Microsoft dumps 'Family Guy' variety show

Seth MacFarlane. Credit: FOX One.

It was pretty exciting and edgy when Microsoft Corp. said it would team with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane on a variety show airing next month.

The software giant was going to be the only advertiser on the show and would collaborate with MacFarlane and his partner in laughs, Alex Borstein. The pair would write jokes and skits into the show that would promote Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7, which came out last week.

Now comes word that Microsoft has pulled out. Apparently "the content was not a good fit," according to a statement the company e-mailed out this afternoon:

We initially chose to participate in the Seth and Alex variety show based on the audience composition and creative humor of Family Guy, but after reviewing an early version of the variety show it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand.  We continue to have a good partnership with FOX, Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein and are working with them in other areas.  We continue to believe in the value of brand integrations and partnerships between brands, media companies and talent.

The show will go on, Microsoft said, but without help from Redmond. Maybe Jerry Seinfeld is as edgy as Bill Gates wants to get.

-- Dan Fost

Microsoft and Windows 7: A Family Guy affair

Seth MacFarlane and friends. Credit: Fox ONE.

Microsoft is trying a new spin on an old method to promote its new Windows 7 operating system this fall.

Taking its inspiration from the old Texaco Star Theater -- television's first big hit, in the 1950s, with Milton Berle hosting a variety show and becoming a fixture in U.S. living rooms -- the computer giant is teaming with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane to sponsor a variety show to air on the Fox network on Nov. 8. 

The show will run without commercials, and instead promises to feature "unique Windows 7-branded programming that blends seamlessly with show content." Although Microsoft would not give away any specific songs or gags, look for MacFarlane and his “Family Guy” co-star Alex Borstein to offer up jokes, songs and cartoons that include clever references to Windows, and maybe even Microsoft's PC guy.

Gayle Troberman, Microsoft's general manager of advertising, said MacFarlane offers what is so rare these days: an opportunity for a mass marketer like Microsoft to appeal to a wide mix of demographics.

In addition, Troberman said, the diversity of the variety show -- mixing comedy, music, animation and live entertainment -- represents "a great opportunity for us to integrate the brand in a fresh and interesting way. It brings to life the power of what Windows can do for consumers."

The show, which has a working title of “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show,” is scheduled to air Sunday, Nov. 8, at 8:30 p.m. EDT and PDT. Although producers clearly have to tread carefully in the world of product placement,  viewers may be growing more comfortable with the concept and may even prefer these intrusions to commercial breaks.

Troberman wouldn't say what Microsoft was paying for the privilege, but Fast Company reported last year that "Family Guy" charged $200,000 for a 30-second spot. Since Microsoft is taking the whole 30-minute show, it's probably spending a pretty penny.

Still, Microsoft has to be careful. While about the only thing Troberman could remember about Texaco Star Theater was the sponsor, Microsoft doesn't even get its name in the title of MacFarlane's show. But at least it will probably keep other names out of the show -- like Microsoft rivals Apple and Google, who distributed MacFarlane's "Cavalcade of Comedy" online.

-- Dan Fost

Huffington Post wants to help

 

anna Huffington. Credit: Huffington Post.

UPDATE: The section will go live at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Tuesday (not 12:01 a.m. as originally reported below.)

You've got to love the left. Even when they're running capitalist enterprises, they want to find some way to help the downtrodden.

Arianna Huffington is adding a new section to her eponymous A-list blog site the Huffington Post, and calling it Impact. She's partnered with Causecast, a Santa Monica venture that has both nonprofit and for-profit arms, and which will provide both articles and, more important, technology to make the section work.

The section will go live at 12:01  8 a.m. Tuesday, and will feature stories on a variety of subjects, including gay issues, helping the homeless,  stopping bullying in schools and flooding in the Philippines. Each story will come with a Causecast "widget" that will help a reader plot a course of action.

"We want to document the hardships and to provide the means and the tools for direct action, money and service," Huffington said.

Ultimately, every article -- not just those in the Impact section -- could feature a Causecast widget. A sample of the widget, seen at right, shows how it could be used with a story on this past weekend's National Equality March in Washington, D.C., for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. The widget is just a small box that runs with the stories containing buttons a reader could click to take them to a Causecast page that promotes other websites, such as the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that helps prevent LGBT youth suicide. 

"Every article has a cause behind it," said Ryan Scott, the founder and CEO of Causecast. "We’re going to show the actions that people can take to effect change on whatever that is. Say it’s a flood or a tsunami. Can they donate? Volunteer? Make calls? Make personal fundraising pages?"

Huffington said ads will run on the site, and the Huffington Post and Causecast will split the ad revenue. Any money donated to any cause goes directly to the cause, with nothing coming out of it. 

Her site continues to expand, reinvesting its proceeds in the product. "We’ve had a very, very good advertising year," she said. "We would be in the black if we were not expanding. Whether you are profitable or not depends whether you're standing still or expanding. This is a window we need to take advantage of."

In addition to Impact, the HuffPost started a Technology section and regional coverage in Denver in September, a Books section earlier this month, and new sections on Sports and Giving planned for November and December. Local news in Los Angeles is also planned for November, and a San Francisco Bay Area section could start before the end of the year, although it's more likely to hold off until early 2010.

Huffington said her audience is highly engaged, with 27 million people visiting the site each month and leaving 2 million comments. "We want to tap into that longing out there to give back," she said. "That was a big part of the success of the Obama campaign, when Obama promised to make service central. That has been slightly derailed with all the problems in the economy but we want to make it central. This is not the icing on the cake. It has to be baked into the cake."

-- Dan Fost

NameDrop, a celebrity social network, wants to sell the real thing

In Hollywood, we've all been trained to salivate at the sight of that red velvet rope that separates the A-listers from, well, everyone else.

Today, a celebrity social media site called NameDrop launched its own version of the velvet rope. For $2.99 a month, subscribers get access to celebrity status updates, blog posts and photos.

The site's owner, Ted Foxman, in November sold his company, Eagle Test Systems, to Teradyne for $360 million. The Chicago entrepreneur poured some of that money into creating NameDrop.

The site currently features content from a dozen celebrities, including Cat Cora, the first female Iron Chef, music producer David Foster, and Matthew Stafford of the Detroit Lions. See the full list here.

Why pay money when you can find out Demi Moore's views on slavery for free on Twitter? NameDrop believes fans will pay good money to know what the celebrities are really thinking as opposed to what their impostors are saying. Working in NameDrop's favor is an insatiable thirst for celebrity news.

But as most content sites know, it's hard to compete with free -- even when you are dangling the velvet rope.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

TechCrunch50: Penn and Teller, the iPhone app

Penn Jillette reveals the secret behind a gadget. Credit: Andy Sternberg from Flickr.

The start-up world has converged on San Francisco's Design Center Concourse this morning, where the TechCrunch50 conference is underway. And nothing says how hot the world of iPhone apps is right now than the presence of the first presenter: comedian/magician Penn Jillette.

Yes, Penn and Teller have an iPhone app, which will be for sale for $1.99 at the iTunes store as soon as Apple approves it. The app lets the user fool his or her friends into thinking that the user knows Penn and Teller, and that the famed duo will perform a card trick over the phone.

Jillette demonstrated how it works to a panel of venture capitalist judges. The user asks a friend to name a card, and then launches the app. The app mimics the iPhone home page, but enables the user to enter a code identifying the card. Then the user pretends to send a text message to Penn and Teller, and a dialogue ensues, ending with the magicians "guessing" the friend's card.

"We wanted to create a trick that somebody could download with no instructions," Jillette said. "We also wanted a trick that would fool ... people."

As Jillette fielded questions from the venture capitalists on stage, it became clear that he is not a typical tech entrepreneur.

"Our main beta tester is a stripper in Philadelphia named Heather who does this for everyone who hired her to do a lap dance," he said. Heather's tips are way up, he reported.

When venture capitalist George Zachary asked what business he was, at least theoretically, being asked to invest in, Jillette shot back, "There’s no venture capital required. We’re done and it’s for sale now."

Asked what he was going to do next, Jillette said, "I’m going to go to Las Vegas and shoot bullets at my partner Teller."

--Dan Fost

Mark Madsen: Clipper, ex-Laker and domain name speculator

Clippers forward Mark Madsen. Credit: AP

In a strange series of events befitting the shady world of domain name speculation, New Jersey state police arrested a man on suspicion of stealing the rights to p2p.com and selling them to Los Angeles Clipper forward Mark Madsen.

Daniel Gonclave, 25, of Union, N.J., is suspected of hacking into the GoDaddy.com account of p2p.com's previous owner, transferring ownership to himself and then selling it to Madsen on eBay for $111,000.  Although the domain name may have been illegally acquired, Madsen reportedly still owns it.

What ever would the "Mad Dog" want with a website associated with peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing? 

It turns out, surprisingly, that Madsen is an active domain name speculator. That's the rather odd subculture of people who buy domain names like beer.com and yeti.tv, hoping to resell them down the road at awesome profit.

Several blogs have linked Madsen to account names on EBay and various message boards, where he looks to have sold or tried to sell dozens of low-, middle- and high-dollar domain names. Those included Internetdating.com, denial.com, carbohydrates.com and even registeredsexoffender.com.

Tom Ziller at Fanhouse has quite a bit more. He writes:

Madsen's activity on DNForum, as well as the big-dollar purchase of P2P.com, indicates the player was in deep in this industry ... A year ago, he offloaded dozens of Canadian domain names-- including lovelies like chocolatecandy.ca, accordians.ca, schooners.ca and the epic menstrualperiods.ca -- for $21,000. On eBay, he sold two domains in June for a total of $7,000.

A person sounding very much like Madsen answered a phone number listed in one of the forum posts, but declined to comment on the New Jersey case, saying he and his attorneys planned to put out a statement about the situation Tuesday.

Madsen is an active Twitterer and maintains a blog where he (irregularly) posts thoughts about the basketball world.  But neither his Twitter stream not his blog yields any evidence of Madsen's low-profile second career as a speculator.

Follow my variable-rate stream of tech and culture-related musings at @dsarno

-- David Sarno

ESPYS gag uses Twitter to poke fun at star athletes

ESPYS host Samuel L. Jackson introduces a fake tweet for tennis star Serena Williams. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

A running gag during tonight's sports-centric ESPY Awards revolves around everyone's favorite social network, Twitter.

And by "everyone," we mean athletes, celebrities and news media -- not necessarily young people, as evidenced by a vocal Morgan Stanley intern.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson was the host of ESPN's awards show, which took place at the Nokia Theatre on Wednesday and airs tonight at 6 p.m. Jackson landed well-timed jokes about Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps "smoking" the competition and about "how to treat a lady," referring to Dodgers power-hitter Manny Ramirez's consumption of fertility drugs.

But an ongoing joke that seemed to fall flat among audience members showed bogus Twitter messages from star athletes in the audience (although Times writer Diane Pucin called it "the night's best running gag").

Jackson himself supposedly Twittered throughout the show on his Blackberry, saying how bored he was. In reality, Jackson has many impersonators on the social network -- none of the accounts appear to be his own.

It has been well documented that athletes have taken to Twitter like a dime cover defense on a slow football receiver (meaning, quite substantially). ESPN pushes its own Twitter account regularly during news broadcasts.

So, it was a natural target for topical humor that allowed Jackson to poke fun at athletes, like controversial Buffalo Bills NFL receiver Terrell Owens, without ...

Celebrities mourn Michael Jackson's death via Twitter

Even before it was officially confirmed that Michael Jackson had died, Twitter was buzzing about the pop icon as if he were dead. Once he died thousands of tweets a minute flooded the microblogging site, many from celebrities. Below is a small sample of unedited entries from some musicians, athletes and personalities as they tweeted through the pain.

MC Hammer: I will be mourning my friend , brother, mentor and inspiration.. He gave me and my family hope. I would never have been me without him.

Jane Fonda: I am stunned. My friend, Michael Jackson is dead. He lived with me for a week on "Golden Pond" set after "Thriller."

Katy Perry: Oh my God.

Greg Grunberg: Terrible news about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson AND Ed McMahon... they will be missed by all.

Ashton Kutcher: I plea to the press to respect his wishes of maintaining the anonymity of his children.

John Mayer: I truly hope he is memorialized as the '83 moonwalking, MTV owning, mesmerizing, unstoppable, invincible Michael Jackson.

Weird Al Yankovich: Oh man. Can't believe it. RIP Michael Jackson.

Pete Wentz: I have never felt this before in my life. I could measure my childhood 2 now on an mj growth chart. if this is true. Rip. The last legend.

Eliza Dushku: Listening to MJ at photoshoot when we all heard~ surreal.

Miley Cyrus: michael jackson was my inspiration. love and blessings

More after the jump...