Since the Zune Music Pass finally arrive on the shores of Australia – a land beyond the grasp of modern civilization by some Microsoft standards, I had to try it out. I was enthusiastic until Zune displayed an error. “The media rights system on your computer has encountered an error and needs to be manually reset.”
Challenge accepted.
Even though Zune’s own “web help” link directed me to an entirely unrelated help page for an error I was not experiencing, I thought “This must be a test. A test of my devotion to how much I want Zune.” After years of anticipation, this was just a small detour in a much bigger quest.
After consulting the great Google and Microsoft Answers, I arrived at this…
A Microsoft intern quips, “Hmm that doesn’t look very legit.”
Of course I knew it was. A Microsoft page styled with distinctive Windows XP-era logo and design dating back to 2001 might be a decade old, but it is most definitely legit.
I soon realized I would be facing an old nemesis, ActiveX where my Firefox was no good. Who would have thought ActiveX might actually outlive Flash.
In one last attempt to throw me off, the popup dialog clearly shows an “X” in the icon as if something wrong and I should give up. If I had been any less determined, I may just have. But I was strong until the end. Until I pressed “Play” in the Zune Music Marketplace and there was sound.
If photobooks or music albums doesn’t fancy you, then how about an Aston Martin Vanquish? For at least one Microsoft employee, the dream of driving like James Bond for a day came true just by placing a bid in the Microsoft Online Charity Auction, one of the most popular employee initiatives of the Employee Giving Campaign.
Unknown to most people outside of the company, this annual employee-only auction has grown to become somewhat of an attraction since it started in 2003. Just to paint a picture how big of a deal this is, this year’s auction has raised over $600,000 for United Way.
Two weeks before the auction begins, employees are encouraged to submit novelty prizes for the bidding that takes place during the month of October. Although it’s not a requirement, there’s a growing reputation for fun, wacky and downright bizarre prizes. Over 1,000 items donated this year, 16% more than last year. A sample of items past included:
- Highly-valued reserved parking spots at prime Microsoft building locations
- Tesla Roadster Joy Ride: An hour ride in the electric convertible car
- Lunch for 10 with Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie at Microsoft’s Home of the Future
- Mr Big’s Boxers: A pair of boxer shorts signed by actor Chris Noth, a.k.a. Mr. Big in “Sex and the City”
- Specially prepared food from fresh baked bread to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich party
- A personal music video professionally produced or personal written song
- A chance to compete with a Microsoft Vice President in martial arts
- Chance to cut off an employee’s pony tail for the charity Wigs for Kids
- dinner on Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith’s yacht
Not only has the scale of the auction changed over the years but the technology too. Starting out with a portal powered by BizTalk and InfoPath forms, it was rewritten as a HTML website in 2006 and Silverlight in 2009. This year it saw a total transition to Windows Azure and SQL Azure with a Metro-inspired HTML5 website which minimized performance degradations during last-minute bidding.
As part of the dogfooding spirit, this year also saw the introduction of a Windows Phone 7 application to make bidding and tracking auction items even easier.
I tip my hat off to the team of roughly 20 volunteers who plan and build the auction tools every year, some of whom have been with the project for over five years. If being responsible for processing more than half a million dollars of donations wasn’t enough, they generate a further $30,000 through Microsoft’s volunteer matching scheme. They must be swimming in karma.
P.S. On a related note, I’ve since gotten in touch with the charity Microsoft Cat Calendar people. Look forward to an interesting story about that next month.
Since it closed acquisitions of Skype last month, Microsoft has taken the first steps to integrate its new baby into the extended family by switching over management of Skype’s client display advertising from third parties to its own. Can you feel the synergy in the air?
It should be noted Skype introduced advertising in its Windows and iPhone clients months before Microsoft’s acquisition however Skype had to partner with a variety of companies in various geographical regions to sell this very premium screen real-estate.
Up until very recently, Meebo was responsible for the US region which has since been replaced by Microsoft Advertising. Of course I expect other regions to soon make the transition too if Australia is any indication.
Last week, Microsoft Australia announced a joint venture with Nine Network to create Mi9, Australia’s largest digital ad network which will assume responsibility for advertising on NineMSN, Bing, XBOX, Hotmail and Messenger in Australia. It also stated, “in 2012 Skype advertising opportunities will also join the family.”
Now with over 35.8 million unique users and an impressive demographic profile in its portfolio, people who claimed advertising was a big factor in Microsoft’s decision was right on the money. Even Microsoft Advertising brags by advertising on MSN and Skype, advertisers can reach 35% of the entire online audience.
Suddenly the idea of in-call advertising no longer seems far fetched.
Continuing the charitable theme of Microsoft employees for the annual October Employee Giving Program, here is another for-charity product of a few gifted volunteers – an album recorded by Microsoft musicians. The last thing I expected to see is “Microsoft” as a record label.
In its fifth-year running, “Musicians at Microsoft: Opening Windows, Volume 5″ is like the photobook equivalent for the musically-minded. Put together by works across many genres (rock, pop, electronic), it “is a compilation of work donated by Microsoft’s diverse community of musicians to support Music Aid Northwest.”
People can find the track listing and a preview of all the songs at cdbaby.com, Amazon and even iTunes. Priced at 0.99 a song and $9.99 for the whole album, all proceeds will be donated to charity.
Although there isn’t anything there for my tastes, it’s nice to see such a variety of hobby groups at Microsoft come together for charitable causes. I’m still on the hunt for the Microsoft cat calendar people.
You know it’s Australian because it’s got kangaroos. Bing Australia made a quiet announcement today that they’re officially out of beta. In the strictest sense, it means they’ve removed the “beta” tag from the logo and enabled a small set of value-add services to the previously barebones local search engine.
Although I believe many of these features were quietly rolled out to Bing Australia over the past year, the official Australian feature-set includes Social Search, homepage hotspots, Instant Answers, Enhanced Results, local results in Bing Maps, News Search, Bing Weather, Image Search and Video Search.
Whilst those might sound quite comprehensive, it’s only the tip of the Bing iceberg. You only need to go as far as to compare the “Explore” page from Bing US and Bing Australia to realize the gap.
Many of the missing features in Australia (and other non-beta markets like the UK) like shopping search, travel search and map apps is what makes Bing unique and special. It’s such a shame to see Bing not capitalize on their strong points in markets outside of the US.
According to the press release Mumbrella received, Bing Australia will be running a special HTML5 video background tomorrow on November 16th. I guess a pretty video can lessen the disappointment a little bit.
As a lover of pixels, I want to spread the word on the little known feature that Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” introduced to fix color bandings in third party applications. Of course, there’s a catch – it’s opt-in for developers. Doh.
The magic attribute is BitsPerPixel="32" inside the App tag of WMAppManifest.xml.
On the Samsung Omnia 7, this attribute appears to enable a noise-based dithering algorithms that is applied to both brush and image resources. Since many Windows Phone apps are scarred by ugly bandings, I encourage all developers to apply and deploy this fix to their apps. The exception being video applications which get opt-in automatically.
Developers, make your Windows Phone applications beautiful. Join the fight against banding.
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