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Oracle Listens – Update/No Update

September 16th, 2008 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Public Relations, Technology

Yesterday I posted on the Oracle Listens projcet.

Today I noticed this update from Justin Kestelyn.

Update (1:49PM PT, Sept 9) - still putting the finishing touches on this after additional last-minute testing; there may be a possible short delay.

But it is September 16 and no change to Oracle.com.

I tweeted Kestelyn but no response – although he did start following me.

Tags: Community, Listens, Oracle, twitter, web2.0

Microsoft Vista Ads with Seinfeld: What’s the Point?

September 15th, 2008 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Technology

Has Bill Gates left Microsoft or was the whole retirement-PR campaign a strategy to divert attention away from the relentless pounding that it and Vista was receiving in the media, old and new?

Either way, the company has invested in a advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfled – the second in the series is here in my ‘Featured Video’ section within my new look site.

I think the strategy discussion went something like this:

MS: OK, so Vista was pretty unfunny. We’re getting a lot of negative publicity – what do you suggest?
Ad Agency: We’ve pulled in our big guns on this one and we recommend making something even more unfunny…
MS: Right, right… like it. Strategy.
Ad Agency: We could a pay a mozza to a well known comic to appear along side Bill. Bill’s involvement would make it authentic.
MS: Yeah, right. And would add to the unfunnyness.
Ad Agency: erm… Yeah.

I have never been a huge Seinfeld fan (I must admit) but I think these ads do very little to demonstrate that MS understands or is in touch with its audience (quite the opposite in fact). They also do a poor job of conveying any meaningful message about the part that MS plays in people’s lives (this is the objective), apart from some throw away motherhood statements.

“Bill, you’ve connected a billion people”

So, what is the point? Perhaps this will build over time? They don’t come close to the Mac vs. MS campaign, which combined stong product messaging with humour and which established affinity with viewers.

MS spent more than $300million on the ad campaign, with $10million of that going to Seinfled. The ad agency is Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s.

Here is what the LA Times had to say.

Microsoft provides more detail about the campaign and the underlying programs (many of which are partner and product focused) here. Its interesting how quickly this explanation gets away from the content of the ads; its concludes with:

In the end, says Veghte, the ideal would be to maintain that level of excitement that users experience when they first purchase a PC, and ensure that it continues through years of use, by helping them find new ways to be creative and productive.

“Windows has always been about putting the power of computing in the hands of people. All of these efforts are designed to reconnect and re-ignite our customers’ imaginations around the value of Windows in their lives today, and the promise of Windows in their lives tomorrow.”

Bill Veghte is the Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group

OK, so the ads are designed to re-ignite our imagination around the value of Windows in our lives. I’m still not getting it.

Tags: Ad, Ballmer, Gates, Microsoft, Seinfeld

Users Clammer for Yammer but will Corporate IT Follow?

September 13th, 2008 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Blogging, Public Relations, Social media, Technology

We're Yamming at work, yamming til the break of dawn

Yammer is the hot Web 2.0 application of the week – having been recognised at TechChrunch50. This service is very similar to Twitter; its a micro-blogging application. The functionality is almost identical.

The big difference here is that Yammer is aimed at the Enterprise; and they have done a very clever thing. Groups are created around email domains, which means that Yammer is piggy backing off of enterprise IT environments.

Yammer is providing a private company networks as a managed service. You can’t sign up for the service with a personal email address.

The Yammer private network facilitates internal communications within individual companies. For a fee (1 dollar per user), corporations can opt to ‘Claim Their Network’, which entitles them to the following services:

Manage Content and Members – Remove a member from the network or delete any message.
Password Policies – Determine the minimum character length and complexity for passwords.
Session Settings – Require email confirmation when logging in from a new browser.
IP Range – Assign an IP range for your network, restricting access to your office network or VPN.
Custom Logo– Brand your network by uploading your company logo to appear at the top of every page.
Assign Administrator Privileges – Grant additional administrative privileges to any user on your network.

This is an ingenius business model but it remains to be seen whether it will generate much goodwill for the company. As with many Web 2,0 applications, Yammer provides users with control, at the expense of Corporate IT. This has been a great thing for innovation and time to market for new technology within business. But the Yammer approach is effectively holding potential customers to ransom. Corporate IT has the easy option of shutting access down altogether. Naturally, business leaders will be concerned about internal messages and company information residing on the servers of a third party and a start-up at that.

My team of seven jumped onto Yammer mid-week and found it useful as a means of sharing links between our small group, sharing updates, chasing deadlines, maintaining morale As with Twitter, users can opt to follow individual members to ensure that they are only on the receiving end of information that is relevant to them.

It seems pretty obvious that the business model helped get Yammer over the line at TechCrunch50 given the fact that this technology already exists and has been relatively well adopted. It will be interesting to see how this goes down and how transparent Yammer is in the coming weeks and months about enterprise adoption. I’d question the suitability of the name – Yammer – for the corporate sector.

Finally, just wondering, is an individual message a Yam. Did I just yam? Or am I yamming?

Micro-blogging for the enterprise

Tags: corporate IT, micro-blogging, privacy, twitter, Yammer

Content Application Integation: Adding Search to Office Applications

September 13th, 2008 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Technology

Google have introduced some new features to their Google Docs office-style applications, including the ability to more easily insert images from the Web into working documents.

I think of this as a type of Content Application Integration and thikn that we are likely to see many more examples of this.

New media is driving increases in the usage of audio, video and imagery (rich media) and so it makes a lot of sense to build features into creative applications that offer search functionality, access to the Web and easy one-click insertion. See my earlier post on a related topic.

CAI (CAI) offers many potential applications… imagine, for example, being able to click on any word in a working document (a Word doc say, or PowerPoint) and going straight to the Wikipedia page for that word or opting to open a search in a Web browser on that term. This would be a variation on the linking strategy that underpins Web collaboration and sharing.

These functional capabilities are available today but CAI would make the integration between the productivity applications and content engines much tighter – furthering enabling the development and creation of multi-media content.

It would seem that Google has a much stronger position in this space as it is suited more to Web based applications as opposed to on-premise apps.

Tags: CAI, Docs, Google, Microsoft, PowerPoint, Search, Wikipedia, Word, Yahoo!

Google launches browser called Chrome

September 2nd, 2008 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Technology

I downloaded the brand new web browser from Google today. It is a beta version and is called Chrome.

Chrome’s stripped down interface maximises the viewing space on the screen. It looks like Fisher Price had a hand in the design – big rounded buttons and basic icons, which is very pleasing to the eye and fresh.

It 0ffers the ability to search in the address bar – which is cool. I think Firefox does this too. Chrome will provide prompts for Web pages and search terms, these are quite slow to pop up I found.Users are presented with a graphical list of the most recently visited Web pages when the application starts up – an innovative and cute design feature.

Tests conducted by others have found that it does well against IE but is not as quick as Firefox or Safari.You can do some cool stuff with the tabs – change the order, pull them out of the window so that they are stand alone instances of the browser and put them back in. Tabs operate independently which prevents one page bringing down the whole browser – a problem I often encounter with IE.

Google explains why they got into this space here.

This is clearly a competitive play with regard to Microsoft IE, which still accounts for 75% of the browser market. It will allow Google to maintain the integrity of its search engine – Microsoft could for example make changes to IE which favoured its search engine over Google. Google retains control with Chrome.It also enables Google to get closer to users and will provide them access to a different type of user information, which provides the basis to their advertising business.Chrome offers an incognito mode – users can surf and withold their usage data from Google.

It will be interesting to see how Google will promote Chrome to the mass market. To most consumers IE is THE web browser – these users haven’t thought about why they use IE, they just do. It comes pre-loaded on their new machines – it does what’s required. It’s familiar and easy. Google have added a download link for Chrome to their famously minimalist home page.

Chrome is only available for XP and Vista at the moment, Linux and Mac to follow.

There are a few things missing from the application, such as a progress bar. Google will obviously be developing this further – this is an open source app which is based on some of the other open source browsers but which according to Google represents the next generation of browsers and an up to date platform for Web applications.

A quick scan of blogs and media shows that Chrome has had a generally positive reception.Interestingly, Google pre-announced Chrome using an online comic, which you can see here. The comic features the RL Google design team.

Tags: browser, Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, incognito, Search

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Oracle Listens – Update/No Update

Microsoft Vista Ads with Seinfeld: What’s the Point?

Content Application Integation: Adding Search to Office Applications

Google launches browser called Chrome

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