Blog

TNOOZ – New Internet Service from Kevin May

Many of you in the travel space will know Kevin from his time as editor at www.Travolution.co.uk

I’ve been fortunate to have presented with the guy in Tenerife a couple of years ago, and like his style.

Well now his much anticipated venture has started emerging as I just got an invite to his new brand’s Facebook Page

Described as “a new, dynamic, global media brand for the travel industry” – they have a new site – www.Tnooz.com – where you can sign up for updates as no doubt he puts the finishing touches to the offering.

Intriguing to say the least!

Could “nooz” be related to “news”, given Kevin’s background as a journalist? 🙂

Dom Doyle’s Reflection at Our Wedding

 

Since our wedding three weeks ago, not a day has gone past without someone asking for the transcript of my friend Dom Doyle’s quite brilliant “reflection” he gave on that day.

Well we’ve gone further than that and uploaded the 8 minute video!

Dom’s a mate of mine from school who now teaches theology at Boston College in Harvard.

When we asked him a few months ago if he would say a few words, we had no idea quite how much he would wow the assembled (and make so many women swoon) with his kind words, incisive English wit, deep human insight and theological candour.

A truly gifted guy!

Going to Advertising Week 2009 in New York

Update: You can now catch up on all the news and coverage from AdWeek on our social media hub where you’ll find videos, photos, Tweets and blog posts following all the action: Advertising Week 2009

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If you follow our Microsoft Advertising Blog you know we’re going to be sponsoring Advertising Week in New York 21-25th of September. IAB MIXX and OMMA are going on at the same time!!

From a social media point of view, we’ll be building on our success at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival and have put together a madcap plan for running around the 5 or 6 venues in NY with our team, blogging, Tweeting and interviewing people on video to really try and bring the conference to life for those of you who can’t make it!

It’s great that Microsoft recognise the power of social media and invest in teams like ours to go and do this sort of thing.

More next week on what we’re doing as we unveil a very cool resource!

Face-Nook Digital Street Artist

imageNot sure how Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers will like this “aligned” branding effort from Hawaii, but while on honeymoon on Waikiki we spotted a guy doing portraits in the street using a tablet PC to draw digital portraits of willing sitters.

A refreshing change from the charcoal-mongers we’re used to:

P1020346Ashley and I splashed out a whole $15 on the above which we had done in Pike Place Market in Seattle……and no he didn’t get a tip for helping me lose 30lbs!

Online Personas – How The Internet Sees You

Picked up this canny little piece of kit from Steve Clayton.

Aaron Zinman’s philosophy with personas is:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant.

Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

image Luckily “online” is represented accurately and the “sport” bit must be my incessant talking about cricket.

Did I say I had tickets for the day at The Oval where we regained The Ashes from Australia but couldn’t go becaue I was on honeymoon!?

Check it our for yourself at: http://personas.media.mit.edu

Favourite Wedding Photo So Far!

So we’re back to earth with a bump from our wedding and honeymoon in Hawaii!

In short it was an awesome day and I’m immensely happy and proud to call myself Ashley’s husband!

When we’ve caught our breath I’ll write some more about it but wanted to share my favourite photo so far. The official one’s are yet to surface from the photographer!

mel-ashley-wedding-thumbs-up 16 year-old Aviv – Josh’s cousin from Israel – caught this moment with the camera I gave him to snap some shots!

Watch TV Online – MSN Video Player

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Just written about this over on the Microsoft Advertising Blog.

I’m the US right now so can’t watch any shows on the MSN Video Player as it’ll only work for UK IP addresses but nevertheless if you are in Blighty, how flippin’ cool?!

As well as comedy and drama it’s got a documentary channel too with shows like The Human Face, Great British Journeys and Human Instinct!

61% of us admit to regularly surfing the web while watching TV so why not just thow open a couple of IE8 windows and watch Shameless while IMing your mates and booking your holiday all at the same time?

I’m looking forward to checking it out when I get back at the end of August.

Take a peek and let me know what you think!

PPC Rockstars Interview with David Szetela

ppc-rockstars

 

Got interviewed last week by Mr PPC Fabulous David Szetela from ClixMarketing

During the show we discuss:

· The evolution of the Microsoft Advertising Community Team

· The Yahoo! deal?!

· Microsoft adCenter as the one-stop-shop for advertisers

· Microsoft Media Network

· Search and Display ROI Uplift Research

· Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

· Atlas Search

· adCenter Desktop

· adCenter ROI – “2 times to 5 times better than on Google and Yahoo!” says David!

· SES San Jose!

· Microsoft Advertising on Social Media

Check out the interview here: Microsoft Advertising Interview with Mel Carson

Best Wedding Entrance Ever?

 

So I’m getting married to Ashley in 22 days – we’re going to have to get our thinking caps on to top this amazing start to a ceremony!

UPDATE!!! YouTube don’t want me to embed it anymore so check it out on their site here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

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