(photo courtesy of Ed Bott’s ZDNet Arcticle)
Back in May I highlighted an article I had read in FastCompany regarding a new advertising campaign coming from Microsoft from Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Ed Bott stumbled across the above image on Microsoft.com eluding to the new campaign. This is the first artifact I’ve seen and so far I can admit I’m still excited. Apparently it’s a “fight back” campaign and it’s something Microsoft needs and deserves to put forth. They’re doing great things in computing and the Apple ads are just killing them in public perception. I’d love to see some PC makers step up their designs and hopefully this campaign will give them reason to invest in stronger brands.
Probably my favorite part of working at IdentityMine is the chance to work with truly awesome peeps who I consider not just coworkers but friends and family. If you ever get a chance to grab a meal or just have a conversation with Robby DO IT. Robby used to blog on notstatic.com but recently he relaunched his blog at www.nerdplusart.com. It’s a collection of his blog posts and WPF/Silverlight tools, talks, tips, tricks etc etc. Where have you heard nerd+art before? Well Robby and Nathan did a talk at MIX08 this spring with the same title. You can read more about the blog and Robby over on his intro post and about page.
(original photo from smenzel on flickr)
Ryan Stewart had a post this morning with fresh stats on the always popular Flashburgers Penetration #. Numbers like % installation and number of downloads are always so foreign to me unless I have a comparison. % is a little easier to visualize but 8 billion/million etc downloads per X always needs a comparison to give it scope. Back at MIX Microsoft checked in with 1.5 million Silverlight installs per day. An update to that number would be great and more importantly I’d love to see a bit of analytics around how much of an increase the new Silverlight Olympics site accounts for.
Kudos to Adobe for working with Google and Yahoo! to make Flash more searchable (Ryan Stewart’s original post on the topic). I really believe it has been a barrier to entry for creating RIA in that users miss out on a lot of Googlejuice etc. I’m disappointed the Live Search wasn’t included in the announcement. Ever since Microsoft bought aQuantive I have had a skewed view of everything Search. This is all about better advertising data.
I’m completely fascinated by the arms race that is currently going on between Google and Microsoft in the Advertising business. Anything Toolbar, Search, Web related ALL has an advertising play in it. With this announcement Google’s advertising tools now have an extra feature which allows advertisers to better target pages with Flash RIA’s embedded in them.
Microsoft has done a good job of integrating DoubleClick functionality in Silverlight and it makes me wonder if this could have happened AFTER Google bought DoubleClick. Personally I am glad to see this happening as I would love to see better targeted ads. I’m also glad to see a large player like Microsoft invest so heavily in this space as I think it will ensure Google is constantly working to better their technology and advance the industry as a whole.
In the June 2008 Expression Newsletter Microsoft announced the availability of the Expression Professional Subscription. At $999 it’s basically a turn key solution for turning any hardware box into an Expression ready machine, including a MAC. What caught my eye was the inclusion of Parallels Desktop for Mac. I feel that Expression continues to do things correctly as far as being open to the designer community. Everything from product packaging to their web design is a departure from Microsoft’s developer oriented feel. At just version 2 I think both Expression and Silverlight is coming on strong. I just hope the Expression team continues to do what’s right and fight the good fight internally. The full list of what is included in Expression Professional Subscription is:
Expression Professional Subscription Includes
- Expression® Studio
- Visual Studio® Standard
- Office Standard
- Office Visio® Professional
- Windows® XP
- Windows Vista® Business Edition
- Virtual PC
- Parallels Desktop for Mac
- Pre-configured virtualized server environments
Had a super busy last few weeks in that I was on a vacation for a week and then did a quick weekend trip up to Seattle for Thingamajiggr and BarCampSeattle. Now that I’m back in the groove I will start posting regularly again soon. Thanks all!
Last weekend I was able to hit up the Union St. Festival with my brother and sister in SF. While cruising the stands we ran across Ork Posters. I’ve seen these before somewhere but was reminded how cool they are. It’s a perfect balance of clean lines and great looking art with a local feel and flavor. Right now they have Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, Manhattan and San Francisco.
Even though I would never buy the Pontiac G8 advertised I LOVED the advertisement utilizing Spy Hunter as a theme. Spy Hunter was a staple of my life and I actually wondered a few times when seeing the original commercial “How’d they do that”. Now there is a behind-the-scenes movie available which shows quite a bit of how it was made.
Head on over to Autoblog to check it out (link)
As part of the upcoming SilverlightDevCampSeattle get together we asked for participants to submit logos. We received four entries and the poll is currently up over on www.silverlightdevcampseattle.com.
Voting ends June 11, 2008 at 11:59PM PST.
When Expression Studio 2 shipped back on May 1 the first thing I did was run over the MSDN to grab the new Blend and Web builds. Unfortunately they didn’t immediately post to MSDN. It looks like the builds were posted on 5/27. In the meantime we got by using the 30 day trial until these were posted.
