The Outsidr

Amazing. Until now, NASA orbiters had only witnessed evidence of water on Mars from a distance. Earlier today however, NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has actually obtained a soil sample from Mars’ surface that contained ice. Scientists will now begin studying the sample in an effort to determine whether or not it contains any evidence of life, past or present.

This marks the first time that water has ever been collected from the surface of Mars. Exciting indeed. I won’t bother going into this any further as you’ll be hearing about it plenty over the next few days. If you’d like, you can even hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. If some evidence of microbial life is discovered within the sample, the coming months and years are going to literally be the most important time in the history of the space program. Will it make up for the billions upon billions of dollars that have been crashed into various space rocks? We’ll see.

Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” site went live on Tuesday, showcasing footage from one of the many campaigns that will combine to form a $300 million initiative aimed at undoing 18 months of Vista smearing. In short, Microsoft pulled several ‘Vista haters’ into a room individually where they were asked about their impressions of Vista. Each person then observed a demo of an upcoming OS codenamed Mojave. At the end of the session and once people’s reactions to Mojave had been recorded, it was revealed that Mojave was indeed Vista. Shock, apology, lather, rinse, repeat.

Microsoft Watch’s Joe Wilcox knew all this when he wrote about it on Tuesday and he sang praise for the campaign. Yesterday all of the sudden his opinion was completely reversed after watching the videos on Microsoft’s site. He described the project fairly accurately in the original post and yet his follow up takes the complete opposite stance. Wilcox’s explanation for this change of heart is completely off track in my opinion. What he misses entirely is the true essence and purpose of this (and any) marketing campaign: To mold the perception of the target audience.

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I can’t remember the last time I have seen anything like this. Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine company based in Menlo Park, literally went from being unheard of to web-famous to “able Google competitor” to crucifixion in a matter of an hour. Perhaps all press is not good press after all. Founded by husband and wife duo Tom Costello (CEO), formerly of Google, and Anna Patterson (VP Engineering), Cuil had amassed pre-launch funding to the tune of $33mm and indexed over 120 billion web pages before it even opened its doors. The California company put together a very unique and interesting UI, a seemingly robust engine and a talented team with a collective rolodex thicker than War and Peace. Within 24 hours, Cuil had succeeded in attaining more blog coverage than any service in recent history. The image below is from Techmeme just a few moments ago:

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If you watch television at all these days, odds are good that you’ve seen a commercial for the relatively new HP Touchsmart. Typical dramatic HP CGI, a young man conducting a virtual symphony of colors and lights; it paints a pretty attractive picture in fact. When the Touchsmart finally makes an appearance in the last five seconds it really does stay consistent with the spectacle that preceded it. It looks… Fantastic.

The UI is beautiful, the size and build are outstanding and the specs seem appealing enough. In person, the Touchsmart hardly fails to impress. In fact, the UI is perhaps even more outstanding outside of the commercials. A tremendous amount of work has gone into making the UI both incredibly attractive and very usable. Fluid iPhone-esque animations triggered by finger flicks send content whizzing by before slowing to a stop or grinding to a halt upon a subsequent touch. Sleek black backgrounds and subtle gray framing enhances the vivid icons and images that come to life on the sizable display. Who would have thought that Vista could be this much fun?

There is but one problem in all of this however – it’s a desktop.

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