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Office2007下载,office2007免费下载,office2007软件下载,中文版,序列号,密钥,注册码,office2007办公软件

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:11:00 +0800

安装序列号（密钥）：
DBXYD-TF477-46YM4-W74MH-6YDQ8 右击另存为或右击使用下载工具下载office2007 软件大小：604MB
解压密码：www.downbank.cn 下载后为.ISO或者是.IMG格式，可以用虚拟光驱载入进行安装！也可以刻成光盘。也可用解压缩工具（WINRAR）把文件用解压缩工具解压到本机硬盘上，直接安装

注：安装之前，要卸载任何OFFICE相关软件和插件（安装不上可以用360安全卫士查看或卸载插件），才能正常安装Office2007 Professional简体中文专业版。

微软office2007为微软最新的office系列软件,不仅在功能上进行了优化,而且安全性稳定性更得到了巩固.现在终于有了简体中文版的office2007软件来供下载了. PRO:专业版

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 (New!) 包括：
Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft Office Word 2007
Microsoft Office Access 2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
Microsoft Office Communicator
Microsoft Office Publisher 2007

office2007免费下载以下是OFFICE2000、2003、2007系列相关注册码：

　　Office 2007终极版（Ultimate Edition）是微软Office 2007产品线最新加入的一个成员。据微软称，Office 2007终极版将囊括Office 2007所提供的一切组件。该款产品目前定价679美元。
　　据外电报道，微软表示，推出这款新产品是“根据顾客的反馈意见”，它将针对那些不愿等到需要时才去一个个选择Office具体应用的用户。
　　Office 2007终极版不仅集中了Office 2007现有的Word、Excel、PowerPoint、Outlook、Publisher、OneNote、InfoPath,和Access等应用，而且还将包含微软新推出的Groove协同套装软件。Groove协同套装软件虽属于Office 2007企业版的一个版本，但微软计划将它推向所有消费者。
　　微软此外还提到计划推出Windows Vista终极版。Windows Vista终极版将集成Vista家庭版和企业版本所具有的一切功能，其主要功能将包括Windows Media Center、Tablet PC支持、搜索引擎、BitLocker硬盘加密、虚拟PC、多语言用户界面支持等。Windows Vista终极版的零售价将定为450美元。
Microsoft office2007下载软件下载 office2007序列号 office2007免费下载 office2007正式版办公自动化word2007下载 Microsoft OFFICE WORD2007 EXCEL2007 ACCESS2007 OUTLOOK2007 PPT2007 office2007中文版 office2007密钥 office2007注册码 office2007专业版中文破解版绿色版激活码密钥 Microsoft Office 2007 Pro 简体中文版 Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 简体中文版 office2007办公软件 Microsoft Office Excel2007 Outlook2007 PowerPoint2007 Word2007软件下载 Access2007 InfoPath2007 Communicator Office Publisher2007下载,软件,注册码, office2007序列号office2003序列号 Office2007 Professional简体中文专业版

以下是在网上收集的注册码，希望能有用。

office 2007 Beta1的序列号、序列、注册码
Office Pro Client: TT3M8-H3469-V89G6-8FWK7-D3Q9Q
Office Server: DHBRK-XPMBY-293WD-F2R8K-BCFBQ

Microsoft Office 2007序列号，微软Office2007中文版序列号：

P2KDC-9HMXH-9QFVK-PMQCB-V2XMM

BMV8D-G272X-MHMXW-4DY9G-M8YTQ

OFFICE 2003序列号 :

GWH28-DGCMP-P6RC4-6J4MT-3HFDY

WFDWY-XQXJF-RHRYG-BG7RQ-BBDHM

Office2000序列号：

J2MV9-JYYQ6-JM44K-QMYTH-8RB2W

FrontPage2003: WFDWY-XQXJF-RHRYG-BG7RQ-BBDHM
ONENOTE 2003 : WFDWY-XQXJF-RHRYG-BG7RQ-BBDHM

Product Name Product Keys System Requirements
Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007
MTP6Q-D868F-448FG-B6MG7-3DBKT System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Visio® Professional 2007
QB6MH-Q82HX-BFWPK-8TXTY-HHJT6 System Requirements
Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager Not Applicable System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Project Server 2007
BWPMX-XY8XF-KGBQ6-XKT8R-GHXD3 System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Project Professional 2007
GP24P-FC3DP-HXY7Q-YG3JR-J4G3G System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007
R83W8-GJQ82-GJ378-XQW9W-JBYKT System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Groove® Server 2007
PGT8R-VBMBC-6V7GY-TW3HT-8FP36 System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Language Pack 2007 – German
DY7FP-TGTKC-2366R-8VJMB-DGYKT System Requirements

Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2007
TFKGD-9VXBG-T22DK-FQB9P-MBPG6 System Requirements

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007
VQCR8-6KP8Q-Y2FTW-3YQD7-R22G6 System Requirements

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 - Enterprise
FDJDK-66WCT-2HD9C-4TY63-38C4G System Requirements

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 - Enterprise(x64)
FDJDK-66WCT-2HD9C-4TY63-38C4G System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Forms Server 2007
FDJDK-66WCT-2HD9C-4TY63-38C4G System Requirements

Microsoft® Office Forms Server 2007 (x64)
FDJDK-66WCT-2HD9C-4TY63-38C4G System Requirements

鲍尔默：微软今后五年会进行100次小规模收购

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:58:00 +0800

Advista 国际在线周四美国旧金山召开的Web 2.0会议上，微软首席执行官鲍尔默表示，微软以后每年会进行5000万到10亿美元的小规模收购，而不会进行大宗并购。这使此前流传的微软收购Yahoo或Facebook的谣言不攻自破。
　　北京时间10月19日消息，据国外媒体报道，周四美国旧金山召开的Web 2.0会议上，微软首席执行官鲍尔默表示，微软以后每年会进行5000万到10亿美元的小规模收购，而不会进行大宗并购。这使此前流传的微软收购Yahoo或Facebook的谣言不攻自破。

　　鲍尔默没有直接回应这些传言，只是说微软当前走的是“独立自主的道路”。他说：“今后5年里，我们可能保持每年收购20家公司。”

　　据了解，微软一直避免大宗收购，总是选择购买一些便宜公司。但分析师认为，微软今年60亿美元收购数码广告公司aQuantive可以视作其战略的转变。

　　另外，微软首席财务官克里斯－里德尔曾表示，今年财年，公司花在收购方面的费用将首次高于研发费用。

　　截至6月的2007年财年中，微软已收购了23家公司。现在它已经公布了总价值为13.4亿美元的13宗收购，其中包括8亿美元购买语音识别技术公司Tellme网络。

Ne-Yo channels Michael Jackson and Prince for poppish second album: review

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:48:00 +0800

(AP) - As one of last year’s biggest R&B discoveries, Ne-Yo proved he knows how to make catchy soul music with the right amount of spirit and heartache. The hits he’s written for others - Beyonce’s bold "Irreplaceable" and Rihanna’s guilt-ridden "Unfaithful" - are prime examples. Plus, on his impressive 2006 debut "In My Own Words," he toed the vulnerable-Romeo line with a graceful swagger.Now on his second effort, "Because of You," Ne-Yo aims not only to showcase his versatility, but follow his pop aspirations, largely by mimicking urban pop standard bearers Michael Jackson and Prince.The first single and title track is a jaunty ode to addictive love, that could easily be an "Off The Wall"-era leftover. Then on the breezy tune, "Crazy," label boss Jay-Z states plainly: "Ne-Yo’s like young Michael/ I’m Quincy Hov." Ne-Yo’s Prince moments - the rousing "Addicted" and the piano-driven "Sex With My Ex" - both sizzle with loads of bedroom boasting but without seeming crass.But Ne-Yo’s kinship to his forebears masks his own vocal limitations. On the touching duet "Leaving Tonight," Jennifer Hudson blows right past him. And elsewhere ("Go On Girl," "Mark It Work") Ne-Yo’s tone sounds whiny instead of heartfelt.Despite those missteps, there’s enough satisfying material here to not sully his reputation as one of today’s R&B talents to watch.-Ne-Yo’Because of You’ (Def Jam)

Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization Releases New Findings on Exposed Victims

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:40:00 +0800

Copyright:
Business Wire
Source:
Business Wire
Wordcount:
554Business Editors/Health Editors WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 9, 2007--The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), an organization dedicated to serving as the voice of asbestos victims, today announced that an increasing number of patients suffering from asbestos-related diseases are now younger than in previous reports. Case reports from the past three years reveal a new median age of 51 and nearly fifty percent of those are women. Anecdotal evidence suggests a changing profile of newly diagnosed patients, many of whom are under 40 years old, nearly forty percent of which have never worked with asbestos, but have environmental exposure. The Columbia University Mesothelioma Center in New York City reports similar findings. "The average age of our peritoneal mesothelioma patients is 51.7," said Dr. Robert N. Taub, Milstein Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Columbia University Mesothelioma Center in New York City. "And less than fifty percent had immediately recognizable asbestos exposure." "Asbestos-related diseases, like many occupationally and environmentally induced diseases, are routinely underreported. It is imperative for clinicians and health care providers to thoroughly investigate and accurately report the diagnosis of disease, as well as record, not only the immediate cause of death, but also significant underlying conditions," said Richard Lemen, PhD, MSPH, Assistant Surgeon General, USPHS (Ret.) and ADAO Science Advisory Board Co-Chair. "Only through better reporting will we ever understand the true impact of asbestos-related health conditions or the affect prevention has played in controlling these highly preventative diseases." "As workplace exposures come under better control, the percentage of environmental exposures continue to increase," said Arthur L. Frank, MD, PhD, Chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, ADAO Science Advisory Board Co-Chair.
"ADAO is being contacted by young fathers and mothers in their late 20s and 30s who are seeking medial resources and support because they have been recently diagnosed with asbestos-caused diseases," said Linda Reinstein, Executive Director and Cofounder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. "Our patient profile program will continue as asbestos exposure and deaths continue to claim more lives. Prevention is the only cure for asbestos diseases." The 1990 patient profile no longer represents the patient of today. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported in 1986 that the median age was nearly 70 and approximately fifty percent had occupational exposure. Other studies estimated that eighty percent of patients were men. In 1999, more than one-third of mesothelioma deaths occurred in just five states (California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio). The occurrence of asbestos-related diseases, including mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis, is growing out of control. Studies estimate that during the next decade, 100,000 victims in the United States will die of an asbestos related disease - equaling 30 deaths per day. About Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) was founded by asbestos victims and their families in 2004. ADAO seeks to give asbestos victims a united voice to help ensure that their rights are fairly represented and protected, and raise public awareness about the dangers of asbestos exposure and the often deadly asbestos related diseases. ADAO is funded through voluntary contributions and staffed by volunteers. For more information visit www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org.CONTACT: Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) Doug Larkin Director of Communications 703-250-3590 x1245 Cell: 202-391-1546 doug@asbestosdiseaseawareness.org This is a news service of Thomson Business Intelligence Service ©2006. This content is for your personal use only, subject to Terms and Conditions. No redistribution allowed.

How Fast Do Search Engines Index Fresh Content

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 23:27:00 +0800

Yesterday was a unique day in the blogosphere. Following the crackdown by Digg staff, the infamous hex key - 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 - was written all over the Internet from blogs to news portals to social websites.Legal issues apart, this mutiny at Digg gives us a great opportunity to compare the indexing behaviour of search engines and how frequently search bots scroll the web in pursuit of fresh content.We executed a search for 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 (without quotes) on all major web and blogs search engines and here are the results.

Microsoft owned Live search has just 18k pages containing the HD DVD key while Google has indexed over half a million documents containing that number.

In case of Blog Search Engines, Bloglines (owned by Ask.com) found 6160 blogs and RSS feeds that mentioned the HD DVD key while Technorati suggested the number as 2200. Google Blog Search results were ~5.5k.

Sort Search Results by Google PageRank or Alexa Rank Using AfterVote

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 23:25:00 +0800

Are you aware of any search engine that lets you sort search results ? Some blog search engines do allow sorting by date or by relevance but nothing beyond.

Enter AfterVote.com that's not just another meta search engine combining the top results of Google, Yahoo or MSN - AfterVote will let you interact with the search results like never before.
AfterVote displays the Alexa Rank, Google PR and StumbleUpon reviews next to each search result. The URLs in the search results can be directly saved on social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc.

And the most impressive feature - you can sort results based on the Alexa rankings or Google PageRank. The more you use this feature, the more addictive it gets.

There's an option to block results from certain web domains (blacklist). And if you are worried about search companies collecting your search queries, Aftervote may be a good solution since it lets you search the web anonymously - even your IP addresses are not stored anywhere.

AfterVote.com AfterVote Results Explained

AfterVote.com reminds me of another Ajax based meta search engine called Zippy Search that displays lot of additional SEO related data next to search engine results.

Microsoft Windows Vista Security Advancements

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 23:03:00 +0800

Microsoft Windows Vista Security Advancements
Microsoft has produced a white paper and on-demand video detailing the security advancements made in Windows Vista.
Updated: July 2006

Windows Vista brings a new level of confidence to computing through improved security, reliability and management. Building on these advances, Microsoft and the rest of the technology industry can work to make computing even more reliable and secure by doing the following:

• Building a trust ecosystem in which people, organizations, device-makers and code authors can be properly identified and held accountable for their actions, while still protecting the privacy of end users.

• Engineering for security by establishing, publishing and sharing best practices, security diagnostic tools and security-specific testing methods.

• Simplifying security for consumers and IT professionals, through a combination of industry standards, common development tools, and unified practices across platforms, products and services.

• Delivering a fundamentally secure platform that includes protection technologies that enable isolation, trust-based multifactor authentication, policy-based access control and unified audit across applications.

These principles are reflected in the design and development of Windows Vista, which embraces a holistic approach to security that makes it a significant milestone along the path to achieving Microsoft’s vision of Trustworthy Computing.

Melinda Gates: Philanthropists need help to solve problems

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 23:01:00 +0800

The world's most difficult problems don't exist in isolation, and neither should the work to solve them, Melinda Gates told a national philanthropy conference in Seattle on Monday.

Philanthropists need to work together with business and government to be more effective, said Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Even the Gates Foundation, with its $33 billion endowment and global influence, doesn't have all the answers.

"We're a young organization," she said. "We're learning, we're trying things and we're changing. The list of lessons we learned is just about as long as the list of mistakes we've made."

The foundation started with the principle that all lives on the planet are of equal value.

"Children who are starving in Africa or India or Bangladesh are just as important and precious as my children are or your children are," said Gates, who got her first taste of philanthropy in high school by volunteering at a hospital in her native Dallas.

She and her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, found a role for themselves harnessing scientific advances to help solve neglected diseases in the developing world.

"We're living in an age of unprecedented innovation. You can get your e-mail and your text messages in the palm of your hand as you sit here," she said. "We mapped the human genome. Right now we have the ability to solve the biggest problems like never before."

While the foundation has made strides in global health, there are still "literally billions of people suffering in the world today as we gather for this breakfast," she said.

The room fell silent when she remarked that all 2,000 seats in the audience could represent the number of children dying from malaria every day.

Some lessons have been basic. Last month the Gateses traveled to Vietnam, a country with a 90 percent vaccination rate for children, she said.

When the country was ready to introduce a new vaccine for rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhea in children, it hit against a simple obstacle.

The vaccine comes in a very bulky package, but the refrigerators used for storage are tiny and full most of the time.

"All that research and development and guess what, the problem is the size of the box," she said.

Other lessons are more complex. The foundation has been studying how it might get involved in clean-water projects. Shortages of food and clean water can't be separated from other health problems, she said.

During a trip to India, Gates said, she saw poor children in slums waiting in a long line to fill old turpentine bottles from a tiny spigot that worked only in the morning. She talked with women in rural communities who were spending three to five hours a day searching for clean water in the mountains.

Solutions are not easy to find, and after two years of study it's not clear the foundation has enough expertise in water to make it a core focus, she said.

"By ourselves we can't make a dent in any of the problems we've chosen to focus on," she said.

Even assets of $30 billion are a drop in the bucket, she added. The entire endowment couldn't cover the cost of educating California students for one year — about $60 billion.

Gates ended her speech by talking about a little girl she met in Mozambique a few years ago who was feverish and dying of malaria. After the right treatment, she recovered and is now living a healthy life.

In her lifetime, Gates said, she can imagine a world in which the girl's story is "is not a miracle anymore but a routine fact of life."

MTV Joins Strong American Schools to Promote Education Reform on Eve of First GOP Presidential Debate

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:57:00 +0800

LOS ANGELES, May 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the first major public event following its April kick-off, the Strong American Schools campaign partnered today with MTV to highlight the importance of education reform in the 2008 presidential campaign. Held on the eve of the first Republican presidential primary debate, the event featured a roundtable discussion with high school students discussing this vital issue, moderated by Strong American Schools Chairman Roy Romer, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell and MTV News Correspondent SuChin Pak. The purpose of the event, which took place at Grant High School in Los Angeles, was to provide students with a platform to send a strong and clear message to all 2008 presidential candidates that education must be a top priority for the next president.

"MTV is an icon among young American citizens, many of whom understand firsthand just how important education reform is to the future of this country," stated former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, a Strong American Schools board of trustees member. "That's why we're so proud MTV is co-sponsoring in this event with Strong American Schools and helping to make sure the voices of future generations are heard loud and clear by presidential hopefuls of both parties."

"We've worked hard in California to raise expectations and hold schools accountable," said State Superintendent Jack O'Connell. "Improving test scores show our students, teachers and schools are working hard to meet this challenge, but much more work needs to be done to prepare all students for success in the 21st century. Our state and every state needs a commitment from our nation's leaders to invest in public schools, to give teachers the support they need and students the education they must have to survive in today's demanding global economy."

"We're proud to partner with Strong American Schools to amplify the voices of America's youth and help make education reform a top priority for every candidate," said Dave Sirulnick, Executive Vice President, MTV Multiplatform, News, Production & Music. "Few issues affect young people more than today's dropout crisis and we're committed to offering them a platform and the tools to bring about the changes that are desperately needed."

The Strong American Schools' "ED in 08" campaign, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, is an unprecedented up to $60 million nonpartisan movement, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which calls on all presidential candidates to improve America's public schools.

"Each year more than 1 million students drop out of high school. That's one child every 29 seconds," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "We all must demand that candidates and our leaders share their opinions and policies on how our country will offer all young people Strong American Schools."

"The American dream is slipping away, and unless our leaders dramatically improve our public schools, our standard of living, our economy and our very democracy will be threatened," said Eli Broad, founder of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. "Our country's education system is no longer the best in the world. We need every American to demand better schools and specific policy solutions from presidential candidates. Our future depends on it."

"We're calling on every American to support "ED in '08." Together, we can make education a top priority for all presidential candidates in this election," said Strong American Schools Chairman Roy Romer, who has been a leader in education and government for the last 50 years. Romer was elected to three terms as governor of Colorado and most recently led the nation's second largest school system as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. "If candidates aren't talking about education, they're not talking about the future. Without an educated and skilled workforce, America's competitiveness and security are undermined. A strong America depends on strong American schools."

Since its inception, MTV has been committed to empowering its audience to effect change on the issues that matter to them most. As part of an ongoing effort to help more high school students graduate prepared for college, career and life, MTV News will soon premiere "The Dropout Chronicles," a new documentary that follows 3 high school students approaching graduation but on the brink of dropping out. The special premieres on-air May 9th (MTV: 2pm ET/PT; MTV2: 8:30pm ET/PT) and will also be screened that day at the "National Summit on America's Silent Epidemic," where Congressional leaders, students, governors and educators will put in motion a plan to help end America's dropout crisis. The summit is co-sponsored by MTV, TIME Magazine, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Civic Enterprises and the National Governors Association and will feature diverse speakers including Mrs. Laura Bush, MTV President Christina Norman, Tim Russert and many other leading voices on the topic.

Seventy percent of all American 8th graders are not proficient in reading and most will never catch up. In California alone, 45 percent of college freshman are not prepared for college-level English and are required to take remedial catch-up courses, according to a new study by the California State University System.

Strong American Schools launched its "ED in '08" campaign last month on the eve of the first Democratic Party primary debate in South Carolina. "ED in '08" is a sweeping public awareness and action campaign that will mobilize the public and presidential candidates around solutions for the country's education crisis. The campaign brings together for the first time leaders of all major political parties who are willing to address education as an American challenge rather than a narrow political issue. Strong American Schools will use the tools of a modern presidential campaign to take the issue to the general public and give Americans many ways for their voices to be heard-including on-the-ground activities in key presidential primary states and a cutting-edge interactive E-campaign based on the Web at http://www.edin08.com/.

As part of its call to action, Strong American Schools will urge leaders to address and debate three common-sense priorities that hold tremendous promise for improving education:

1) Strong American education standards. Regardless of where they live, all students need to acquire knowledge and skills that prepare them for college, for the workplace, and for life.

2) Effective teachers in every classroom. We need to enable teachers to improve their skills, measure teachers' performance in the classroom, and pay them more if they produce superior results or take on challenging assignments.

3) More time and support for learning. We need to provide successful and struggling students alike more time for in-depth learning and greater personal attention.

Strong American Schools' steering committee is comprised of prominent business, education, and political leaders. In addition to Broad and Romer,

the steering committee includes: Allan Golston, President of the U.S. program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Janet Murguia, President and CEO of National Council of La Raza; Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM Corporation; John Engler, former Governor of Michigan and President of the National Association of Manufacturers; and Marc Lampkin, former 2000 Bush for President Deputy Campaign Manager and current Executive Director of Strong American Schools.

The foundations have committed up to $60 million to support the campaign through November 2008. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with state leadership offices opening across the country in the coming months. Strong American Schools does not support or oppose any candidate for public office and does not take positions on legislation. To join the "ED in '08" campaign, and for more information, log onto: http://www.edin08.com/.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is a national venture philanthropy established by businessman and philanthropist Eli Broad to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, scientific and medical research and the arts. Broad, who founded two Fortune 500 companies, SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home, created The Broad Foundation to dramatically improve K-12 urban public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition. The Broad Foundation's Internet address is http://www.broadfoundation.org/.

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequalities and improve lives around the world. In developing countries, it focuses on improving health, reducing extreme poverty, and increasing access to technology in public libraries. In the United States, the foundation seeks to ensure that all people have access to a great education and to technology in public libraries. In its local region, it focuses on improving the lives of low-income families. Based in Seattle, the foundation is led by CEO Patty Stonesifer and co-chairs William H. Gates Sr., Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates. More information is available at http://www.gatesfoundation.org/.

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that helps donors to create thoughtful, effective philanthropy throughout the world. RPA provides research and counsel on charitable giving, develops philanthropic programs, and offers complete program, administrative and management services for foundations and trusts. For more information visit http://www.rockpa.org/.

THINKMTV is the umbrella for the network's on-air, off-air and online "pro-social" campaigns that engage, educate and encourage young people to take action on some of the biggest challenges facing their generation, including the Break the Addiction campaign on global warming, the Choose or Lose campaign on the presidential election, and ongoing efforts with the Kaiser Family Foundation on sexual health and HIV/AIDS. THINKMTV and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also joined in an ongoing effort aimed at using MTV's reach and credibility with young people, particularly low-income and minority youth, to provide them the tools, resources and media platform to graduate from high school prepared for college, career and life. The campaign consists of long-form documentaries such as the Dropout Chronicles and Think Over Your School, PSAs featuring high school students talking candidly about their aspirations for college and beyond; MTV News reports on young people and their educational aspirations; and online tools at http://think.mtv.com/, including resources to prepare themselves for graduation, college, and the workplace.

Strong American Schools, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, is a nonpartisan campaign supported by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation promoting sound education policies for all Americans. SAS does not support or oppose any candidate for public office and does not take positions on legislation. Web: http://www.strongamericanschools.org/

Source: Strong American Schools

Bill Gates, Craig Mundie: Microsoft Government Leaders Forum -- Asia 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:52:00 +0800

Transcript of remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft CorporationCraig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft CorporationProfessor Muhammad Yunus, Founder - Grameen Bank, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize LaureateMicrosoft Government Leaders Forum – Asia 2007Beijing, People's Republic of ChinaApril 19, 2007
TIM CHEN: Let me introduce another person who also had a dream. That dream is to create a company that would try to change the world with software and technology. And today, Mr. Bill Gates, and Microsoft, we have had the pleasure to see that dream realized. Today over 600 million people around the world are using Microsoft software, and have experienced the power of the computer. This is incredible progress, and we also understand the enormous responsibility that comes with that progress. And Microsoft has been thinking about how to continue to fulfill our responsibilities in a way consistent with the original vision to change the world, to live up to our commitment for inclusion, and changing the lives of those we have reached or touched.
Bill has come to China many times. China is a country that exemplifies so much of the potential we see in many of the emerging markets around the world, and Bill has come to provide at this time Microsoft's thinking of where we'll go for the next step. So with that, welcome Mr. Bill Gates. (Applause.)
BILL GATES: Well, good afternoon. It's great to be here in Asia where there's so much dynamic growth, so many exciting things going on. And it's great to have this group together to talk about how governments play a key role in driving the information revolution within their countries, using technology themselves to be more efficiency, to be more transparent, to deliver better services, and then providing key policies for the investments, particularly in education.
If you look at one thing that really explains the dynamic growth in these Asian economies, I think we can look to education and the commitment to that is one of the key factors that has allowed things to develop as well as they have. As we think about the next ten years, the advances in technology are going to create even more opportunities, and we're going to revolutionize more activities than ever before. The technology will be lower cost as the prices constantly come down, and it will be much easier to use because instead of just working with a key board in the years ahead, the machine will be able to take ink as an input. It will have a tablet device that you can just write on it, and send your ink to other people, or have it be recognized. You'll be able to use speech. The computer will even have a camera and be able to tell who is participating, who is talking, and see exactly who is there, so that it can offer up all the right options.
This idea of natural interface, smaller devices, means that computing will be very, very pervasive. Now, of course, a big beneficiary of all these advances will be the people who are using computing today. They'll be able to work at a distance better than ever. They'll be able to navigate information and find trends better than ever. They'll be able to move in-between devices, from their phone, to their PC, to another PC, and all their information will be there for them. Getting insights into sales results, or quality will be far better. And so the benefit of more advanced software will be quite incredible.
But another goal we should have is to go beyond helping the billion people who use technology today, and bringing that to the other 5 billion. Now, that will take time, and there are many priorities, many things we need to do to drive equity on a global basis. But one of those over time is to make sure that access to technology, to the information and the empowerment that's being developed on the Internet, that every kid and everybody who wants can have access to those capabilities. With technology moving so quickly, this is within our reach. We have to plan for it. We have to think about the infrastructure and the training. We have to think about how we finance these things, and maintain the quality. And we have to think about the whole problem. It's not just the cost of the PC, but rather these issues of connectivity, of the training, the maintenance, the support, all of those have to come together, and most of those are actually more difficult, and more expensive than just the hardware piece.
The magic of software is something that we've believed in for a long, long time. Microsoft is now over 30 years old, and the original dream was about computers for everyone. And so that says that as we go after this next 5 billion, it really is going back to the original roots, the original commitment of what Microsoft is all about. In the years ahead, computing will change the way we think about education. The chance to go up online and see the lectures from the best universities in the world, the chance for a teacher to go up and see another teacher teaching the course, and doing it in the best way possible, the opportunity to go up and find materials that will make the course interesting to the students, those things are all going to be just standard capabilities that we take for granted. And things that we used to think of all being together in education will, in some ways, separate out.
When we think of a university, we think of giving lectures, we think of doing study groups to help with the materials, and we think about testing to really certify that somebody has a degree, that they have a certain skill set. Well, as we use the Internet and digital approaches, the lectures will be there and a very few universities can provide either for free or at low cost, and so that piece others should not feel the need to duplicate, because it will be much better to use what's already there. Likewise, the certification, the actual testing of knowledge can be delivered in a very efficient digital form. So that leaves creating the environment where the teacher and the students are working together and interacting. Today that is best done on a face-to-face basis. But over time even some elements of that can be done over the Internet. There was an interesting study done where some students watching university lectures were actually at the university, and some others were at a remote facility. What they did at the remote facility was, they stopped every 15 minutes and let the students discuss the topic among each other, and they wondered where would the learning be best? They were worried that actually not being at the lecture might be some problem. In fact, it was the remote group that could stop and discuss things whenever they wanted, because it was stored, and they could start and stop, actually that was the group that did the best. So education really is starting to change. Sharing best practices, getting the richness of the Internet, and we'll see that in many places.
An announcement that Microsoft is making to help push this forward, we call our broad program where we allow software donations for computing to be used broadly, we call it Unlimited Potential, and that's because our overall story is about empowering people to reach their potential. Of course, that's touched on many things around the world. In each country it's tailored to the particular things that we hear from the government and the citizens they're interested in, but it's always to do with education, to do with innovation, and creating jobs in that environment. We have a business group that focuses on this with Will Poole and Orlando Ayala, who are really looking at how we can take the best practices, the great results we've had, and make sure that we're sharing those on a worldwide basis.
Education is the most important investment for the future, an we've already been able to have a significant impact. In China, our computer labs are reaching 11 million middle school students. We've been able to train 2.6 million teachers on a global basis. And we've got to drive this forward. Technology is going to be a critical element of the classroom experiencing, having a machine, even though it's shared, that students can get on and work with, and having the teachers, and the curriculum, and all the elements that connect up to that.
An announcement we're making today is for the new offering we call Student Innovation Suites that for a nominal price of US$3, for any time where the government is actually buying the computers themselves to give to students, we provide a whole suite of software, including Windows XP Starter, Microsoft Office Home and Student, Microsoft Math, Learning Essentials for Office, and a mail package, all of those things for the $3 offer. That's to address where the government is actually buying the hardware, and they're to work on any system that can run Windows. And so we've seen great work from partners. Intel has made some big advances in new hardware. AMD is making advances. Companies like HP and Dell are doing work there as well. And so the innovation of our hardware partners together with an offering like this, together with governments that are offering things will really come together as a way of driving a number of these projects forward.
I mentioned education as an area of incredible advance. We can look at almost every type of endeavor and say that the digital revolution will change it. We can look at banking, and say that by having the data online and using the cell phone, things like micro-finance over time will benefit from this, micro-insurance, micro-savings. How do you identify yourself, just using your fingerprint on the cell phone, so that's a very reliable system. These are things that are at an early stage, but even for people in developing countries using digital technology to allow the overhead costs for many services to be far lower, that's a real focus that we have.
If we think about meetings today, in business we have lots of meetings, we have to travel and meet face-to-face. More and more we should be able to over the Internet share documents, edit them together, share video if we want, talk to each other, and have it, because it's Internet-based, have almost no extra cost for doing that. So making the world a smaller place, and allowing people to work together and collaborate by connecting up over the Internet, there is software to be done there. The classic phone system will go away, the standard PBX will go away, and it will just be a phone connected to the PC, which is connected to the Internet, and the user interface can be far better because you can use the large screen. Things that have been difficult today, like setting up conference calls, or actually impossible like knowing who called you while you were gone, or saying that if certain people call you, you can let them pick open times in your calendar when they might want to call you back, or meet with you. All of those can be enabled as we get the full power of software on the Internet together with telephony. And yet, here again, we can save lots of people lots of money. They don't have to buy that separate PBX system, they don't have to think of it as something separate. If they're out of their office, the ability of the call to reach them is far better than in that traditional world.
Now the software industry has grown, and we're very proud of that, because we measure ourselves by creating success for our partners. In Asia, there's about for every dollar of business we do our partners do about $12. So if we can grow them, that's a key factor in growing our own opportunity.
We want to create that opportunity for large companies and small companies, new innovators. One example of how we do that is we have for students contests where they can develop ideas and submit those. We have what's called the Imagine Cup, and we have over 100,000 students registered for that this year, still more will be registering, and actually Asia is where we see the highest level of sign ups.
Many of the projects that have been submitted to that have gone on to be the basis for starting up new companies. They have startups that are formed around the contest work that was done there, and it's fantastic to see that, in fact, as part of our award program. We help them with the marketing, we help them with some of the efforts to get going.
We're creating what we call more Innovation Centers, which are places that developers can come in and get advice, use hardware they might not be able to buy themselves. Today around the world we have about 110 of these, and we're committing to grow this over the next couple of years, so we have over 200. We're adding a lot of places for software developers to come in and have access to things, including partnerships and learning, that wouldn't be available elsewhere.
We have great examples of companies like Heulabs in Singapore, that have grown out of these Innovation Centers, and it's very gratifying. In that case it's actually an application for my favorite Windows product, which is the Windows Tablet. The Tablet device that's smaller than a portable machine, very thin, with that wireless Internet connection, which over time will mean that students don't need to have textbooks, that the cost of that device will actually be less than the textbooks, and yet the experience of using it, the interactivity, the note-taking, the browsing the Internet, watching videos is dramatically superior to what you would have had if you had a paper-based experience.
So what Heulabs did is they did some software for the tablet that has been used in countries around the world, over 140 different schools. So it's just one example of success and jobs that come out of an innovation center.
In terms of creating jobs, obviously technology is a growing sector. It's the sector that will continue to grow. There's a shortage of great engineering skills, skills worldwide. In fact, in many of the richer countries the number of people going into engineering is going down. So that's partly why there's opportunities for the countries where the science and engineering programs are still very strong. Most of those countries are here in Asia, and the world will benefit from the skills of those students.
We're creating in India an employment portal, to let students go up and check their skills, see what additional skills they need to get, see where the jobs are, be able to reach out to curriculum that partners develop there, and that will be an excellent way of using technology to empower people. Of course, as that's successful we'll do like we've done with all of our government-related projects, we'll take the experience, we'll write it up, we'll actually take the source code of what we do, put it up in a library that's available, so people can have a quick start if they want to do it themselves, they want us to help out and do that.
That's been true for many government projects, like The Portal Project where you connect all the different departments together into one Web site. We've been able to do those projects very rapidly, because we've done them now for many dozens of countries, and so the effort to take the existing software, without changing it, where it doesn't know it's connected to the Internet, it just thinks it's traditional interface, but the software connects up and takes that information, and puts it in a Web format, using a Web services approach. We've now done that enough times that for us or anyone else to do a portal has gotten to be a very straightforward thing.
When people think about these software projects, historically they probably thought about projects that were many tens of millions of dollars, and two to four years in time. With the advances in the development tools and building on similar applications that have been done, it would be very unusual nowadays for a project to run more than a small number of millions, and to run more than, say, 18 months. So the ability to prototype what needs to be done, look at the users, get their feedback, constantly be improving it, instead of going through a very complex procurement and design cycle, now software is so much better that things can be done very quickly.
In fact, any government Internet system, one nice thing about it is you're constantly getting feedback from users. You can see what pieces they use, so the people who are using it you can survey them, ask them what was complicated, and why did they like it, what didn't they like, and go on and drive up the traffic, drive up the satisfaction that people get from those things.
I'm often asked, is the technology revolution going to reach an end, the improvement in the chips and the software will that start to slow down as we reach some limit? And the answer is, certainly in the decades ahead, we don't see any limits. We see the fact that the power will just get better and better, and already these machines, even the very inexpensive Windows Server-type machines, are far more powerful than the most expensive mainframe or other non-standards type system.
The government database, whether it's every citizen, or a photograph of every citizen, the hardware required for that today is very, very inexpensive. In fact, for those projects the key is to make sure that you have the right software tools and training, that you're doing the interface the right way. That's the only important part of the project, not skimping on hardware, because that will not be a software challenge in pulling that system together.
We really see no limits in terms of bandwidth connecting systems together. In fact, new wireless approaches will let us reach out into rural areas, let us have very good, high bandwidth, without wired systems. We see TV changing to use the Internet, because now we have enough bandwidth to do not just normal video, high quality video, which is where things like the educational lectures I talked about come in, but also movies, or business meetings, or video of any type. That's certainly new for the Internet.
Five years ago we talked about music on the Internet, we talked about photos on the Internet, but video was not a mainstream thing. Today it's very mainstream. Why? The power of the systems, the power of the software tools, and the use of high speed connections allowed that video to work very well on every one of these systems. So that's going out and being used in many different ways, some very serious, important things, like education and training, some more frivolous, in terms of people posting entertaining videos, and being able to find those and share those. And that's great.
The Internet has always had a mix of something that you use at home, something that you use at work, something that you use in education. And having it be one standard, the classic PC interface, whether it's Windows or Office, the browsing interface, the standard protocols of the Internet, having that all be essentially a global thing that people can expect is very valuable. Anywhere in the world you go, you go into an Internet kiosk, you sit down, you're going to be very familiar, whether it's creating a document, or a spreadsheet, or doing electronic mail, these tools have become very standard. We're making them far richer, for things like collaboration, business intelligence, a lot, lot richer.
These are the tools that will continue to allow scientific progress to accelerate, whether it's clients for designing products like cars or planes, or whether it's science for designing new crops, understanding the genetics, and how we do breeding, or other techniques to make improvements there, how we study data and make breakthrough medicines. Really the Internet and software are the enabling factors that are letting people all over the world share information, connect up, and gain understanding at a far more rapid rate.
As I said, a centerpiece of this is absolutely education and what goes on in that space. And we're seeing a lot of ways that the hardware can change, a lot of ways that we can use new approaches. And I think these ideas will probably be first used throughout the countries in Asia, because as I mentioned, a strength, an incredible strength of all these countries, no matte what stage of development they're at, is the interest in, and commitment to education.
We believe that Microsoft has a role to play in this. The new announcements today, like the Student Innovation Suite, for government projects, some of the things we're doing around the Innovation Centers, all of those are elements, and they build on what we've been able to do. The fact that we can provide the great software, and some money for training, the hardware are becoming more and more feasible allows us to reach out and talk about this next 5 billion.
It won't happen overnight. We'll need to deliver through not only PCs, some things we'll need to deliver through cell phones, through TVs, and so we have to be very creative about that. We have to let people author material, let teachers edit the course material themselves, without understanding a lot of technology. So in every language, for every subject, it's easy to build it up, and it doesn't rely on a global company to do that. A local entrepreneur can take and absolutely do those things.
So we always come back to education as a very key thing. This is how every citizen in the world has a chance to realize their full potential, and it goes back to something I said in The Road Ahead, the book I wrote now well over 10 years ago, and I said at that time that if you wanted to understand somebody's economic opportunity, the one thing that would best predict that would be what country they were in. Very rapidly that's changing, so the one thing that best predicts their opportunity is what level of education they have received. And so anyone, no matter where you are in the world, who's got a great university education, essentially through the Internet, to some degree, jobs come to you, because there's a shortage of that kind of top talent.
So this is raising living conditions everywhere. It will take a lot of time and it, in turn, needs to be used to help and make education more effective, to have a better understanding of what the student knows and the quality of that teacher, and helping those teachers do a better job. But, we're very committed to this, we're very excited about what's going to come out of it. So I think you get a sense of why education is at the top of our list. But, for all these things we're just at the beginning of what technology can do.
Thank you. (Applause.)
Well, now just to give you a glimpse of some of the new ideas, the new ways of using technology, particularly in education, I'd like to ask Craig Mundie, who's our Chief Research and Strategy Officer, to come out and show us those things. And he's got quite a few neat things. And then when he's done, I'll come back out with Dr. Yunus for some questions. Welcome.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Thanks, Bill. (Applause.)
Good afternoon, everyone.
As Bill said in his remarks, we have had a vision for some time about the role that technology can play in improving education for everyone on a global basis. And as we've expanded this Unlimited Potential activity, one of the big challenges in our mind is to try to help people understand how do I get started. And I decided that I would take 10 minutes this afternoon to some extent to give you a roadmap by talking a little bit about what we see as this ultimate future that we're headed for, and how we think that the core computer technology will evolve to allow that, but then to bring that back, recognizing that over the time period that we're trying to solve this problem of improving education, we will have an incredible dynamic range, from students in elite schools in wealthy countries to basically people in impoverished locations, with perhaps little capability for delivery of formal education in any traditional sense.
And so I hope you can walk away from these anecdotes with some ideas about things that actually could be done today, and that as you build on them you'll ultimately end up with a spectrum of tools that will allow you to make some improvements.
One of the things that we clearly believe will happen in the future is that people will have better devices. And just to ground you in what's possible today, and yet what steps have yet to be taken, this device is a small computer. It's actually running Windows Vista, the latest operating system. Much like the latest cell phones, you can slide it open and it has a small keyboard under the bottom of it.
So this will basically be a computer for people not so much in education today, but for people like me, businesspeople who are willing to spend some significant amount of money, but who want a complete computing experience that is a little more capable than a cell phone but still quite a bit too expensive to think that it's the basis of every student having one.
But, in fact, that is the vision that we have. This device is about two centimeters thick, weighs under a kilogram, but today still costs about a thousand dollars or so.
This is actually a model, a physical model of the device that the companies we work with in this space are now moving to make. This one is only about one centimeter thick, would weigh well under a kilogram, probably under half a kilogram, and you can see is largely a much more sophisticated display technology.
But as Bill said in his remarks, this is the class of computer that we hope will have its cost come down. And clearly the physics of the device and the capabilities of the device would make it an ideal vehicle for delivering this future educational experience. And the challenge is, how do we ultimately get devices of that capability into literally every child's hand?
But under the assumption that that day will come, that just as personal computers and television and now cell phones have become very inexpensive and are permeating the society globally, we expect to see the same thing happen. And when it does, then the ability to have an educational experience not just in the classroom but at home, in transit, wherever you are, will continue to improve.
So, here you might see a device like this in the hands of a student on a subway. This would provide communication's capability to their friends, the ability to review their course material as they go.
One of the things that we think will also happen is that displays will become more and more prevalent, and lower and lower cost, and that one of the opportunities we have is to recognize the potential to decouple the display acquisition in the form of a television or a VCD player or any of a variety of other devices from the acquisition of the total computer itself. Today, televisions were never designed to display computer output, but all future televisions, all flat panel display technologies, in fact, are designed to do that, and our ability then to couple these together in the home where you add a keyboard, a display, a little docking station means that the small computers you take with you can, in fact, be the big computer that you use when you want to do more creative projects at home.
In this era, we would expect that you'll have communication and collaboration as an integral part of the experience, that children would be able to collaborate, just as today we're starting to have businesspeople collaborate in real time. It will be much more prevalent to have voice annotation and other ways to have a multimedia component to the curriculum and the interaction that students have with that curriculum. And we expect that people will become facile with editing and creating their own multimedia capabilities. And we think it will be more and more likely that students will graduate from what they do today, which is to do PowerPoint demonstrations as part of their classroom work to where they would be taking photographs or videos and editing them and adding comments together in order to produce this capability.
We also expect that software will become sophisticated enough to provide individual tutoring. Essentially software in certain areas will become a capable tutor in specific subject matter. And when that fails, we can use the mechanisms that are being used on the Internet today, for example, to develop synthetic reputation and to qualify people as assistants, and be able to use these not to allow people to buy goods, but, in fact, to essentially buy or acquire tutoring services from the people that they may know or, in fact, not know.
And so all of this would be an ideal environment, but the question is how do we do things in a practical sense between now and the time where this future might emerge?
So, let me talk briefly about things that might happen tomorrow. And by tomorrow I mean in the next couple of years. We definitely think that we'll start to see the emergence of low-cost, rugged laptop class devices, things that are designed to tolerate the stresses of being in the hands of small children or certainly high school aged children, and that the software suite that they'll have available is like the one that Bill talked about today, that we've introduced for government supported projects.
And so whether people acquire them themselves, have access to them in school or are acquiring them through government subsidized programs, we think that this will give us an interesting capability to have a laptop class experience but at a much smaller cost and form factor.
And we start to see a number of activities from Intel and other places, which make us quite confident that this class of computer will emerge quite quickly.
But even that represents a significant cost burden for the families or the government or the school to try to provide. And so one of the things that Bill and I have talked about for about the last 18 months is the idea of really leveraging the power of the cell phone and the ubiquity of the cell phone as a way to move into computing in support of things, including education, using the cell phone as the basic computer.
Today, even a low-end cell phone has the power of what used to be a desktop computer less than 10 years ago. And so if we're careful in how we design the software and the applications, it's conceivable that on a cell phone the computational capability is sufficient, but, of course, the ergonomics are not appropriate for many tasks that people want to have.
But what we think is that we can now build economically the ability for a cell phone to basically dock with a keyboard and any type of display, including an existing television display. So a school might, in fact, be able to begin, if they had no other computation facility, to have a setup like this picture indicates, where you can literally take a cell phone, hook up a keyboard and a TV to it, and begin to give people an entry level personal computing experience that could be used for Internet access or limited types of curriculum capability. And so we think that that's an interesting way to contemplate getting started.
But even before that might happen, or before the student, in fact, might have that cell phone and not just have it in a classroom but the ability to hook it up to a display or the family television at home, there are still other things that can be done, and I want to share with you some things that are not speculation but are, in fact, being done and delivered today.
There are three things I'll share with you, and the first, Edunova is a collaborative learning system developed down in Santiago, Chile. The next is Windows MultiPoint, which is a new technology around multiple mice; and then a concept called Digital Study Hall.
Edunova is a program developed by Miguel Nussbaum at the Catholic University of Santiago, Chile. A few years ago, he said I can't afford to buy big computers for everybody, but what if I gave them these small Pocket PCs, and I develop curriculum around that. But not just as an individual idea, but to use the technology to create collaboration under the assumption that collaboration would, in fact, be an equalizer in terms of how the children interacted with each other, and that they would begin to help each other, particularly in an environment where the teachers themselves were not very sophisticated.
And so he developed a capability where the kids were broken up into groups of three, and a curriculum that always operated in this triple sense. No student would be able to really advance unless their two partners could advance at the same time. They couldn't deliver a solution to a problem unless each of them delivered their component of that solution. And the small devices fostered this type of collaboration.
And they've had remarkably good success with this. Even in one year they were able to see statistically significant improvements in outcomes around the different curricula they had used, and they've now been exporting this to other parts of the world.
So, here we can start with small devices, but with an innovative model of education, and make some interesting progress.
This inspired us a little bit to recognize that indeed collaboration is a very powerful thing, and is there an economical way that we can start people down this path.
So, the Microsoft Research people developed what we call MultiPoint, the ability to take individual PC mice, and instead of having one mouse per computer, be able to have essentially an arbitrary number of mice per computer. They've got one computer, one display, one keyboard, but a mouse per user.
And so what you see here in this picture of the classroom is a little projector -- and you can buy them now for a small amount of money -- hooked up to one personal computer, but each of those icons you see on this screen is actually a cursor that's owned by a child who has their own mouse. And so their ability to essentially operate mice simultaneously on the screen has created a very, very interesting palette on which people are now creating new collaborative models of learning.
The children become very, very excited in using these things, and we have found that it tends to create a much more equal level of participation. And we can do things where they solve problems together, or, in fact, where they look at the screen and have been given ways of using the mouse to answer individual questions.
So, we can do everything from individual testing in a group environment to collaborative learning all by just adding a mouse. And so the mouse you could think of as the smallest incremental expense in which to give personal computing to everybody in a classroom.
And so each of these I offer to you as an example of a combination of clever hardware, clever software, and clever people who are thinking about new ways in which they can move towards this world of technology assisted education. And with that, we're very, very confident that the results that can be delivered can be substantially improved. And so these things give us a great deal of excitement.
The last thing says, well, isn't there something I can do even if I don't have computers to give to everybody. And this is a project that we did in India called Digital Study Hall. What you see here is essentially a classroom with a teacher, but in this case what we're doing is recording using just a standard Handicam the best teachers in each subject in each school district. And by recording them we wanted to make those lectures, as Bill said, available to all the people in the school. Many times it's the teacher who has insufficient training in a particular curricula, or, in fact, is just not a great teacher or has not had sufficient experience.
And so the idea was could we take the best teachers, video them, and then find an innovative way to deliver the videos and use that as part of the learning process. The example Bill Gates talked about was done at the university level where the remote people actually had better outcomes because of their ability to pause and resume the playback.
And what's actually already happened in these schools in India where this has been tried is that the teachers and the students benefit from exposure to these recordings of the best educators in their area. What was originally thought to happen was that the local teacher would just mediate the playing of the video lecture for the children, and in the early days that's what they did, and then the teachers, the local teacher said, well, I can take this video home and learn myself, and instead of just mediating the playback, I can add some value and ultimately I can emulate these teachers. And so the teachers started to learn, as well as the students started to learn, and the results have been extremely promising.
So, here you need literally only a television and a DVD player, which arguably almost every school has or can afford in the poorest environments, and the question is how do you distribute it. Here we don't even presume that we have the Internet in some sense to do it; we just have the mail system or local motorbike couriers. And the thing that makes this all possible now is the ability for an individual personal computer to be attached to these low-cost DVD replicators and to take these videos as home movies essentially, replicate them in volume, and then just put them in little envelopes and use the postal system to distribute them to all the schools. And by doing this we're basically creating a network -- we used to joke about SneakerNet in the old days of computing where we'd carry tapes around -- and in a sense this is a motorbike network that is delivering DVDs. But again the early outcomes from this, the level of participation is very positive, and we're very enthusiastic about this.
So, all of these things are technologies that are available today. They start at extremely low cost. And we think it allows us to have a spectrum of capability that can go from absolutely the poorest regions even today to the most sophisticated, and the technology will only continue to get better.
So, let me stop there, and ask Dr. Yunus and Bill Gates to come back and join me, and we'll use the remaining time we have for a question and answer session with Bill and Dr. Yunus. Bill? Thank you. (Applause.)
So, in preparation, and I guess through the session, people here have been able to put forward some questions, and I've got a few of those things, in case they're bashful and don't want to come to a microphone. But hopefully we'll get you involved in this a bit more interactively, and there are roaming microphones around.
So, if you have individual questions you'd like to ask now that you've heard their talks, please get your thoughts together and in a minute we'll open the floor to the microphones.
Let me start maybe though with one question that was presented for Dr. Yunus's consideration by quite a number of the delegates. The general question was, can you offer some thoughts about the role that technology can play in helping to eradicate poverty. Clearly the work you did with the banking was not technology dependent per se. Backstage you and I were talking about things like solar power and other things. What do you see as some of the other technologies that could play a role now in getting these people bootstrapped in this self-sufficiency model that you advocate?
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Technology plays a central role, very strategic role. No matter what you do, in which form you do, there's a technology to boost it up, make it powerful. Even just look at the microfinance itself; if you bring technology, as Bill was explaining, how powerful it gets, if you take the cell phone and can bring financial services to the people right away.
And information technology, which will change the whole world, I mean, getting to the bottom level, the poorest level, and bring the technology in the hands of the poorer people will create a completely different kind of world.
Simply we are not putting our mind into that level yet. We are so mesmerized by the designs and things for people at the top. Those are all the designs that you have shown. These are all addressed to those same people, repeatedly, improving one step, more steps, and a few more steps, but nothing yet to this beggar woman who sits in the street.
What information technology can take her out of that begging and be a self-earning system? How young people looking for a job can change his or her life with information technology, without being subservient to somebody else? Like if I could create a company which can not only find my job, and I create more jobs with information technology, if I can do that, the very orientation, job orientation itself is a wrong orientation. Why young people come out of schools to look for jobs? Why can't they say I will never seek any job from anybody, I will create jobs. That's where the creativity part comes in, and technology helps that.
So, I would put this as central. And you said about the renewable energy and other things, other kinds of technologies, all kinds of technology, but again the core technology I still see to change the world is information technology, a manifestation of it, not just one manifestation, which you have been talking about, there are thousands of manifestations of how you do that.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Thank you.
One other common theme that I'll present for Bill's consideration, everybody I think recognizes that alleviating poverty perhaps has its genesis in education. The Internet and many of these other things may play a role in that. It says, however, the issues of high cost and system congestion related to connectivity, leading to low speeds and high cost, may severely impede the realization of this inclusion that might come. What ideas do you have that might really lower the cost of connectivity in these poorer or rural environments?
BILL GATES: Well, there are several things that should be able to help us there. The first is bringing together the mobile world and the Internet world, and thinking of those as one world. And so when you run optic fiber into a village, and allow it to connect up to wireless base stations, that will be for PCs to connect to Internet, and for phones to connect to both voice services and to the Internet, so we can bring those together.
The wireless technologies are actually advancing quite rapidly. Intel's a big believer in WiMAX. There are other forms of that. Even today's 3G networks you can often get anywhere from 40k to 100k baud connection up to the Internet. And now for high quality video that's not good enough, but if you just want to do a low quality video, like a videoconference, if you want to see any text pages, which for a farmer looking at prices or markets is adequate, then that works very, very well.
What we need is a tiered approach where everybody can get in at some way of doing Internet connection, and then as they are advancing, it's easy without them learning something new, without buying totally new equipment, to get up to that higher speed connection.
In fact, one of our partners in India, Reliance, is talking about running fiber to provide a new type of TV infrastructure, and then it just comes for free that you get the Internet capability there as well.
Some of the things you reminded me that the things that CK Prahalad has written about, where you think about products, both cost reducing what we have, but also designing in a very simple way, and I think the IT sector is going to have both of those dynamics taking place.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Okay, anybody in the audience have a question they'd like to offer up now? Keep thinking. I'll keep going then. I have most of your questions anyway.
Another question, Bill, for you was what's the vision and strategy for Microsoft in healthcare through the year 2020? Do you think that these technologies will be able to facilitate things like personalized genomic medicine, and will that make a difference in the healthcare of the future?
BILL GATES: Well, healthcare I'd say is right up there with education as a tough area, a growing area, where we have to think about how the rich world is going to change in what it's doing in healthcare, and how we bring more equity and more capability into the developing countries.
From a technology point of view, Microsoft is putting a lot into healthcare. In fact, under Craig's management we have a new business group, which is our healthcare business group. We just saw so many places where we could come in and do a little more of a specific solution, either for hospitals or for consumers, that we're trying out some new things there.
If you look at the developing countries, that's more where I've gotten involved with my foundation, looking at a lot of the disease problems that because the richer countries weren't thinking about them, that there was no established market. And so the amount of investment in something like a malaria vaccine or tuberculosis vaccine or certain childhood diseases, there wasn't the right investment there.
And yet as we get those advances, as you improve health outcomes, it's very well established that that actually lowers -- ironically, and people were surprised about this in the 1970s where they discovered this -- that actually reduces family size. So, population growth goes down as the certainty of a parent that their children will survive into adulthood and be able to take care of them, as that goes up, you actually reduce population growth. So, these healthcare interventions can have a very big impact.
In terms of technology, we're already seeing consumers going out and learning on the Internet about what's going on. They need some more trusted sources for that information. There are people who are doing telemedicine, medicine at a distance, where every country has a challenge that it's hard to get the experts to live in the rural areas. And so often that Internet connection approach will come in and play a role there.
I do think that biology will be advancing because of our understanding of genetics and all the tools we have around that. I don't know how much it will be individualized medicine, but I do know that things like heart disease, cancer, and the diseases my foundation has as a priority, that if you take a time period like 20 years, most of those will be dramatically improved, that the average lifetime will go up quite a bit, we'll have many more vaccines than we have today. And so that's the other sector of the world that's moving very quickly, partly by taking advantage of software tools.
CRAIG MUNDIE: I'll try one more question, maybe a brief comment from both of you about this one. "The World is Flat," written by Thomas Friedman, is now a very popular book in Japan. What's your impression about that book, and what role do you think that Microsoft and other companies like this really play in this flat world of the future?
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Going back to health issues on that one, I see health as a real challenge around the world, along with the poverty, because being poor is also synonymous with being in poor health. It's the same story, so they go together. So, if you are addressing poverty, you are impacting on health; if you're addressing health, you're impacting on poverty. So you can look at it in a simultaneous way.
And we basically left the whole health issue on the shoulder of the government. That's what generally speaking happens. And it's not doing very well, it's not very successful, and with the varieties of experience mostly it's people at the bottom not being reached, despite the good intention of the governments and international programs.
How do we do that? How do we get to that? And that's where I was coming up with the idea of creating another kind of business, social business. Health can be an exciting social business, a business to address the health issues. And in our case we are creating two hospitals right now, eye care hospitals as a social business. Cataracts are a big problem in Bangladesh; like many other diseases, cataracts are a problem. So, we are exclusively addressing the cataract patients, cataract operations. Everybody will get the service. Those who are able to pay, they pay full market price. And those who cannot afford it, we have discounted price. Even somebody who is absolutely beggar at the lowest level, she gets a treatment, too, but for a penny or something, but everybody gets the treatment.
Hospital as a whole covers all its costs. That's a social business. Nobody is trying to make money out of this.
So, we can create a lot of those things, because it becomes institutionalized. Most of the NGOs doing like in Bangladesh, NGOs have been very effective, BRAC and other organizations in addressing this. But you need to keep on pumping money to keep it moving. It improves the health condition, but institutionalization and self-sufficiency is a very important issue in that. Bangladesh is a case where mortality, child mortality has declined. As a result, one of the reasons, the fertility rate has gone down very dramatically. It used to be 6.4 some 20 years back; today, it's 3.0 fertility rate, in 20 years. So, how each one is connected to the other?
So, this is what -- and Bangladesh is doing very well related to India, related to Pakistan, related to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh is doing very well because it's doing very well in poverty reduction. Poverty is reducing in Bangladesh in a very systematic way, very sustained way.
So, we see the interlinks, so we need to think in a way that we can do it in a business way, in a very technology oriented way. More and more of the technology, more and more business ideas can change the situation dramatically.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Yeah, I was in India recently, and even there where you say, even though the government ostensibly has the role of providing the healthcare, even at the lowest level, most people are paying for some type of private healthcare.
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Much more, much more.
CRAIG MUNDIE: And so I think you're right, that's clearly an opportunity.
BILL GATES: In terms of the Friedman book, I think it's a very excellent book and captures some of the key trends. Craig and I had a chance to get to know Tom, and talked to him as he was working on that. I sort of gave him a hard time and said, well, you know, it's not flat for 6 billion. It used to be flat for 1 billion, and now it's flat for maybe 3 billion. And that is a phenomenal thing, because markets in terms of drug discovery and innovations, as you scale them up from 1 billion to 3 billion, it's more than a linear impact; it creates an acceleration of innovation of what's going on there.
But I would say that the other 3 billion won't get into this virtuous cycle without some creativity, including microfinance, more work on their diseases, more special work from the IT sector of what they can do.
So, I'm optimistic that some day we will be able to say the earth is flat. Now, when I said that to Friedman, he said, fine, but it's not as good a title to say half the world is flat, and so he didn't change that, but he put a few things in there to talk about that. In fact, Bangalore, where he had a scene in Bangalore, if you walk just about two miles from where he was sitting in that nice Infosys office, there's a terrible slum in Bangalore. So, there are places in the world you can literally see the contrasts are still pretty stunning.
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: And that's the point I was making when I said that 6 percent of the world income goes to the 60 percent of the world's population. That's not a flat world. So, for those 60 percent with 6 percent income, the whole thing that we are talking about of the world doesn't exist. So not only they are deprived, the people who are enjoying the 94 percent of the income, they're also deprived, because the creativity of these people are not put on the table. You don't know how much powerful those creativities were, which were rejected, undiscovered, unexplored, the great gift that each individual has in them, never that gift never unwrapped, we didn't see what it is. So, that's the shame. That's where the flatness disappears.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Okay. Well, before we end, is there anybody in the audience who'd like to ask the last question? Okay, one back here.
QUESTION: Good afternoon. May I ask Mr. Gates, I heard your views about how to improve human life, but may I know how do you believe that information technology or ICT would help in mitigating climate change, the home, the very life here on earth? I'd like to know how you believe that ICT would be able to help us make this world a healthy one for all of us. Thank you.
BILL GATES: Sure. Well, fortunately climate change, although it's a huge challenge, it's a challenge that happens over a long period of time. And so most of the forecasts about by the year 2100 that the ocean will have risen perhaps a foot and a half, you know, we have time to work on that.
If you had said -- if you'd gone back 90 years ago, and said, okay, we have this big challenge, you would have underappreciated how much things would change and improve during that time. I think it's always possible to underestimate innovation.
In terms of energy generation, we need innovation. We need it for two reasons. One is we need it for better environmental things, but the second is we need to continue to make energy less expensive. If you're a poor person, energy is a big deal to you. Fertilizer is energy, getting to your job is energy, food, a lot of the costs come from energy. And so only in rich countries can we say, oh, well, let's go ahead and make energy a lot more expensive. Well, maybe in the short run in rich countries to spur innovation that needs to be done, but if you take, say, a 20-year timeframe, we need a solution for developing countries where the cost of energy is low, and it's environmentally friendly.
Now, fortunately there are many sources of energy that could do that, and right now we have the marketplace in its normal kind of crazy way with lots of startups and ideas, and there's maybe 100 ideas being pursued. In the solar area there are dozens. In the geothermal area, wind, there are nuclear designs that to me look very exciting. They won't come overnight, but they'll have safety and low-cost capabilities.
And so I think we have to see how can we foster these new energy technologies without having the developing world pay a short term price where already today millions are dying and they're in a very deprived situation, and that in many ways is far more acute than even the problem that you're looking at 40 or 50 years from now.
And so it's always easy in the rich world to get things out of balance. People in the rich world know about SARS, what a terrible disease SARS was. Well, you know, in five minutes malaria kills as many people as SARS killed in all time. Now, you just don't read about it in the newspaper because it's poor people dying and they're dying every day. And so we have to think, okay, some tragedies are happening right now. It's up to the rich world to be more generous in helping with those things, while at the same time driving the innovation. So, to be honest, I'm very optimistic that we'll have those innovations.
In the near term the IT industry is doing things with better power management capabilities where machines can shut down. We've had to learn a little bit about this because of battery life of portable machines, but what we're doing now is we're taking those techniques and applying them to desktop and server, and so we can reduce energy in those areas as well. The best we're going to do though for IT technology within the sector is be pretty flat in terms of any energy usage.
Now, our impact in terms of reducing the need for travel, allowing people to get information without having to make paper or trips or things that really are very energy intensive, that's really where we'll have the greatest impact.
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Can I just add?
CRAIG MUNDIE: Sure. You have the final word.
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Bill, whatever it is to be done is to be quick for us in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country which is at the level of most of the sea level, very little high ground in Bangladesh. If the sea level rises with the global warming, climate change, millions of people in Bangladesh will be affected, because part of Bangladesh will go under water. And the remaining part, which will not go under water, their agriculture, their whole likelihoods will be threatened. So, with 145 million people in this tiny little piece of land, with the global warming shaking it up, it will be a terrible disaster of no going back. It's not a flood that comes and disappears; it's something kind of one way traffic.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Either that or you'll have to learn from the Dutch.
PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS: No, the Dutch can't teach us on this one. The Dutch was not fighting the global warming.
So, the point I'm making, that the whole lifestyle has to change. This is not a sustainable lifestyle that we are promoting in rich countries. So, we have to address that issue very quickly, what kind of lifestyle it is, because today this is seen as the lifestyle, so everybody else is emulating, like China is coming that direction, India is coming that direction, Bangladesh is moving in that direction. Unless those things are changed, we said this is not sustainable, we have to make a drastic turnaround, be careful about what we do. This is not going to disappear very easily, even if you put the brakes today. Still the whole momentum of it will take us a long time. So, we need to do very, very serious intention into it and take action on that.
CRAIG MUNDIE: Thank you. Thank you very much to Bill and Dr. Yunus, and I hope you enjoyed the comments, and thanks for your attention. (Applause.)
GERRI ELLIOTT (Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector): Thank you so much, Bill and Craig, and very, very, very special thanks goes to Dr. Yunus, whose absolutely innovative efforts have impacted thousands of people, not only in Bangladesh but elsewhere, and his groundbreaking model of economic empowerment is exactly the kind of initiative that we've been talking about here for the last two days that we hope will sustain and broaden the reach of economic growth in this region.
I want to thank all of the speakers that we've had over the last day and a half. Each and every one of them has made a unique contribution to this conference, and to extending prosperity and opportunity in Asia. And we thank them for sharing their ideas and the lessons that they learned.
And, of course, we want to extend a very special thanks to our Chinese hosts for welcoming us so warmly in this wonderful city of Beijing. We wish you continued prosperity, and all the best for next year's Olympic games. We know this dynamic city and this country will shine brightly for all the world to see.
We had a number of goals for this forum that we shared with you in the very beginning, to give you all a chance to network and share best practices, to talk about some of the key challenges that you all face in this region, and to give you some takeaways and some practical ideas that you can hopefully implement in your country.
I hope we succeeded in fulfilling those goals, and that hopefully we made some small contribution to the conversation and the way ahead in Asia.
We look forward to continuing the discussions that we started here, and to deepening the new friendships that have emerged. And we look forward to furthering our partnerships to help you empower your countries, your institutions, and your people.
So, on behalf of Microsoft and my entire Worldwide Public Sector team, we send you off with many blessings, and we wish you safe passage home. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END

Search Engine Watch Forums Adds "Intrusive" Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:43:00 +0800

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch Forums has changed the placement of the ads displayed on the site and forums. The ads used to be primarily on the left hand bar, in a box on the right side and a thin line at the top. I believe the forums pretty much had ads only on the left hand side, if any. That has changed, Search Engine Watch Forums has added ads.
Here is Search Engine Watch Forums before the ads:

It takes about 400 pixels from top to bottom to get to content within a specific forum thread.
The new Search Engine Watch Forums with ads:

Here it takes about 650 pixels from top to bottom to get to the content within a specific forum thread.
Some folks don't mind the ads, saying; "I have a degree in ignoring most things, including the ads so I dont mind."
Others like Marcia, an Search Engine Watch Forums moderator dislikes them, saying; "very intrusive."
I dislike them as well, and I would pay to not see them. I am not sure if that is an option, but hopefully it will be an option.

Wikipedia co-founder wants open-source search engine

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:41:00 +0800

Jabber founder Jeremie Miller has signed on to help develop Wikia's open-source search engine project, the organization announced. The Wikia project aims to develop a search engine, crawlers and other indexing tools through a collaborative, open-source process. "Jeremie is a brilliant thinker and a natural fit to help revolutionize the world of search," Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement. "I believe Internet search is currently broken, and the way to fix it is to build a community whose mission is to develop a search platform that is open and totally transparent." Contributors will likely include graduate students, as well large companies that want to include search functionality in their products but don't want to pay royalties to a search company, according to Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. Another constituency will likely be smaller search companies that don't have the time or money to do everything required for a complete search service themselves. "Everyone has to crawl the Web, but it costs a lot of money," Penchina said. "There has been a lot of interest in academia for better tools." The ultimate goal of the project is to bring "absolute transparency, collaboration and human intelligence to complement search algorithms," according to a press release. Source: CNET Networks

Marketcom PR Analysis: Search Engine Technology Has Changed PR Forever -- So Maybe They Should Just Call It Google Relations?

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:39:00 +0800

GREENWICH, Conn., May 2, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- It wasn't so long ago that PR was a pretty predictable business for most big companies. CFOs put out quarterly earnings releases. CEOs did media tours once or twice a year. Corporate communications teamed up with legal to plan for "crisis communications" events that might never happen. And then the PR team sat back and waited for the media calls to come in.
Then came Google, and everything changed. As Marketcom PR President Greg Miller observes, "For a discipline built on the assumption that you could not only manage but actually mold the perceptions of all of your key audiences, Google has upset the PR paradigm. It's much harder to control information. It's much harder to get out ahead of bad news. And every piece of public information about your company -- the good, the bad, the ugly -- lives on the Web more or less forever."
Don't believe it? Think of the impact of Google Alerts popping up all day on the electronic desktops of your customers, vendors, employees, analysts, shareholders, regulators and everyone else capable of typing your company's name. Then think of how much information is available about your company through a typical Google search. Then think of all of the comments about your company floating around on blogs and instantly searchable through Google or other search engines like Technorati. How much of that stuff is the result of something you or your company directly control? Not much.
What does it mean?
That there really is no such thing as a secret anymore. One high-powered private equity manager learned that when private information about an important alliance popped up in a simple Google search. Turned out that a young associate at the law firm of his firm's alliance partner popped the information into his website bio to make himself look more important.
That the media is now using Google as a primary news source -- and often the only one -- in its coverage about you and your company. That's what a well-known media investor discovered when a West Coast business journal printed a fable about his current business strategy based on what had happened in his career almost two decades ago without ever calling him. When asked why, the young reporter said, "Well, I found it all on Google." So it must be true.
That Google allows you to become the story in ways you could never anticipate. That's what a partner in a high-profile private equity firm found out when a former colleague reminisced in his blog about their shared time together as young, overworked associates at a major investment bank. The occasion -- running into each other at the marriage of a third former overworked associate at a major investment bank. Google found the entry -- with details and a picture -- only hours after it was posted. No harm done, but no control over the information, either.
Greg Miller's article, "Search Engine Technology Has Changed PR Forever -- So Why Is It Taking So Long for PR People to Adapt?" was published in the April 26 issue of The Bulldog Reporter. To view the article online, please go to http://www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog/issues/1_1/dailydog_barks_bites/index.html.
About Marketcom PR
Marketcom PR designs and implements communications initiatives that combine classic media outreach tools with market-oriented thought leadership vehicles to help clients communicate better with their key audiences. For more information, visit www.marketcomPR.com.

The Chinese search engine that out-Googled Google

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:32:00 +0800

Chinese search giant Baidu is beating Google at its own game in China, but it's playing by different rules
April 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- SINGAPORE -- "I get it," the Western man says, speaking heavily accented Chinese. Surrounded by beautiful Chinese women in the video advertisement, he grins with self-satisfaction. Nearby, a suave Chinese man dressed in scholar's robes laughs. "You don't necessarily get it," he says. As the ad unfolds, the Chinese scholar proceeds to humiliate the Westerner, mocking his poor Chinese-language skills. In the end, the women flock to the scholar's side, and the Westerner is left confused, alone and humiliated. "Baidu understands Chinese better," the Baidu.com Inc. advertisement says, needling the company's former investor and current rival, Google Inc. And statistics seem to bear that out: Baidu accounts for 62% of the country's search traffic, up from 52% in 2005, according to the China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing. For Western companies trying to establish a Web presence in China, understanding how Baidu plays the game could be key.

Robin LiFounded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, two Chinese technology executives who once worked in the U.S., Baidu has grown to become the most visited Chinese-language Web site in the world. In the process, it has also earned the rare distinction of being one of few companies to have competed toe-to-toe with Google and won, though some would say the playing field was tilted. Baidu's detractors claim that the company abets music piracy and pads the top of its search results with paid listings. But the success and popularity of the company's search engine is undeniable. A large part of Baidu's early success is attributable to its MP3 search engine, which came just as MP3 players were taking off in China. Lawsuits brought by music companies claiming that the search service infringes on their copyrights haven't slowed Baidu's progress. The company's rise occurred as the Chinese government was growing increasingly concerned about Google's search engine.
That situation came to a head in September 2002, when government censors shut off access to Google in China. A few days later, Chinese officials "hijacked" the Google.com domain name, redirecting Chinese Internet traffic to local search engines that censor results. Most of that traffic ended up at Baidu, giving it an instant boost in popularity and sparking rumors of cooperation with China's police administration, the Public Security Bureau. (Baidu executives declined to comment for this article.) No reason was ever disclosed for the blocking and subsequent hijacking of Google's domain name, which lasted for a total of 10 days. The event was notable for two reasons, however: It was the first time Chinese censors blocked access to a search engine, and it marked the beginning of the end of Google's reign as China's most popular search engine. Today, Google lags far behind Baidu in China, in terms of both its popularity with users and revenue derived from search-related advertising. Despite Google's best efforts and the millions of dollars it spent to open an office in China, the company shows no signs of closing the gap with Baidu. Baidu executives clearly believe that the company's success is secure. "We don't think competition is a major threat at this point," founder Li, who currently serves as the company's chairman and CEO, told investors during a February conference call. (Xu left the company in 2004.) Like Google, Baidu derives most of its revenue from Internet ads. It earned 829 million renminbi ($106 million U.S.) from online advertising in 2006, a 170% increase over the previous year. In recent months, Baidu has branched out into new areas, reaching beyond search. The company has added a news service, for which it recently received a license from the Chinese government, and a blogging service, called Baidu Spaces. Buoyed by its success, the company launched a Japanese-language search engine, Baidu.jp, in March, as part of its plan to spend $15 million this year to build up a Japanese business. It will be interesting to see if Baidu "gets" Japan. Lemon is an IDG News Service correspondent in Singapore. Contact him at

Search volunteers called out after man lies to partner

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:30:00 +0800

Police are considering charging a Nelson man whose lies triggered a search and rescue operation.
The 26-year-old man texted his partner on Tuesday night, saying he was driving back to Nelson after dropping a friend at the Picton interisland ferry terminal and would be home soon.
He sent another text about an hour later later saying he'd been stopped by police and delayed.
At 4.30am yesterday, the man's frantic partner alerted police to his apparent disappearance after she'd driven along the dangerous Whangamoa Hill road between Nelson and the Rai Valley looking for him or signs of a crash.
Senior Sergeant John Maxwell said police and search and rescue volunteers from Nelson, Picton and Blenheim were called out about 5.30am and a helicopter was placed on standby.
"Our worst fear was that there was a person out there in an upturned vehicle somewhere either injured or dead," he told NZPA today.
"His partner had been driving up and down the Whangamoas, which is a dangerous stretch of road at any time. Given the weather we'd had the previous night, it made it even worse."
Calls to the man's cellphone went unanswered, but police managed to establish that calls had been made from it to a house in Hastings, where the man was located about 10am.
Mr Maxwell said police were considering laying charges against the man.
"This was a complete and utter waste of police resources and time," he said.
"He put a lot of people to inconvenience for something that transpired to be a thoughtless lie."
Mr Maxwell said the man told him he was visiting family and had wanted to see his daughter.
"I've advised him that I'd like to talk to him directly when he gets back to Nelson."
He said the man's partner was "less than impressed" with the explanation.
"No doubt she'll be having some stern words with him."
- NZPA

Ad Revenue Up at Martha Stewart

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:26:00 +0800

Martha Stewart Living (MSO - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) posted a wider first-quarter loss but said ad revenue rose 20%.
For the quarter ended March 31, the New York publishing company lost $12 million, or 23 cents a share, compared with the year-ago $7 million, or 13 cents a share. The latest-quarter loss included 11 cents a share in costs tied to the warrant issued in connection with a syndicated TV show. Excluding those costs, the quarterly loss was 12 cents a share.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were looking for a 17-cent loss.
Revenue rose 7% from a year ago to $66 million. Advertising revenue rose 20% to $21.4 million. The company said advertising revenue growth continues to exceed page growth, "a strong trend from last year that continued through this quarter."
The company guided to second-quarter revenue of $69 million to $72 million and full-year revenue of $330 million to $340 million. Analysts were looking for $340 million for the year.
The company also announced an agreement with warehouse club giant Costco (COST - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) to sell co-branded food. The move is the latest in a series of licensing deals for Martha Stewart, which is looking to expand its branded products beyond its prior offerings with Sears Holdings' (SHLD - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) Kmart.
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Vonage and the case of the missing ad copy

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:23:00 +0800

Why did the Wall Street Journal request edits of a Vonage ad? Fortune's Stephanie Mehta reports.

By Stephanie N. Mehta, Fortune senior writer
May 3 2007: 6:24 AM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Readers of the The Wall Street Journal on April 27 may have noticed something unusual about the full-page ad on the back of the Marketplace section: a blacked-out sentence right in the middle of a block of text. Journal readers were left wondering: Was the hastily Magic Marker-ed out line part of the ad's creative message? Or was it covering up something truly offensive?
The answer, as it turns out, is neither. The ad in question was placed by Vonage (Charts), which uses Internet technology to deliver phone calls over other companies' broadband networks. Vonage is engaged in a bruising patent dispute with Verizon (Charts, Fortune 500), the huge New York-based phone company. Earlier this year, a jury ruled that Vonage had violated key Verizon patents. Tuesday, Vonage asked for a retrial after the Supreme Court, as part of its decision in the case of KSR v. Teleflex, called for "more common sense" in assessing whether inventions were eligible for patent protection.
The Wall Street Journal's edited version of the Vonage ad
The New York Times ran the ad, in full, the same day.
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Verizon vs Vonage, the sequel
Fortune's Legal Affairs Editor Roger Parloff looks at Vonage's attempt to get a new hearing of its case, in Legal Pad. (Read the blog.)
But Vonage isn't just sitting idly by while it waits for the courts to rule on its fate. The company decided to launch a Web site, freetocompete.com, which argues Verizon's patent litigation amounts to uncompetitive behavior. And to generate buzz for the site, Vonage placed full-page advertisements in a number of national and local newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal.
As it turns out, the Journal was the only publication that asked Vonage to alter the ad. Newspapers such as The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post all ran the advertisement in full. The passage the Journal blanked out: "Verizon has chosen to attack Vonage in the courts. Could it be all about the money?"
A Vonage spokeswoman would only call the paper's actions "highly unusual." She added: "We were surprised at their requirement for us to edit the advertisement when none of the other publications demanded the same." (Vonage supplied us with images of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times ads shown here.)
A spokeswoman for Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal (and a former employer of mine), declined comment. (Though, to be sure, Journal executives had other things on their minds after news broke of Rupert Murdoch's unsolicited offer to buy Dow Jones for $5 billion.)
A source familiar with the whole redaction situation tells Fortune that Vonage's agency sought early last week to place the ads in several publications based on when the company could get the most favorable rates. (A black and white, full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal's national edition can run close to $200,000 for one-time buyers, according to the newspaper's Web site.) By the time the Journal planned to run the ad, it had already appeared in other news outlets.
The source says Vonage's advertising agency got a call late Thursday afternoon, the day before the Journal planned to run the ad, asking for changes. The paper's advertising department questioned Vonage's claim it had never raised its prices; Vonage representatives had to provide the Journal with SEC filings that showed the company had, in fact, lowered its rates during the course of its short life. The Journal also had problems with language that suggested Verizon's patent case was "all about the money."
The source says Vonage was unwilling to edit the advertisement at the 11th hour, and instead proposed blacking out the language in question. At 10:30 p.m. Thursday, the Journal agreed to run the advertisement with the redaction.
Conspiracy theories abound in the blogosphere. A headline about the item on DSLreports.com reads: "Wall Street Journal Votes for Verizon: Censoring of Vonage ads is suspect." The commentary seems to be suggesting the Journal was trying to protect another, bigger advertiser: Verizon. That doesn't exactly hold up, though. The New York Times, for example, didn't ask for redactions, and the Times gets much more advertising from Verizon, which heavily advertises its wireless services in its more consumer-oriented pages. Same goes for USA Today and The Washington Post.
More like, the Journal was seeking to protect Vonage - and itself - from using legally questionable language. But as one source close to Vonage put it: "Vonage wasn't asking the Wall Street Journal to act as its attorney, it was asking the Wall Street Journal to take its money and accept the ad."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/02/news/companies/pluggedin_mehta_ad.fortune/

Online Ad Revenue Jumps in the Great White North

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:20:00 +0800

Several factors have contributed to the rise of Canadian online ad revenue to C1.01 billion in 2006, reports eMarketer.
According to the Internet Advertising Bureau of Canada, increased search, rich media and video options all add up to the jump in revenue. The dollar figure represents an 80 percent rise from 2005's numbers.
The rise in display ad spending has been quicker than search, opposite the trend in the U.S. That's at least partially attributed to a higher rate of broadband penetration in Canada, where 58 percent of households have the faster connection. In the U.S. only 46 percent of households have broadband connections.

AOL Bright Spot For Time Warner; Ad Sales Up 40%

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:18:00 +0800

by Gavin O'Malley, Thursday, May 3, 2007 6:00 AM ET
CONTINUING ITS TRANSFORMATION FROM A blemish to a bright spot for Time Warner, AOL helped its parent company post better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter on Wednesday. Remarkably, AOL's ad sales soared 40% year-over-year, thanks largely to its move from a walled-off subscription service to a free, ad-supported Web portal.
AOL's overall revenue fell 25% due to waning subscriptions, but that didn't keep its adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization, or OIBDA--a key measure of profitability--from rising 27%.
While praising the new ad strategy, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons said projected ad growth for the year would not match the first-quarter rate.
Until recently, AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2000 was largely seen as one of the worst corporate collaborations in history. But critics have had to reassess the deal in light of the success of AOL's decision last October to drop its subscription model for an ad-supported approach.
Upon the release of Time Warner's earnings, Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang made a point of praising the recent performance of AOL, saying that the unit was "moving along" in a research note released Wednesday.
"All of the upside to both revenue and EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] was due to a slower than expected decline in subscribers in packages that are available for free or lower prices," Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne said in a research note.
Swinburne cautioned, however: "We believe that this is likely a near-term positive rather than something that will drive long-term value for the company."
Earlier this year, Time Warner's stock enjoyed a much-needed jolt, thanks in part to AOL's ad sales, which rose to nearly $2 billion in fourth-quarter 2006, up 49% year-over-year.
Further strengthening its relationship with display advertisers, AOL last month launched a private-label version of Google AdWords search allowing advertisers to place search ads only within the AOL network.
The so-called AOL Search Marketplace was an expansion of a five-year strategic relationship between Google and AOL struck in December 2005 in which Google powered the contextual search ads found on the AOL service.
The initiative is also meant to give AOL a better shot at getting some of the search ad dollars that have traditionally gone to Google.
Other recent initiatives include the launch of AOL Local Search, which incorporates technology from MapQuest and CityGuide, and an AOL Shopping and Commerce Search, which came from a partnership with comparison shopping site PriceGrabber.com.
Reinvigorated, AOL has been busy assembling a solid team of executive leaders. Earlier this year, it named Nisha Kumar to the position of chief financial officer, reporting to AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco. Kumar came to AOL from Time Warner Inc., where she held senior positions in operations and mergers and acquisitions. AOL is also presently on the hunt for a star CMO.
Time Warner, which is also the parent of CNNMoney.com, reported sales of $11.2 billion, corresponding to analysts' forecasts, and up 9% year-over-year.
Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said Wednesday that Time Warner's strong performance supported her conviction that this year is a "comeback year" for profits.
Net income fell 18% to $1.2 billion, or 31 cents a share. After excluding gains from asset sales, profit came in at 22 cents per share, beating Wall Street's expectations of 20 cents a share. Time Warner's OIBDA also beat expectations of $3 billion, rising 19% to $3.1 billion.
Another factor in Time Warner's strong performance--and possibly the foremost reason--was its newly public Time Warner Cable unit, which saw solid increases in subscribers for digital cable, digital phone and high-speed Internet access services. The unit reported revenue of $3.85 billion, up 61% from a year earlier and adjusted OIBDA of $1.31 billion, an increase of 54% year-over-year.
Notably, analysts like UBS's Aryeh Bourkoff continue to speculate over whether AOL might be sold or spun off, though Time Warner says it has no intention of letting go.

Microsoft Buys Mobile Ad Network

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Thu, 3 May 2007 22:17:00 +0800

By Brian Morrissey
NEW YORK Microsoft is branching further from its core computer software business with the purchase of ScreenTonic, a company that helps advertisers run campaigns on mobile phones.The purchase of the Paris-based company will add to Microsoft's ad capabilities, which already include Web search, display ads and videogame placements.
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Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.ScreenTonic's platform shows both text and display ads to mobile users, reporting data to advertisers on viewings and actions taken on the placements. The company works with both mobile operators and publishers. It has deals with mobile companies in the U.K., Belgium and France.In addition to its tech platform, ScreenTonic also operates a mobile ad network that sells placements on mobile sites.After trailing Google badly in search advertising, Microsoft has vowed to build a wide-ranging digital ad platform that links search, display, gaming and mobile. A year ago it bought Massive, which places ads within videogames.Mobile advertising is currently a small market, but is expected to quickly grow. ABI Research anticipates $3 billion will be spent on mobile ads this year, rising to $19 billion in 2011.
http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003580311

Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Wed, 2 May 2007 01:45:00 +0800

Update: Listen to our podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb at TalkCrunch.

Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complimenting it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform.
During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio.
When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web - in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.

The CLRThe biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.
The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB - which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.
Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it - it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.
MultimediaA lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia - particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen). The demonstrations shown today were simply gorgeous, and we are finally seeing a web-based video distribution model that can compete with both desktop-based downloads as well as DVD and other offline content.
As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB (it will be a bit bigger for Mac OSX as it is a universal binary). The install happens automatically, and doesn’t require a restart in IE which will probably result in video content sites being the first major distributors of the Silverlight 1.0 client across browsers. I expect that over time we will see a host of sites, especially those currently serving WMV of other formats into media player embeds, migrate their video serving to Silverlight.
ServicesThe same video sites that will be switching to Silverlight for content delivery will also want to consider one of the new web services announced by Microsoft today. The service is called Silverlight Streaming and it allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. Best of all, this service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality. Starting right now, you can build a total video content site using Silverlight at no cost. The future for this service looks good as they will incorporate Silverlight Streaming with the MSN Video ad network to allow you to easily monetize your video streams and participate in a revenue sharing opportunity with Microsoft while removing your distribution costs. There will also be a premium level of content delivery where you will be able to pay for higher levels of usage - the cost for this service is as yet unknown but expect it to be very low.
MobileSilverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone - so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well - thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do.
What is next..In all we should expect to see more services provided by Microsoft as part of the ecosystem. Ray Ozzie today spoke about a vision of services complimenting software - and announcing Silverlight Streaming at the same time as the new Silverlight client is an excellent example of that. Microsoft are clearly determined to position themselves as the premier provider of tools, software and services for the web.
Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident - so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.
My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched - but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).
To find out more about Silverlight, and to download toolkits and samples and particpiate in discussions check out the new Silverlight website at http://silverlight.net/. Silverlight 1.0 will go gold sometime this summer.
Nik Cubrilovic has been a contributor to Techcrunch since early 2006. He writes a blog at http://www.nik.com.au/ and he is the CEO of Omnidrive

Making Money with Google Ads in India

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Tue, 1 May 2007 20:43:00 +0800

Making Money with Google Ads in India
posted by Amit Agarwal
Sometime back, there was a report saying that India has a large but secret army of college graduates and "work at home" housewives who are clicking Pay-Per-Click ads on the Internet (e.g. Google AdSense) to make few hundred dollars per month.In all these years, Google may have vastly improved their click fraud detection mechanisms and the problem of invalid clicks may not be so grave as before, the perception that one can easily hire cheap AdSense labor in India continues to exist.When Google Ads publisher Mark Percival received his first AdSense cheque from Google, here's what he wrote:
Well I've officially made money from Google. And all without paying guys in India to click on my links.Now I just need to move to a country where its possible to live on $100 a month. Rural china maybe? Similar concerns were raised when Google announced their AdSense support team based in Hyderabad, India.
Is this new team going to help them [AdSense spammers] create more SE spam? Can they help create better SERPs by educating and stopping - at least these Indian AdSense publishers from doing it the wrong way?Would you agree with the observations of these people ? Do these Ad clicking jobs really exist ? If not, can something be done to change the general perception.

Aodhan Cullen - The Google PageRank 10 Guy

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Tue, 1 May 2007 20:38:00 +0800

posted by Amit Agarwal

Can you recognize the person wearing the red tie in the picture above ? His name is Aodhan Cullen, is only 24 years old and runs a hugely popular web stats service called Statcounter.com.Based in Ireland, Aodhan Cullen founded StatCounter.com when he was just 16 years old. Today his service is used by around 1.3 million webmasters and bloggers to track over 9 billion pageviews or hits a month.Due to the widespread usage of Statcounter, the site enjoys that perfect but elusive Google PageRank - 10 putting it in the august company of sites like Google, Apple, Adobe, MIT, etc. Even Microsoft.com is at PR 9.Statcounter.com is the only Google PageRank 10 website that actually accepts Text Link ads and also Google Ads. While the amount that Statcounter charges for a Text link ad on their PR 10 page is not known, they are very selective in choosing advertisers. If you thought of running ads of a pharmacy store, no point approaching them.Though Aodham maintains a low profile, he does have a good following - his first blog post attracted over 900 comments and was digged over 900 times.

Microsoft appoints marketer to drive mobile search division

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Tue, 1 May 2007 18:29:00 +0800

Microsoft Online Services Group (OSG) has appointed Hugh Griffiths as director of mobile as it ramps up its push into the mobile search market. Griffiths joins from telecoms provider O2, where he was responsible for driving online search and advertising in a consultancy role.
Griffiths will be responsible for driving the overall strategy and direction of the Microsoft OSG. He will drive the next stage of development, which will include launching services such as Windows Live, MSN portal and Search on the mobile platform.
Microsoft recently announced tie-ups with Vodafone and France Telecom to offer next-generation messaging services based on the Windows Live Messenger.
Griffiths says: "It is the company's aim to provide consumers with personal, relevant digital services to enhance their lifestyle and we believe mobile to be integral to this. We are also working with the industry to provide advertisers with innovative solutions to engage effectively with consumers."
Prior to O2, Griffiths was managing director for iTouch UK at Independent News & Media. He is also a former head of product and marketing strategy at Cable & Wireless.

Windows Live Search exec abandons Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Advista Creative Ad) — Tue, 1 May 2007 18:29:00 +0800

Microsoft struggling to keep up with Google
Juan Carlos Perez
Another executive is leaving Microsoft's internet search group, as the company continues to struggle to compete with web search leader Google.
Dane Glasgow, general manager of Windows Live Search, is leaving the company, a spokesman for Microsoft confirmed yesterday.
Last month, Microsoft acknowledged the departure of its highest-ranking search executive, Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search.
Microsoft has invested heavily in recent years to develop its own search engine and accompanying search advertising platform, in an effort to compete with Google and Yahoo and benefit from the fast growth in online advertising.
However, the results have been disappointing. Microsoft lags in a distant third place in web search usage and it hasn't been able to capitalise as much as expected from the boom in search engine advertising.
In an apparent attempt to use its strong presence in the enterprise to lift its web search usage, Microsoft last month acknowledged it is offering financial incentives to large enterprise customers whose employees use Microsoft's Live Search engine.
In exchange for their employees' Live Search usage, Microsoft is providing "service or training credits" to these enterprise customers, the company said.