An all-star team is forming at StatusNet, the open microblogging service for businesses and communities. The newest addition is Jon Phillips, former community and business development manager for Creative Commons.Phillips joins Brion Vibber,who came from theWikimedia Foundationwhere he served as chief technology officer.SponsorThe news is significant as it reflects the interest in open-source alternatives to the proprietary microblogging services that currently dominate the market in the consumer and enterprise communities.According to their web site, StatusNet makes sites that use open-source software to create and distribute open content. The company also provides professional support contracts and customization for companies that use StatusNet software on their own servers for intranet or Internet microblogging.identi.ca, the open network micro-blogging service is based on the StatusNet tool. Phillips and Vibber join ateamled by Evan Promodou, the founder of StatusNet, whose previous work included creating the Open Content travel guide, Wikitravel.Phillips, who is an avid microblogger (@rejon) writes on the StatusNet blog:I'm super enthused about the direction Status.Net is heading as a free network service, as a business, and as a leader in software and culture with a focus locally on niche communities on scaling internationally (more on that soon). Right now, we are working very hard towards some big releases slightly under the radar with the push towards Status.net hosted services and Status.Net 1.0 software.Phillips says he will help with some large projects Status.Net is building, including an upcoming relaunch. He will be there to help ease some of Evan's work load so he can be freed up to be "uber-CEO rather than having to wear 50 different hats."According to the bioon his blog, Phillips worked from 2005 to 2008 building the community and business development strategy for Creative Commons. Phillips "worked with hundreds of businesses through Creative Commons 50+ international jurisdictions to integrate Creative Commons licensing, and managed globally successful projects such as ccSalons, the Case Studies, Metrics, and CC+ projects. He recently completed the special project, the Public Domain Wiki, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Access Copyright, and Internet Archive.Pretty impressive. We expect some major pushes from the open-source microblogging community. Phillips arrival is a sure sign that major efforts are underway to make StatusNet a leader in this realm.Discuss

  Following weeks of requests from open-source developers, HTC has released the Hero Android source code on their developer site.In response to the mobile devs, HTC has previously stated it was waiting for its own developers to provide the source before releasing it publicly. As late as last week, HTC representatives had emaileddevelopers saying, "At the moment we do not know when the kernel source for the Hero will be released," and "We are still pushing our developers to provide us with the source code and for the links to be added." Since the Android kernel is licensed under the GPL, this delay was creating both dissatisfaction and controversy in the community.SponsorHowever, just as a few developers were beginning to talk about enforcement actions, the company posted the code, and everyone lived happily ever after.Or something along those lines. GPL non-compliance and hints of internal process and delivery issues don't mode well for the mobile manufacturer. After unfavorable coverage of the company's "foot-dragging" on Slashdotand long threads of modev complaints, we do hope that HTC's future Android projects will be more swiftly opened.The Hero, as a device, is significant in itself, hence the enhanced perception of cruelty in HTC's not releasing its source code sooner. It's created huge waves in geek circles, beating out the iPhone for Gadget of the Year at the prestigious T3 awardsand generating enough gadget-geek slaveringto power a small city.So, will the gadget geeks and modevs have to push for open sourcing every time a cool, Android-powered device is released? Where was the major malfunction that led to these delays? Were the HTC engineers thrown under the bus to allow leadership to save face, or do the HTC powers that be simply need to get their engineering team under control? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.Discuss

  For once the Bay Area Rapid Transit service has more to brag about than its endless supply of used under-the-seat bubble gum and noxious mystery smells. According to its site, Bay Area Rapid Transitwill be the first transit agency to partner with location-based game sensation Foursquare. SponsorReadWriteWeb first covered the point-based check-in service in March, and since then Foursquare has spread like wildfire across the US and to the UK. As of next month, users from Dublin to Milbrae will have a chance to win the coveted title of Mayor of one of the most utilized transit services in the Bay Area. From November onward, the transit authority will award $25 promotional tickets to random users who check-in at one of 34 BART stations. During the three month pilot program, the agency will also look for new ways to reward Foursquare mayors and incorporate local discounts from mybart.orgvenue partners. Said BART website manager Timothy Moore,"We hope this partnership will encourage users to check out different stations and neighborhoods, and will show people who aren't already BART riders some of the great things to do that are easy to get to on transit." Despite the fact that a number of BART-related Foursquare tips are going to document urine stains and public drunkenness, the reality is that absolutely anything beats driving the US-101 during rush hour traffic. BART check-ins are likely to encourage tired drivers to get out of their car and into a greener and less frustrating alternative. Those interested in official BART tips can visit the transit authority's profile page at foursquare.com/user/SFBART.Discuss

  While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs sitethe company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they're calling "open messaging for the open web". While Mozilla's Snowl Firefox Add-Onmade it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard. SponsorRaindrop's mission is to "make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend's blog or as part of a social networking site." Essentially, Raindrop is cutting out the noise and pulling in the information that is actually of interest. While email clients can filter bot and spam messages, it's more difficult to discern between personal and general messages from real people. With Raindrop, users messages are categorized and prioritized. For example, in Twitter your direct messages and reply messages are highlighted while the rest of the stream is cast aside. Meanwhile, mailing list messages are also given their own category, separate from personal emails. As with most Mozilla products, the group will encourage front-end widgets and code from outside 3rd party developers. While the tool certainly shows promise, it is currently only available to developers. The group's first priority is to build a downloadable installer. To ensure that you're one of the first non-developer testers, keep an eye on labs.mozilla.com/raindrop. Raindrop UX Design and Demofrom Mozilla Messagingon Vimeo.Thanks to Arjo for the tip!Discuss

  CNN.com, one of the top 25 websites in the US, just announced a radical redesign of its service at a press event in New York City. The new CNN.com homepage will be split up into three parts. On the left, CNN will now highlight breaking news stories, the middle section will feature older stories and a 'highlights' section, and the right sidebar will be customizable with personalized weather and sports scores. Right beneath the fold, the new CNN will feature a list of 'editor's choice' stories - similar to the NYTimes's 'Inside NYTimes.com' section. The new site will go live next Monday.SponsorAccording to CNN's General Manager of CNN.com Kenneth Estenson, CNN.com currently gets about 1.7 billion page views and 100 million video views every month. In total the CNN homepage has been called up over 120 billion times since its first iteration in 1996.CNN clearly put a lot of thought into this redesign. As William Hsu, CNN's VP for News Advertising Sales for Asia Pacific told Exchange4media.comearlier this week, the CNN team "did a lot of research, biometric research, in Europe" (update: a CNN spokesperson just told us that this study was done independent of the site redesign). According to Hsu, these studies showed that very few users ever went beyond the current homepage. Because of this, the new homepage will show far more content but will also make it easier for readers to navigate the site.More Emphasis on Video - Including Videos from TEDAt today's press event, CNN also stressed that the new site will integrate more of its TV product. Instead of keeping video and text separate, the new CNN.com will bring the two together. 50% of CNN's users already watch both the video and read the story, so bringing the two closer together is a smart move for CNN. CNN also announced a partnership with TED, which will bring TED videos to a completely new audience.NewsPulseThe new homepage will also have a new feature called 'NewsPulse.' This will allow users to reorganize news stories by correspondent, subject, or keyword. Today's press event was low on specifics, but this looks like a good way to personalize CNN's homepage and to find interesting content on the site.Similarity to CNN GoCNN also recently launched CNN Go, which focuses on news for the Asian market and also has a more magazine-like layout. What About the Competition?We have also heard that MSNBC will soon launch a redesign of its own. While we aren't aware of any specifics yet, the new MSNBC will focus on adding value to news wire stories by bringing together more material from NBC's affiliates and a larger focus on interactive elements designed specifically for MSNBC.Discuss

  As iPhone and Android users, it's easy to forget that Facebook hasn't been fully optimized for all touchscreen phones. Many of us sit here from the comfort of our sleek mobile applications, never knowing the drudgery that Palm owners have to face as they type in URLs to open their favorite services. Well Palm owners, you're in luck. As of today, Facebook has redesigned its mobile site for touch devices (x.facebook.comand iphone.facebook.com) and launched a new domain name at touch.facebook.com.SponsorAccording to AllFacebook,the company is looking to offer a consistent user experience across all devices, regardless of how Facebook is accessed. While this is a stopgap measure until Facebook applications are built for emerging touchscreen phones, the new site is a much better interface than the standard mobile iteration. In the past, mobile site users tolerated one long stream of notifications, messages, friend requests and invitations. For a power Facebook user, the single stream display was easily overwhelming. By improving upon the mobile experience, the company is removing the barrier to photo uploads, notes and status messages for these users. In January, 20million people were accessing Facebook on their mobile phones. By September, that number had more than tripled to a whopping 65 million mobile users. As the company continues to upgrade the mobile user experience, the rate of content generation appears poised for unlimited growth. To test the redesigned mobile site visit touch.facebook.com.Discuss

  While Crowdflower has forged some amazing partnerships in the past, including a deal with Samasource to launch a training program for Kenyan refugees, the company's latest partnership has a somewhat questionable benefit statement. Crowdflowerand Gambitare offering sponsored promotions for gamers to earn virtual currency via cloud-based labor. While the program sounds like a great idea, the pitch we received specified that promotions would help "monetize younger users". It will be interesting to see how parents react to these promotions. SponsorIn order to protect their kids, many parents seek out age-appropriate web content like ReadWriteWeb's list of kid-friendly resources. Others opt for tools like CYBERsitterthat offer parental controls over web filtering software. While most of these tools protect against worst-case-scenarios, few protect against invasive advertising or remote labor offers. Just this week a MediaPost articlediscussed how the Iconix Brand Groupagreed to pay $250,000 after advertising to children without parental consent. While you wouldn't normally associate brands like Candies shoesor Bongo denimwith kids, Iconix collected birth date and user information from under 13-year-olds associated with these companies. Targeting newsletters and advertising to these users was enough to raise questions with the Federal Trade Commission. It will be interesting to see how Gambit and Crowdflower will balance the issue of parental consent amongst this younger labor force. Can we classify this as child labor if only virtual goods are involved?Some of the tasks listed for casual gamers include tagging images and video clips, classifying text and finding business contact information. While others might argue that the web-task barter system is akin to earning one's allowance, the fact that children could be scraping the web to help businesses advertise to us seems somewhat exploitative. While it's too early to say how this program will pan out, there's no doubt that Crowdflower and Gambit will have to walk a fine line to keep this program ethical. Photo Credit: Jim SneedonDiscuss

  In the world of Software-as-a-Service, you can start to see how platforms will evolve into service networks - where enterprise users may subscribe and get access to applications that they pay for on a per use basis.Today, Box.netannounced a partnership with Salesforce.com CRMthat shows this developing model.SponsorBox.net will now be available in Salesforce.com CRM through tabs that will give the user access to their files stored within the Box.net environment. The tabs provide access to the user's Box.net files instead of the corporate site or the user's desktop.Documents, presentations or rich media files may be emailed to contacts through Outlook or Google Apps. Box.net integrates witheFax. Contracts may also be sent digitally usingEchoSign, a digital signature company.Box.net shows how a service using the cloud can be disruptive to the big players in the market.It's without question that Box.net is gunning for Sharepointand the enterprise market. Founder Aaron Levy did an interview with Robert Scoble this week. Levy wore a no Sharepoint shirt. That says it all.Box.net Says They Have Better Than Sharepoint 2010 Today- Watch the best video clips hereThe Box.net announcement is illustrative of an overall trend for service providers to provide their applications on existing SaaS platforms.Freshbooks,for instance, is a platform for small businesses to manage their finances. Services such as MailChimp, RightSignatureand Batchbookoffer their applications to Freshbooks users.It's clear this kind of integration is gaining traction with enterprise users. Companies have seen the value of cloud services like Salesforce.com. The next step is for the enterprise to leverage applications that rest on top of SaaS applications such as Box.net.Box.net is offering unlimited storage for companies that sign up for the service. Cost is $25 per user per month for an Enterprise account. Discuss

  Google's dominance in the search engine market isn't likely to end anytime soon, but Microsoft's Bingmanaged to continue its slow but steady growth last month, even though the search engine market in general remained at seasonal lows. According to the latest data from Compete, Bing's market share only grew from 8.7% in August to 8.8% in September, but the total query volume on Bing grew 8.2%. All the other large search engines - except for Ask - registered a decline in total search queries last month.SponsorYahooYahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August. Google, Ask and AOL Hold SteadyGoogle's market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo's market share, but isn't growing at Google's expense. Searches Per DayCompete's Marko Madjarac points out that Bing's numbers are even more impressive when we take into account that Bing's users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google's users (5.6 searches). Bing apparently lives up to its promise to get users to relevant answers faster than any other search engine. Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day. Discuss

  While Twitter offers a decent search experience, Twitter's own search engine doesn't make it very easyto discover interesting local Twitter users. LocaFollowwants to change this. The service offers an easy to use interface that makes it painless to find local Twitter users by searching through their Twitter bios. Once a search is completed, users are presented with a list of local Twitter users, their bios, a basic set of statistics and their latest tweets.SponsorYou could use Twitter's own advanced searchto find tweets from local users as well, but Twitter doesn't allow you to restrict searches to its users' bios. LocaFollow, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on searching through Twitter bios. If you are interested in following all the marketers in Portland, OR, for example, you can do so with just one click - or you select those users who seem to be the most interesting ones by examining their follower numbers and their latest tweets.LocaFollow uses OAuth to connect to Twitter and this makes it easy to bulk-follow all the selected users with just one click.Hopefully, once Twitter expands its lists feature, services like LocaFollow will also make it easy for users to immediately create new lists based on their selections. After all, the more users you follow, the more useful these lists become.There are, of course, other services that allow you to discover local Twitter users. LocalTweeps, for example, lets you discover local Twitter users, but this service doesn't allow you to search for users with specific interests. The same is true for similar services like NearbyTweets or TwitterLocal. TweepSearchmakes it easy to search through users' bios, but it doesn't have LocaFollow's focus on finding local users.Discuss

  Social media data company Rapleafhas just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think. SponsorFor the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age and gender after having collected the data from social media profiles where people have publicly disclosed this information. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their blog post. Users of social media sites already tend to be younger, so it's not surprising that they found that the majority of the webmail users studied were young with 75% under the age of 35. Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample. Gmail Skews Young, AOL OlderThat being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age: Nearly 50% of Gmail users are under 25 years of ageAOL users tend to be older, with 31% of users being at least 36 years oldYahoo and Hotmail email users have similar age distributionsIt's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc. As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available. Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More MalesPerhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning. Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too. Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.) Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's sitefor more information.Discuss

  Yesterday, amid all the news of Twitter's arrivalinto both Microsoft's Bing and the Google search engine, another major announcement was being made. MySpace is giving up on trying to be a major social network.According to MySpace CEO, Owen Van Natta, Facebook is no longer their competition. "We're focused on a different space," he says. That "different space," as it turns out, is music...and it really isn't all that different, especially considering MySpace's roots. If anything, this major overhaul of the social network is an attempt to return the site to becoming the popular entertainment hub it once was. SponsorMySpace: Remember When it Was "A Place for Music?"When MySpace hit the scene back in 2003, local bands - especially indie rock bands - were among the first to create profiles on the social network. Their presence immediately began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyonewas there. But at the same time that MySpace was having its heyday, another social networking site was being created. Although still in its infancy in 2004, a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg began writing the code for what would eventually become Facebook, now the world's largest social network. Over recent months, we've seen the mass exodus from MySpace to the more popular - and more populated - Facebook. Studies have shownthat those left actively engaging on MySpace now tend to be younger, lower-income users. Researcher Danah Boyd pointed out, somewhat controversially, that the differences between the two networks, MySpace and Facebook, went further than age and income - they involved your "social class," too. Tired of being compared to Facebook in this way and certainly tired of hemorrhaging its users, MySpace CEO Van Natta has plans to turn the sinking ship around. After taking over the company six months ago, he's been busy arranging new partnerships for the one-time king of social networks. These partnerships aim to bring the focus back to music, and less on socializing. New Music Initiatives: iLike, Videos, Artist DashboardsOne of the most notable new initiatives involves MySpace's iLike integration. After being acquired by MySpace in August, many wondered why iLikewasn't becoming a part of the MySpace network. Actually it was, but Van Natta didn't want to disclose that information at the time.But now, the iLike acquisition is beginning to make sense. Through iLike music video widgets, now popular installations on other social networks like Facebook and Orkut, the videos - and, most importantly, their ads - can be streamed on other sites while the revenue generated returns to MySpace. Even though many of the users watching these videos now may be lost forever to MySpace, they're helping the company regain its footing through their streams.MySpace's entire music video vault, one of the most popular features on the social network, has also been integrated with iLike. In August, comScore reported 45 million people watched 340 million videos during the course of the month. It only makes sense for MySpace to capitalize on that activity, which is why the company has now launched MySpace Music Videos, an online video archive where users can not only watch videos from their favorite artists, but with a click, purchase the song or ringtone from Amazon or iTunes. Meanwhile, pre-roll, post-roll, and overlay ads help to monetize the content. In addition, to cater to the musicians, bands, and labels who make MySpace their home, the network has also launched "Artist Dashboards." These online analytical tools track the fans' demographics by age and location, the total number of plays per song, profile views and more. Every artist with a MySpace profile is given free access to these tools. Is it Enough?The question that remains, of course, is whether or not MySpace's re-branding efforts will be enough to keep the site from going under. Although MySpace still had a healthy 64 million users in August of this year, that number is 12 million fewer than it did at the same time last year. Meanwhile, Facebook climbed to 300 million worldwide that same month. Can MySpace entice people to come back to the network through its new music-based initiatives? It's too soon to tell at the moment whether the strategy will work or not, but it's definitely the network's best shot. By capitalizing on what remains the most popular activity on MySpace to date (music and video), the company hopes to become more of a niche site for socializing aroundmusic instead of a site for just socializing.The newly launched features are just a part of the company's overall efforts in this direction, too. Still to come are concert ticket and merchandise sales, although no details or launch dates have been given for those features as of yet. While these efforts may not ever allow MySpace to reclaim its status as the number one social network - that ship seems to have sailed - they could definitely help the network maintain profitability. And at the end of the day, that's all that's really needed. It's not about how many users you have, it's about how much money you can make off of those that you do.Discuss

  Editor's note:we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interestingto our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.Coming soon to a mall near you: the Microsoft Retail Store.Yes, that's right: Redmond, Washington's favorite son wants a closer, snugglier relationship with you, the consumer.SponsorGiven Microsoft's relative lack of retail experience, and the fact that it plans to locate near its nemesis (well, one of its nemeses), the Apple Store, we wanted to help. So we came up with a list of ideas to help the big MS make its stores a hit.Warning: some of these are serious, others not so much. Which is which? You be the judge.Hold star-powered store opening events.Announce thatMicrosoft will celebrate all store openings with live skits featuring goofy bosom buddies Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.Hire the very best people to run the stores.You only get one chance to make a good first impression, so make sure your people have the track recordto pull this off.Offer diagnostic and repair services.If Geniuses can fix or replace any Apple-branded electronics still under warranty, then Microsoft's retail staff can do the same for stuff that sports stickers claiming things like "Windows Vista Capable."Build alliances with computer manufacturers to staff the Guru Bars.And why not? The big names have plenty riding on the launch of Windows 7. Besides, they've built up plenty of customer service expertise in places like Texas, California and Hyderabad. (Note: certain fine computer builders, like Bob &Doug's Corner Computer Emporium, might not get a seat at the Bar.)Train all staff to maintain the highest level of professionalism.For instance, make sure associates smile politely when a customer walks up, grins, says "Hello, I'm a Mac" and elbows them in the ribs.Display Windows-based hardware for people to try.Show how Windows runs on computers, smartphones and whatever else Microsoft wants to convince people to buy.Promote fan clubs to celebrate previous Microsoft consumer successes.Start with enthusiasts for Microsoft Surface, Windows Tablet Edition, Passport, Vista and Sidekick.Run workshops for business users.Exploit current holes in software available for the Mac. For instance, bring in experts to explain how to set up popular accounting packages and, for lawyers, legal practice management systems.Run workshops for creative users.Run workshops showing how Windows computer users can start their artsy projects (photo books, websites, music videos) right out of the box. Have the workshops led by cute little girls who end each seminar by saying "I'm a PC and I'm four and a half."Run safe computing workshops.Teach users the basics, like not opening all attachments, not clicking links in spam email and so forth.Run basic Windows repair workshops.Teach computer users how to: remove pre-loaded trial software; replace faulty .dlls; make changes in the Windows registry; manually uninstall software when Windows botches the job; effectively scan online forums for answers to other problems; and, when all else fails, reinstall Windows and all other software from the ground up.Create an X-Box gaming area.Preview the latest games, hold in-store tournaments and otherwise build excitement around Microsoft's gaming platform. Contain this area in a soundproof room away from workshops, ideally in the mall display window so that everyone can see how rockin' Microsoft is.Guerilla marketing (offense).Every day, send people to nearby Apple Stores to pose as shoppers, whine about how expensive Macs are, then proclaim loudly, "Maybe we shouldgo PC."Guerilla marketing (defense).Prepare a list of canned answers to anticipated questions from Apple operatives. Of particular importance, be ready to explain how Microsoft's operating system is nota copy of Apple's.Offer kids play area.Create a low "play table" where kids can sit down and show their parents how easily they can figure out a Windows computer.Store closing.To tell shoppers the store is closing for the day in a way they're sure to understand, have the giant video wall display the Windows Blue Screen of Death.What do you want from Microsoft Retail Stores? Please tell us in the comments below.Discuss

  We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google's pitches into the corporate world.But it's always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMediumis a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.SponsorOfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It's developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.Overall, OfficeMedium is a clean, easy to use intranet software. In the new world of the enterprise, every employee will create their own media. OfficeMedium provides an environment to fit with this emerging trend but with enough hooks to satisfy the needs of a business where keeping people in the loop is often mission critical.This front page has a clean UI with clear demarcation for recent content added or updated; comments; a calendar; a "shoutbox," for quick messages and a basic activity stream..The profiles we looked at have just a few fields for web sites but included a blog, personal and miscellaneous sites that the user may include. We'd add several more fields to this section to reflect the real media presence of the user. The blog environment has built in notifications that may be sent to users. Comments can be turned on, off or set to read-only.Overall, the social features are pretty decent but could use some improvement. For instance it's difficult to find tags that are associated with the user or the company. A nice, robust cloud tag would be excellent to have front and center on every page. The navigation down the right column clearly identifies what the system can do but we wonder if this could be consolidated in some manner to provide a richer activity stream.We'd also like to see rich media integration. Services like OfficeMedium can be fertile places for training and sharing marketing materials that may include videos. To have a place for them on the service would be quite handy.But on a basic level - OfficeMedium works. Perhaps what we suggest is beyond what the small business user is looking for in an intranet. But overall, they do a good job of covering the basics. Here's a summary of what they offer:Task and Event ManagementPersonal and Group CalendarsFile Sharing, Storage, and OrganizationContact ManagementArchivingFurther, the service provides the ability to integrate external parties with controls so the outside user can only see what is intended for them. That's a big plus as more often than before, users work pretty closely online with outside parties.OfficeMedium is $8 per user per month and $1 more per gigabyte used. The first 512 megabytes are free. Discuss