Microsoft Archive

Check out the new TV ad for the Microsoft Windows Phone I wrote about on the Microsoft Advertising Blog last week.

The phone is positioned as having an operating system which can cope with the demands of both work tasks and play stuff like social networking, web and music.

So this is the demo of Looking Glass that Stephen Kim gave at Advertising Week in New York a few days ago.

A few hours before I’d published a post about the code-named LookingGlass which outlined its features, but more importantly that it’s a proof-of-concept and just one of a number of projects teams at Microsoft are working on to really start making sense of all the data available within the social media space and make it actionable.

I interviewed a few folks after the presentation and the reception was great. What agencies and advertisers alike were excited about was the ability to layer external data on top. So using APIs you’ll have the functionality to add in call centre numbers or sales information to really knuckle down and spot trends or potential pitfalls that you can then do something about, and quickly!

We’re excited about the great coverage on ClickZ, AdAge & TechCrunch and from Andy Beal and I know Jamey and Marc will relish more of your thoughts!

Well we’re having a blast over here in New York, working hard – 18 hour days – and playing hard for the rest of the time!

Feel very privileged to have been in the front row at Yusuf’s speech which I wrote about on Monday and there’s been a tremendous reception for my post on Ashton Kutcher’s keynote conversation yesterday.

Today we’re announcing LookingGlass and doing a ton more Tweeting and Blogging.

But check out the demo Yusuf does in this video. If you don’t have 40 minutes for the whole thing then just fast forward to the Bing demo at about 10.30 and that jaw dropping virtual reality stuff at 21 minutes!

Really pleased with this combined effort from our design/marketing/community teams at Microsoft Advertising.

We’ve just launched this Advertising Week 2009 social media hub which includes a Twitter feed of everything being talked about in relation to the event and videos of interviews we’ve done before and we’ll be doing during our time there. 

There’s a photo stream and including a very cool DeepZoom plug-in on the home page!

I’ll be in New York for the week blogging and Tweeting, so hope to catch up with a lot of you there!

If you can’t make it I hope you’ll drop by this site now and again…

Did you know that 77% of jobs in the UK require some sort of IT skills? To us digital marketers, sparking up a laptop or downloading the latest version of Tweetdeck seems like second nature, but to a lot of people just sending an email must seem like a hefty mountain to climb (ask my new mother-in-law!)

This morning on BBC Breakfast our UK MD – Gordon Frazer – talked about Microsoft’s new Britain Works initiative.

A company as big as Microsoft would not be doing its duty during a recession if it just battened down the hatches and fended for itself. All the research says that skills and investment in business developed during lean times pay dividends in the end, so MS have kicked off a 5 part plan:

1.    Partnerships with NGOs – Microsoft will build on existing relationships and create new partnerships with employment focussed NGOs to support their work in getting hard-to-reach people back to work.  Support for NGOs will be in the form of cash, software and volunteering time.

2.    Apprenticeships – The Partner Apprenticeship programme will be rolled out from the pilot area in the West Midlands to a national offer. The apprentices are trained by a Microsoft IT Academy and after 7 months are working full time for the partner.

3.    Technology start-ups – Through the BizSpark programme we are supporting the creating of thousands of software development jobs in new technology startups.

4.    Training Vouchers – We will be providing 450,000  training vouchers to enable selected client groups access to IT training.

5.    Britain Works Skills Portal- www.microsoft.com/uk/britainworks  – The Britain Works website will provide people with full information on all the training and work opportunities available through the programme.

The idea is to help 500k people into work by 2012.

It’s things like this that make me proud to work for Microsoft!

4 years and counting many more………I hope!

Snapshot of what’s available for FREE at Silverlight Streaming on Windows Live – you get 10GBs of free hosting which ain’t bad…

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

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!

Not 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:

Ashley 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!

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.

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

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!