Anyone who follows Direct2Dell knows that we've been rolling out new blogs in the last several weeks. I see a key part of my job as Chief Blogger is to connect people with information that they're looking for (more on that topic from me soon). Things have been moving so fast, I haven't done a very good job of connecting the dots so far.

To try to improve on that, I wanted to try something new with this post. A while back, the IdeaStorm team started a Weekly Recap that has been pretty well received by the IdeaStorm community. In the week in review, I'll call out posts from the Direct2Dell family and try to provide a bit of context into where they fit in the blogosphere.

• Direct2Dell Japan launch: Overall traffic was modest for the first week.. only a handful of links from the blogosphere to the main site. We'll keep working to reach more customers there over time.
• Alienware and the Dell XPS Brand: A WSJ story sparked some discussion on this topic. Anne Camden stepped in to refute the idea that we were phasing out XPS gaming machines early, and reitierated that XPS brand isn't going away. Later in the week, John Blain blogged about our featuring two Alienware laptops on Dell.com as an example of how we'll work together. 
• HP/ EDS Deal: This one got lots of discussions going in the blogosphere. In her blog post, Lynn Tyson said that the service model that Dell continues to build is based on a fundamentally different strategy than the one the deal is based on. I thought both Jeff Kaplan and Ed Moltzen offered interesting perspective on the deal. Other folks like Om Malik reported that the deal was about building a cloud infrastructure for the future. Marc Farley provided a different viewpoint (from a car wash no less) that agreed more with Nick Carr's take: the HP EDS Acquisition was about cash from IT infrastructure outsourcing, not about the clouds.
• Dell's XS23 Cloud Server: Todd Brannon from the Data Center Solutions team shared more XS23 details on the Cloud Computing blog about a custom server setup that The Register hinted at recently.
• 8800M GTX Graphics Card Upgrade Option: John Blain answered why this upgrade option for exisitng XPS M1730 customers was taking so long. He'll continue to publish updates on Direct2Dell as we have new information to share.

Bottom line, I hope this becomes a useful snapshot for customers to get an idea of what's going on across all our sites and how it relates to the broader blogosphere. I created a category for all of these updates called D2D Week in Review.

Feel free to let me know how I can make it better.

Many of you have been following the earthquake that affected China on Monday – the second major disaster to hit Asia in less than a week. Fortunately, the Dell employees who were in our Chengdu and Chongqing facilities, closest to the epicenter of the earthquake, are all safe.

However, thousands of others in the region have been impacted and are in desperate need of assistance.

While the government is moving quickly to help the victims, Dell and our employees are anxious to do what we can to help. We’re contributing RMB 2.1 million to the relief effort, and we’ll stay in close contact with and offer help to our employees, customers, suppliers and the emergency response organizations in these areas as they rebuild their communities.

China is one of our home countries. We’ve been doing business in China for 10 years now and employ more than 6,000 people across the country. And the Dell China team is extremely committed to its communities; in 2007, our employees volunteered more than 7,000 hours to Chinese charities. Their energy and commitment is an inspiration, one that has spread throughout Dell.

I hope others, both individuals and corporations, will do what they can to help. To learn how you can contribute to the China relief efforts, visit the Red Cross donation site. 

I saw that Gizmodo and Engadget reacted to the Wall Street Journal story about plans for our XPS brand and Alienware. Several other blogs like Tech Digest and CyberNet News and others reported details as well. IdeaStorm user dabrace1984 posted an idea called Keep the XPS Product Line.

Bottom line, we aren't phasing out any gaming machines early and we are not dropping the XPS line. For more details on what's going on, take a look at Anne Camden's post on Your Blog.

A few months ago, Lionel blogged that Dell had added the NVIDIA Dual 8800M GTX to the XPS M1730. This raised a lot of questions from existing M1730 owners, as you can see from the comments to the post, mostly regarding the possibility of an upgrade program. Given how absolutely amazing this card is, I’m surprised it didn’t generate more churn than it did.

As the gaming/consumer liaison for the Dell community, I was able to take some of these questions to those in the know and get a few answers.

First thing’s first: an upgrade solution is in the works, and will hopefully be released later this month. From what I’ve seen, there will be two options, one with an installation package, and one do-it-yourself kit for those die-hard techies. Considering the number of screws holding this beast together, most people will probably want the installation, but the do-it-yourself kit will be appealing to people like me that like playing with computer innards. The price of these upgrades is yet to be determined.

So what’s taking so long? The core issue is that MediaDirect 3.3 is not compatible with the driver for the NVIDIA card. This incompatibility means that the Media Direct software needs to be upgraded. Unfortunately, the upgrade will require a reformat and reinstallation. Beyond that, it will also require you to repartition the hard disk to make room for the new version of MediaDirect, which is a bit larger. Data loss has been a major concern for the engineers working on a solution. At this point, it would appear that there’s really no way around wiping the drive to make the upgrade work with every feature.

Since this card is obviously “the r0x0r”, I would think people’s inner gamer would be perfectly fine with a reinstallation in order to make this card work. This card is just that cool.

I know this upgrade has been long in coming, and I know it's caused some frustration. We're sorry this is taking so long, and are working to get this card into your hands as quickly as possible.

Folks who keep up with this blog have heard me mention it a couple of times. Today, we're launching Direct2Dell in Japanese. I think it's worth noting, not only because it is the fifth language that we've added to the Direct2Dell family, but because it's one of the most important ones: according to Technorati, Japanese is the most common language in the blogosphere.

Japan leads the world in Internet download speeds (check out the report from speedmatters.org—note that Japan's average broadband speed is 30 times faster that of the United States). And that kind of leadership also extends to the mobile phone space thanks to technology like NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service and competing technologies. That translates into millions of users who routinely use text messaging, access video and other multimedia content on mobile phones. That's one reason I think that services like Twitter—despite the fact that they just launched service in Japan—are really taking off there.

Today, Michael Dell will mention the Direct2Dell Japanese blog in a speech to students and media at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, part of  Hitotsubashi University.

So why is this important to Dell? Because we want to enable more direct conversations around the world. We understand that social media is global. Other recent studies like this one from Universal McCann show just how global it is. Click here for the PDF of that report.

If you are interested in following our Japanese blog, go here: http://japanese.direct2dell.com

Konnichiwa - こんにちは。 デルが、日本語のブログワールドに参入します。

過去の私のブログでも、他言語の追加について言及したことがあります。本日、日本語のDirect2Dellがオープンします。Direct2Dellに5番目の言語として追加されるということはさておき、もっと重要なのは、Technoratiによると、日本語は、ブログワールドで最も多く利用されている言語だということです。

日本は、インターネットのダウンロード速度 においても世界をリードしています。（speedmatters.orgのレポートによると、日本のブロードバンド速度の平均値はアメリカの30倍に匹敵するそうです） NTTドコモのi-modeのようなテクノロジーに代表される携帯電話の世界でも、日本の先進性を見ることができます。何百万人もの人が日常的に携帯電話でメールをし、携帯電話から動画などのマルチメディアコンテンツにアクセスしているのです。Twitterのようなサービスが、日本語でのサービスを立ち上げたばかりにもかかわらず、非常に人気が高いのも、こういった理由によるものでしょう。

本日、マイケル・デルが、一橋大学大学院国際企業戦略研究科の学生へのスピーチの中で、日本語のDirect2Dellについて言及することになります。

ところで、なぜ、このことがデルにとって重要なのでしょう？それは、デルが、今まで以上に、ダイレクトな会話をグローバルでできるようになるからです。ソーシャルメディアは、グローバル規模のものです。ユニバーサルマッキャンの最近のレポートでも、ソーシャルメディアが如何にグローバルであるかが示されています。このレポートのPDFフォーマットは、こちらからどうぞ。

日本語のDirect2Dellに興味のある方は右記URLにアクセスしてみてください：  http://japanese.direct2dell.com

We don’t believe that environmental leadership is defined by how many awards we win.  And when we are recognized we know it doesn’t mean our journey to sustainability is complete. Occasionally, when we are awarded, we do like to celebrate the Dell teams that make it possible.

Last week we were honored to receive the Commendation for Reporting on Product Stewardship for our 2007 Sustainability Report from Ceres and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA).  Our Sustainability team was on hand at the Ceres annual conference to receive the award and we also hosted our latest stakeholder feedback forum with 40 non-governmental (NGO) and socially responsible investor participants.  We expect the 2008 Sustainability Report will be ready in mid-June.  You can see details about our recycling programs which underscore our product stewardship efforts here.

A few months ago, Working Mother magazine recognized Dell as one of the Best Green Companies for America’s Children.  Earlier this week, Mark Newton is presenting on Dell’s environmental programs to a virtual conference organized by Working Mother media.  It’s one more way we are partnering with customers, stakeholders and members of the Regeneration in sharing what we’ve learned from our own efforts to be environmentally responsible.

We are thankful for the recognition, and thankful for a customer base that pushes us to do more.

Thanks to Notebook Review user nexas for pointing out an issue with the XPS M1330. When a user presses the eject button on the optical drive, the system may hang for a few seconds.

Dell Community Forum users like Vishnu M. issue reported this issue. We've identified the issue and corrected it with the latest BIOS revision posted yesterday, version A10, which will correct the symptoms.

Again, users that have encountered this issue can click here to download the BIOS.

There have also been reports of this issue on the XPS M1530. The next BIOS revision is being tested now, and will also correct the symptoms. That revision is slated for web posting in June.

You may have read about a Vostro 1310 and 1510 keyboard issue that's affecting some customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa. See Bill Bivin's post over at the Small Business blog for more details.

On April 26, I had the privilege to speak at the vBusiness Expo in Second Life. The goal of the event was to provide a forum for discussion of virtual business and education issues actually within a virtual environment. No travel necessary. No hotel expenses or per diems. Just easy access to experts for anyone interested in using virtual environments as a platform for business.

I use the term experts not really to refer to myself, but to all the Ph.D.s, analysts and corporate directors that filled the list of speakers. Corporate representatives included: Senior Director of eBusiness for Kelley Services David Fenech; IBM’s Global Director for 3D Internet and Virtual Business Sandra Kearney; and, Fiona Gallagher who works in the global brand and advertising group of Sun Microsystems. I found myself sandwiched in the program listing of speakers between Larry Johnson, Ph.D. who is chief executive officer of the New Media Consortium and Mark Bell a Ph.D. student in the Indiana University Telecommunications department. These great academic minds were joined by Chris Collins an IT Analyst at the UCit Instructional & Research Computing department at the University of Cincinnati (better known to many of us in Second Life as Fleep Tuque) and Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins a Ph.D. candidate at Ball State University, Muncie Indiana. There were also representatives from the non-profit sector like Barry Joseph of Global Kids, and a bevy of lawyers to talk about legal issues involving virtual worlds such as intellectual property.

I tout the diverse group of speakers and panelist because I think it illustrates the breadth of opportunities that exist in virtual world environments. From business to education to philanthropy, everyone can benefit from the ability to cross geographies and bring people together in an immersive environment. This type of conference is a great way to illustrate that.

Virtual TV magazine "LIFE 4-U" reported on the event (including a couple of shots of myself/Pyrrha Dell during my talk). And, here’s a still shot to give you an idea of what the event looked like:

If you’re interested in my own presentation about what Dell has done in Second Life, what we’ve learned and where we are looking to go, you can view the slides online. In addition, Caleb Booker is working to post audio recordings and slides from all the presenters online soon. I’ll update this post with a link as soon as I get it.