“Even Microsoft’s online version of Outlook called Outlook Web Access is far better than Gmail… Gmail… doesn’t compare to Microsoft Outlook.”
Now:
“Outlook… was getting kind of tired. Gmail is new, fast, web based, and has all the features I need. I especially like the way it threads conversations making it easy to keep everything in context… One other subtle thing: no spam. I never realized how much corporate spam invaded my Microsoft inbox.”
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington sits down with the recently laid-off Don Dodge and conducts an unofficial exit interview with the former director of business development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team.
Dodge, who said he was in Silicon Valley “just visiting friends,” to Arrington’s disbelief, said he might have been “too visible,” as the company’s startup liaison, and that might not have gone over too well with some at the software giant.
It was the latter last night, as the Mass Technology Leadership Council held the latest of its monthly Tech Tuesday events at Microsoft Corp.’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, affectionately and appropriately known as NERD. The topic of the evening was the gaming sector in the Bay State, as MassTLC celebrated the official launch of its digital gaming cluster with a report on the local industry.
Tech Tuesday attendees rock out to The Beatles: Rock Band at Microsoft NERD.
To help set the gaming mood, folks from Cambridge neighbor Harmonix Inc. set up a full set of its now ubiquitous fake instruments for attendees to try their hands at The Beatles: Rock Band. After a demonstration by Sean Baptiste, Harmonix’s manager of community development, who rocked out with other players from companies like GamerDNA Inc., game geeks from the crowd decided to step up and try their hand at being an erstwhile John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr or even George Harrison.
With the smell of pizza, beer and soda in the air, it could have been any basement in the Greater Boston area — if that basement was on the 11th floor of a building on the Charles River and could hold 200 people.
Kenny, seen here in Boston as chairman/CEO of Digitas, in 2007
Local digital advertising executive David Kenny — the managing partner of VivaKi, which is the digital unit of Publicis Groupe (known better locally as Digitas) — is making the media rounds in the wake of the Microsoft-Yahoo search advertising deal announced earlier this week.
Kenny weighed in on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal in a New York Times blog and, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Kenny was also among a number of digital ad executives whom Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz met with back in June. The WSJ said they discussed how a possible Microsoft-Yahoo deal could add value to VivaKi’s clients. “I didn’t feel they were lobbying, but felt they were generally asking my opinion,” Kenny told the Journal.
In AdAge, Kenny was quoted as saying that the deal is “a net positive for marketers.”
“Anything that creates a credible platform and more innovation in search is going to be good for consumers and, therefore, good for advertisers,” he told AdAge.
GigaOm picks up on something the Berkman Center’s David Weinberger noticed awhile back: Microsoft Bing’s travel service looks a lot like Kayak.com. GigaOm includes comments from a lawyer:
When I showed the two to Stephen J. Roe, a patent and software copyright attorney in Madison, Wis., he was similarly taken aback. “If you debrand it, and remove anything that mentions Microsoft or Kayak,” Roe said, “it would be really tough to decide if you were seeing Kayak or Bing.”
In today’s NewsFlash Roundup, Abiomed implants an artificial heart, EMC implants itself in Cambridge, and Big Blue implants social networking in its LotusLive software.
Don Dodge, director of business development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team, dropped by This Week in Startups to talk about the company’s Bing search engine and its BizSpark program.
Working with MIT researchers, Microsoft’s NERD facility in Cambridge has developed a computer model for self-assembling structures of nanoscale particles, according to Technology Review.
“Theory there is sorely lacking,” says Mila Boncheva, a senior scientist at Firmenich, in Geneva, who played an important role in early research on this kind of self-assembly at Harvard University. “What people are currently doing in design is mostly trial and error based on common sense.” The theoretical model is aimed at helping materials scientists figure out much more quickly what the right materials and conditions are for self-assembly of a given structure.
TechCrunchIT liveblogged Microsoft chief software architect and former tech-industry townie Ray Ozzie’s Q&A session at the Churchill Club’s Potential of Cloud Computing event in Palo Alto, where he talked about Groove’s technology being used in Microsoft’s Live Mesh, and Google Wave.
The Berkman Center’s David Weinberger had a unique take among the avalanche of It’s-pretty-cool-but-won’t-kill-Google Bing reviews — he says Microsoft’s new search engine bites Kayak.com’s style.
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