Microsoft Archive

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Microsoft has conducted some research in the US on how familiar teenagers are with intellectual property laws. The Genuine Software Initiative commissioned the study asking 7th to 10th graders if they knew the rules around downloading music, pictures, movies and software from the internet.

They found that if the teenagers knew the laws, they’d be less likely to flout them. Just 11% said they were “clearly” familiar with what was right and what was wrong when it came to IP.

“Teens who were familiar with downloading rules credited their parents, TV or stories in magazines and newspapers, and Web sites — more so than their schools — as resources for information about illegal downloading.”

So Microsoft has launched an educational website – My Bytes – it compliments an educational pilot aimed at schools they’ve kicked off in conjunction with Topics Education.

“The curriculum is focused on preparing students for the digital age, helping them understand in a meaningful way how intellectual property rights affect their lives and sparking discussion to clarify the “gray areas” in protected and shared content.”

The site lets kids develop their own intellectual property and create their own ringtone by mixing it online.

Wholesale education has to be a good thing! Every time I visit my nephews, the oldest one is 11, their PC is clogged up with all sorts of stuff they’ve swiped online, either not knowing how or why they’ve done it in the first place.

I was at the 4th Annual Demo Fest here in Redmond hosted by the guys from Microsoft adLab.

As I’m writing a series of posts on the adCenter Blog, I had trotted along to see what was new and was not dissapointed!

From today’s press release here’s a selection of the kind of innovative tools they’re working on:

• Air Wave – This technology creates a “fourth screen” experience beyond the TV, PC and mobile phone to enable advertisers to engage consumers outside of the home in public places such as an airport or a shopping mall. By using an interactive, multitouch screen display, consumers can play games or interact with advertisements to receive coupons or product information. With the help of a webcam, they can try on products such as sunglasses virtually. This technology builds on the “large display ads” technology showcased at last year’s Demo Fest.
• Contextual Ads for Video – Through speech recognition, this technology enables ads to be dynamically served based on the content discussed in the video. For example, if the topic of the video was gardening, ads related to gardening or lawn improvement could be served in an adjacent text-based ad as the video played. For advertisers, this provides access to consumers while at the point of consideration.
• Intelligent Bug Ads – This technology balances the interests of advertisers and the target audience by locating nonintrusive frames in a video in which to place ads. By using a computer vision algorithm to calculate the least intrusive spot in the video, it approximates human judgment and places the ad in the video where it is least likely to interfere with the consumer’s viewing experience. 
• Visual Product Browsing – This tool uses computer vision algorithms to browse and categorize images as a human might, without the need for manual data tagging. Online shoppers could use this technology to visually browse categorized images of products such as lamps and narrow their search to find “more like this” options through physical and visual characteristics such as the product’s height, depth and width. This brings efficiency to photo browsing and enhanced targeting capabilities for advertisers who are trying to better understand user intent and preferences. 
• Content Analysis Engine – This technology uses advanced algorithms to automatically extract and categorize information from search queries and Web page contents to better understand user intent and minimize search engine marketing complexity. Search engine marketers can use this technology to discover valuable keywords relevant to their category or to bid on categories, such as digital cameras, instead of managing each individual keyword associated with a category. Categorization also helps publishers more effectively monetize their advertising inventory by opening up additional contextual content opportunities deeper into their content pages.
• Content Detection in Sub-documents –This technology identifies sensitive or unsuitable content such as pornography, weapons or negative sentiments that advertisers would not likely want to be associated with, and automatically blocks contextual ads related to that content. Microsoft is building on “whole-page content detection,” shown at last year’s Demo Fest, to respect users’ sensitivities and advertisers’ brands and images. This year the adCenter Labs team took it one step further by analyzing individual sections of a complex Web page, such as the MSN home page, and only serving contextual ads that relate to nonsensitive content. 
• Ad Research Dashboard – The dashboard builds on the success of the Keyword Services Platform (KSP) introduced at Demo Fest last year. It is a flexible and central place within adCenter that provides marketers with access to analytics and advanced algorithms that are tied to actual data sets from adCenter to help them maximize the effectiveness of their search marketing campaigns. The dashboard builds on Microsoft’s commitment to provide advertisers and agencies with as much data transparency as possible to help them to make more informed decisions about their search marketing campaigns.

Trust me to be in a cab on the way to the airport when I get an email from Steve Ballmer with the news! (82k other Microsoftee’s got the mail too, not just me 😉 )

Anyway – Dixon Jones was straight on it!

How do I feel? Well I called a couple of guys to have a chat and we’re really pleased – it it all goes through. It’s been an incredible journey for the last 2 1/2 years, we’ve spent a lot of time and energy on adCenter and even more on our customers.

People have noted how things have changed for the better since we’ve come to market, and it’ll keep getting better as, if this deal comes off, we integrate the businesses and continue in the vein in which we started.

Advertiser’s, publisher’s & marketer’s needs are at the heart of what we’re doing here!

I love this industry!!!!

Right! Flight’s boarding….gotta run!

Check out the Microsoft inside scoop from James Senior who’s just met the guy!

Bill Gates was in town yesterday for a whirlwind trip which included a meeting with Gordon at No 10 and a stint at the IOD. This was his last visit to the UK as a full time Microsoft employee. 🙁

You can see what he has to say to the Institute of Directors World Leader Lunch which includes a very candid 40 minute Q&A!

Highlights:

• Pace of innovation over the next 10 years quicker than the last 10
• The way we read newspapers will change and we’ll see delivery of TV over a personalised channel
• Whythis change? Exponential growth in efficiency of hardware and storage capacity is fueling us to be more ambitious
• Computing has become a tool to equalise the small business with the large business.
• Huge democratization from having the internet as a tool to market your products and services.
• Microsoft’s $6b in R&D – devices will become a lot smaller and powerful and all will connect to the internet.
• What does this mean at the consumer level? Messaging & search will get better but it’s the knowledge workers that will be empowered in a more efficient way, helping maximise productivity.
• 75% of training is now done using video at Microsoft.
• We need to unify phone, computers, internet and TV. The “internet with software” will get bigger, enabling different sorts of communication channels, reducing cost and complexity allowing more capability.

He also does a demo of Microsoft Surface!

Dennis Mortensen has posted on his VisualRevenue Blog that “Microsoft is the best converting search engine today!”

He “conducted a study on 15,014,924 visits across multiple global commerce web properties in Q4 2007, with approximately USD 1.2 Million in Paid Search advertising spend.”

This Independent research backs up the study we did last year with NNR which concluded that Live Search would convert 70% (actually we revisited it and it’s now 80%) higher than than other search engines on average.

Net/Net – Although the traffic from Live Search may be lower than on Google and in some cases Yahoo! it still pays to advertise on adCenter from an ROI perspective.

And if you want more high quality traffic, how does 20m unique users and 330m pageviews sound?

Following hot on the heels of Digg, Facebook and Viacom, the “biz dev” boys over in Redmond have been busy doing it again – this time with The WSJ.

The deal means third-party exclusive rights to provide contextual and paid search advertising for its network of sites, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com and others.

“This deal is a significant win for Microsoft for two key reasons. First, it makes the extended Microsoft advertising network the premier destination for advertisers interested in reaching financially minded users, as it complements our offering in this vertical through MSN Money and other syndication partners,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Microsoft.

“Second, this deal is a strong indicator that we’re gaining significant traction with our advertising platform. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is one of the largest financial services publishers in a very dynamic vertical segment, and we’re delighted to add it to our portfolio.”

What I love is when I see a comment like the below from WebmasterWorld!

Gets me all fired up!

“I always like seeing “positive” Microsoft news. I’ll have to say that MS have been “kicking it up a notch” over these past 90-120 days. TV advertising appears to be stepped up and earnings reports are good. I’m rootin’ for ya MS. We need some balance in our space and between you, Yahoo! and Ask.com, you’re all we have left. 🙂 “

Dave Naylor and I were comparing tools the other day and both agreed the snipping tool in Microsoft Vista is a life/time saver.

It’s available is some of the more advanced versions of vista and can be found in the accessories folder.

Slip it onto your quick launch menu and it’s ready and waiting when ever you need to grab a quick screenshot.

Once you kick it off just use the cursor to lassoo the bit of the screen you want to grab.

You can quickly email the shot straight from here. Click on the envelope…

It then opens up in an email and you just add a recipient and send…

You can highlight stuff in the screenshot before you email it off just to be precise!

Finally, you can also save really easily AND copy and paste into Word or Powerpoint!

All in all a fabulous little gem which is saving me hours a week, and making it easier for me to irritate my collegues by sending them more stuff than I ever did before 😉

Get more info at Windows Help