like a TV than a computer. All of the hardware for Chrome OS will be based on flash, not hard drives. "That makes a huge difference" for speed, he says. He's contrasting today's operating systems with Chrome OS. When they boos, today's OSes start with firmware, then a standard kernel, services, start-up apps, then a browser. Chrome will only have three steps.

He's talking about security, and Security-Verified boot. They want to make sure every time you boot that you're running what you should be. (This sounds like an automatic virus scan, only different.) It checks the cryptographic signature keys to make sure they're legit. If something goes wrong – if something's corrupted – it pulls the right stuff off the web and repairs itself, then reboots. "We repair the system automatically. Basically what this is doing is re-imaging your computer. … You don't lose anything in the process."

How do they make sure apps don't harm your machine? Current OSes use a model where apps have the same privileges you do. Installing an app is a great risk because of that. In Chrome, all apps are web apps and the security model is different – the OS doesn't trust any app.

(There's an interesting philosophical approach showing itself here. These Chrome OS PCs will implicitly trust Google to do absolutely anything to your machine, even re-image it, almost without telling you. But it doesn't trust the apps – or trust the user – to do much of anything. I imagine some security pros will raise red flags about this.)

Now he's talking more specifically about security, how everything is encrypted. If someone snatches your flash drive, it will be tough for them to crack it and steal your data. (But since everything on the laptop is synced back to the cloud, that's the weakest link here; all a thief has to do is steal your online login and he'll probably have access to not only your Google accounts, but also everything on every Chrome OS PC you own.)

Sundar is back talking about how they will go to market with this. There aren't a lot of details yet, but there are a few. They're going to be very specific about what kinds of hardware Chrome OS will run on. "As a consumer, you can't download Chrome OS and install it on any machine. You have to buy a Chrome OS machine." Interesting. Makes one wonder whether hobbyists will be able to build their own.

It strikes me that what Google is talking about here isn't really a PC. It's a Google-controlled appliance that runs on a web browser. It's more like a Kindle than anything else.

Google's now showing a 3-minute video that the marketing team came up with to explain what Chrome OS is. It's classic Google video. Cartoony, very easy to follow. It argues that the web browser is the center of the computing experience, where we spend 90% of our time. So Google made Chrome, and Chrome is fast. Since we all just want to get online, and today's computers take too long to get online, Google made Chrome OS that boots straight into the browser.

At the end of the video, all the Google people in the corner clap again. Which, again, is weird.

Now, Q&A:

What will a Chrome OS netbook cost?
Google won't say. "We expect to have devices in the price ranges people are used to today. … You will see larger netbooks than you are seeing today."

Someone asks what Chrome OS was running on today: it was an off-the-shelf EeePC.

How will manufacturers sign up to build a Chrome OS machine? Google has info online. Developers? There's info online. Standards? Google is working with the W3C. No clear answer on APIs. In general we want to see all of this get standardized.

Will there be an app store? What about drivers? What about photo editing or video editing apps?
No answer on the app store. There are hundreds of millions of applications on the web already. Google is working on drivers. On the third question, Google is focused on making the Chrome machine a second machine. It might be the primary device in terms of the amount of time you spend, but there will be things that this won't do. If you're a lawyer editing contracts all day, this won't be the machine for you.

Will Google support Silverlight? Google doesn't answer, but seem to leave the door open to it.

How will other browsers run on the machine? They won't. By open-sourcing it, Google is making it possible for someone else to make an OS version based on another browser. Interesting. So, no – no other browsers will run on Chrome OS. The browser is the operating system. (Neither Microsoft nor Apple would get away with this.)

Will this run on more robust machines than netbooks? It could. But for the next year or so, Google is focused on things that look like netbooks.

Will it work when you're not online? You'll be able to cache stuff locally. With HTML5 offline capabilities, that will work too. Google is focused on WiFi as the primary connectivity option. They don't answer whether they're working on cellular too.

Will there be native apps? Our current plan is to only support web apps.

Will Chrome run on ARM? It will work on both x86 and ARM.

How long before this works on more powerful machines? And is there a business model besides sending more traffic to Google? No business model that he's speaking of. He didn't answer the question about when it will work on full-fledged PCs.

Is there anything you can do with a Chrome OS machine that you can't do with a laptop? (Good question.) The answer isn't too coherent. Aside from instant-on and security stuff, there's not much difference between running the Chrome browser on another PC, and running a Chrome OS PC.

Will the data cacheing be open? (I didn't catch the answer to this question. But I suspect the answer is no; these machines will be locked into Google.)

No drivers. Keyboards and mice will work. Chrome OS will print. (An easy way to do this would be to keep the drivers in the cloud and create a USB receiver that hooks into a printer or other devices.)

The Q&A is over.

Settlement or no settlement, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Dirk Meyer still doesn’t trust Intel. That much was clear when I sat across the table from him last week at AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale.

I had a chance to talk to Meyer during the AMD analyst meeting last Wednesday. In a series of presentations that morning, Meyer and his lieutenants had made a cogent case that 2010 would be their comeback year. They have cut costs, pared non-core businesses, and returned to designing good chips and delivering them on time. Next year the company plans to begin selling several new chips, including a first: one that has a microprocessor and a graphics processor on the same chip.

But what about Intel (INTC), I asked him. In the past when AMD (AMD) had good products, you accused the chip giant of using its market dominance to unfairly squash you. (Intel has maintained that it plays by the rules.) Why should this time be any different? Do you think the playing field is level now?

Meyer knew what I didn’t: that in a few hours, he and Intel CEO Paul Otellini would announce a massive $1.25 billion legal settlement with Intel that’s supposed to put the companies’ acrimonious past behind them. That didn’t seem to change Meyer’s outlook on the chip giant, however.

“I would not tell any regulator around the world who’s still looking at Intel’s business practices to stop,” Meyer said. “The work that we’ve done needs to continue.”

Sounds to me like these two rivals might have put down the legal hatchet for now, but they haven’t quite buried it.

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