6th March 2008 12:22 am MSN

Whether people are searching online for a vacation hot spot, scanning the galaxy for distant planets or seeking ways to improve the environment on planet Earth, innovations from Microsoft Research could help deliver better results and entirely new experiences.

TechFest 2008, an annual event that brings researchers from around the world together with people from across the company, is showcasing some of these innovations at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.

Speaking at TechFest before an audience of customers, academics, dignitaries and media representatives, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, said, “Computing impacts every facet of our lives, from the way we work to the way we learn and live. Our job in research is to continuously advance technology to make our lives better in tangible ways.”

With almost 40 exciting new technologies on display to the public at TechFest, and dozens more accessible only to Microsoft employees, Rashid highlighted numerous projects that show how computing enables new experiences, and how the basic tools of computer science are evolving to help all the sciences advance more rapidly.

Rashid was joined onstage by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Alan Alda, host of “Scientific American Frontiers.” Mundie said, “By investing in long-term research, we can transform software and computing technologies, helping to inspire innovations that will have a lasting and positive impact on the world’s most pressing issues, from education and healthcare to energy and the environment.”

WorldWide Telescope is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, combining imagery from the most advanced ground-and space-based telescopes in the world to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe.

“WorldWide Telescope is like having an observatory on your desktop,” said Rashid. “It enables you to see the sky in a completely new way.”

Rashid announced that WorldWide Telescope will run on the Visual Experience Engine, a Microsoft Research technology that enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky, blending terabytes of images, data and narratives from multiple sources over the Internet into a rich, immersive experience. The Visual Experience Engine can also be applied to
other scenarios, such as tours of parks, national monuments or vacation destinations.

Mundie and Alda observed that the WorldWide Telescope could lead to new discoveries and inspire a new generation of young people to consider focusing on math and science.

Today, Web browsers and search engines are typically designed to support an individual person, working alone, at a single point in time. Microsoft Research showed three new user interfaces that support richer
types of search experiences:

* CoSearch enables groups of people who are sharing a single computer to collaborate on a single Web search by using multiple mice or even mobile phones.
* SearchBar assists people in resuming searches that are interrupted.
* SearchTogether helps groups of people collaborate on Web searches by showing the group’s query history.

Rashid announced that Singularity, a prototype operating system for the computer science research environment, will be available starting today at no charge for academic and noncommercial use. The goal of Singularity is to help improve software dependability and foster inventive research in systems, programming languages and tools.

“Singularity is not the next Windows,” Rashid said. “Think of it like a concept car. It is a prototype operating system designed from the ground up to test-drive a new paradigm for how operating systems and applications interact with one another. We are making it available to the community in the hope that it will enable researchers to try out new ideas quickly.”

Singularity can be downloaded from CodePlex, an online portal created in 2006 to foster collaborative software development projects and host shared source code.

Rashid also showed a project called BEE3, a hardware platform that lets researchers experiment with different computer architectures without using costly custom chips. He also highlighted multiple projects aimed at advancing the understanding of natural ecosystems.

Following Rashid’s presentation, Mundie and Alda, who share a conviction that technology can help transform society, discussed other technologies that hold the promise to advance society, including sensor networks and software technologies that could reduce energy consumption in homes and enterprises, provide valuable data for preserving the environment, and lead to better healthcare for people everywhere.

MSN release data on user’s attitudes towards sponsored links

27th February 2008 12:47 pm MSN

Micrsosoft have released some data compiled by Neilsen. Perhaps unsurprisingly it shows that their sponsored links are seen by users as much more trustworthy. It does however give an interesting snapshot of the attitudes to the sponsored ads on the various search engines. The article written by Nick Drew states :

A consumer coming from Live Search is 70% more likely than the average searcher to convert (buy a product or sign up to a newsletter) during a visit to a particular website.

In order to explore some of the reasons behind this, we partnered with Nielsen NetRatings – a respected internet analytics and research firm – to look into how consumers feel about search engines, whether they trust them and so on. The results are particularly relevant in light of all the news stories recently about privacy and trust online.

The study showed that users trust Live Search more than any of the other major search engines. In fact, 95% of users say that they trust Live Search. When it comes to the quality of results provided, more than 2/3 believe that Live Search would only list reliable and trustworthy websites – significantly more than said the same for Live Search’s main competitors.

The second major finding has to do with how Live Search users perceive paid search links. In fact, they’re quite positive about them; so much so that searchers on Live Search are 3 times more likely to look at the sponsored listings first than those using Google.

In addition, as the chart below shows, searchers on Live Search are significantly more likely than those on other search engines to regard a website more favourably if it appears in the sponsored listings.

Full article available here

Would you like to know more about this Paid search / Pay Per Click advertising? If so, contact Hit Search on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world out there, make sure you become visible.

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Microsoft Live users experience outage

27th February 2008 11:08 am MSN

Microsoft announced they’d service outage yesterday afternoon (local Pacific time) they attributed the problems to a glitch with the company’s Live ID authentication service.

Samantha McManus, Windows Live product manager, issued the following  statement InternetNews.com.”Earlier today, an issue began that has caused some consumers worldwide to experience difficulty logging in to their Windows Live ID accounts. This issue has since been resolved and normal operations have been restored to all customers,”. The company apologised for the inconvenience

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March 1st sees the introduction of new Microsoft’s ad effectivness measure

26th February 2008 1:41 pm MSN

Microsoft have announced they will soon be testing a new measure of ad effectiveness by taking into account all the internet activity that leads up to a conversion. They are calling it “Engagement Mapping” and in their press release they say:

Microsoft Corp. today announced Engagement Mapping, a new approach to managing and measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns that goes beyond the current “last ad clicked” standard. For the last decade, virtually all ad campaign reporting methodologies associate sales, leads and Web traffic simply to the last click or ad exposure.

Engagement Mapping takes into account for the first time all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale.

Based on the Engagement Mapping concept, Microsoft announced the beta of Engagement ROI, an online campaign reporting and optimization solution that will undergo testing by national advertising clients and agencies, including Agência Click + UNICA, Best Western International Inc., BKV, Citi Cards, GSD&M Idea City, Ingenuity Media of The Martin Agency, Initiative, McKinney, MEC Interaction, Mindshare Interaction, Monster Worldwide Inc., Neo@Ogilvy, Sprint and World Vision.

Engagement ROI evaluates and assigns measurable value to a consumer’s interaction with ads, giving advertisers and publishers a more complete picture of online behavior.

“The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase.”

“We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.”

Announcement of the Engagement ROI beta coincided with a keynote speech, “Advertising Ecosystem 2.0,” by McAndrews at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Annual Meeting in Phoenix today.

The Engagement ROI is a fully integrated reporting capability within the Atlas Media Console currently available through Microsoft. Value is assigned and measured on a real-time basis and takes into account the impact that recency, frequency, size and ad format (such as rich media and video) have on a consumer’s online path to action.

Engagement ROI is designed to allow advertisers and publishers to manage their campaigns with greater insight and control than previously available through third-party ad serving.

The beta officially begins on March 1, with results expected to be available before the end of the second calendar quarter.

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Surfcanyon hits our browsers

19th February 2008 2:44 pm MSN

We have noticed that Surf Canyon Incorporated have just released their new browser extension for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.  Basically it scans your search results and upon selecting a desired result it presents further matches it thinks are relevant. According to their website “Surf Canyon develops semantic real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-pending Discovery Engine for Search™ transforms static result pages into dynamic knowledge resources, enabling users to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among the irrelevant results, significantly accelerating the search process.”

The following example is taken from their site :

a simple click on the target icon gives you a drilldown selection of other results :

Subsequent clicks will normalise your search further until SurfCanyon gets enough data to grasp exactly what it is you are looking for. So far they’ve demoed it with Google, Yahoo and MSN.

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