A total of 37 companies converged at Suntec Convention Centre for a 2-day conference, with key exhibitors that included namesake powerhouses like Friendster, Google, Yahoo! SEA. In addition to that, there were SMEs that were making their presence felt - Comwerks Interactive, i-POP, and Acronym Media. However, the real deal was in the keynotes as well as the various SIG speeches that were held during the event.

There were a couple of interesting sessions that were by-invitation only - of which one of them featured Wendy Cheng and Jeff Ooi in a session titled “Blogging Universe - Building Brand Awareness or Losing Control”. There were other head honchos and key decision makers from various conglomerates that were present at the convention to present their nuggets of valuable insight into a market that has gotten people spending US$25-billion dollars worldwide just on online advertising alone in 2007 (according to statistics revealed by PricewaterhouseCooper’s 7th annual Global Etertainment and Media Outlook report).
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When this video was placed up on the likes of YouTube and Collegehumor, viewers who saw it were all up in arms shouting: HOLY ****!

Well, guess what - it is a fake. Yes, that’s right folks. Step on right up, for I am going to tell you that it is a Gatorade viral video. Bob Garfield from AdvertisingAge, clearly mentioned the following:

The commercial takes us to a Triple A game between the Tacoma Rainiers and Fresno Grizzlies (televised because … well … Fresno). In the action, the Tacoma batter yanks a hanging curveball deep down the left field line. The ball curls foul into the corner and the Fresno leftfielder doesn’t even make a move on it. But then appears the ball girl, who climbs up the wall in two bounds — Jet Li-style — and spins for a leaping catch.

It’s certainly an amazing fabrication of an amazing play. The ball girl is a stuntwoman who was lifted by cables as she planted her feet against the wall, a sequence cut into actual game footage and enhanced with a bit of CGI and a perfectly natural-sounding announcer track. This guy is the quintessential play-by-play man, very much like Bob Carpenter of the Washington Nationals, especially with his postscript as the ball girl resumes her folding chair with the bottle of Gatorade at her feet.

Now that is some viral marketing. Element 79 was commissioned to come up with a brilliant product marketing for Gatorade for which they did an excellent job. In fact, there are thousands of comments sprucing up everywhere saying that “oh, it is possible”, and “yeah, my brother’s friend could two-step that wall” - further cementing an urban legend/belief that the trick can be replicated with the right know-how.

From CNET,

Stephen Shankland writes about Google’s Datacenter Infrastructure and what runs the search/advertisement giant. You have to read it for yourself! Its pretty amazing to finally read about Google and how they operate on the backend.

Here are some quotes,

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

The MapReduce reliability was severely tested once during a maintenance operation on one cluster with 1,800 servers. Workers unplugged groups of 80 machines at a time, during which the other 1,720 machines would pick up the slack. “It ran a little slowly, but it all completed,” Dean said.

And in a 2004 presentation, Dean said, one system withstood a failure of 1,600 servers in a 1,800-unit cluster.

Well, if that isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.

Ever wondered what’s this whole hoo-ha about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Check out this easy to understand bite-size video that pretty much explains that concept.

Microsoft Press Release

Now this is strange though, despite having gone through a fierce battle with ODF and eventually having their standard, OOXML, ratified as a global standard as ISO/IEC 29500, why the turnaround now?

Quoting sniplets from their press release:

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF and will take part in the ISO/IEC working group being formed to work on ODF maintenance.

The company will also be an active participant in the ongoing standardization and maintenance activities for XPS and PDF. It will also continue to work with the IT community to promote interoperability between document file formats, including Open XML and ODF, as well as Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY XML), the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content.

Why now? Why create a standard and then go the other direction?