Microsoft has recently launched the lastest version of IE, number 8 with a new ad campaign featuring ex Superman star Dean Cain. With Google Chrome starting to market their browser with a series of artist commissioned ads, Microsoft have tried to appeal more to tech enthusiasts using the infamous acronym style that was popularised in instant chat rooms.

The four ads are OMGIGP (Oh my God I’m gonna puke), FOMS (Fear of Missing Something), GRIPES (Gritting Raging Internet Pathetically Extra Slow) and my favourite SHYNESS (Sharing Heavily Yet Not Enough Sharing Still). They  sit perfectly with the more hardcore tech community (users of LOLBILLIES) but also accessible to a wider audience (users of OMG).

The new features their pushing are their Accelerators, Web Slices, inPrivate Browsing and its Faster

In lauching the new product Microsoft have also partnered with Not For Profit Feeding America, and have incentivised downloads by donating 8 meals to the charity per download.

Have a look at the ads and download it here.

Independent Ad Agency BooneOakley has come into recent blogosphere fame with their bold move to house their company website through a series of interactive YouTube videos. The 2 minutes and 39 second video breaks down the company’s history, ideology and examples of their work. What is great about having your site in a Youtube video is that it can be embedded into countless sites and blogs.

BooneOakley president and strategic director Phil Smith said “we needed to refresh our website but have a lot of work on so this seemed like a quick way… Happily, it also didn’t cost us a penny.”

The site/video is navigate-able through embedded annotations – links within the YouTube clips. The technology has been available for about a year but has not really been explored or executed in this way so successfully before.

Watch it here.

Google Squared was released June 3 and is the latest experiment to come out of Google Labs exploring how to give users more meaningful and structured Searches. Erick Schonfield on Tech Crunch summed it up well: “Puts Web Search into a Spreadsheet”.

The new application gives you the same search results but can break them down by your own topical categories. There are some pre – built squares that Google have put together as examples. The British Poets will give you a list of different poets and certain pieces of info on each one like City of Birth. The Squared engine can pull up images, text excerpts to fit with the categories and saves you the trip to five different Wikipedia pages.

There has been some discussion that Squared was created to try and crush Wolfram Alpha the ‘knowledge engine’ but the two products are quite different. One key difference being that Wolfram Alpha computes answers based on keyword strings where as Squared is more an exploration on how to filter and display data sets.

Still Google Squared, Wolfram Alpha and Bing and other recent forays into the development of the semantic web signal the beginning of the Web 3.0 era which Tom Tague; VP of Solutions and Marketing at Clear Forest, described as “cleaning up the mess we made and harvesting the value of Web 2.0.” (from here)

Build you own square here.

So I Googled the definition of ‘bing’ and turned up a few interesting meanings; ‘Bing is an annoying lizardLizard Lizards are reptiles of the order Squamata, which they share with the snakes”, ” heap eg of coal, debris or colliery waste Blaes – mudstone or shale not containing much bituminous or carbonaceous matter”. But no mention of Microsoft’s brand new Search Engine which launched this week called “Bing“. Named so that it could be turned into a verb, Microsoft are hoping that there new search engine will have us all binging in no time.

The product has been under construction for a long time, initially titled Kumo. You can read reviews of it here on Search Engine Land. The name Bing came into rumors recently and although doesn’t quite have the ring that “Just Google it” does, it’s better than Kumo.

Compared the Microsoft’s other Search tool Window’s Live, Bing is strides ahead with a similar feel to Google but a few key differences. Both share the same clean interface and offer search by image, web, news, video, etc. What’s interesting is the Bing image search tool which lets you sort by image dimensions (i.e if you want it wide, square or tall), style (illustration or photo), color (do you want black and white images or full color) and also whether you want people in the images. This I’m sure will make the job of sourcing images much easier.

Their video section similarly lets you sort by length, screen size, resolution and source. Bing also features it’s own Maps app that is practically exactly the same as Google Maps.

One interesting feature they have is the xRank which they describe as ”a cultural snap shot of who’s hot and who’s not’:

xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. (taken from Bing xRank site)

Another nice detail is that Bing throws up a list of related searches on the left hand side of the page that gives you different categories on the key term – try “turkey” for instance.

From a brief play Bing does the job, and a bit better than Google. It’s an interesting market because for so long there was no point even trying to challenge Google due to it’s sheer domination over the market but when you play Google style you may come out on top binging.

So try “binging” today!

Google’s latest endeavor – Google Wave – was announced on Friday at the Google I/O Developer conference in San Fransisco and it’s already had a ripple effect all over the internet. Google describes it as a new tool to change the way people communicate and collaborate on the web. It’s a new take on emailing that looks like instant messaging but lets you integrate rich text formatting, photos, videos, maps, and other widget, etc you please.

But it’s difficult to summarize the complexity of this product in a post so you can ride the full demo wave at the Wave microsite – the full 1 hour and 20 minutes of it!

Wave is also fully open source and developers can use the Wave API to build their on extensions into it. And whilst the demo presentation is frequently punctuated by applause there are mixed reviews about Wave. Fast Company were quick to release their ‘Five Reasons to be Terrified of Google Wave“, asking:

“what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across America? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile?”

Tech Crunch are more impressed with the product and you can read their in depth review of wave here.

Launching off the Google platform Wave has a very strong likelihood of success, and there is no doubt it offers impressive real time communication tools. You can sign up to get updated about the release of Wave here.

In a recent talk on Ted, marketing guru Seth Godin talked about the development of tribes in today’s mass culture. Whilst this has been around for centuries the internet makes it easier for people to connect and you see it everyday on the internet, facebook is a portal for people to find tribes, social niche groups that share the same interests. What we see is the power of social groups to give rise to massive cultural “movements” like the iPhone, like Susan Boyle, and like Dr Horrible’s sing-a-long blog, etc.

One new start up in line with this tribal mentality is Get Glue. This Firefox add on is a meta social network which offers contextually relevant social information as you browse. Once installed as a toolbar it sits dormant until you hit one of the sites in the Glue network; i.e Amazon, where it will then drop down and show you which of you friends were on a particular product page and what they thought of it. Currently its enabled on major movie, music and books sites like Amazon, imdb, Rotten tomatoes, Wikipedia to name a few, but it’s easy to see how Glue could work across a whole range of categories from restaurants, hotels, services, etc. Also when you are setting up your account there is the option to sync with you friends on Facebook.

Head Up is a similar start up that is also a Firefox add on that can aggregate content based on what you search and also what your friends are searching for.

So what do these kind of technologies mean for marketing today. According to Jerimiah Owyang, writer of Web Strategy ” Marketing as we know it will have to switch to focus on social recommendations.” This is also what Godin talks about is his theory on modern day tribal culture. As technologies like this and the semantic web continue to develop and be adopted we need to develop strategies around hooking the leaders of these tribes or social groups, and then let them do the rest by spreading the word to their friends, and then their friends and it will continue to ripple on.

Watch Godin’s talk on the tribes we lead here.

Fanta have also jumped onto the Augmented Reality Bandwagon but stepped up the game by using it to create a mobile Augmented Reality Game Application. Yes that’s right, Virtual Tennis lets people play tennis against each other on their mobiles.

So how do you play – users need to first of all download the game from the Fanta Micro site, print out the virtual tennis court and that’s all the sporting equipment you need. Multiply that by two, and you and a friend can get playing – more details on the Fanta Virtual Tennis site. Currently the app only works on some Nokia versions including N81, N95, 6120 and 6121 smartphones (more on the site) so if you have one or can get you hands on one it’s definitely worth a serve or two.

The growth in Augumented Reality applications and mobile apps is a pretty good hint as to where branding is headed these days. Have a look at Virtual Tennis in action on You Tube.

In an act of net activism the Australian Classification Board’s website was hacked last Thursday in protest of the Australia ISP level internet filtering scheme. The hackers infiltrated the site and inserted text into the introductory text; displaying the following message:

This site contains information about the boards that have the right to CONTROL YOUR FREEDOMZ. The Classification Board has the right to not just classify content (the name is an ELABORATE TRICK), but also the right to DECIDE WHAT IS AND ISNT APPROPRIATE and BAN CONTENT FROM THE PUBLIC. We are part of an ELABORATE DECEPTION from CHINA to CONTROL AND SHEEPIFY the NATION, to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. All opposers must HATE CHILDREN, and therefore must be KILLED WITH A LARGE MELONS during the PROSECUTION PARTIES IN SEPTEMBER. Come join our ALIEN SPACE PARTY.

The controversial filtering plan was first announced in 2007, an $189 million anti-pornography initiative which would cause all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block all inappropriate content.

Get Up Australia who are responsible for the Save the Net Campaign have been petitioning against the proposal and to date have achieved 99,264 signatures, a few thousand short of their 105,000 target. According to them the filtering system will slow internet by up to 87% and 1 in every 12 block sites will be block incorrectly.

There have been a few hiccups in the government’s testing plan. Back in June 08 tests showed bad results with 5 out of 6 filters degrading network performance by 20%. A leaked list of potential black listed sites also revealed many to be of legitimate content.

The hacked page has now been taken down and the HP show a page load error.

A lot of us took for granted the access to computers and games when we had when we were growing up. It’s hard for me to imagine school holidays without my SNES and Diddy Kong. Well for many kids growing up in developing countries computer games let alone computers are a whole virtual world away. There are a lot of initiatives out there trying to get technology into the hands of these kids, the most well know probably the one laptop per child project spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte which began distributing their bright green laptops in Colombia earlier this year.

I came across another group called Play power.org who have dedicated themselves to bringing Computer Aided Learning to children in developing countries. Similar to OLPC project Playpower take a cost effective approach to the problem by looking at what is currently accessible to these kids and modifying it. They are currently targeting 412 TV -Computers in China, India and South America.

This is a great cause that highlights the staple status of play in a childs congnitive learning plus helping them develop necessary technical skills for the future. This is truly great design at work because it solves a problem, PlayPower’s work recycles old technology and most importantly makes it accessible to people who need it. Find out more about their progress at the PowerPlay blog.

It’s coming and industry pundits are already calling it the most significant development in Search since Google. It’s called Wolfram Alpha and it’s an answer engine; and represents the first real developments towards the sematic web.

Unlike Google, a search engine which searches and finds information in the database of knowledge people have published on the web, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that computes answers to questions based on collective knowledge.

Wolfram Research is well known for its work in scientific and technical computation. Their product Mathematica has been consistently setting the standard in this field for the last 20 years. So it comes as no surprise that there are equally high hpes for Wolfram Alpha.

The product launches in May 09 and you can read more about the details in this review by Noval Spivak.