Artificial ignorance

Ashton Kutcher launched his new startup, Blah Girls, at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco this week. Ashton walked by the Microsoft lounge several times, in and out of interviews as you can imagine. From Ashton’s most recent blog post, I think he liked the Microsoft Surface we have on display here:

“The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is Microsoft Surfce. Its a coffee table thats like a giant iphone.”

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I’m pretty damned stoked about TechCrunch50. I spent most of today setting up the Microsoft lounge area at the venue. The idea for the lounge started when I was sitting with the Qik team brainstorming ways in which we could partner to do some fun things at the event. In the midst of that, Michael Arrington calls and says, “get a Surface Table [for TechCrunch50]”. And so, we did.

Aside from the “Big Ass Table” (which, by the way, has been getting “ooo”s and “aah”s from everyone who has stopped by, including Ashton Kutcher), we have a couple of XBox’s with Halo and RockBand set up. We are also going to be using the FlotZam application to show off Tweets, Flickr photos etc. about the event. By the way, here’s a Qik video of Megan Asha using shot at our lounge:
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I’m in Boulder today at TechStars’ annual Investor and Demo Day. The energy level is high, the startup teams are knocking their demos out of the park, and the who’s who from VC-land is here. And I’m sitting next to one of the most prolific bloggers, Don Dodge, which leads me to want to do this pseudo-post of sorts. I’m live blogging twittering the event:  http://twitter.com/anandiyer. Alternately, you can watch for the keyword ‘techstars08’. Come join the conversation.

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Today at OSCON, Sam Ramji announced that Microsoft will become an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF provides support for the Apache community of open source projects. There are over 60 top-level projects at the ASF that are characterized by an open and pragmatic software license. We have a firm commitment to interoperability with open source and increasing our outreach with the open source development community. As a supporter of open source I am excited that Microsoft has decided to support the ASF.

Sam also announced

• contributions to the PHP community specifically the ADOdb project ADOdb (written in PHP, ADOdb provides an abstraction interface for PHP applications to access many different types of databases). This contribution will enable ADOdb to interoperate with Microsoft’s native SQL Server driver.
• our commitment to interoperability by extending our Open Specification Promise (OSP) to over 150 additional protocols, including protocols built into Windows Server and protocols that are part of the .NET Framework. The OSP guarantees freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

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I’m suffering from a serious case of blogger’s block. If you’re wondering, yes, it is like writer’s block in a lot of ways. I’ve also been extremely busy and suffering with some (professional) issues. But aside from that, everything’s been peachy. In a few lines here are some things I’ve wanted to communicate :

• MIX08 was awesome in many many ways.
• I was at SxSWi. Loved it! It was my first time, and I think I can easily say that its my fave conference yet.
  • Along with my Chinese-American friend Vivian, I caught the world premiere of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. I recorded some bits of the Q&A portion of the premiere and plopped it on youtube : video1 and video2. (ps : someone in the movie dies)
• We launched Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 in SF last week. I had the privilege of doing portions of the keynote with Bob Kelly.
• I got the chance to attend the Under the Radar conference for startups at our campus in Mountain View. That was pretty cool. You can catch all my tweets on it.
• I’ve been twittering a lot. So far, so good. It’s an interesting evil, this Twitter. More on that later.

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