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At the World Economic Forum 2010, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers chats with the always great interviewer Maria Bartiromo of CNBC.  This is John’s 11th straight attendance at WEF and he compares this year’s WEF to last year’s and talks about the “mood” of fellow WEF attendees.

CNBC writes: “Most of the global economies have stabilized,” John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, said. “Here in Davos, the mood is much more positive than a year ago, especially for the technology companies. And that’s natural because when economies start to recover, you apply first technology – get your productivity up – then you add jobs.”

Tae Yoo, Cisco SVP for Corporate Affairs, accepted the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Award from CCTV (a leading business channel in China) last night in Davos, Switzerland at their World Economic Forum “China Night.”  CCTV sponsored a survey in China to identify the “top 10 most influential multinational companies in China.”  Cisco was honored to be named to CCTV’s list…and honored to accept the CSR award from CCTV.

Tae* accepted the award on behalf of Cisco China employees and thanked CCTV for this prestigious award.

Chris Dedicoat, President of Cisco Europe, shares his views on attending this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland…his fifth year as an attendee  He talks about the relative “feel” of attendees toward the economy, the focus of attendees on green issues and smart grid, and more.

As senior vice president of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group, Marthin De Beer is heavily involved in fashioning tomorrow’s technologies.

So as he was unveiling yesterday’s announcement of a second I-Prize global innovation competition at the Networkers at Cisco Live crowd in Barcelona, it made sense to ask him which far-out technology areas he would pick to keep an eye on in, say, five years’ time.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a futurologist, you might want to look away at this point and jot down your own top technology picks for five years hence. When I put the question to De Beer, he kicked off his choice of technologies to watch with collaboration, and particularly…

1. Video

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 27, 2010 – Cisco today announced the launch of the second I-Prize contest, an open global innovation competition in which entrepreneurs worldwide can collaborate and submit their proposals with the potential to be Cisco’s next billion-dollar business idea. Following last year’s competition, which drew nearly 2,500 entrants, this year innovative thinkers will have …

Our hearts go out to those affected by the devastating earthquake in Haiti. In the earthquake’s aftermath the world has seen the terrible images and heard tragic stories and it’s in times like these that individuals, employees and companies ask, “What can I do to help?”

Our immediate response included a donation from the Cisco Foundation of US$250,000 to the American Red Cross and the matching of employee donations up to US$1 million.  Our internal campaign was quickly extended to other NGO partners including the Australian Red Cross, British Red Cross, Canadian Red Cross, CARE, Doctors Without Borders USA, Hong Kong Red Cross, and NetHope, Inc. to provide local giving choices in areas where we have high concentrations of interested non-US employees.

The Australian Scout Jamboree is the biggest event in the Australian scouting calendar and this year the 22^nd Australian Jamboree, was the largest since Australia hosted the World Jamboree in 1988. Around 12,000 scouts, leaders and volunteers converged from all points of the country and the globe at Cataract Scout Park in New South Wales, Australia to camp for two weeks of fun, adventure and friendship.

This year Cisco Australia and New Zealand supported the vision for a digital jamboree, setting a new standard for jamborees with an integrated technology platform that enabled attendees to stay connected and share their experiences with family and friends as well as scouting communities around Australia and abroad.

That’s the end of the written word, by the way… or pretty much.

Listening to Marthin De Beer, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group (ETG), who this morning addressed the Networkers at Cisco Live crowd in Barcelona, it’s easy to believe that in a few years you won’t be reading this anymore.

You’ll be watching it instead… because video is essentially taking over the (online) world.

According to De Beer, by 2013 90 percent of Internet traffic (and around half of all mobile traffic) will be made up of video, representing the biggest development in networking since voice and data first traveled along the same wire. It’s not a shift Cisco is worried about, though.

On the contrary, the company is doing its utmost to help the process, fired up by the growth in demand for video-based tools such as Cisco TelePresence, which has been sold to 550 enterprise customers since its launch in October 2006.

De Beer says video is “like chocolate”: once you try it it’s easy to get hooked. And getting people hooked depends on two things.

The first is simplicity. For all its high-definition, life-size, in-person brilliance, says De Beer: “the best thing we did with TelePresence was having the one-button push-to-talk feature. It’s CEO-proof.”

Building on this philosophy, Cisco is adding medianet capabilities to many of its existing technologies so business networks can handle video without creating a headache for IT administrators, and launching applications which harness the power of video but are simple to use.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia – Jan. 26, 2010 – Cisco announced today that Grand Hotel Europe, one of the oldest and most prominent hotels in Russia, has completed the deployment of a Cisco® Unified Communications solution. It marks the first case of Cisco’s advanced Internet Protocol (IP) communications systems being used in the hospitality business of Russia’s northern capital. The hotel …

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 26, 2010 – Building on its history of using open standards to break down the barriers to intercompany collaboration, Cisco today announced the release of an interoperability protocol to the public domain that allows multiscreen telepresence systems to interoperate. TelePresence customers now have a way to improve communications with vendors, suppliers and partners …