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Going to MIX07 and Switching to Vista on my MacBook


Tomorrow I'm heading for Las Vegas for Mix07, together with my colleague Jo. We were invited by Microsoft in Belgium (but we pay part ourselves) and of course we're very excited. I just tried to make sense of the programme but I lost my login somewhere along the way,so the sophisticated conference planner is not an option. Still, here's a list of keynotes and speeches I'l looking forward to:

Keynotes:
Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Robert Bach, President, Entertainment and Devices Division, Microsoft Corporation
Scott Guthrie, General Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Michael Arrington, TechCrunch (YES, I'm a fan of Mike!)

Breakout sessions (way too many):

"ZAP!, WHAM!, KAPOW!": Windows Presentation Foundation and the Next Generation of Online Comic Book Reading
Speaker(s): Nathan Dunlap - IdentityMine, Robby Ingebretsen - IdentityMine

Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE
Speaker(s): Nathan Dunlap - IdentityMine, Darren Laybourn - Microsoft, Josh Wagoner - IdentityMine

Broaden Your Market with Windows Live
Speaker(s): Paul Elliott - Microsoft, Keiji Kanazawa - Microsoft, Kitty Leung - Microsoft, Dave Nicholson - Zopa

Building a Real, Money-Making Business Application Using Microsoft Virtual Earth
Speaker(s): Matt Goyer - Redfin, John Pope - TripHub, Aric Weiker - Microsoft

Building Rich, Interactive E-commerce Applications Using ASP.NET and Silverlight
Speaker(s): Ori Gershony - Microsoft, Mark Townsend - Microsoft

Creating a Domain Communication Experience on Windows Live
Speaker(s): Arnold Blinn - Microsoft, Brian Goldstein - Microsoft, Duane J. Schau - Indiana University, Alan Walsh - Indiana University

Experience: A Star to Sail Your Ship By
Speaker(s): Jesse James Garrett - Adaptive Path

Fumbling towards AGENCY 2.0
Speaker(s): Clement Mok

Interactive Advertising on the Windows Media Center Platform
Speaker(s): Dan Poling - Microsoft, Matthew Rechs - Schematic

Making Money with RSS
Speaker(s): Walter VonKoch - Microsoft

Next Design 3.0, Making Sense of Design Now
Speaker(s): GK VanPatter - NextDesign Leadership Institute, Elizabeth Pastor - NextDesign Leadership Institute

The Art, Science, and Business of Killer Content Experiences
Speaker(s): Roger Black - Danilo Black, Kevin Gjerstad - Microsoft, Robert Larson - New York Times, Wayne Reuvers - LiveTech

The Emotion of Customer Experience
Speaker(s): Lou Carbone - Experience Engineering

Using Windows Live Services in Your Own Web Applications
Speaker(s): Brian Arbogast - Microsoft, Eddie Dombrower - Match.com, Mike Presz - Match.com

Windows Live Messenger: Show Me the Money
Speaker(s): Glenn Allison - Microsoft, Todd Biggs - Microsoft, Morrie Eisenberg - imtLabs, Imran Qureshi - imtLabs

I feel like preparing for a geek orgy. And yes it's all Microsoft, but I'm really interrested to hear from insiders in Microsoft what these guys are thinking of for the future.

But will I dear to enter Microsoft territory with a MacBook? Of course, but as a positive gesture to my hosts I'm switching to Windows Vista (on my MacBook via VMWare) for a week. As I'm doing a lot of my stuff online (see post about office tools), and as you can simply drag-and-drop files from one window to another, I don't see much trouble switching. And who knows, I may just switch forever ;)

Proof of my switch is in the image above, notice also the designer laptop-stand I made for my home office. The stylish white box contains all connections, adapters, cables, etc. Keeps my desk clean and my laptop ergonomically placed in front of me.

Last promise (need to go prepare my suitcase): I'll blog frequently about my MIX07 so you can all enjoy with me.

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Weblin visualises the "presence" aspect of social networks


Weblin is a small tool makes you and others on the Web visible as small Avatars. There are others on the same page you are on right now.

I really like this idea, it's a first simple mashup between the web and virtual worlds. Imagine all your friends use this, then you can actually see who's visiting your blog or website when you are. Pitty it's only for PC, no Mac version yet.

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Advertising on my blog

I recently joined the blog advertising network Adhese/Enchanté and today the first add is appearing (look to the right). It will not make me rich, and if the quality of the adds is good it may even add something to my blog. To me it's mostly a hands-on experience with advertising on blogs.

When I heard about my first add I was happy to hear it was for Eurostar. I have worked for Eurostar for several years when I was at Agency.com and I really have good memories from this client. In fact it was my first big online advertising customer and we won several prizes together. The initiative that's advertised: placetobiz.eu is one of the last things I worked on for them, although the credit must go mostly to Xavier, my successor on the Eurostar account. It's a collaborative platform for business travelers, so advertising on business blogs is the right choice here.

As for traveling to London, Eurostar is indeed a great way to travel to the center of the British capital. The ideal combination price/quality is to go in "Standard" and return "Business Select". That way you have some flexibility when coming back, you can access the brilliant lounge (Starck design) and have a nice meal in all comfort while diving under the channel. However, it's a combination travel agencies never offer, so you have to book your self (online).
In case you need to be outside London or for connecting flights, BMI is the best alternative. Their service is said to be legendary, something I have not had the pleasure to enjoy yet. But that is about to change, on Saturday I'm starting my trip to MIX07 in Las Vegas with a BMI flight to London. More about MIX07 later this week.

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MS Office vs Open Office vs Google Docs vs Apple

Since I joined ONE Agency at the beginning of this year, I switched to a Mac. I had always been a home-mac-user, but for over 15 years I have spent my days on a Windows machine. So one could say that I have Windows and especially Excel and Powerpoint in my fingers. I'm one of those guys everybody would call upon in case of MS Office questions.
Over the past months I've been experimenting a lot with MS Office alternatives. This is of course due to my Mac-switch, but mainly because we do not (yet) have a stringent policy on which desktop systems. We simply try to work together as efficiently as possible. So we need some 'common ground' to be able we can work on each-others documents.

1. MS Office: The incumbent leader
The office suite is obviously candidate N°1. Great product, everybody knows how to work with all elements, and the specialists know all the work-arounds to solve small shortcomings (e.g. including an Excel sheet in Powerpoint in a practial way = paste as image). If you're working on Windows, Office is the obvious choice. But let's be honest, Word is over-sophisticated, Outlook is not fun to work with and to closed a system to be the center of your life and Powerpoing is boring (Excel is great, no complaints there).
The biggest problem however is that the whole packages is very expensive. Especially for a growing company. Who want's to pay 25 full licences for this ... even if e.g. a designer only use Word every now and then to open a file from a customer.
Collaboration: perfect if everybody uses Office

2. Open Office / Neo Office (for Mac): The open source challenger
Neo Office, the open source version of Office for Mac, offers Excel, Word, Powerpoint and some more stuff all in one application. The functions are 95% identical and the user interface is almost as good as the latest Office suite. So if your life does not depend on super-duper spreadsheets with pivot tables and over 25 connected sheets, and if you're not an editor working in Word every day, Neo Office is perfect.
The fact that it's an open source product also means you need to install updates an patches manually, that may be a problem for some users. But hey, it's free!
Side remark ... Open Office is in fact a functional copy of MS Office, so I feel a bit like we're stealing from years of Microsoft work here ...
Collaboration: Opens and saves Office documents perfectly

3. Keynote and Pages: The Apple alternatives
Apple has their own products for presentations and word processing pre-installed on all Macs. I tried a bit of "Pages" and I must admit it offers some nice features. But nothing that could seduce me into switching though.
Keynote is a different story. It's so much more fun and good-looking then Powerpoint that I'm now turning into a Keynote aficionado. Although I must admit there is some work to be done on some usability things. All the pop-ups clutter my (small) MacBook screen, and to change the appearance of a piece of text you need to open two different windows. But the 3D-effects, lovely shows (very much appreciated my colleague Jo, now nicknamed Joe Shadow) and the possibility to export to PDF, PPT (for sharing with Powerpoint users), HTML, Flash(!) and Quicktime(!!) largely compensate that.
Collaboration: Opening and saving to Office documents is possible, but you loose the nice bits in Keynote.

4. Google Docs: the product of the future
Last but not least is Google Docs and Gmail. I have centered all of my personal organization around Gmail. All my accounts (business, private, hobby, etc.) point to one inbox, and there I organize my life with a "Getting Things Done" plugin. This experience made me a real fan of "everything on the web". Give me somethings that connects and has a browser (PC, PDA, phone, TV set, PSP, ...) and I have all I need for a day's work. Especially because I also use Google Calendar which integrates perfectly with all iCal compatible tools (that's everything except Outlook).
Based on that experience, I started using Google Docs more intensively. The word processor does a good job for simple texts and is great for sharing, but I really need to be able to use nice-looking templates to publish docs for my customers. Google spreadsheet is also OK for simple calculations and lists, but after some time I always run into the limits and need to switch to Neo Office. I did not use the presentation tool Google just launched, but I'd be surprised if it would beat the Keynote experience.
In general Google Docs also still has too many small 'glitches'. There are too many small hickups while working to really get into your document and fully concentrate on the content and not on the tool you are using.
BUT, I'm still convinced this is the future. A small example: My 10 year old daughter prepared a document for school on Google Docs which allowed her to work on it at home, at school and while she was on holiday at my aunt's. All without here having a PC of her own.
Collaboration: perfect if everybody switches (which will not work for now)

So, what is going to be?
E-mail: Gmail
Agenda: Google Calendar
Word processing: Neo Office
Spreadsheets: Neo Office
Presentations: Keynote

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Sloggi not fun

David Hachez (tx for the picture) reports on a campaign by Sloggi in Belgium, and I agree with his critical view. I would even go further, it SUCKS.

The billboards may attract some attention, but I've seen it so many times now that I started noticing how much the picture has been photoshopped. I thought we had arrived in the age of 'real natural beauty', and that Sloggi was about no-nonsense cute but especially comfortable underwear. The four models seem to have identical bodies with identical skin color ... they look as if they just fell out of a cloning machine.

Then the site ... it's boring, the process is time consuming, the idea is not original and the result is not interesting. The campaign has no reference to the local market, it would have been so easy to see the result of your photo shoot on a Brussels background rather then some US city. Oh and euh, photoshop doesn't work on video :)

And indeed David, you can for sure motivate quite some men to go play with female flesh, but very few women ... who are the main target group here (I assume).

Lesson: New interactive marketing is not about simply plugging a microsite in your billboard campaign.

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Cost Per Influence

I found (through Seth's blog) this great article called: The Devil & Online Advertising. After a lengthy intro he introduces the concept of "cost per influence". I don't like the sounding of the term, but what's more important is that he describes at least the beginning of an answer to a problem I've been struggling with for quite some time. How to really measure the importance/effect/influence/value of a website/blog.
I even had that discussion with Joseph Jaffe (through his podcast), but we never got to a real answer.

Here's a mixture of measurements that may make a difference, I think the "Average Time on Each Page is what makes the difference here:


Accurate Rankings & Value Comparisons.
We absolutely need to define how it is we measure web traffic and then we need to create a score for each site that takes into account:

Average Time on Each Page: The longer an ad is exposed to a visitor the greater the value to the advertiser.
,
Return Visitor Percentage: The loyalty of a site’s readership will have an affect on the sway it will give to an advertiser on that site, and increase the positive attitude towards that advertiser.

Ad Impressions Served: The total number of ads served on a site and presented to visitors.

Ad Exposures Per Page: The more ads per page the less influence each advertiser has on a visitor.

Go check out the complete article! Especially if you're in the online media business, it may save your job in the long run.

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DNS stuff sorted out and other ambitions

Acting upon Pascal's tip, I'm now publishing straight to www.ibert.be and still hosting (for free) with Google. However, not without a fair amount of trouble. My favorite sysadmin Paul was there to help, but it still took some digging in help files and forums (long live consumer generated help) to get everything working perfectly.

So if you fancy using your own domain for a blogger-blog without forwarding in a frame, give it a try, it works. But keep in mind this little quote from the blogger help forum:
"In general, Blogger custom domains is a "power user" feature that requires some understanding of DNS that not all bloggers have. We are planning to add more wizards and automation to make the process of setting up custom domains easier and less painful and more accessible for the less technical user."

My next challenge is to migrate my gmail account to Google apps. There my question is: When migrating from gmail to google apps mail (which is basically the same), will I keep the labels I've been using?

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Porting to a new blogging platform?

My right column starts to look really messy. So I'm considering moving to another platform. That would also allow me to work with Ecto more comfortably, and boost my pagerank if everything goes onto www.ibert.be.

Does anybody know whether I can port the 'old' content from blogger to a new platform?

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Twitter experiment out ...

I'm the type of person who wants to test stuff hands on before formulating an opinion. So I got myself a Twitter account a few weeks ago. Some of you may have noticed the twitter-widget to the right here. Not anymore, I threw it out.

I hardly get to posting stuff on this blog, and take pride in making it interesting (a bit at least). So why on earth would I post what I'm doing every hour on Twitter. People who need to know can check my Googel Calendar. Maybe it's such a hit in the US because they do not have a developed SMS culture as we do in Europe ... who knows.
On the other hand, we did have some creative ideas around the office. One of our interns still has a secret mission to launch Twitter Porn.

A last attempt to discover the virtues may be to introduce my 11 year old daughter to Twitter to see what a native Pagen does with it. But then again, this may classify as child abuse :)

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The best messenger messages - II

Here's a new list of Windows Live messages I found in my buddy list:

> "Squareminded" (what does that mean?)
> "If it doesn't sell, it's not creative" (good point)
> "I tried setting my gmail password to penis. It said my password wasn't long enough. :(" (lol)
> "I'm in like with you" (???)
> "Watching striptease on één" (he's had that for days now ...)
> "Colt is run by a bunch of hobbyist fickwads" (my favourite > Colt 'd better get their act together before the community strikes back)
> "Serenity now" (hypefucker)
> "Mijn favoriete boek: 'De postduif en de paperclip'" (is he serious?)
> "Mata ki te rani" (help)

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Virtual worlds, the community rules!

Over the past months virtual worlds and especially Second Life have enjoyed a kind of media hype. All traditional media have covered the phenomenon at length as if the idea was invented yesterday.

But as fast as the hype rose, the sceptics were there just as fast. Especially the internet intelligentia thought it was hipper to shoot down virtual worlds (because already too mainstream) rather then taking some time to reflect what it could mean. I like to compare Second Life to the internet 10 to 15 years ago. Then too everybody thought it was slow, had average graphics and the question 'what will you do with it' popped up just as often as it does today. The answer is not easy, but in the mean time we have learned that intelligent experimentation is the best way to find answers. Maybe virtual worlds are the user interface of the future. Will, after MS Dos, Windows and Mac OS develop into a 3D interface? A workspace in which the communication aspect of the internet is harnessed 100%, a full open-source interface completely build by the community ... how much more 2.0 can you be?

And this is what makes virtual worlds so difficult to understand. It's not a game or a contest, there is no real objective. The rules are those of the community, the purpose is to achieve what you yourself want to achieve in the community.

My first project at ONE Agency, the new marketing agency I joined since the beginning of this year, was the launch of Windows Vista in Second Life with the live streaming of a gig by Praga Khan in the Atomium in Brussels. And I'd like to share some learning from that experience. The way this project came to be was very "2.0". Some enlightened minds started talking, specialists of all sorts were called in and two weeks later everything was arranged without having one physical meeting. During the project the objectives, scope and ambitions were constantly adjusted, the permanent beta. And in the end we succeeded together in mobilizing the Second Life community for this project. Anybody who was in Second Life in between the 15th and 31st of January knows that Microsoft launched windows Vista.
But there's more then the 375 people who attended the concert in Second Life (note: that's more then at the physical event). The surround effect of the launch was much bigger. Both in the SL community as in the blogoshere the conversation was buzzing at full speed. The number of 'impressions' generated is meaningless next to the enthusiasm and passion that bubbled up in blogposts and comments. This shows that programs that touch the publics hart have a much higher impact then one more banner in a even bigger size.

So if you were wondering where marketing is heading for in 2007, this give a good idea if you ask me.

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Bwards2006 - good fun

Yesterday was the Bwards2006 party. Great work by the whole team, especially Jeroen (the spark), Maarten en Clo (ongetwijfeld de beste belblogdel ever).

Friday night is not the ideal moment for hard working family man to go party, so I left rather early. What struck me was the diversity of the crowd: the nerds were there, but also some babes, there were artists and boring business people, alterno's and a lot of plain and simple "normal people". All unique personalities, (almost) all with a blog.

The stand up comedians were not all at the same level, but the atmosphere was good.

The highlights:
- Won a wireless mouse!
- Hooked up with some people I know (bloggers & other)
- Clo as Beldel
- The rap band

Oh and Miss Dams, hope you appreciate the drink :)

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A commecial shot in Second Life ... and money (L$) for free!

Today Jobat launches it's Second Life presence: "The Career Zone". Every visitor who comes by between 14:00 and 16:00h CET get's a month's salary for free (in L$ that is, so L$ 2500).

To launch the project we at ONE Agency produced a commercial completely filmed in Second Life:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uInLrh9bXT4]

Want to see the movie? Go to Second Life :) or visit the ONE Agency site to see the first commercial shot in Second Life.

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The PAGENS are coming

Jo Caudron (our CEO) did a great presentation today at the "Webscene" conference. He coined a new term we came up with while working on a big youngsters project for an international brand. We started calling this new generation "PAGENS", short for "PArticipation GENeration". Note the nifty reference to pagans, indeed in a traditional marketing world the pagens will be considered as heidens. They will not simply accept what the traditional media and brand power houses feed them.

Check out our pagen blog on pagen.one-agency.be. It's a brand new blog, so go crazy on comments (and links).

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Useless marketing by Danone

I've always been surprised by the way fast moving consumer goods marketeers juggle with brand names, packaging, line extensions and promotions to get some attention for their products. Although I prefer true innovation, line extensions and small improvements to a product are a good opportunity to talk (or better even, make people talk) about your brand.

But last week Danone really did it for me. I saw a TV commercial in which they announce a new name for their yogurt. So it's no longer yogurt but something else, god knows why. Unfortunately I don't remember the new name, which shouldn't be much of a surprise as TV commercial are not a very engaging medium. Especially if it's just another clip with dancing yogurt pots and logos jumping around. I checked the Danone Belgium site and in the "yogurts" category ordinary yogurt is not there (only Activia & Vitalinea), nothing about this new thingy.

But here comes the best part. On the pots of this "product formerly known as yogurt" there's a large call-out that says "UNCHANGED RECIPE". So basically Danone is investing money (packaging + TV commercial + ...) in a name change for yogurt, and it's extra difficult because part of the message is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Tip for Danone: Don't change the name, spend the money on innovation in marketing. Not only products (which they do) but communication too.

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