Microsoft isn’t usually known for great marketing campaigns.  That’s true to a point, of course, but that’s because Microsoft’s main audience is the corporate world and – to be frank – the Shells, HSBCs and Coca-Colas of this world don’t exactly determine their global IT expenditure on what adverts Microsoft punts onto TV.

However, Microsoft does have a large (and still rapidly-growing) line of consumer-facing products and services.  Windows 7, Windows Live, Xbox, Zune, Microsoft Auto, KIN, and the forthcoming Windows Phone 7, to name a few…  And – remember them or not (and I’m sure you will when you actually think for a moment) – there have been some really effective marketing campaigns to match (Halo 2’s I Love Bees campaign) being one of the most prominent.

However – for this year’s E3 event, and to promote the launch of Kinect, Microsoft’s marketing machine have really outdone themselves.

For those who enjoy “high-brow entertainment”, you will undoubtedly have come across the Cirque du Soleil.  In which case, you’ll know the quality of spectacular shows that these folk put on.  Oh – and how expensive they are… :)

Well – Microsoft’s Xbox unit commissioned a totally custom, one-off show for the E3 launch.  That’s right – custom costumes, custom stunts, custom music (played by a live orchestra, as per Cirque du Soleil tradition) – even a live roaming elephant, wandering through the arena!

Yep – when it tries, Microsoft’s consumer division really knows how to put on a show!

[UPDATE: Sorry – I really should have posted a link to the video.  You won’t get to see the Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, though, but get to see snippets of it here.]

I’ve just finished watching the live presentation by Microsoft Xbox at E3 on live streaming.  Wow.  I mean, a geeky, geeky wow!  Watch the media briefing, and also consider how this technology can be applied to the “User Interface” experience not only in gaming, but in computers.  Because this is coming to PCs – you can bet on it…!

In the meantime, look at my geeky setup that I had while the broadcast was taking place:

(Yes – I did specifically wait for the Halo: Reach logo to appear before taking the screenshot, because I am that much of a Halo fanboy.)

Highlights for me were…

• Live streaming of the event to New York Times Square!
• New Xbox 360 brand tweak (green wave thing)
• Halo: Reach – almost peeing with excitement for this one…! :)
• Scary tech – Kinect allows you to log onto Xbox Live merely by waving at it (facial recognition)!
• Ahhh!  Scary tech 2 – Kinect has voice recognition for Xbox Live navigation as well!  Just say what you want to access, and it launches it!
• “Xbox – pause”. “Xbox – play”. I’m going to be uttering this all the time when I first get my hands on Kinect!
• Video Kinect – enabling consumer videoconferencing across both Xbox and Windows Live Messenger!
• I like the neat weather status as part of the videoconferencing window, as well as shared video and web browsing!
• Kinect also tracks you, so will follow you if you wander around the room! :)
• Meh – ESPN on Xbox Live.  Not for us non-American folk, I guess…
•    An aside – I notice that Charlie Brooker is providing Twitter updates as the briefing happens live!
• Kinectimals – I’m sorry.  Too…  Cute…!  (Yeah, I like Pokémon, so I’m going to like shit like this…)
• Holy crap – the technology is cool…  A 10-year old mutters “Go get your jump-rope”, and the animal avatar comes back with a skipping rope!
• Kinect Sports looks far too tiring for a lazy, inactive person like me…
• That’s scary! Ubisoft demo a game that scans your body metrics – height, waist size, arm and leg length, shoulder width, etc. The clothing-penetrating camera can be used for nefarious purposes…!
• Holy crap – online car brochures taken to a whole new level with a pitch for Ferrari.  You can “walk” around the car, view at any angle, and pick up technical specs by tapping on the appropriate part of the car!

Gaming interaction is about to be changed – some demos look like cheap novelties, but the new User Experience is genuinely exciting.  And I can’t wait for this to hit the PC…!

Hey, London-based folk!

Want free ice-cream?  Well – during the whole month of June, you can!  Just hunt down the Microsoft Bing ice-cream van!

Get more details from Microsoft Advertising here, or find out where the Bing Ice Cream van is right now!

This is a very neat way of showing some of the features available in Bing Maps – including the ability to create and share your own contributions, the ability to Tour in 3D (much neater in the US where a lot of the cities have 3D models on the map), and also the ability to mark waypoints with details and photos!

Also very cool is the Silverlight version of Bing Maps!

Microsoft have just released a new video which provides an overview of the forthcoming Windows Live Essentials “Wave 4” release – check it out below.  A quick rundown of key features:

• Invoke the power of dark magic and have Windows Live Photo Gallery automatically recognise faces and allow you to quickly tag your friends
• Easily retouch your photo to show the shot you want – like all the best paparazzi peeps
• Combine elements of several photos into one final photo, allowing you to create a group shot of yourself alongside Obama and Saddam Hussein
• Use Windows Live Movie Maker to create “You’ve Been Framed” style home movies no-one wants to watch, and upload to Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere
• Saturate the web with the same boring old holiday shots – upload your photos and movies to SkyDrive/Live Mesh, flickr, Facebook MySpace, YouTube and others
• Even better – bombard your mates directly with e-mail with Windows Live Mail (or your own regular e-mail client) connecting to Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! Mail and others, so you can e-mail entire albums without actually attaching them to your message (courtesy of SkyDrive integration)
• Keep banging on about your uninteresting photos by using Windows Live Writer and blogging to Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, TypePad AND WordPress for maximum saturation
• Use Windows Live Sync to store your photos in the cloud, so you can bore people anytime, anywhere
• Are you a flash bugger with more than one PC?  Use Sync to keep your albums, er, synced over multiple computers
• Harass your entire social network by using Windows Live Messenger, which now combines multiple social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn and many others into one dashboard

Seriously, though – the free Windows Live Essentials download (not available just quite yet) is full of fantastic applications that help integrate your social networks, manage photos and videos, and sync’n’share content very easily.

Ooo… Another shiny new tool has come out after my initial peek at some social aggregators.

Like Seesmic Look, this tool is limited to Twitter only.  However, the interface is quite slick and the whole application is quite fast.  I also like the “infinite” scrolling… :)

Go and try out MetroTwit for yourself…

Well – not really.  But Shoothill and the Imperial War Museum have created a fantastic collage of Churchill photos using Silverlight and Deep Zoom technologies…

The result is really rather cool…  Go play… :)

I came across this inadvertently courtesy of James O’Neill (@jamesoneill)

It has been just about a month since I decided to launch wholeheartedly into the social networking scene.  I have discovered, very quickly, what an incredibly disjointed experience this whole social networking thing is.

I aggregate, consume and disseminate information through my Windows Live blog, SkyDrive Photo Albums, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  However, I’m finding it incredibly hard to integrate these disparate services together.  Also, in the age of pretty user-interfaces, seeing web pages as ugly as the examples below is slightly disappointing:

Having had a poke about the interweb, I’ve evaluated some new tools which allow me to attempt to knit my social networks together.  There’s the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Client for Facebook, Seesmic Look, Spindex, sobees web, and Seesmic Desktop.  Each has their own pros and cons, but here’s a very quick tour of them all…

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Client for Facebook

This is a very nice Silverlight client that runs locally on the desktop (either Windows or Mac).  A very slick interface – slick enough for me to actually make a video tour rather than write some meaningless text about the swish interface…

I also like the fact that you can configure Outlook-style notifications:

But…  The spoiler is in the name – this is very much for Facebook only.  So – a great replacement for the official Facebook web page, but hardly the social aggregator I’m looking for.  Still – very slick and shows great promise if they can integrate it with Twitter, YouTube and others…  You can download here…

Seesmic Look

Seesmic Look is another Silverlight client that can also run on the desktop.  Again – it also has a slick interface, so I’ve posted up another quick video tour of this…

Like the Silverlight Client for Facebook, though, the Seesmic Look client is currently very limited as it only pulls information from Twitter…  Back to the drawing board for me, but don’t let that stop you from trying it out yourself…

Spindex

Spindex was the first real “aggregator” I tested out.  Released by Microsoft FUSE Labs (FUSE standing for FUture Social Experiences), it does not really knit content together in a traditional sense.  The focus is very much on search and the connectivity of information – it searches through your various social networking interactions (in my case Facebook and Twitter) and brings to the surface common themes and trends.  Again – best explained by a video:

I like Spindex, but it is very weird and sometimes illogical.  Although it collates all the information I need from various sources, it presents this info to me in what it deems the most relevant to me.  Being a logical, methodical and anal type, I like sifting through all my information myself and making calls on what I think is and is not worth my attention…  Give it a shot and see what you think…

[Update: OK – it appears that the ordering of the links was not deliberately “illogical”.  Spindex should interleave all my posts from Facebook/Twitter/others and order them chronologically, which makes much more sense.  However, this currently doesn’t happen for quite a few folk…  http://bit.ly/aw22rj  A big thumbs-up to the Spindex team for responding so quickly – they’re now looking into the issue…]

sobees web

sobees web is an interesting technology application, but boring practical application.  It is again based on Silverlight, and can be run on the web or on the local desktop.  Like Spindex, it also uses Windows Azure in the back-end – which hooks into various social networks (in addition to Facebook and Twitter, I also find that LinkedIn is supported).

Unfortunately, it only appears to provide basic (and separately listed) feeds, as you can see in the screenshot above.  It also only really handles basic text feeds well – the navigation of friends, events, connections and so forth is pretty basic and poor.  And forget about viewing photos and videos – trying to access these just launches a web browser back to the web-based interface of Facebook et. all.

Too boring for a video, I’m afraid – but feel free to try it out yourself…

Seesmic Desktop (2 preview)

This is similar to sobees web – better in some respects and worse in others.  Seesmic Desktop is another Silverlight application (seeing a theme here?).  It does aggregate feeds and presents them in one list (see screenshot above).  Like sobees web – this is it’s main (only?) strength.

Again – there’s not much slick interaction – it’s not easy to navigate your list of friends, quickly view photos, perform searches, etc.  Having said that – I’d still encourage folk to try it out…

Closing Thoughts

Well – I have to admit that I almost wet myself when I came across the Silverlight 4 Client for Facebook – the interface is extremely slick, fast and intuitive.  Navigating around is easy and the Facebook information is incredibly well-presented.  The downside is that it doesn’t quite aggregate any other data at the moment.  In an ideal world, this client would be expanded to support other social networks – add a sprinkling of the clever search integration in Spindex and I’d have the perfect client for knitting together my online social life.

Coming on the horizon, though, are further attempts to mash-up the social networks…  Windows Phone 7 will bring this to the mobile phone in a far slicker way than any device so far, and I hear good things about the tight integration of social networks in Windows Live “Wave 4”, which is due out in the next few months…  However, I’m personally really excited about the social integration within Windows Phone 7:

In the meantime, I’ll still struggle along with a combination of the Facebook and Twitter interfaces on the web browser and mobile phone, as well as using the Silverlight 4 Client for Facebook and Spindex.

Anyone else come across any interesting aggregators…?

Greece may be imploding as a result of its own financial meltdown.  The UK elections are reaching fever pitch, with potentially one of the most exciting outcomes for over a century (especially if you’re pro-LibDem).

And I’m excited.  Over my new toy… :)  Yep – my priorities are in all the wrong order again…!

Since it was announced at the start of the year, I’ve been waiting for the new Sony DSC-HX5V to become available in the UK.

It’s here, and I’m happy.  I now have a newer, nicer, compact camera job that can get thrown around and used to capture much drunken hilarity.

Which is well-timed, as I’m down in Edinburgh this weekend for an evening of utterly irresponsible drunken “hilarity”.  If I don’t end up in hospital having my stomach pumped, then the weekend is a failure.

My business meeting on Monday in Edinburgh should prove interesting… ;)

OK – so it might be a massive pile of marketing shite, and there’s no way I’ll end up as trendy (or as young) as the target market of the Microsoft KIN, but one of the core messages in the KIN reveal and launch really struck a chord with me.  Given the collection of contacts I’ve built up over the years, and the fact that I’ve just now succumbed to the whole social networking thing (thanks, peer pressure) – it does have me thinking who are my Friends, “friends” and FRIENDS.

If you can sit through a pile of pretentious gash on how trendy (and apparently jobless) people swim in the social ocean, this quick marketing video nonsense encapsulates what I’m trying to find out for myself…

So…  Where do you sit?  And more honestly, would you actually care?!?  :)

By slightly bastardising the title of the similarly named film, I think I’ve hit the nail on the head of this small social experiment I’m running on myself.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I think that the time has come where I launch myself wholeheartedly into the craze of social networking.  As usual, I’m electing to do things slightly differently by attempting to mash my separate technical, professional and social lives together.  Into the mix everything goes – family members, friends, business acquaintances, employees, the network of Microsoft folk I know – just about everyone that I choose to have an interaction with, basically.

This should prove interesting (if only to satisfy my own curiosity).  Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that most people try to keep their personal and business lives at arms-length, and for good reason.  I’m half expecting this little experiment to end in tears.  There’s the risk that clients (and potential clients) will be shocked that their technical consultant embarks on some randomly outrageous drunken irresponsibility during weekends…  Friends may wonder who this condescending business wanker is…  Employees may possibly despair that their continued employment rests on such a flippant individual.  And business partners and technical contacts may question exactly why they’ve chosen to network with this flaky personality…

This should definitely be an interesting experiment for me…

Let’s see where this goes – and whether it enhances or destroys any credibility I have in the circles that I play in… :)

Links to various social networks on the left, under StanYau+!

For those who are roughly the same age as me, you can’t possibly forget classic student television fare like Banzai and The League of Gentlemen.

Well (if you haven’t already bought the DVDs) then good news!  Microsoft launched their MSN Video Service to the UK and amongst some other TV shows and stuff, all three seasons of Banzai and both seasons of The League of Gentlemen are available for online viewing.

Thanks to Microsoft, we can waste yet more hours of our lives sitting in front of the PC watching these shows, furiously trying to recapture our student youth…  Huzzah!

My Orange phone bill came in a few days ago.

I really must stop calling all those sex chat-up lines…

I blame London.  I was there last month, and a friend and I came across this telephone booth.  I should point out that we were walking back from a restaurant in Mayfair to the hotel on Park Lane, so don’t be accusing me of straying off to some seedy part of London.  I should additionally point out that the image below is probably work-safe, as they’ve covered the nipples with stars and this was, after all, in a public phone box!

So…

Copious Quantities of Japanese Sake + Ridiculous Hotel Cocktails + Wallpapers of Porn Phone Numbers = Regrettable Mobile Bill Hangover

Oh – and I’m particularly amused that BT have a “how was it for you?” sticker in the phone box (to the left of the phone)…  With hindsight, I should really have used that payphone rather than my mobile…

As folk may (or may not) know, I currently drive an incredibly ridiculous car – the Audi RS 6.  Everything about the car is excessively stupid for what I desperately keep claiming(/justifying) is a family estate car.

5.0 litre V10 twin-turbo.  572bhp.  0-62mph in 4.6 seconds.  650Nm torque (and delivered pretty much in a straight line, rather than a curve – see the chart a bit down this page).  Near £100,000 price tag (thanks to silly amount of pointless optional extras like the £6,000 ceramic brakes).  All wrapped up in an unassumingly plain family estate car (well, that’s what I say, anyway).

Not that there aren’t greater things to complain about, but the car does have it’s downside.  The 333g/km CO2 emissions, for one (to contrast, the emissions from the friend-of-the-green-brigade Toyota Prius is 89g/km).  Every time I drive the car, I probably pump out enough emissions to melt a polar icecap somewhere, or choke dead an innocent baby seal.

Unfortunately, the sheer petrol-thirst of the car is also hitting the wallet.  The evidence:

That’s for a full tank of petrol.  £95 (or $145 to my American friends)!  For 80 litres.  To put this in context – that will last me approximately 1 week of normal commuting.  Or a single return journey from Aberdeen to Edinburgh (that’s a 250 mile round-trip).  Yep – the 15-20 mpg fuel consumption certainly takes its toll.

Having said that – the car is fun.  Oh, dear goodness, it’s sheer, ridiculous fun.  I’m just over 1.5 years of ownership, and it still provides childish glee.

But…  My reality-check is kicking in.  And despite the childish glee, I’m starting to wonder whether it really is worth all the utter excessiveness.  I love my toy.  But it really is an utterly pointless, excessive, expensive, unjustifiable toy.  But, it’s fun…

Buyer’s remorse.  Gah!

Many moons ago (back in the Windows XP days), I decided to rip my entire music CD collection to a digital file format.  I made the decision to go for the Windows Media Audio format, as I was both a keen Microsoft fanboy and also because I was a wannabe audiophile.  At the time, the WMA format was much further advanced than the standard MP3 format, allowing higher aural fidelity at the same or smaller bit-rate (better quality at smaller file size).

Hard disk storage space (and device compatibility) were constraints back then, so I ripped music at WMA v9 192kbps – quite a high quality at the time.  Over 500+ CDs from my collection were painstakingly and laboriously ripped.

However, time marches on and I now own a [shiny new MP3 player] which supports newer and better audio formats.  After much pondering, I’ve decided to go through the whole process of re-ripping my entire music collection once more.  Look at the stacks that I need to wade through…!

Lesson learned, though.  Storage is now incredibly cheap, so I’m going to use the Windows Media Audio Lossless format, basically creating a new music collection at CD quality, with no loss of fidelity at all.

This master library is going to be stored on my Windows Home Server, which allows me to access my music on my home network through my various Tablet PCs, the Xbox 360 and the dedicated Windows Media Center connected to my TV and hi-fi system.

In addition, the entire library is automatically re-encoded to WMA Pro (at 128kpbs) on the Windows Media Center, which is then automatically synched to my Live Mesh setup – this is then funnelled down to my day-to-day Tablet PC (the HP EliteBook 2730p) which then pumps the music wirelessly to my Zune HD.

So – I’m hopefully future-proofed.  As audio formats march on and get better, I can simply change the automatic re-encode process to a newer music format (or eventually just use the lossless format once technology reaches the stage of being able to hold 500GB of music on tiny MP3 player devices) and I’ll will be reassured that everything gets automatically and seamlessly updated across all my PCs and music devices.

Huzzah!

Given the recent excitement about Microsoft’s new phone OS (a topic for a future blog, but more details at Engadget), I simply had to get my hands on Microsoft’s latest MP3 Player, the Zune HD.  If you’re wondering what the link is, then I should point out that the user interface for the next version of Windows Phone is very similar to the interface in the Zune HD, hence my curiosity.  Indeed – it appears that the Zune team have been subsumed into the Windows Phone team (or is it the other way around), and there is a very strong scent of Zune pervading through the new phone release.

Anyway – back to my toy…

If you’re wondering, here’s how it compares in size to a Zune 80:

There are videos all over the place on how the user interface works, but the thing that impresses me most is the “connectedness” and pervasive content in these devices.

On my Zune HD, I merely uploaded my music collection onto the device.  It then worked out who the artists were, downloaded photos and biographies, and also linked to other albums by the same artists, as well as recommending similar artists.  It’s nice to have that info all on the device, without actually being connected to the Internet at that time.

OK – so the Zune HD has been out for a while now (launched nearly 6 months ago, back in Sep 09)…  But as it’s only available in the US and Canada, it’s hardly a surprise that it’s taken a while for me to get my hands on one (a big thanks to one of the peeps at Micropack (one of our clients) who brought three of these units back to the UK for me).