Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ category

Microsoft turns to Dolly Parton to pitch IE8 – true story

November 13th, 2009

ie8There must something in the water in Seattle.  Microsoft has turned to country music legend Dolly Parton to pitch Internet Explorer 8.  Specifically, IE8′s new WebSlices feature which allows users to effectively bookmark their sites of interest and receive notifications when those sites are updated within their browser.  A nice new feature – but not really that newsworthy.  What is more interesting in Microsoft’s recent ad and promotional campaign which targets the “common” user – trying to soften and humanize the corporate giants image.

Check out the Dolly Parton video clip below:

What do you think of Microsoft’s media campaign – attempting to “humanize” their products?  Is it working?

It seems to me that this is another attempt by Microsoft to use marketing instead of product development and engineering to compete.  Don’t get me wrong, IE8 has a number of improvements (many long overdue).  But does it hold a candle to Mozilla’s Firefox or Google’s Chrome?  Sorry Safari – Apple still needs to catch up quite a bit in the browser wars.

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Twitter and Facebook hit Xbox LIVE on Nov 17

November 12th, 2009

xboxIts official, coming to Xbox LIVE on November 17 – Facebook and Twitter.  The software update is free, and also includes Last.fm and Zune HD video compatibility – however you will need to have a Gold membership to use these new services.  With these new releases, Xbox LIVE will become the largest social media enabled network connect to your TV with features designed for your living room.

“We’re delivering some truly exciting social entertainment experiences to our members,” said Marc Whitten, Xbox LIVE general manager. “Xbox LIVE’s differentiator has always been our community, and we’ve already seen a tremendous response to these features in our public preview. It’s the community that drives us forward and allows us to pioneer new ways of connecting people through the entertainment they love.”

Here are some screen shots of the new Twitter and Facebook services on Xbox LIVE:

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Microsoft launches Windows 7 on The Today Show on a MacBook Pro

October 23rd, 2009

You may be asking yourself why is nextATOM covering the mounting public war between Microsoft and Apple for the personal operating system given that we primarily cover sociawindows_7_graphic1l media on the web.  Well I just couldn’t help myself.  There has been so much noise between the two tech giants and some pretty good clips – that I had to share them with you.  Inevitably, this ever growing and evolving competition for the OS does impact – pretty fundamentally – how our social internet and tech world evolves.  That being said, here are some of the blow-by-blow’s over the last few days which culminated earlier today when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went on The Today Show to introduce the new OS (clip below):

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Microsoft announces Bing deal with Twitter

October 21st, 2009

Microsoft formerly announced today their partnership with Twitter to provide real-time tweet streams to their search engine Bing.  Microsoft’s President of the Online Services Group, Qi Lu made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA earlier today.  The deal has been rumored for some time now.  The Bing Twitter service is now live and you can access it here.  When you land on the Bing Twitter page you’ll see a familiar tag cloud that includes the hottest topics on Twitter right now (shown below).

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As was highlighted in the presentation today, the big element of this new partnership is the ability Bing now has to deliver real-time information to your search results via Twitter.  As demonstrated to the crowd in San Francisco today, this new service is more than just giving users a live stream of tweets (which it does as well) – but also giving users the ‘best matches’ to their real-time search results.  The Bing Twitter service does de-duping to eliminate repeat tweets, and delivers its results based on quality using relevance.  As an example, they will rank results based on how many followers a user may have as well as the content of their posts.

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Facebook and Twitter coming soon to the XBOX 360

October 17th, 2009

Microsoft will be releasing social networking applications on its XBOX 360 Live platform this autumn.  While Microsoft has been pretty tight-lipped about their exact release dates of Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm integration for the XBOX 360 Live service – they have been promoting all three social sites on the XBOX 360 website.  While the US site is somewhat quite about the release, the XBOX 360 website for the UK is proudly announcing the ‘coming soon’ services (screen shot below).

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While the release was originally expected to come out in August of this year, it was decided by Microsoft to release the services later this fall – in time for the holiday season.  You can see a deeper look into the interface courtesy of JoyStiq here.

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Microsoft turns to ‘Family Guy’ to launch Windows 7

October 14th, 2009

Microsoft just announced they have teamed up with Fox to deliver a 30-minute ‘Family Guy’ comedy special on November 8. During the special there will be no commercial ad time, no network promotions and no commercial breaks. Just 30-minutes of a Microsoft Windows 7 promotion incorporated into the popular animated comedy.  See the promo clip below:

The show entitled, ‘Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show’ will air Sunday, November 8, at 8:30 p.m. (ET and PT).  Microsoft and Fox also announced plans to put on a 12-week college tour allowing students to try Windows 7 and tying in outdoor-movie nights hosted by the Stewie and Brian.

You may ask yourseld, how much did Microsoft pay ‘Family Guy’ creator Seth MacFarlane to sell out?  Very good question given MacFarlane’s history of parody of Microsoft’s products (clip below).

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Lifecasting startup Zokem lets you share your life automatically

October 12th, 2009

Zokem, a Finnish lifecasting statup, announces global service for their alpha application on multiple platform’s at the recent MindTrek Launchpad in Tampere, Finland.  Zokezokemm’s mobile lifecasting application enables users to automatically share and publish their daily lives through their mobile phones.  Users’ activities and status updates are shared in real time to friends’ mobile phones, and social networking services, such as Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and Facebook.

With apps for the Nokia S60, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile – as well as an app for Java enabled phones – Zokem allows users to easily update their social media information automatically from wherever they may be.  Stay in contact with your network by using the Zokem native app itself or by connecting the app to your favorite social networking site for real time updates.  You can check out the real time updates on the Zokem home page from some of their alpha users – see screen shot below.

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Microsoft creates social media lab

October 9th, 2009

Microsoft has just announced that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, has started mslogo1_thumba new group focused on social computing.  The new group is called the Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, which includes approximately 80 people from Microsoft’s Creative Systems Group, Rich Media Labs and Startup Labs.  Microsoft veteran, Lili Cheng, will run FUSE Labs from Redmond, Wash.

In an e-mail to Microsoft employees Ozzie explains the Labs role:

“Myriad scenarios inozzievolving the notion of ‘social’ have now gone far beyond communications and collaboration and are transforming experiences that are key to our customers and key to our business, in leisure & entertainment; productivity & teamwork; experiences extending how we use the OS itself.


The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices.

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Twitter in talks with Google and Microsoft on real time search

October 8th, 2009

Well that didn’t take long didn’t it?  With the threat of newtwitter_logo_header real time search providers on the horizon, Google and Microsoft (separately of course) are now in talks with Twitter about licensing a full feed from Twitter that would be integrated into their two search engine results.  Twitter would provide both players a rather large and ever growing stream of real time content sharing information for its over 54 million users.

While sources close to the deal a somewhat “tight-lipped”, there have been a number of potential structures implied including various revenue sharing proposals – given Twitter’s recent post-money valuation of $1 billion an acquisition seems unlikely at this point.  Any deal that Twitter would do would most likely be nonexclusive to allowgoogle_logo the growing silicon valley giant to remain independent.

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A new wave of real time search

October 7th, 2009

When we think of search on the web players like Google, Yahoo and Bing site come to mindgoogle_logo.  These players built their search dominance (some more than others) by approaching the web as network of documents that needed to be indexed.  This approach of crawling the web and indexing content and analyzing link behavior has worked for years.

logo-yahooA lot has changed on the web since then.  We now live in an age of real time content and streaming conversations.  In this age, the traditional search players like Google, Yahoo and Bing can’t keep up with the ever-changing content and conversations on the web.  In addition to an army of bloggers (yours truly included) site and services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg, MySpace and many others are adding to the flood of rapidly changinbing-logog content.  The result of this change if that more and more people are searching on these sites and services – as noted by TechCrunch earlier this year.

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