Hulu CEO Jason Kilar stopped by the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit to discuss the future of online video advertising and why giving users what they want trumps having it stolen.

Lambasted by blogs and analysts as a has-been even before it launched, the online video joint venture of News Corp and NBC Universal first full month as a publicly available company will probably change some minds. Its monthly usage in April beat every major U.S. television network including those of its founders. More details below:

Data: Nielsen VideoCensus / Metrics: Total Streams, Streams % Change from Previous Month, Streams Per Viewer (SPV), SPV % Change from Previous Month, Time Spent Viewing (TSV), TSV % Change from Previous Month, TSV per Viewer, TSV per Viewer % Change from Previous Month, StreamCensus Global

We learned a couple of things about National Semiconductor CEO Brian Halla during our interview with him at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit on Monday, not the least of which is his love of the phrase “megatrend.”

• He has bought seven Apple iPhones for his family, with the last one going to his wife after she was stranded, out of gas, and her cellphone (which employed older Nat Semi tech) was unreachable.
• He’s on a waiting list for the Tesla, which has no less than 25 different circuits designed by Nat Semi.
• He feels that the tech industry makes people buy things they don’t really need.

In between discussing the state of the economy and the semiconductor industry, Halla pulled back the curtains for a peek at a few things the world desperately needs cooked up by Nat Semi’s research and development team.

Anti-homicide:
By training noise cancellation technology to identify gunshots and the sounds of breaking glass, Nat Semi’s engineers have come up with an idea to create an early alert system that would be able to dial up security automatically.

“If every thermostat in every office building, every school classroom…had a gunshot detection device that would wake up and immediately locate where the gunshot came from, lock down all the classrooms that are not in that vicinity, call the campus police to that entrance, that technology would’ve saved 30 lives at Virginia Tech.”

When will we see product? “Sooner than years.”

Anti-boredom:
What if you didn’t have to wait — at all — for your cellphone to charge up? “We’ll try to be the first company to be out with an instant charge capability on the handset. Plug it into the wall and it’s charged.”

Neat! Halla said they’ll have something to show in the next 12 months. Now all they need is a vendor brave enough to manufacture and sell these new power adapters that will destroy its entire business and those of its rivals.

Anti-cancer:
Through its work with a University of Southern California research group, with whom it helped figure out implantable electronic devices, it figured out how to adapt a range of temperature sensors to detect early signs of breast cancer.

When blockage constricts a vein, blood will actually speed up like water through a hose with a nozzle on it and that causes a Venturi effect which raises the temperature of the blood. So with a temp sensor probe you can actually see the signature of the blockage in the heart without having to invasively go in with an angiogram or with a scanner …

I was telling them (medical researchers) about this probe that we have. He said that would be fantastic for the early detection of breast cancer because cancer cells in the breast … (when) subjected to a temp sensor, heat up more than a regular cell …

If someone could do a home early breast cancer detector to say you should go have a check-up, I think that would be pretty exciting.

Halla said these projects were currently in the idea phase, but the company owns patents related to the technology.

Next up on the to-do list: ending world hunger.

Going green, in the literal sense, starts at home, Nokia CFO Rick Simonson tells us.

Asked during the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecom Summit what he’s doing at home about the environment, Simonson joked, “One of my daughters has just gone vegan. I haven’t figured out what’s the carbon footprint of that.”

As it turns out, three out of his five kids are vegetarians. His son, however, jokingly calls himself a “Meatatarian,” said Simonson. “Maybe it’s just to get out of eating vegetables he doesn’t like.”

On a more serious note, Simonson told Reuters that one of the biggest enemies to the environment is actually those who are also most likely to boost sales — consumers who have a hard time letting go of old devices. (I think he’s talking about me. I have separation issues when it comes to old tech.)

We’re a little bit frustrated … People tend to have their old devices sitting in the drawer, sitting in the closet, sitting on their desk, rather than recycling them. They’re not even throwing most of it away, which is the worse possibility. They’re just sitting there, building up on their desks, in the closet. And if you can get those back and get them recycled, then you can do a lot, both for sustainability and for the environment.

There you have it. Lazy geeks need to send their devices back or raid eBay to save our planet.

The Quadrangle Group and co-founder Steven Rattner might be valuable advisers to the Sulzberger family when it comes to helping determine the future of The New York Times, but the private equity firm isn't all that hot on buying papers.

Managing Principal Joshua Steiner , speaking at the Reuters Hedge Fund and Private Equity Summit on Wednesday, said that the valuations aren't what they ought to be for papers, so they're staying on the sidelines for now.

There's a reason that they don't exist in our portfolio. It's not for lack of looking... . As I said, I don't think they're disappearing tomorrow, but when we look at the expected cash flows that they're likely to produce over the holding period where we're likely to own them, and you think about how they are valued at the time we'd be thinking about exiting them... Generally speaking, we can't get to the prices that people are paying for them, and that's why we haven't bought them.

Listen here to what else Steiner said about newspapers:

[quicktime]http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/ reuters/editorial/images/20080409/Quadra ngle_nupes2.mp3[/quicktime]

Is experimentation at risk? Will the economic downturn neuter the anticipated lift the presidential elections and Beijing Olympics were expected to contribute to the estimated $290 billion U.S. ad market in 2008? When will writers and studio chiefs get along?

These are just some of the big issues we aim discuss starting Monday at the annual Reuters Media Summit.Join us this week (Nov. 26 through the 29th) on Reuters.com and our MediaFile blog as we chat with leaders in the media industry to give the market a glimpse at what’s in and what’s out in 2008.

Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn, MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath, EA Chief John Riccitiello, IPG’s Michael Roth, and the commissioners of Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and NASCAR will drop by our offices to share ideas and strategies in what looks certain to be a pivotal if challenging year.

Just where did the market share go in the first quarter? Nokia CFO Rick Simonson attempts to solve the mystery during the New York-leg of Reuters’ Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York on Monday.

His theory? Just wait a quarter.

“People had a mistaken notion that when Motorola announced a large decrease in market share, why wasnt market share taken by Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson. The problem was it went into the channel and it takes time to work its way through. Those players with a superior product portfolio should take a lot of market share. Were pretty confident in saying that we will have (increased) market share in q2 versus q1.”

“Theres no reason why we cant have 36 (percent) or more market share and not achieve higher profitability.”

On Apple’s upcoming iPhone:
–”The iPhone is interesting … It’s very much a validation of what were doing, a multimedia device that people will pay for N73 is a great example of that. The N95 is already out there doing many of the things people are talking about.
– “U.S. consumers have not had a lot of choice to pick up higher-end feature-rich devices.
–”Theyll bring some things to the table that people are responsive to.
Theyre excellent in design. We can’t trivialize that.”