Astute watchers of my Flickr feed noticed something new showed up in my family room tonight.

How did I get Maryam to allow this? Five simple words:

No payments for 18 months.

Heheh.

Here's the Sony model I bought.

It's awesome, by the way. It's HUGE and crisp.

My brother also has one, he did a lot of research and found it's the sharpest resolution at about a $3,000 price range.

That's our old Sony in the background. We're off to Fred Meyer to buy some cables and get it setup.

Maryam's reaction? She's playing Zuma and says "great, now I'll have to call in sick tomorrow." She loves it! See, Maryam, far better than a stove. :-)

Last week I had a great meeting with the guy (David Webster) who runs naming for Microsoft. He enumerated the ways that fun code names suck. Why? Cause he has to do a few things to any name that we use:

1) It has to be trademarkable. Even after his team does a trademark search they still get into trouble over names that other people own.
2) It has to test well in most markets (they do focus groups and other testing to make sure they don't pick a name that accidentally turns off people in a marketplace — even with all this testing finding names that work well everywhere is really hard).

What got me to write about it? Chris Smith talks about his favorite code names (and about Nintendo's "cooler" code name).

What's the answer? Well, he has a whole bunch of rules for product teams as they make names. For one, he wishes that teams would talk with him before coming up with "fun" code names. For two, he wishes that teams would come up with names that don't exist in Internet searches. Remember my "Brrreeeport" test? When I put that name on my blog there were zero results on Google and Live.com. Today it has 169,000 results, according to Google (yes, we know that isn't true, but let's go with it anyway, heheh).

He says that if companies and teams come up with names that simply don't exist in Google and Yahoo and Windows Live that they'll have a pretty good chance of surviving any trademark search that you come up with (it's a rare trademark that doesn't make it to Internet search engines).

I think the day is coming near when companies simply ban any product name that doesn't pass this test.

What do you think?

The new reading technology announced on Friday with the New York Times by Microsoft is at the top of Memeorandum.

I saw an early prototype and this stuff is awesome. Comes out of a lot of research and work that teams are doing here about how the human eye works. Vista will have new fonts, and new technology (aka Windows Presentation Foundation) that opens up a lot of new possibilities in how we can present information, particularly for new high resolution screens.

I'll have to do a video on this stuff. The demos are spectacular, by the way. Makes a Tablet PC far more useful too.

Here's a new way to make money: register names that are close, but are misspellings of popular sites.

What's fueling this? The new advertising craze, the Washington Post is saying.

In other news Henry Blodgett says Microsoft is losing in the Advertising game and gets very close to counting us out forever.

He's right. As long as Microsoft copies others and doesn't do anything radically different this game will be over.

Why? Because we're in an audience business. Blodgett assumes this is about search. It's not. Or about Web. It's not that either. It's about building audiences that advertisers want to pay money to be in front of.

Advertisers want a few things:

1) Eyeballs. Don't believe me? Go to Times Square in New York. Why are those signs (er, advertising) there (they cost millions of dollars each)? Eyeballs. Hundreds of thousands of them every day.
2) Purchasers. Every Sunday there's a "homes" section in the local newspaper. Why? Cause the newspaper industry has trained us that if we're looking to buy a home, we should get the Sunday newspaper, throw away all that news crud, and start circling homes we're going to look at that day.

This is a simple business. It's all about figuring out how to get an audience.

Now, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are just like the music industry in that regard. We're trying to figure out what the next big audience pleasing thing will be.

Let's be honest. Google signed the metaphorical equivilent of the Beatles.

So, is the way to build a world-class business to just copy the Beatles?

No.

If Microsoft and Yahoo want to grow, we must build the next big thing. Not copy yesterday's big thing.

On the other hand. Search is not done. That's where it's different from a music act. With services you can take what used to exist and make something new.

Look at A9.com. Here, search for Scoble. What do you notice? First, that it shows you a bunch of stuff that the other engines don't.

Another thing I notice? They are using Microsoft's search engine now instead of Google's. Take THAT Henry! Chris Overd is the one to notice that.

Or, look at Gada.be. Here, search for Scoble there. It uses all kinds of search engines.

This week RawSugar is going to turn on a new improved search engine based on tags. I got a look last week at what they are gonna turn on and it's really great. That small company has done something innovative that the big boys haven't even tried to do yet.

Oh, and if Google has done such a great job in search, why can't I find Sony's site when I do a search for Sony HDTV SD (I'm looking at buying a Sony SD-series HDTV). Nah, search is finished.

Microsoft is finished. Yahoo is finished. This job is done. There's nothing left to improve. Nothing left to do.

Hmmm, I've heard this before. Hell, in 1989 I even was one of those counting Microsoft out (the just released Apple Mac II back then was so superior to anything Microsoft had that I thought Microsoft should just close up shop and go home).

One thing: I like being the underdog. The one all the experts are counting out. The one that the stock market has no confidence in. It's motivating.

We got nowhere to go but up.

Brandon Paddock, lead us out of here.

Heheh, my brother is here. He's far better at gaming than I am. He just earned 200,000 in Geometry Wars (Chris Pirillo has 800,000). But, who gets credit for his playing? Me! Heheheh. He got me an achievement.

I have about a dozen achievements. I only earned one so far. My son is the leader.

Oh, and if you look at my Xbox Live card you'll see that someone is currently playing Zuma. That's Maryam. She's addicted.

Here's my GamerCard: RobertScoble.

What's possibly the most used piece of software developed at Microsoft? The WiX toolset. It is used by Windows, Office, and even MySQL, among many other products, to install. What's even better is it's done by an all-volunteer team and it's open source too. I videoed the team a while back and just put the video up. Rob Mensching of the team is here at MindCamp.

Speaking of MindCamp, I am uploading an occassional photo on my Flickr feed.

Every once in a while I find a blog that just stands out from the crowd. Mark Wallace's 3pointD is one of these. If you're interested in stuff like Second Life or Google's SketchUp, this is the place to watch.

Thomas Hawk is shooting awesome photos from New Orleans' Jazz Fest this weekend.

It's awesome that MSN is broadcasting the festival live. Ernie the Attorney, who lives in New Orleans, told me that this year's JazzFest will be historic and that they are seeing even more awesome musicians coming to town than they usually do.

Anyone see any other great blogging or podcasting or videoblogging from New Orleans? Let us know.

As for MindCamp, I'll be there today, unfortunately it's sold out so if you don't have tickets it won't be possible to get you in. That's a good reminder to get your tickets for these events: MeshForum (mid-May in San Francisco); Syndicate (mid-May in New York); VSLive (mid-May in Orlando and Mid-June in Las Vegas); Microsoft Mobile and Embedded DevCon (mid-May in Las Vegas); Windows Hardware Conference (mid-May in Seattle); eBayDevCon (mid-June in Las Vegas); SuperNova (mid-June in San Francisco); TechEd (mid-June in Boston); Gnomedex (end of June in Seattle); Reboot (beginning of June in Copenhagen) and BlogHer (end of July in Silicon Valley). Tickets to most of these events are going quickly.

Update: I forgot VLoggerCon (mid-June in San Francisco).

Can the world take more geek and blogger conferences? I sure can't. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but I'm exhausted just by listing them all out.

What conferences are you attending in the next few months?

As I go around Microsoft I ask teams "are you just gonna sell your participants/partners/users/customers down the river or are you gonna stand up for them?" Especially when someone is offering you money to do something anti-user?

This week when I was interviewing the Hotmail Windows Live Mail team they told me about a decision they had made to reduce the number of advertisments on their service from two to one.

Omar Shahine detailed this decision, and other things (he works on this team).

We are afraid to tell you is just how much money is left on the table by this decision, but it's a HUGE pile. More money than I would imagine (turns out that putting two ads on a page is very profitable). Why? Because we're scared of making shareholders even more skittish than they already are (our expenses are up and leaving many millions of dollars on the table doesn't seem like a smart decision, does it?)

But, this decision makes me happy. Ecstatic, actually. It means that the product teams have been given the green light to make the best-of-breed experiences for our customers and users.

The Windows Live Mail team just got a philosophy. Companies that have pro-participant philosophies, especially in the advertising age, will end up with bigger audiences and more profit in the end.

I tell ya, Live.com just got a whole lot easier for me to evangelize.

Does this matter? Windows Live Mail has 200 million unique accounts that have been signed into in the past 30 days. They block more than a billion spam messages every day. This is one of the most used Web Services in the world.

Their new site design is working really well for me. Much nicer than the existing Hotmail.

I love this team.

The MSDN events team tells me they are taking to the road again in USA showing how to use the .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP.NET. Hmmm, those are the technologies that let us build On10.net with three team members in less than five weeks. Also the same tech that runs MySpace, one of the most traffic'ed sites on the Internet. Hey, it's free.