Archive for January, 2007
January 12, 2007 at 11:45 pm ·
Filed under Games, Video
Last Tuesday I was on national television to give a bit of a demo of Second Life, the virtual world. It was quite the experience to have a director, a reporter/researcher, a camera guy and a sound guy in a cosy room at my house. Friday night they’ve spent about three hours here, and Saturday they were back from 2pm til 7pm. All this time they were asking question, filming and waiting for Second Life to load. All these hours of film resulted in a clip of about 8 minutes, and in that clip two fellow bloggers (and marketeer-friends) were also interviewed. I think it was a nice demo, and I’m glad they didn’t cut it down to ‘dating and sex’, because there’s a lot more to Second Life than just that. I’m too lazy to get it subtitled at the moment, because I’ve had a busy week and it’s a clip with a lot of talking. I’ll break it down in a few phrases for you.
First there’s an intro with some fast facts about second life, then the journalists demonstrate how they’ve created the first Belgian reporter in Second Life. Then I take over and show off my property a bit, while talking about the stuff you can do in the virtual world. Then Clo Willaerts, the marketing manager from Skynet talks about communities and places SL in the world of people like a pub or ‘the movies’, on the third place in the people’s lives. (school/work, home & and a third leisure spot). Bert Van Wassenhove, Manager of “One Agency”, talks about SL as a channel to reach out to consumers, and then there’s a piece about pr0n and escorts and some footage of clubs and fun things to do.
“Koppen” (translated: Heads), the program that featured this documentary, has a reach of app. 850.000 pairs of eyeballs. Not bad at all for a first time appearance on TV. It’s not really a big deal, but rather more of a nice experience.
Monday at noon, a reporter from StudioBrussel, a popular radio station, is coming to my work at Microsoft for an interview for her show as well. It’ll be aired on Tuesday, but I don’t know the time yet.
The clip above is take from Robin’s Marketingblog.eu, but since he uploaded it to YouTube and I don’t blog YouTube clips… I uploaded it to DailyMotion.
Cross-posted on Marketing Thoughts
January 11, 2007 at 2:42 pm ·
Filed under PR, Buzz, Video
There’s an internal Live Search promotion that started early this week. The Live team has sponsored a race car for the 24-hours of Daytona race on January 27th and 28th as part of an internal branding and trial campaign for Live Search. The car is racing for Team Seattle, a local motor sports charity that raises money for Children’s Hospital. They get a lot of coverage in the local press, will be featured on Evening Magazine, and will be making a lot of noise (both literal and figurative) on campus over the next two weeks with images of the Live Search car on posters, ½ size cardboard cut-outs of the car, mail-box inserts and even some in-person appearance by the Team Seattle show car.
In concert with the sponsorship of the car, they’ve have also created a click-for-the-cause site that went live on Monday. For each Live Search query that is done from this site (http://teamseattle.live.com) between now and Jan 30th, an additional dollar will be added to our donation to Children’s Hospital (with a maximum of $25,000). While this site is accessible externally, the goal is to promote it internally and use it as a way to get Microsoft employees, friends and family to try Live Search.
If you’re up to it, you can sponsor the Live Search car and Team Seattle (details here.) The more successful the overall Team Seattle fundraising efforts are, the more exposure Live Search will get at the race and at the post race check presentation.
You can follow coverage of the race on a special MSN Autos site that also went live on Monday. The race will be covered on the Speed Channel, and more details still need to follow as the race nears. Stay tuned!
More on TeamSeattle
January 9, 2007 at 12:52 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, CES
Sunday night I stayed up late to watch the CES keynote of Microsoft. At 3.45am it finally started and I don’t regret staying up for it. Obviously you must’ve read elsewhere already what has been said there, but here’s a small recap. The annual Las Vegas event allowed Bill Gates to showcase the tremendous innovation and progress there’s been made with Windows Vista, Windows Live and the 2007 Office system, while Robert Bach highlighted the success this holiday with selling Xbox 360, Zune, Games for Windows, and other Microsoft products.
Microsoft also unveiled offerings, including IPTV on Xbox 360, which will combine the best-in-class gaming platform with the best-in-class Microsoft IPTV Edition software. This new solution represents a shining example of Microsoft’s vision around “Connected Entertainment” and will ultimately provide consumers gaming, TV, movies, and more through their Xbox 360 console.
Gates also announced the launch of Windows Home Server, which will make it easier for people with multiple PCs and devices to store, protect, and share their expanding collections of digital documents, photographs, music, and videos. He also introduced “Sync.” Based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford Sync is an updatable, smart and safe solution for connecting your car with your life that will appear in new Ford automobiles later this year.
Here’s a 1 hour 16 minute clip from the keynote:
Then on Monday morning I had to go to the city hall to apply for a digital passport so I can travel to the TechReady event in Seattle in February. It took a while before it was all done, you know how that goes… taking a number and waiting in line… then dealing with the fastness of administration. Anyways, I arrived at the office at 11.30 AM and I got some good news before I had put down my laptop: the Vaios were here!
Joy! Now I can kickstart the program and start finding influentials in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and the UK/Ireland. If all goes well the project should find it’s way to the outside world around two weeks after TechReady. That’s umm, in the second or third week of February.
A lot of things need to be taken care of though, so I’ll have my hands full, since there’s a few other projects I’m working on as well.
The rest of the day we had fun uninstalling the WindowsXP that came with the Vaios and mounting the Vista on it, then tuning the Vaio with some nice tools and sidebar gadgets so it would be all set to go.
Today I had my first commitment meeting as well, where I had to plan and define my targets for this fiscal year. Now all I have to do is make the commitments official and kick it up the ladder so they’ll know ‘up there’ what I’ll be doing ‘down here’.
The CES info is based on a memo from Robert Bach. It sums up the event better than I could’ve done it.
For a drill-down of live coverage, see Inside Microsoft
January 6, 2007 at 12:25 pm ·
Filed under Games, Video
I soooo want an XBox 360 to play this! This is the best game ever made. I need this like I need food or air. Daily and plenty.
Update - Sunday, Jan. 7th, 12.18 PM :
I didn’t think it would become such a big deal to just post two clips that have been around for such a long time already. It just looked fun to post them here, after all these long posts I did. But since Randy thinks I’m stealing content from his blog and decided to ‘unsubscribe’, let me rectify the situation here:
Thank you Nathan, for posting this back in November. I saw it back then, but didn’t repost it. It’s cool you posted so many spoofs.
Also, I’ve seen it on The Official XBox site, (also here), and I didn’t link to the hundreds of others because I haven’t found them and don’t have the time to look for them.
Then I wanted to add, for the record, that I honestly missed Randy’s post, I haven’t checked my feeds since the last post I did on Marketing Thoughts, which is January 4th. I just didn’t had the time. I have over 3000 items to read in the ‘Friends’ folder. I check that one less regular. Then when I posted this post yesterday, I started at the top of my feedreader which features the folder of ‘Advertising’ (comes before the folder ‘Friends’ where Randy is) and I saw the commercial linked on AdArena. Since I don’t post YouTube clips, I went to look for that commercial elsewhere, and ended up on DailyMotion, where I also saw the second clip that is posted above. Accidentally, those are the only two official trailers out there that have been linked to from all over the globe, and both are really awesome, so I linked them.
The only thing I didn’t do, and I’ll take the blame for that, is link to AdArena, because I saw the TV commercial there, which reminded me again. And since I’m now more into XBox then when I was still working for i-merge, I decided to blog it because it’s the main reason why I’d try an XBox 360.
Sorry it has to go this way Randy. You of all people should know that I’m a linker. We go back quite some time already. Weird to see how fast things can take a turn. Especially over something silly as this.
The last phrase of your post “You belong with Microsoft”. Dude. What’s up with that? Is that what it’s all about?
January 5, 2007 at 3:41 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
There were only two short sessions today, so it was actually only half a day of newbie-ology. The first session was about training and development within Microsoft. Something I’ve already been getting familiar with. There were also talks about how you should set your goals, how to define your ambitions and how you’d be rated when ‘judgement day’ is there. Interesting thing is that managers are actively being rated by their employees twice a year, meaning that their leadership skills better be ok, because if a few people complain, it might very well be that manager will have to defend his actions, behavior or decisions to the higher management (the level-uppers).
Then the most funny session of all started. ‘Introduction to Licensing’. I’ve been taking a few courses online already that are closely related to this matter, so I didn’t learn that much new. I did learn some more things about the local policies and actions and about the confusion there sometimes is with clients, when they need to upgrade or merge.
A lot of technical and legal blah-blah. Mandatory stuff and good to know, but not really ‘alive’. That changed pretty fast when the speaker started with examples of incredible things he had witnessed or received reports from. You wouldn’t believe how stupid some people are.
For instance: a guy stole OEM Windows versions at the company he worked for and tried to sell them on eBay for like 30% of the price of a regular Windows CD. Obviously there’s something fishy, so the software bounty hunters tracked him down and put an end to his lucrative little business. Turns out the guy was an IT worker at a major company, and he set up the laptops for employees, but kept the OEM CDs so he could sell them.
Then stories like this kept coming, about company owners who ran the entire company on 1 single licence, about how ignorant some companies are when it comes to archiving their licences and software, how sometimes the entire team needs to work itself from the cellar to the attic, in search of the right licenses “because they really have to be there somewhere”.
Just great. You should’ve heard it, it was like 20 times more animated and entertaining than written here. Heheh.
Before the sessions, around 7.45 this morning, I finished that course of “Smart Dealmaking at Microsoft”. There’s not much about that which I didn’t explain yesterday already. It was just a very interesting course about the things you have to pay attention to when making a deal with a customer. And about how to be sure that the things you do for other people are legal and can’t be misinterpreted. Clarity, transparency and solid deals. That’s how revenue is made.
This afternoon I listened to Jon Beighle, Director of D&PE (Developer and Platform Evangelism). He told about the mission, value, and goals of the Enterprise Partner Group and the role of the evangelists. Pretty cool how he puts things in the right context. I think I’ll listen to it again tonight, because what he says makes a lot of sense.
Have a good weekend, all of you, and stay tuned for the keynote at CES in Las Vegas on Sunday night, January 7th! It’s going to be very very special!
January 4, 2007 at 5:55 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
Today was a very techy day. Half of the time I had to double-check abbreviations because I totally had no clue what they meant. I think this company is a paradise for people who love TLAs. Sometimes when you overhear conversations in the hallway, it looks like they speak a totally different language.
We had a lot of tutorials, about how to make conference calls and all sorts of practical things to get around. Also a lot of tool demos and guidelines about security precautions and issues alike. Very informative. I still have a lot to configure.
I passed my test on Enterprise Search (with SharePoint) this morning before the second newbie day started. I left home at 6.45 AM so I’d be early and still have time to get it done. Score! Now I can start the other courses and make some progress. Next on the list is “Smart Dealmaking at Microsoft”, a course that’s designed to ensure that Microsoft’s sales organization has a general understanding of some of the key compliance issues that impact the success and effectiveness of the sales deals we make at Microsoft. Specifically, this course covers 1) revenue recognition issues; 2) information about, and ways to avoid, unauthorized side agreements; 3) basic fundamentals and requirements of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and 4) licensing information to ensure that customers do not inadvertently misuse their volume license agreement because of confusion or misinformation.
Looking forward to learning about that. I’ll do it in the morning before the third and last newbie day starts. Tomorrow we have sessions about training and development at Microsoft and an introduction on licensing. It’s going to be a short session day, so I’ll get to spend the rest of the time exploring more courses online.
January 3, 2007 at 10:22 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
Today was day one of three ‘newbie’ days. A really nice lady from HR made a lot of time and effort to inform us about what went on ‘inside Microsoft’. After a brief introduction about the history of Microsoft, from 1975 until today, and the key points in the markets which caused major changes, the local organization was completely analyzed. The 7 departments were explained with a brief note about who was running it and what they did, and then the breakdown into the subs was explained as well.
Then we got a talk about the core values of Microsoft. About integrity & honesty; about passion for customers, partners and technology; about the willingness to take on big challenges and seeing them through; about being open and respectful while being self critical. About how you have to be questioning and be commited to personal excellence and self improvement, and about being accountable for the commitments you make, and being accountable for results and quality to customers, shareholders, partners and fellow-employees. High Expectations. Sometimes I think of all these things and I wonder how I’ll ever live up to it. I guess the only thing you can do is be sincere and try to do just that little more than ‘just your best’.
Apparently Microsoft has a deal with two (maybe soon three) gyms in the near surroundings of the offices, to motivate employees to stay fit. Well, the deal is like this: Microsoft invests in sports facilities to offer employees the opportunity to have some physical activity, to relax from work stress, and also meet their colleagues in an informal manner. If you show your MSFT badge, and mention the name at the entrance, you can participate for free. Obviously, the use of the sport facilities is meant for ‘out of office’ hours, but I like the gesture. Too bad I already have a yearly membership at the gym in my town. However, I’m thinking of setting up a competition between the DPEs, just to spice up the work atmosphere a bit. :)
Later in the afternoon we got a talk about the Complaint Explorer, an online tool where you can log any problem you encounter, and about how important it was to log issues customers point us too, before those issues can escalate. It was a short talk, but the essence was quite clear. The fact that a customer tells you there’s something wrong isn’t bad. Obviously it would be utopic to have no complaints at all, so if they tell you there’s an issue, that creates the window to an opportunity to fix things and learn from it in order to prevent it from happening in the future. They could’ve gone to the competition as well without telling, but since they’re telling you (even if they are a little mad or upset), you should try to get things fixed sooner as possible. It’s just common sense, but I think it’s cool we have a department especially for that.
Then we got a session about Finance, how that works, what they pay, how Microsoft makes money, what departments bring in the money and so on. Apparently the Belux (Belgium + Luxemburg) branch brings in 0.6 percent of the total MSFT turnover. I’m not going to go in detail because there were waaaaaay too many numbers on the slides to make sense of it, so I’ll probably say the wrong things anyway. Anyway, it’s good that I’m not in Finance. I’d go crazy from all those digits. Respect to all accountants worldwide who spend hours looking to their complicated Excel sheets. I get dizzy from looking at it for a few minutes already. I think I’ll stick to pie charts.
Busy day. Lot of info. I finally got my official ‘Welcome Map’ with in it a welcome/greeting card digitally signed by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. I’m going to sell it on eBay or so when I’m 65. By then it’ll be worth more than Google’s stock. Heheh.
Tomorrow there’s an entire day in IT wonderland, including the pizza lunch. They’ll point out how to find our way through the massive intraweb, the IT policies and security. We’ll get some training and introduction sessions for EPE, the IT web, MySite, SharePoint and some workshops in the afternoon about how to get the most out of your smartphone and how to use the corporate tools like MSVacation and MSExpense. It’s going to be another day filled with information and goodies. I love this stuff really.
I think I’ll leave early tomorrow so I can complete another course in my RoadMap because yesterday I only scored 73% on my test on Enterprise Search and SharePoint 2007, and I need 80% to pass it. I have to get one more question right, but I’ll have to re-read the entire course in case the questions are different, because maybe I won’t know all the details anymore and then I’ll maybe miss another question I answered correctly already. I can’t take any chances. I have to move on.
January 2, 2007 at 2:44 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
It seems everybody in the Microsoft network is doing the RoadMap thing today - I have over 90 hours left of ‘classes’ to follow, so I know what I’ll be doing the next few days (perhaps even weeks).
Today I already completed a few courses about pretty interesting stuff.
“Are You Ready For People-Ready” was a session about The People-Ready Business (PRB) Campaign, which seeks to answer the question “Why Microsoft” in business terms for business audiences. Then after that I switched to a course about “Speaking Intellectual Property”. This was a session where you could find out what intellectual property is, why it matters to Microsoft, and, most importantly, why it matters to your customers. That was really enlightening. One if the things that struck me was that Microsoft has over 4000 filed patents and pays roughly $1.4 billion every year to use patented ‘products’ from other companies. Wow.
[edit: for the clarity of the matter, the exact phrase I wanted to quote from a question list goes as follows: “In 2004, Microsoft paid over $1,4 billion to license other’s intellectual rights” - just to get it straight]
Then I did the ‘Understanding Microsoft’ training, and there’s still a few of those ‘general’ sessions left to do. It’s quite important for a new employee to know how to do things and who to ask if you need something done. Microsoft has a really strong corporate image, and obviously it’s important everyone acts according to the guidelines. There’s more than enough space to be yourself though, and that’s just great.
In the last days of last year, I also completed the “WorldWide Privacy 101″ session, where I was provided with targeted content based on my business group and job role to provide actionable and relevant guidance, as a Microsoft employee, about my privacy responsibilities. It is fundamental that every employee within Microsoft is aware of Privacy, how it emerges in their every day jobs. Everyone is personally accountable for upholding Microsoft Privacy policies, and it’s important to learn how to deal with privacy issues. I thought it was very interesting to have a ‘behind the scenes’ experience of this. Before joining, I was ‘just a consumer’. It’s nice to know what actually happens with the things you fill in in the registration forms and what happens to the data that has been collected.
Right now I’m doing a session about Enterprise Search and SharePoint 2007 (with the Server and Search versions included). I’ve been playing around with SharePoint before I joined Microsoft, so I’m pretty excited to see this thing from the inside out. But like I said in the beginning of the post, it looks like everyone is doing RoadMap today, so this session is taking me quite some time to get through it. I think I’m going to wrap it up for now and retry tonight from home.
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