OK, I will be the first to admit that I am mildly interested in spam. I usually actually read it. In the end, it is a form of marketing, be it an unsympathetic and clumsy one.
Usually I get the point, too. Most of the time it’s not that hard: get this fake Rolex, buy a fake university degree, use these pills and you will grow pornstar genitals, etc, etc. I get the picture.
Microsoft recently launched the “I am a PC” ad campaign. Click here to check it out. What I like about is that it gets to the root of what is good about PC’s. But let’s take one step back. Basically, this campaign is really about Apple vs. Microsoft, or, on a hardware level, Mac vs. PC. A response in the discussion that was originally started by Apple’s “Hi, I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” TV commercial campaign that ran in America, featuring a hip young kid as a Mac and a boring guy with a tie as a PC.
Internet geeks like fashion too. It’s just not about clothes, but about technology. Joost was really in fashion 18 months ago, when they launched a flashy full-screen video program that you had to download to see their “Internet TV” shows. Distribution would be helped by the peer-to-peer exchange of video data between users, theoretically offering great viewing quality. There would be social stuff. Almost everyone loved it and there was a run on beta invitations.
Microsoft has shown a new interactive television application developed in co-operation with the BBC for the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. Building on red button interactive television, the BBC iPlayer and the BBC web site, it offers access to web style material on the TV through an intuitive interface.
The concept demonstration of the BBC service suggests how news, sport and weather information could be presented on the TV set using the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. The result is more like a modern web experience than a traditional interactive television service, using the broadband connection to good effect. Mediaroom is currently being deployed in he United Kingdom by BT Vision, the interactive TV offering from British Telecom.
This is just an awesome example of a company dealing with a user posting a video online about their product.
As a response to a Youtube video about a glitch in Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the “glitch” Levinator25 thought he found in the game, may not be a glitch at all.
Brilliant marketing, this is how to deal with the social web and step into a conversation. EA definitely gets it :)
Things are tough if you run a record label these days. Apple owns somewhere between 85 and 95% of the total market for selling music online - but it is not paying much to the record labels. The label’s margins are just cents per download, while Apple sits firmly in the top 10 best-selling retailers online, having sold more than 5 billion songs in iTunes. “The iTunes Store became the largest music retailer in the U.S. based on the amount of music sold during January and February 2008,” according to Apple. That is not just the largest download store, but iTunes is the largest music seller in the USA. Selling a database of 8 million tracks that are “owned” by the labels, but of which they see little return from Apple. That’s total dependence.
Self-release
And then there is the threatening trend that artists Read on…
Today, Google leaked the plans for Google Chrome, a browser from Google. Details about the secret project were sent into the world when a comic book introducing the new, open source browser was sent out early. The comic is now publicly available — you can find it here. Google will be launching the beta version of the Google Chrome browser on September 2nd in more than 100 countries.
Why Google Chrome?
The Google reply to this is: “Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.” We may be in for some real innovation, since “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser”. I’m holding my breath :)
OK, I will be the first to admit that I am mildly interested in spam. I usually actually read it. In the end, it is a form of marketing, be it an unsympathetic and clumsy one. 
Internet geeks like fashion too. It’s just not about clothes, but about technology. 
Microsoft has shown a new interactive television application developed in co-operation with the BBC for the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. Building on red button interactive television, the BBC iPlayer and the BBC web site, it offers access to web style material on the TV through an intuitive interface.
Today, Google leaked the plans for Google Chrome, a browser from Google. Details about the secret project were sent into the world when a comic book introducing the new, open source browser was sent out early. The comic is now publicly available — you can find it