Even as it moves to add Yahoo’s to its own, Microsoft showed off new advertising technologies for its AdCenter unit. Among the technologies are an interactive multi-touch advertising display for public places, an algorithm that determines the least annoying place to insert ads in videos, a way to prevent ads from being displayed alongside objectionable content, speech recognition that automatically categorizes videos, among other things.
Neatorama has a look at the evolution of various tech company logos over the years, including Microsoft, Apple and Nokia. I’m shocked at the hyper-detailed awful logos Apple and some others started with, especially how different it is from Apple’s normal minimalism.
(via Scott Beale > Twitter)
By the by, I’ve started posting updates to both my blogs to Twitter, as well as using Twitter finally as a quick communications medium. I was adverse to using Twitter, until I saw how easy it was to post to it and read Tweets in Outlook with OutTwit. If you’d like to get updates and communicate with my on Twitter, go ahead and start following me.
Frank Arrigo got to tell his son’s Second Grade class at a Job Fail what it’s like working at Microsoft, and Alfred Thompson sent him some interesting stats about Microsoft’s campus. Enjoy:
We’re talking about 30,000 cans of soda and 30,000 cans juice per average workday. Jeez!
Josh Kopelman is running an ad campaign on Facebook that targets Microsoft employees who may be looking to leave the company to run their own startup. He ran the campaign three months ago, with a grand total of zero takers, and the same ads are now running with a surprisingly high click through rate. Does that mean that Microsofties are looking to leave, panicking at the idea of working for a Microsoft/Yahoo hybrid?
There are a number of reason’s Josh’s ad could be getting so much attention. First off, Facebook’s ad system has been getting a lot better, and is targeting well enough to perform better. When he first ran the ad, the ad system had just launched, and was filled with bugs and bad decisions. All ads are probably performing much better these days.
Also, the new year just started. There are a million reasons that employees might want to leave Microsoft after the new year, including vested options, re-evaluating their place in the company, new year’s resolutions, and, yes, the Yahoo acquisition. Some (and I mean a very small number proportionally) Microsoft employees are redundant in a post-Yahoo world, destined to be replaced by Yahoo employees who do good work on Yahoo’s successful products.
Others are probably panicking at the acquisition price and the debt Microsoft will be taking on. I’m sure there’s a fear that $44.6 billion, and at least $10 billion in debt, plus billions in integration costs and thousands of new salaries will sink the company. If all those fears add up to 15 out of every 1,264 Microsoft employees leaving the company, it’s not great, but it’s something the company can live with.
After all, Microsoft can just replace them with Yahoos.
(via Fred Wilson)
For continuing coverage of Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Yahoo, keep visiting this page.
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