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So the tech and geek crowd is a little underwhelmed by the new $300 million Microsoft advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld that kicked off tonight. It’s mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It’s a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years.

So what’s the deal? In an email we’ve obtained from Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte to all employees, he talks about the goals of the campaign. The overall goal is to inspire consumers and “tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today.” This first phase, he says, “is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.”

The ads are just an icebreaker, he ads, to reintroduce Microsoft to consumers. Later this month they’ll do a deeper dive, which I assume means talking about features.

One thing’s for sure - the ads have sparked conversation. Full text of email is below:

From: Bill Veghte
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 5:37 PM
To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Telling the story of Windows

Since it first launched nearly 25 years ago, Windows has been one of the most successful products in the history of the high tech industry. As we set our sights on the next 25 years, it is essential that we deliver incredible offerings on a great platform. We must also tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today. We must inspire consumers with the promise of what Windows uniquely makes possible across the PC, phone and web.

Telling our story means making significant investments to improve the way consumers experience Windows. To that end, we are focused on making improvements at practically every consumer touch point, from the moment they hear about the Windows brand in our advertising to how they learn more about Windows products online; from how they view Windows and try it at retail to how they use the entire range of Windows offerings – Windows Vista, Windows Mobile and Windows Live – across their whole life.

Today, we are kicking off a highly visible advertising campaign. The first phase of this campaign is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity. The first in this series of television ads airs initially in the U.S., and it aims to re-ignite consumer excitement about the broader value of Windows. The first television spot aired on NBC during the opening game of the NFL season and will be seen throughout the evening on various primetime programs. Worldwide, you can view this first TV spot at http://msw.

This first set of ads features Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Think of these ads as an icebreaker to reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context. Later this month, as the campaign moves into its next phase, we’ll go much deeper in telling the Windows story and celebrating what it can do for consumers at work, at play and on-the-go. At that time, I’ll be back to share more information about our plans to further strengthen the bond between consumers and Windows – one of the most amazing products, businesses and brands of all time, and, with the right tenacity, passion and agility from all of us, a story that has many great chapters to come.

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Dropbox is one of those infuriating startups that just won’t show us much of what they’re up to beyond the basic user experience (see video). We first saw them at Y Combinator demo day in August 2007, and talked to them again in March when they went into private beta.

It looks like Sequoia was on them fast though. Last September, we’ve learned, the company raised a small $1.2 million round of financing from the fund, making it Sequoia’s second known investment in a YCombinator company (the other is Loopt).

Expect more news on Dropbox in the next week or two.

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There are few things more hilariously hopeless than watching someone play a modern video game for the first time: their targeting cursors wobble aimlessly across the screen, unleashing a stream of bullets that manage to hit everything but their target. And amid their cries of frustration and accusations of cheating, they seem to inevitably come to one conclusion: “this game sucks”.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is bad for the industry, as a bad experience can turn off a fledgling gamer from gaming entirely. And while developers do everything they can to make their games as accessible as possible to novices (or newbies, as they’re often called), nothing can make up for the years of experience many of today’s gamers have under their belts. At least, until now.

Meet GamerTrainer, a new startup that offers in-game tutoring sessions online across a variety of today’s most popular games. For $30 an hour (or less if purchased in bulk), you can have a private lesson with one of the site’s official GamerTrainers, all of whom have years of experience in the games they’re teaching.

At launch supported games include:

• Battlefield: Bad Company™
• Call of Duty 4®: Modern Combat™
• Guitar Hero® III and Rock Band™
• Halo® 2 and 3
• Madden NFL 09
• Rainbow Six® Vegas 1 and 2
• Super Smash Bros.® Brawl
• World of Warcraft

GamerTrainer has a great idea, and could easily be a hit if it can get enough exposure - in fact, it is a business model that the industry may want to consider embracing. In the days before the internet, gaming systems offered dedicated phone “hint lines”, which gamers could call whenever they ran into trouble (for only a few dollars a minute). Since then, games have become far more complex - written tips no longer suffice, and the barrier to entry has been raised. It’s in the industry’s best interest to help prospective gamers as much as possible, and private tutorials could easily be very lucrative way to increase a game’s user base.

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Yahoo’s already crushed stock price has fallen further today - its down 8.36% since this morning, bringing it to a nearly five year low of $17.75. Yahoo has been as high as $34 in the last year (thanks to that Microsoft takeover bid), which means nearly $23 billion has been taken out of shareholder pockets in that period.

How long can Jerry weather this storm? Is he willing to drive the company into the ground to prove how much he hates Microsoft?

Plans must be in place at the board level to name a successor soon. In fact, I’m guessing some arrangement was made with Carl Icahn when he agreed to back off his proxy fight before the Yahoo shareholder meeting last month. If the stock price continues to fall, Yang will be forced to step down sooner (at least, any sane public company would remove him, Yahoo has not shown much sanity this year).

We’re still betting on Dan Rosensweig, who left Yahoo in December 2006, to come back. In June we named him as a possible successor should Yang bail out. Our guess is he’d take the job if asked.

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Until today Google was saying Google Analytics would not track Chrome usage for some time. Today they added Chrome tracking, allowing site owners to see how many of their users are coming to the site from the Chrome Browser.

Clicky continues to track Chrome usage in the 2-3% range across its 45,000 sites. Use of Chrome among TechCrunch readers is much higher: 6.23% since Tuesday, making it the fourth most popular browser among TechCrunch readers after Firefox, IE and Safari.

Nearly all the market share was taken from IE. Firefox actually gained almost 2% share in the last two days, and Safari was up more than 1%. IE, though, dropped from 30.77% to 23.92%. Compare our previous chart without Chrome to this, taken a few minutes ago:

The fact that a large percentage of readers are using Chrome doesn’t surprise me, given how many early adopter types read this blog. But i expected these users to be bailing on Firefox, not IE. If they hadn’t switched away from IE after four years of Firefox being around, it seems odd that they would jump ship now.

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280 North, the Y Combinator-backed startup that brought you slideshow maker 280 Slides, has released a programming language and set of frameworks collectively known as Cappuccino that can be used to create rich web applications in the same way you’d create desktop applications for MacOS X.

Like SproutCore, which powers Apple’s MobileMe, Cappuccino seeks to replicate the functionality of Cocoa, a native application programming environment for MacOS X. But unlike SproutCore, Cappuccino doesn’t expect its developers to know any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - the languages used traditionally for standards-based web development.

Rather, Cappuccino implements a language called Objective-J that mimics the Objective-C language used by Cocoa developers. While this poses a learning curve for many existing web developers, it eases the transition to the web for many desktop developers. There are other advantages to basing things in Objective-J as well: advancements in the Cappuccino frameworks don’t wait for the slow emergence of new standards, developers only deal with one language, and Cappuccino comes with useful language features simply not available in JavaScript.

Ultimately, Cappuccino intends to facilitate and speed up the development of rich web applications - ones that look and feel like desktop applications. For example, it helps with creating apps that have drag ‘n drop, copy and paste, undo and redo, and document saving functionality. If you can do something with Cocoa when developing for MacOS X, you can probably do it with Cappuccino as well.

Cappuccino is being provided as open source software under the lesser general public license. The 280 North team intends to spend more of its time on Cappuccino rather than 280 Slides going forward, although it does plan to continue releasing updates to that product. You can read more about 280 North and how Cappuccino compares to SproutCore in this Ars Technica interview from June.

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TimeBridge, the service that allows users to collaboratively determine when to schedule their meetings, has released a WAP mobile version of its site alongside a plugin adding iCal support. The iCal plugin is currently in private beta, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to go here will be able to partipate (enter the password “techcrunch”).

TimeBridge, which we reviewed last August, tries to take the hassle out of arranging meetings by eliminating the long email threads that often result whenever more than a few people try to schedule something. The site employs a voting system, allowing users to select a number of times they’d be able to make, and the system chooses the most agreeable slot. Besides iCal, TimeBridge also supports integration with Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar.

In conjunction with the new releases, TimeBridge has also announced that it has hit the 100,000 user milestone. While this represents only a tiny fraction of the site’s possible market, it is still an impressive gain in a space where many companies are set in their tried-and-true habits. There are a number of other players in this space, including Jiffle, which we covered in April, and Tungle (reviewed here).

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Today marks DreamIt Ventures’ first Funding Day, during which the new startup incubator will introduce a dozen new companies to a collection of founders and venture capitalists. DreamIt is a program in the same vein as Y Combinator and TechStars, offering startups seed funding, guidance, and connections in exchange for equity. We’ve written brief introductions to each of the startups, which you can view below:

SCVNGR: SCVNGR is a promising startup that allows users to create mobile games without any technical knowhow. The games are free to play from any cell phone, and don’t require a download. SCVNGR games are ideal for group activities, like school orientations, corporate team building, and promotions.

Vuzit: Vuzit offers an embeddable document viewer, allowing users to include documents in their web pages and blogposts. Very similar functionality by Scribd and Docstoc, but Vuzit is aiming to become a tool for individuals and companies who are interested in managing access to their content instead of a destination portal.

Phrazit: Phrazit condenses reviews down to 30 characters or less by allowing users to create tag clouds for just about anything. Users submit words or phrases associated with each word, with the most popular results displayed in a large font. For example, the Phrazit for Harry Potter describes the series as “Bloody Awesome”. You can see our full review of Phrazit from last month here.

DropCard: DropCard hopes to be a solution to the problems that plague business cards (namely, you don’t always have them with you, and they’re practically useless if you have too many of them). DropCard remedies this issue by asking users to text their new acquantince’s email address to a 41411, which will send their contact information and ask them to repicrocate by signing up and sending theirs. For a similar service, see Rmbrme.

BeanStockd: BeanStockd is a news site and media company hoping to further bring the green and enviornmental movements to the public’s attention. The site currently features a blog, and also plans to release a web-based game, which users can advance on by participating in real-world green activities.

InterviewBest: InterviewBest helps users prepare for their job interviews by generating printed presentations that can be used during their interviews. The site also helps users write their post-interview follow-up letters. InterviewBest will offer a trial version, and will generate revenue with a paid subscription plan.

Anthillz: Anthillz asks professionals to review their colleagues, which can be used as a “social pitch” for future job applications. In order to request a review from one of your colleagues, you have to write a review about them first - a design that may help the site increase its content, but may also lead to inaccurate or careless reviews.

Sleep.fm: A self-described “social alarm clock”, Sleep.FM allows users to set their alarm and have their friends leave messages which will wake them up in lieu of a standard buzzer. The site also promises to allow users to set up “smart” alarms, such as a weather report or a notification if a flight has been delayed.

SnackFeed: SnackFeed indexes premium video content on the web and tries to ascertain which shows will interest you the most. The site also intends to offer an activity feed for video, allowing you to see what videos your friends have uploaded or watched.

TapInko: TapInko looks to simply the often time consuming process of purchasing ad space in the real world. The site plans to offer users a variety of ad placement options, including newspapers, restaurant walls, vehicles, or even as a tattoo on someone else’s body part (who had previously put a portion of their skin up for sale).

Trendient: Trendient is positioning itself as a promotions and sales intelligence solution for the long tail of e-tailers, who may not have the time or resources to track such data themselves. Details at this point are slim, as the site is currently in alpha testing.

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There have been a number of timed and anecdotal speed tests performed on Google Chrome over the last couple of days.

My personal testing: Chrome is the fastest browser I have ever used. More structured TechCrunch testing showed similar results: It’s fast. Here are what others came up with:

CNET agrees, but their approach was biased towards Google. Chrome came out way ahead in a suite of Javascript benchmark tests. The only problem is that Google hosts the tests and flat out says they tuned their V8 Javascript engine around them. The test does show Chrome coming out way ahead of other browsers (for me, Chrome had a score of 403 v. IE7’s 18). Try it out for yourself.

And also try the SunSpider Javascript benchmark test as well. Firefox’s new build, which runs the TraceMonkey engine, comes in marginally faster than Chrome there.

Today Yahoo’s Zimbra team also published their own test results based on how well different browsers ran the Javascript-heavy Zimbra web application. No surprise: Chrome beat the pants off of Firefox and (especially) IE8. But…Safari came in slightly ahead of Chrome.

So Is Chrome the fastest browser? Who knows. It clearly runs Javascript, at least, very well. But more important than these speed tests is Google’s build on Mac and Linux. A lot of users are still sitting on the sidelines, waiting to try it out.

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Geni founder David Sacks has said all along that he wants to create a single family tree for the whole world. Based on some usage stats the company will announce on Thursday, they’re moving towards that goal: over a million unique visitors in August (growth has been steady).

And the biggest family tree at Geni now has over 680,000 profiles and 40,000 users (profiles include deceased family members).

A key feature driving big trees is the ability to merge smaller ones, which can create a snowball effect. Prior to the release of the merge feature, Geni’s largest tree was just 35,000 profiles.

Geni now allows users to upload photos and videos, arrange family calendars, etc. As we said over a year ago, the site is clearly aiming to be the family-centered social network:

Geni won’t be successful if all they can do is get people to add themselves and a couple of relatives and then rarely revisit the site. They want viral growth and the kind of big page view numbers that the large social networks see - up to 20 per day per visitor. To get there they’re adding a few proven features to the site. And by adding these features, they are essentially creating a social network with the family, as well as family friends, as the core. There’s a direct analogy to facebook - instead of colleges and universities, Geni is focusing on family units.

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Ponoko ID is a new service from Ponoko that allows customers to “bid” on projects that they’d like to have build. As you probably recall, Ponoko.com is a rapid prototyping/design service that allows you to upload, build, and assemble projects to your exacting specifications.

Rather than making customers to design their own items, Ponoko ID allows customers to request a certain project and describe it in general terms without having to draw or design anything - although image links are encouraged. Designers then bid on the project and the customer and designer decide on pricing and distribution.

Shoppers use the new service to post requests for custom-made individualized goods. Requests are sent to a selection of Ponoko’s pool of more than 10,000 members who then have the chance to put forward a bid to make the item.

Ponoko Chief Strategy Officer Derek Elley says Ponoko ID is a way for shoppers and designers to collaborate to create something unique and special. “What’s exciting is that Ponoko ID makes getting something made just for you as easy as sending an email,” he says. “Shoppers no longer have to accept ‘one size fits all’ mass produced goods but can now save a bunch of money to get their ideas turned into reality by expert designers worldwide.”

Ponoko originally - and fairly obviously - suffered from the too many customers/not enough product problem. Hopefully this new matching system will fill up the Ponoko shelves with cool - and commissioned - goodies.

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