Saturday, April 29, 2006

On10

In the past few weeks, Scoble's been heavily promoting On10, a new website from Microsoft offering videos about technology. It seems a bit like Channel9 (the excellent, and very popular video website from MS aimed at techies and developers), except aimed at those with just a passing interest in technology, rather than an obsession.From the 0n10 website:

On10 is a place for people who want to use technology to change the world. Every weekday at 10:00 am (PST) we’ll update this site with a new video that highlights people, their passions and often the technology they are using. At the end of each week we compile these videos into a full length show with some extra surprises for you.In addition to the show, we're launching a number of blogs for the enthusiast covering a wide range of topics. Our blogs will be written by Microsoft employees, members of the 10 community or a mixture of both.

Welcome to the beginning of 10, the next step starts with you!

One of the features of On10 is the ability to stick their videos on your blog, like Google Video and YouTube, so just for the sake of it, here's a quite good video of Vista Scoble was talking about.

UPDATE: Video removed, it was causing 'issues'. You can view it here. In the mean time, On10 needs to sort this out!

It's a good way for MS to promote itself and improve its image with that all important target market of those people who are quite interested in technology but don't know vast amounts about it, and all-to-often (or maybe not) see Microsoft as a nasty big evil monopoly. They should do more of this stuff, maybe sponsering tech shows in the mainstream media in exchange for a chance to put across their products, in the hope of slowly eroding the image.

In other MS news, their appeal against the EU Commission is over, and they await judgement. If they lose, there's not much point worrying about image, because they've got the far bigger worry of millions of euros of fines per day, and compulsary sharing of information with competitors about their key architectures.

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