Lies, Damned Lies...

Try out Silverlight Streaming, earn money

You may have heard of Silverlight, our Rich Internet Applications framework - and if you haven't, you're sure to hear more about it this summer, as it'll be used on the NBC site to stream Olympics videos. But you don't have to be NBC to take advantage of Silverlight video streaming - or know anything about Silverlight development.

Our friends over on the Windows Live Dev team have had a hosted Silverlight Streaming service up and running for a little while now. You can upload your own videos (in pretty much any format) and we'll transcode them into streaming format and give you a nice little snippet of HTML that you can include on your own website to embed your streamed video whereever you like. And the quality is waaaaay better than those other guys - even if the content might be of questionable quality.

Why I'm telling you about it now is that we're about to start a trial program where we insert ads into the video stream as overlays, and cut you in on the revenues. All you have to do is add a few keywords each time you upload a video and we'll insert some relevant (and appropriate) advertising into the stream (see an example here - scroll down the page a little). So if you've been struggling to monetize your video content with something like AdSense, now's your chance.

Sign up for Silverlight Streaming itself by clicking here - and if you want to sign up for the ads trial, click here. I'm afraid this trial is only open to US residents with a US Social Security number or tax ID right now; if you don't have one of these, we can't pay you, unfortunately.

The running of the programmers

  Off-topic, this, but there's an interesting report in this week's Economist about the changing lifestyle patterns created by mobile technology, and the rise of the digital "nomad" who works anywhere and everywhere (I'm writing this from my local coffee shop, just to prove what a trendy nomadic-type person I am). Particularly interesting (to folks round here, anyway) is a write-up of the results of a series of studies of US traffic patterns carried out by Alan Pisarski over the past three decades:

Car trips had stopped increasing and were even declining in cities such as Seattle, Atlanta and Portland. Traffic was still heavy but now spread out over much longer periods, starting at 5am and lasting till noon, say. Bizarre new patterns were cropping up, such as a “reverse commute” in Seattle as lots of male computer scientists at Microsoft in the suburb of Redmond raced downtown to find females—a weekday ritual called "the running of the programmers".

I have to admit that I've never heard the term "running of the programmers" (and besides, I live in Seattle, and am married), but I can attest to the misery that is the 520 into Seattle at 5pm, and I use everything in my power (including not going to Redmond, or traveling on a wi-fi enabled bus) to avoid it. So now I'm part of a lifestyle trend.

Pragmatists vs Idealists

Joel Spolsky has an outstanding post over on his blog about the recent decision by the IE team to have IE8 default to web "standards" mode. I have very little to add to Joel's insightful and educative post, except to say that one of the most interesting dynamics about working for Microsoft (especially having previously worked for Microsoft competitors) is seeing the very real challenges that the company faces in balancing backwards compatibility with interoperability.

What's happening tomorrow?

Well, something cool, hopefully. Watch this space.

Trust me, I work for Microsoft

I am on the plane back from London after a fun few days with the folks there. It's always a pleasure to return to my home town, though it's a little strange returning there now that I don't live there any more, and rather eye-wateringly expensive now that I'm paid in dollars ($100 cab fare, anyone? How about an $8 tube ticket?).

Highlight of the trip was my panel session at SES London with Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg, Brian Clifton of Google and Steve Jackson, discussing the future of web analytics in search. Our host, Kevin Ryan, quizzed us about the "rise" of the free tools and what tensions that would create with site owners (and their visitors) having to get used to sharing their data with companies like Google and Microsoft. Can we be trusted not to misuse the data entrusted to us for nefarious ends?

Brian was a little coy about this, insisting that for Google to misuse the data it gets from Google Analytics (for example, to manipulate bid pricing) would be tantamount to fraud, and so of course would be out of the question. I believe him, and believe the same of Microsoft too - it would be suicidal (not to mention morally reprehensible and howlingly naive) of Microsoft to take anything other than the greatest care with the data we collect from Gatineau. But - and let's not beat about the bush here - this data is of value to us, and the benefit we get from it subsidizes the development of free tools like GA and Gatineau. And we need to be open and honest about that.

Where Brian and I differed on the panel was that I can all too easily believe that the general public will not be totally reassured by any insistence we make that we will look after their data and only use it responsibly. Maybe this is because I work for a company that - how can I put it? - doesn't enjoy the highest levels of trust in the industry. For me, building trust in our stewardship of data is something that we have had to do day by day, brick by brick, but more importantly something that we will always need to continue to do - a garden that we will always need to tend, if you like.

It's certainly not enough simply to stay inside the law and expect to maintain user trust simply because nothing bad (like a data leak) has happened on our watch. Even if we feel we are doing everything right, if we stop trying to build trust, it will wither away.

The rest of the panel discussion passed without much incident, and afterwards I had a chance to have a good chat with Bryan (with a Y) about the plans that FutureNow are putting together to create a new class of offering in the site/campaign optimization/analytics space. I look forward to further announcements from Bryan on this soon.

The formalities (such as they were) of SES done, we retired to Spanish restaurant Moro (the name of which generated an impromptu "Who's on first base?" gag - "Where are we going?" "To Moro" "I thought we were going tonight" "We are, we're going to Moro" "We're going twice?" "No, just once - to Moro", "I thought you said we were going tonight", etc), where we were joined by my UK colleague and adCenter stalwart Mel Carson (whom you should sponsor), Rob Stevens of UK usability firm Bunnyfoot, and the inimitable Dennis Mortensen. A fine time was had by all, with Bryan E taking a number of deeply unflattering photos of us and uploading them via his mobile to Facebook.

And then, after dinner, for me, the highlight of the evening - finally meeting Dave Naylor (the man who leaked the screenshots of Gatineau back in August last year) in the flesh for the first time. And what a nice man he is.

Come to SES London, hear me roar

Well, maybe not roar, exactly. Answer questions in a polite but engaging fashion about the use of Web Analytics to help with search engine marketing would perhaps be more accurate. Tomorrow (the 19th) at 1.30pm I'll be joining a very distinguished panel at SES London (at the Business Design Centre) to do just this, featuring the peripatetic Jim Sterne, the avuncular Bryan Eisenberg, the cheeky Brian Clifton, and the enigmatic (at least to me, since I've not met him) Steve Jackson. If you can muster the courage to approach us afterwards (be sure to kow-tow as you do so), we may just autograph your programme. Think of the resale value!

Wanna come work here?

As I mentioned in a previous post, my colleague Justin Carder recently left Microsoft to go and work as Director of Blogging (yes, really) for Marchex. Justin was the lead product manager for Gatineau; despite my higher public profile, Justin was really more involved day-to-day with ensuring that Gatineau saw the light of day - my remit is somewhat broader.

So now that Justin's gone, we're hiring. We need to find a bright, super-enthusiastic web analytics fanatic who wants to play a pivotal role in creating and launching THE web analytics product of 2008. You'll need to be experienced at working with Marketing and Development folk to set product strategy and ensure execution. You'll get the chance to travel the country (and the world) talking to potential customers, industry experts and a host of other people about web analytics. And you'll be right at the heart of the next big transformation of web analytics, in one of the most interesting parts of what is, it must be said, one pretty darn interesting company.

The only (sort of) catch is that you will need to come and live in Seattle. But the sun is shining today, and Seattle is one of the most civilized cities in the world. I moved here last year from London, after all, and I'm having a whale of a time.

So if this sounds like you, or it sounds like someone you know, then take a closer look at the job spec on our recruiting website (you might have to log in). Or if you'd like to ask me any informal questions about the role, ping me directly.

What's in an ANID?

I promised some time ago that I'd post more information on the process by which we get the demographic data into Gatineau. As I mentioned before, this information comes ultimately from data that people provide when they sign up for a "Live ID" to access one of Microsoft's online services, such as Messenger or Hotmail (this ID was previously known as a "Passport" ID).

I also mentioned that we are careful (to say the least) to anonymize the data before we pass it over to Gatineau. The anonymization process relies on the creation of an intermediate "Anonymous ID", or ('cos we just love acronyms), the "ANID". But how does this process work? Well, my colleagues over at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Initiative have posted an excellent white paper which explains how the ANID works and where it fits into the overall schema of the IDs and cookies you'll get when you use our online properties. The paper's here (PDF format):

Privacy Protections in Microsoft’s Ad Serving System and the Process of “De-identification”

I have only one beef with this white paper, and that's its rather lengthy title. Read it for a clear view of how we go about protecting the privacy of our online users, whilst at the same time using behavioral and demographic data to add value to the advertising inventory that we sell on our network.

It's here

The wait is finally over. Beta 1 of our "Gatineau" web analytics product is finally open for business! Today, Monday October 29 (coincidentally, Justin's birthday - happy birthday, Justin), we've started sending out beta signup invitation codes.  So what can you expect in beta 1? Here's the run-down:

 

Demographic segmentation

As previously trailed, demographic segmentation - the ability t0 compare the behavior of men vs women, or different age groups who are using your site - is a key feature of Gatineau. All of Gatineau's tabular reports support this segmentation capability, so you can compare bounce rates across segments, for example, or see which of your marketing campaigns played well with women, and which with men.

Custom taxonomies

A neat feature of Gatineau beta 1 which hasn't had much air-time is the ability to define a custom taxonomy (i.e. site structure) as you're instrumenting your site. So, for example, if you use a CMS to manage your site, you can map the document hierarchy from your CMS into the instrumentation, and see this in the Gatineau reports. When you're viewing page reports you can then select the custom taxonomy from the "Browse" menu drop-down at the top of the report box.

Funnel Report

Of course, no web analytics product would be complete without a funnel report. We've put a bunch of effort into the one inside Gatineau - as well as providing a nice visualization of the drop-out through a defined process, it also shows the top entry points into the funnel, and the top exit destinations.

Outbound link tracking

Kinda kicking myself that I didn't mention this at E-metrics last week in DC, given that Google then announced the same functionality the next day, but beta 1 provides automatic outbound link tracking. All you have to do to enable it is set a variable when you implement your tracking script, and all outbound links will be tracked - including downloads of things like PDFs. This is key functionality for folks who use server log-based reporting tools to track this aspect of site usage, as tag-based web analytics tools have historically not been great at tracking downloads.

Inbound referrals

Gatineau's Inbound Referrals report is pretty much what you'd expect it to be; however, it includes a very useful "Not Referred" group which shows the amount of direct traffic to the site (i.e. people typing in the URL directly, or clicking on a link in an e-mail or other non-referrer-generating source).

ROI reports

One of Gatineau's main goals is to provide marketers with a real view of how successful their marketing activities are. Beta 1 provides four ROI reports to achieve this - a Campaign Overview report which provides an all-up picture of marketing effectiveness, and E-mail, Banner and Offline Campaigns reports which provide more detail for - you've guessed it - e-mail, banner and offline campaigns. We're still working out some technical details to integrate paid search data properly into Gatineau, and when we do, paid search (including automatic integration with Microsoft adCenter paid search) will appear in this report group.

Goal analysis

Every website has goals - even ones which don't take money from people. Gatineau's Goals report shows how many visitors are reaching the goals you've defined for your site, so you can decide if you're being successful or not.

Client system reports

Gatineau contains the usual array of reports about your users' location and browser set-up. So, for example, you can see whether you can design your site based upon a 1024 x 768 resolution, or whether you still need to stick to 800 x 600.

 

Other stuff you need to know

There are some other things to bear in mind about this beta. The first is, if you've requested a beta invite, you'll be on the list and will receive one in due course - but remember, some people have been in the line since January, so please be patient as we ramp up users slowly; there's no need to remind us that you're waiting.

The other thing that it's worth reiterating here is that if you don't have an adCenter account already, you'll have to pay $5 to set one up in order to get access to the beta at this stage. Yes, we know this is - how can I put this? - regrettable. It's a strictly temporary situation that has arisen for no other reason than some development timeline issues internally. As soon as we can remove the $5 requirement, we will, rest assured.

Resources & Feedback

To coincide with this beta launch, we're putting some resources in place to help you get the best out of the beta. The first is a "Web Analytics" discussion board on our adCenter forum, at the following URL:

http://forums.microsoft.com/adcenter

Secondly, we'll be posting official announcements about Gatineau on the official adCenter blog, at the following URL:

http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/

Thirdly, even though Gatineau's just in beta, we have support folk lined up to answer your queries. You can access this support through Gatineau's online help system. Just click the "Get more help" link in the bottom right of the help window for any Gatineau help topic (the Gatineau UI is peppered with helpful little question marks which you can click to get help about that page). We're testing out our support as well as our software in this process, so we need you to try it out and let us know what you think.

Fourthly, you can send us feedback about Gatineau using the following online form:

Gatineau Feedback Form

Please feel free to send us any feedback at all that you have about the product based upon actual usage of it. If you don't have access to Gatineau yet, or you want to give us feedback about the product in general, or the beta process, please use the forum.

And finally, if you haven't requested access to the beta yet, you can do so at the following URL:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/gatineau

And finally...

We're incredibly proud of this beta, even as we know that we have a good deal of work still to do. We hope you enjoy using the product that we've put together. And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody at Microsoft who's worked on the project thus far, and also our friends outside the organization who've taken the time to give us the benefit of their opinions about the project.

Another peek at Gatineau

Following on from my Gatineau movies last week, my colleague Justin Carder has appeared in a video interview shot by the folks over at VisitMixx, talking about Gatineau and showing some more of its functionality. Justin is becoming quite the media personality, it seems. Sadly his rise to fame comes a little late for us here - Justin is leaving Microsoft to go on to pastures new. So if you're interested in working for Microsoft and having a very significant influence on the direction of this exciting project, at a pretty darn exciting time for the company (what with the aQuantive acquisition, and all), please get in touch. Contact details on my about page.

And Justin, it's been a pleasure working with you on the Gatineau project. May you find great success with your new (ad)venture!

The skinny on Gatineau

Another E-metrics conference draws to a close (minus me, as it happens - I'm already back in Seattle). Highlights for me included the chocolates and cigars provided (as ever) by Rene, and the hospitality shown by Jim in inviting us all back to his (absolutely enormous) room at about 12.30 am until we were kicked out by the hotel management for disturbing the other guests.

For those of you unable to come to DC to see my demo of Gatineau, or if you were there but feel like you missed something as I whizzed haphazardly through the stuff I had to show, here are some screen-cap movies of the features that I focused on in the demo. First up, logging into Gatineau:

Things to note here are that Gatineau lives within the Microsoft adCenter UI; as I've previously posted, you'll need an adCenter account to gain access to Gatineau. At the moment this means you have to give us $5, but this requirement will go away in due course.

Once you've logged in, you can set up multiple profiles to manage the web analytics data associated with the sites that you want to analyze. And, of course, in order to get data into a profile, you have to take the Gatineau tracking code and put it into your pages. Applying tracking scripts is still the #1 barrier to web analytics adoption, so we decided to make it easier by adding some automation to the process: [Note: this is a beta 2 feature]

A key thing to note about this functionality is that we've implemented it as a browser plug-in; so, although it makes an FTP connection to your web server (and therefore requires you to provide username and password information), this information isn't sent to Microsoft, and we don't store it. So there's no chance of us stealing your login, logging into your webserver, and changing all your website text to say, "Microsoft rocks!", or something like that.

Finally, here's a video of the reporting UI, showing the segmentation functionality, and something that I didn't show on Monday - the funnel report. Note that the data in this demo system is rather funky - we've been deliberately throwing all sorts of odd data at the test system to try to break it, which is why the funnel has an odd look to it. Your funnels will look like funnels, I promise!

I'm not going to post videos of the Campaign or Treemap visualizations, because they're still in development. More information on these soon. I should be able to post pretty soon about the beta 1 availability date. So watch this space...

Famous for fifteen minutes

As you may have already read (you're probably here because you linked through from one of the stories in the Internet), I used my presentation at OX2's Web Analytics Day last Friday to talk about the upcoming "Gatineau" beta 1 release and a little about some of the stuff we're working on for subsequent beta releases. It seems like the presentation was well received; you can view the slides here and here, or (if you're really a glutton for punishment) view Rene's video of the presentation here.

One thing I'd stress again is that all the slides from "Campaign Visualization" onward (except the last one - that's in there in error) represent stuff that we're working on for future beta releases of Gatineau. So if you get the chance to get into beta 1, you won't see this functionality.

It was fun to travel to Brussels (especially on the oh-so-civilized Eurostar) and catch up with Rene, Aurelie, Eric and Dennis, and to meet Robin Wauters of Blognation, Marianina Chaplin,  and the legendary Wandering Dave Rhee, who has now wandered all the way to Frankfurt (for some reason, given his moniker, I had a vision of Dave as a long-haired hippy type, so did a double-take when I met him in person (yes, I know, I should just have checked out his profile page for a nice photo of him)). Dave, best of luck with OX2 and your new life in Frankfurt - I hope you enjoy it as much as I'm enjoying being in the US. It was also great to see my colleagues Andzrej and Cristian, two members of our development team in Dublin who are actually responsible for creating many of the things that I showed on the screen. Thanks guys!

Your next chance to see Gatineau (and me) in the flesh will be at the E-metrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC in October (14-17, to be exact).  Book your ticket now!

Oh, and if you want to request access to the Gatineau beta, go here.

Welcome to the world of Microsoft APS

So, last Monday was a big day for me, and for a few thousand of my colleagues at Microsoft and aQuantive - we closed the aQuantive acquisition that we originally announced in May. Those of you who like to track every iteration of Microsoft's ever-changing organizational structure may already have read that we've created a new organization within the "Platform and Services Division" that is headed by Kevin Johnson, called the "Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group" (or APS, as we acronym-heads are already calling it). APS will be headed by Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive and will provide ad buying and selling solutions for advertisers and publishers (hence the imaginative name).

So far, so "so what?" But actually the creation of APS is highly significant for Microsoft's online business - I'd go as far as to say it's the most significant development since the creation of MSN back in 1995 (or perhaps more accurately the creation of MSN.com in 1999, which heralded the start of Microsoft's foray into selling online advertising).

Why? Because up until now Microsoft's online business model has been as a "first-party" seller of ads.

Publish and be damned

MSN and Live.com are essentially just big publisher sites (or media networks, to use the fancy term), and the day-to-day business of making money from them has been a case of creating advertising opportunities (everything from banners on the MSN.com home page to ad spots within the MSN Messenger window) and selling this ad space to advertisers, either directly or through agencies or networks.

Sure, Microsoft is one of the most sophisticated media networks out there, with a full-fledged search engine and a whole suite of tools to sell, buy and place ads on our network, but we've always been limited (with some minor exceptions) to selling inventory from our own network. And how do you grow a first-party ad business? Well, you have to grow your audience, or you have to grow the amount they use your stuff (since the more often they come back to your site, the more times you can show them ads). We've been doing pretty well in both these areas, but big online portals are one of the more mature areas of the Internet, and the other guys have been providing some fairly robust competition in the area of search.

From first-party to third-party

So over the past year or so, we've been embarking on a different strategy; or, at least, a complementary one. We've been cutting deals with Facebook and Digg to serve ads onto their pages; we've been working on a contextual ad platform that will allow third-party publishers to monetize their content, and we've been acquiring companies like Massive (which sells ads inside video games) and adECN (an online ad exchange).

What all of these have in common is that they help us to sell ads on third-party sites, not just on our own sites. The aQuantive acquisition fits right into this strategy.

aQuantive's business is all third-party - they help advertisers to buy advertising, and they help publishers to sell ad space. The money's made in fees for providing those services. So they really understand this business, especially the third-party publisher part, where we have less experience.

Brian, meet Steve; Steve, Brian.

So the way to think about APS is as a third-party ad business within Microsoft. We already have a long list of advertiser clients, and a long list of publishers and ad networks (define), of whom one (albeit a really, really big one) is Steve Berkowitz's Online Services Business - that is, MSN and Live.com. With the creation of APS, Steve's charter just got simpler: his job is to generate the maximum revenue he can from the MSN and Live properties. He's running a media business.

Brian's job, on the other hand, is to buy and sell the most ads he can for the best price he can, by connecting various buyers and sellers of these ads. And to do this, he needs a great suite of products to help advertisers compose and upload ads, find the best places online to show those ads, decide on what price to pay, and understand how those ads are performing; whilst for publishers, we need products to help them make their ad inventory available to buy, decide on what price to charge, structure their inventory so they sell the most of it they can, and understand how their inventory is performing (i.e. how many ad clicks they're getting).

Plenty of technology, in other words, for a died-in-the-wool geek like me to sink his teeth into. And did you notice how measurement is present on both sides of the equation? Measurement (and its glamorous younger sister, optimization) is the bread and butter of the online ad business. So the next couple of years should be fun...

Miscellany

Yet again I have to apologize for not posting more frequently. In lieu of a proper, substantive post about a weighty topic, here's a collection of tidbits from the industry and blogosphere:

Another civilized spat has broken out about the merits (or otherwise) of Technorati rankings for assessing a blog's popularity, spurred by Avinash's latest semi-annual Top 10 Web Analytics Blogs post (I'm in at #8, thanks principally to the large number of inbound links I get every time I post anything about Gatineau). Eric Peterson and Gary Angel weigh in on the side of the humans. Me? I'm happy for Avinash to continue to rely on Technorati rankings until my RSS subscribers (the other component of Avinash's new ranking algorithm) pick up.

We've been putting our hands in our pockets again  - this time to buy adECN, an online ad exchange based in Santa Barbara, California (horrible place full of reprobates, I hear). This acquisition, though small (especially compared to our recent splurge), is central to our strategy of building an efficient marketplace where buyers and sellers of online ads can find each other and do business efficiently. Unclear as to exactly what an ad exchange is? You need to read this excellent article by my colleague Eric Picard (he's not as mean as he looks in his by-line photo).

Visual Sciences is continuing its quest to find a buyer. This news isn't super-fresh, but it seems that Visual Sciences (formerly WebSideStory) is looking for a buyer, and has appointed an advisor. They have also announced revised Q2 earnings expectations, down a couple of million dollars from their previous estimate. So the question is, who would be interested in buying VS? By all accounts they've faced some challenges integrating Visual Sciences into the main company (with the rename, the have a Visual Sciences division within Visual Sciences Inc - too confusing), as Rand Schulman explains in a recent interview with Eric Enge. They have some very strong technology, but I'm having trouble imagining which single company would want both the VS and HBX sides of the business. Perhaps someone will buy up the whole thing and then sell off half of the business/technology? Or is the company too integrated to do this now?

There's been plenty of comment out there in the blogosphere about the pre-beta screenshots of our "Gatineau" analytics tool that leaked a couple of weeks ago. Much of the comment has centered around the demographic segmentation functionality that will be a central feature of the tool. It's interesting to observe the gap between what we consider to be acceptable use of anonymized data and what (some of) the rest of the world thinks. I'm still hoping to post a little more detail about the systems we use to ensure complete separation between the PII data we collect from our Live ID users and the demographic data that turns up in Gatineau, but I still need to check with PR/Legal, and I haven't had the time.

That's it - turns out I probably had enough content for a couple of posts, but then I would forget to get to the second one, so you get it all in a lump. 'Til next time...

Microsoft 'Gatineau' sneak peek

So, some screenshots of the interface for beta 1 of our web analytics product (codenamed 'Gatineau') have slipped out onto the web, courtesy of Dave Naylor. Dave attended our adChamps briefing in London a couple of weeks ago where he saw a demo of the software and spoke with my colleague Justin (who did a sterling job of flying to London at less than 24 hours' notice when I had to cancel because of another engagement). Not quite sure how he got these images (we were planning to make an announcement ourselves soon), but... hey. At least gives me a chance to clear up a couple of things:

Beta date
Beta 1 of Gatineau will likely hit the web later this summer. If you'd like to participate in the beta, please fill out the online beta request form, but please note that this will be a limited beta and so you may have to wait to be admitted. I'm not going to make any promises around how long that wait might be. If you've already e-mailed us, no need to do so again - we know who you are.

The beta is a work-in-progress. We're planning to add more reports to the product before we consider it "done" (whatever that means in this day and age).

Demographic data
One of the reasons we wanted to wait for our own announcement around the beta functionality is because we wanted to explain where we get our demographic data from. Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have. Questions are already being asked on Dave's blog about where we get this data from; the answer is that we do get this information from users' Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.

Hopefully I'll be able to post a more comprehensive explanation of this process very soon (in fact, I started writing one in this post, but halfway through my implant started bleeping so I hit the delete key before my brain stem was fried). Will be back once I've checked with Legal. In the meantime, if you have any comments on this or any other aspect of the product, you know where the comments box is.

Bring the love back

I'm a sucker for a nice little TV short, and this amused me at the same time as giving me that glow you get when the behemoth of a company you work for does something cool:

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

My favorite line from this is when the guy says, "Know you? Sweetheart, I know everything about you! You're 28... to 34".

To learn more about the film and the way it's being used, visit www.bringtheloveback.com.

[Update 6/5/07: Thanks to Kip for pointing out that I had the URL above totally wrong; I've corrected it now]

A snip at $6B

$6 billion is a lot to pay for any company, particularly when it's about five times as much as you've ever paid for any previous acquisition; it's even more impressive when you consider it's a cash deal. But those are the table stakes to get into (or stay in) the online advertising business these days; and after Google agreed to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, it doesn't seem so bad. But there are a lot of very happy aQuantive shareholders right now (me not amongst them, sadly):

After all the furore around DoubleClick, this is a great piece of news for us. People know, of course, that we were in the market for DoubleClick when Google bought them, and of course I can't elaborate (mainly because I don't know) why we didn't get that deal; but I think we've actually ended up with the better fit for our needs. aQuantive has a full-fledged media network and one of the world's largest interactive agencies in its portfolio, in addition to its ad buying & selling technologies. Microsoft will really benefit from the wealth of experience that aQuantive's people will bring. Plus (and this is by a mile the most important aspect of the news for me), Microsoft gets a downtown Seattle office out of the deal, which is a godsend for those of us who hate the 520 with a passion bordering on the psychotic.

[I would have posted about this on Friday, but I was too busy drinking Margaritas]