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Microsoft Ads: First Phase To “Engage Consumers, Spark Conversation”
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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Wixi’s Media-Centric Social Webtop Launches To The Public
Wixi, the social filesharing network that debuted at TechCrunch40, has finally been released to the public. The site offers a media-centric virtual desktop that allows users to play their media files from any computer that supports Flash, and also serves as a service for file sharing between friends. Any users that sign up by October 1 will get unlimited storage for life, while members joining after that date will need to pay $5 a month for the privilege (though they will still be able to get a free account with a 3GB limit).
After creating a profile on the site, users upload their media files to their desktop, which they can then categorize using a familiar drag-and-drop folder system. Each file can be streamed from any computer that supports Flash from within the service’s media player. Users can also browse through files through the site’s search feature or their friends profiles, and when they find something they like, they can save it to their virtual desktop for future reference. However, you will only be able to stream this content - you won’t be able to download a file unless you were the original uploader.
Beyond Wixi’s standard web interface, there’s also an iPhone version of the site available at http://www.iphone.wixi.com, with plans to expand to more platforms like Nintendo’s Wii in the future.
Wixi was initially planning to launch to the public months ago - but it quickly became obvious that the service was facing some glaring piracy issues. The site was originally going to let users share all of their media with public, allowing strangers to peruse their files at will. Unsurprisingly, a large number of copyrighted films were quickly posted to Wixi’s servers, all of which could be easily streamed for free after conducting a simple search.
Wixi has since addressed most of these issues, though some copyright holders may still take issue with the service. Files greater than 100 MB are now restricted from public sharing - you’ll have to be someone’s friend if you want to stream a large file from their account, which makes movie sharing difficult. But that doesn’t solve all of Wixi’s problems: copyright owners will still object to letting even a small group of friends stream movies to eachother. And everyone will still be able stream smaller files like TV shows or music from anywhere, which will still make Wixi a lawsuit target.
While it will likely face a number of legal battles, I like Wixi. The site is an intuitive alternative to filesharing services like RapidShare or the standard Email route, and its interface is very polished. The mobile access is a nice touch too, allowing users to access their music and videos when they’re away from a computer.
For another web desktop, check out Stixy, which is more concerned with online document collaboration than file sharing.
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Secretive Storage Company Dropbox Took Sequoia Funding in 2007
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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First Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld Advertisement. Where’s The Microsoft?
Those Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft advertisements started today. CrunchGear’s Doug Aamoth recorded the first ad during the Giants/Redskins game and put it up on the site. This is reportedly a $300 million ad spend. Seinfeld gets $10 million.
It’s a cute and cuddly situation comedy about shoes. Has a couple of moments. No mention of Microsoft or Windows other than “are they ever going to come out with something that will make our computers moist and chewy like cake so we can just eat them while working?” A butt wiggle by Gates followed. Overall, I give this a 0/10.
These ads can’t be all tech or they’ll lose the audience. But I can’t imagine this will sell software, either.
Update: Microsoft email to all employees about the ads is here.
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Can’t Survive The World Of Warcraft? Get A Private Game Tutor
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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Mobile VoIP Startup iSkoot Buys Social.im
Pushing beyond its mobile Skype service, iSkoot has purchased social.im, and instant messaging client that let’s you IM all of your Facebook friends. iSkoot already has a partnership with Skype to bring the VoIP service to mobile phones, including Skype-branded mobile phones in other countries. With social.im, it will add a Web-based IM service that taps into your social network.
Social.im was a promising service, until Facebook launched its own IM feature. The play here for iSkoot is to bring that social IM functionality to its mobile client (as well as news and other information).
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. iSkoot has raised $13 million from investors including Khosla ventures and Charles River Ventures.
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Yahoo Stock Falls Off The Cliff. When Will Jerry Give Up?
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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Hulu vs. Amazon: Amazon Never Stood A Chance
Since Amazon released its video on demand service earlier today, I’ve pored over each and every section of the site to determine if it has what it takes to supplant Hulu as the best online video service providing professional network content. And after doing just that, I’ve quickly realized that it doesn’t.
Amazon has done all it can to solidify its stance in the online video market. First, it launched its Unbox service to compete with film streaming and now it has tried to compete in on-demand streaming of TV shows and movies. And by making TV shows and movies available online to be streamed directly to your computer, it’s quickly becoming apparent that Amazon is not necessarily focusing all its attention on iTunes, but on what it perceives to be the next frontier in video: online streaming.
Selection
Amazon is quick to point out that the videos it offers on its new service don’t have ads breaking into the flow of the shows. But that is because you have to pay $1.99 for each TV episode. Granted, Amazon’s VOD service does have some free shows — I watched 30 Rock a few times — but the list of free shows is laughable, compared to the sheer number of paid shows.
So is it even fair to compare a paid service to a free one? Sure it is. Right now, for instance, Hulu is offering five episodes of The Office for free on its site with just a handful of commercials in each. I tried playing those same shows on Amazon to see if I could stream them for free on its service and was presented with a banner telling me I needed to buy the show after just 2 minutes of viewing.
If you’re fine with paying for TV shows, you’ll be happy to know that Amazon’s offering has quite a few — it claims it has over 40,000 movies and TV shows available. In fact, practically every episode from each season of every show in Amazon’s VOD service is available for purchase. I was pleased to see that I could choose from a slew of networks like TV Land and NBC. So Amazon lives up to its name in terms of breadth of selection. But there was something frustrating about the fact that so few shows had a free stream available, given all the free TV to be found on the Web.
Experience
Overall, the Amazon VOD experience is quite similar to Hulu: you pick a network from the links on the left column, choose your show, and find your episode. The picture quality of the videos I watched were highly-detailed and I was pleasantly surprised by Amazon’s decision to offer such a large display instead of the somewhat smaller screens found on Hulu.
That said, the actual video playback was suspect at times and the video streams would skip too often. That may be the result of all the attention Amazon’s VOD is receiving today, but so far, I haven’t seen any improvements. I also didn’t like that the video playback screens were too cluttered with extras. The pages feature all the episodes below the video. And Amazon’s ubiquitous recommendation engine picks underneath only muddies an otherwise clean screen.
Are no commercials worth it?
The main selling points of Amazon’s Video On Demand service are that it doesn’t have commercials, it has a slew of shows available and the picture quality is superb.But the streaming is choppy, the site layout is suspect, and some of the same content is available elsewhere for free.
Even though Hulu commercials can annoy me when I’m excited to see what happens next on The Office, I’ve never realized until now just how much I prefer them to shelling outcash for what is often a hit-or-miss experience. I don’t mind paying for a show I enjoy, but $1.99 seems a bit steep for one episode and if it’s being played for free on Hulu, I’m not sure why I would even consider using Amazon’s service.
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Docstoc Brings ‘My Documents’ Replacement To The Web
Docstoc, the professional document network, has launched a pair of new features that help transition the site from primarily a document sharing platform to a personal document archive as well. The features, dubbed MyDocs and Sync, allow users to quickly upload their files to the web, where they can be quickly accessed from any computer that supports the ubiquitous Flash plugin.
MyDocs is essentially a dashboard for users’ documents, not unlike an online version of Windows’ My Documents folder. Users can skim through their files as thumbnails, search by keyword, sort each document into online folders, and modify each doc’s privacy settings. Most impressive is MyDoc’s Preview feature, which allows users to rapidly skim through full versions of their documents using Docstoc’s Flash-based Document viewer. In Preview mode, Docstoc displays a list of thumbnails down a sidebar and presents the document itself as part of the main window, allowing users to quickly browse through their documents. In practice this worked surprisingly well - documents opened within a few seconds (oftentimes faster than they would on the desktop), making MyDocs a viable alternative to the traditional My Documents Folder.
As part of today’s release Docstoc is also launching a new Sync client, which is available for Windows and Mac. The client runs in the background, automatically detecting changes in files in designated folders on the desktop machine and uploading them to MyDocs. Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar says that Sync isn’t meant as a replacement from the many backup sites already on the web. Instead, it’s meant to help keep Docstoc’s MyDocs section populated with the most up-to-date documents, so users can quickly browse their files from any computer on the web.
As part of Sync, Docstoc is also including a “My Public Documents” folder, which further streamlines the site’s document upload process. To upload a document, users need only drag their files into the special folder, and sync will automatically upload the doc to the user’s linked Docstoc profile.
Docstoc made its debut at TechCrunch40 and launched in October 2007. Since then, the site has grown to 200,000 registered users and sees around 2 million visitors monthly. Docstoc’s primary competitor is Scribd, a document sharing community with a similar Flash-based file viewer.
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Google Analytics Now Tracks Chrome. Our Share: 6.23%
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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Election ‘08 for iPhone Offers Up-to-the-minute Political Info
After so long in gestation, the 2008 election season has actually kind of snuck up on me. And what with the App store being released, I thought there would be a ton of politically-orientated apps out there. Incredibly, there are virtually none, and certainly none this cool. You can track polls, electoral vote estimates and so on based on live data, and organize it by state, candidate, percentage and all that. It even has historical data built-in so you can look at trends. Best of all, it’s nonpartisan. Whether you’re an Obamanaut or McCainicon, the data is presented to your liking and without comment (Independents are out of luck, as usual). The link is here and unfortunately it does cost money: you’ll soon be 99 cents closer to the poorhouse.
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Cappuccino Brings Cocoa-Like Programming To The Web
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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Box.net Gets Spot on Dell’s New Mini Laptop; We Have Five to Give Away
Online file storage and sharing service Box.net is helping to put the “cloud” in Dell’s first netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9.
With only 4GB of built-in hard drive space, Dell needed some way to boost capacity. So it placed a default Box icon on the desktop that leads to 2GB of free internet storage (twice the normal 1GB that Box provides for free).
Right now, that icon is just a shortcut to Box’s website where users can sign up for the service. The Palo Alto-based startup has suggested, however, that a deeper level of desktop integration is in the works.
Don’t want to cough up $350 for one of these little guys? Box has offered to give away five of them for free to our readers. Each will come with 25GB of Box storage.
To win one, tell us in the comments why you need an ultraportable laptop. We’ll pick the five best reasons and email to follow up, so make sure to submit your real email address.
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TimeBridge’s Collaborative Scheduler Goes Mobile, Now Supports iCal
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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Cake Financial Pushes A New Social Stock Index: The Cakedex. Can It Beat The S&P 500?
One year after it launched at TechCrunch40, Cake Financial is rolling out a new design today with a load of new features. One of the most interesting is a new stock index called the Cakedex that is based on the top 100 holdings of the top performing investors on the social investing site. Over the past five and half years, the Cakedex would have outperformed the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, and the Nasdaq. Although, over the past 90 days, it has been underperforming the major stock indexes. Next year, the company plans to launch an exchange-traded fund based on the Cakedex so that people can actually invest in it. Can the top investors on Cake do better than the market?
The Cakedex was actually introduced in May, but is now integrated into Cake’s new design timed with its first birthday. Cake members track the performance of their actual brokerage accounts and share that data with each other. Cake can now tap into 60 different brokerage services, up from a dozen or so. And has now tracked over one million transactions.
In addition to Cakedex, other new features include:
Cake Take: A stock rating system updated several times a day, based on the real-time buying and selling of stocks by Cake’s members. Cake has ratings for 2,033 stocks, mutual funds and ETfs (versus 3,069 for Schwab and 4,074 for Morningtsar).
Cake Scout: A stock recommendation system that uses collaborative filtering to show you what other Cake members with similar holdings and risk profiles are buying and selling. Each recommendation includes the Cake Take stock rating.
By adding these social recommendation features, Cake is becoming more like the Last.fm of investing. But it adds a ranking element so you know which members are worth following. Other social investing startups creating similar ranking systems include Covestor and Vestopia, and the race is on to create real financial products based on the social investing data that these startups are collecting.
Cake now has “tens of thousands of members,” according to CEO Steve Carpenter and is collectively tracking about $1 billion worth of assets. But the Cakedex is based only on the holdings of the top 10 percent of members. The biggest equities that make up the Cakedex are:
Apple
Visa
Google
Berkshire Hathaway
Oracle
Amazon
Washington Mutual
Intel
Research In Motion
General Electric
But how good are Cake’s top 10 percent beyond what is goes into the Cakedex? The average Cake member’s portfolio is down 9.84 percent over the past 12 months, while that of the average top-ten-percenter is up 7.41 percent. (YTD it is -12.39 percent versus -5.59 percent, respectively). So not bad. Maybe there is some wisdom in this crowd. Here are comparisons for other time periods:
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DreamIt Incubator Holds Funding Day To Commemorate First Graduating Class
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.
