I'm taking a break for a week, but a few posts may appear while I'm gone.

Enjoy the spring, Brier

Microsoft is reaching out to college students with a zippy new campaign developed by Seattle marketing shop Wexley School for Girls. In addition to a special Web site and viral ad spots, the "Hey Genius" campaign includes branded laundry detergent, sandwich boards and the Jobcuzzi:

Competition for the Google pool?

A little cross-town collaboration led to a redesigned version of Biznik that launched today.

Biznik, a localized social networking site for business communities based in Ballard, upgraded its profile pages with videos using technology from Eyejot in Pioneer Square.

Here's the profile page of Eyejot founder David Geller, with his video profile on the lower right.

Wetpaint Chief Executive Ben Elowitz told me he'll have a big product announcement in a few months, but while we were talking at his office in Pioneer Square today, one of his potential customers was apparently talking to Michael Arrington.

The stealthy Bellevue education startup founded by Ben Slivka, a key player in Microsoft's rise in the 1990s, and Lou Gray, former UIEvolution president, is finally opening its kimono.

Expect more news soon about Lagotek, the Bellevue home automation technology company profiled in today's column.

Some think it's hogwash and Microsoft's about to close the Yahoo deal amicably, but the New York Post is reporting whispers on Wall Street that Ballmer & Co. is having trouble finding friendly faces to stuff onto Yahoo's board.

Maybe it's because Yahoo board compensation has been awful lately.

Pogue channeled Robert Scoble and wrote a piece today about how companies should use blogs and Web 2.0 tools to open up to customers and the world.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft will rename its online "CRM Live" product "CRM Online," reflecting a new approach.

Amazon Web Services introduced two new tools today, including one offering more assurance to its users. The new "Availability Zones" feature lets developers assign applications to Amazon's different regional processing centers, giving them more specific benefits from Amazon.com's redundancy.

I wonder if it will also shed light on the super secretive company's infrastructure. It's like pulling teeth to get Amazon to say anything at all about where its operations are located, particularly data centers.

The acquisition of Auctomatic was just the beginning, according to Live Current Media President Jonathan Ehrlich, who briefed me on the deal this afternoon.

It's been obvious at CES for the past few years, but the number of TVs with Internet connections is about to take off, according to a new report.

Is it launch week for companies around here? New products debuting the past few days:

Communicate.com of Vancouver, B.C., is undergoing an extreme makeover today with the acquisition of tiny San Francisco startup Auctomatic for $5 million -- $2 million cash plus $3 million in Communicate stock.

At least that's what it sounds like from this report, outlining the product map for Asustek's low-cost computers.

The Seattle startup crowd gets attention for networking events like the Lunch 2.0 series and Open Coffee (especially since OC founder Andy Sack started an investment fund).

It's not quite the same, but I hear via Phil Haack that "Lazy Coder" Scott Koon is organizing an Eastside shindig Wednesday night at the Three Lions Pub in Redmond.

It's getting harder to keep track of the bitter fumes clogging the blogosphere this week, and it's only Tuesday.

In case you missed it: Privacy god Phil Zimmermann's new software for encrypting phone calls became available for download last week. Here's a Forbes interview where he discusses the Zfone project.

The feds can still get info on bad guys from traffic patterns that aren't blocked by the encryption, Zimmermann contends. A quote from the Forbes piece:

"From the point of view of law enforcement, traffic analysis can be quite useful. But for a criminal trying to get information for insider training, he's only interested in the content. So encryption actually hits criminals harder than it hits law enforcement agencies."

The beta software is free, but enthusiasts may want to send him a few bucks so he can start building something to protect passport data and library records.

Here are a few tidbits supplementing today's column on the Harmony One remote.

It's not getting the attention of the HTC "Dream" phone being developed with Google's new mobile platform, but the company's new "Shift" looks pretty nifty as well.

Seattle will formally ask companies in September for proposals to construct a fiber-to-the-home broadband network, a project that would challenge the Comcast-Qwest lock on the market.

But at least one City Council member today questioned whether Seattle should give more consideration to managing the system itself, rather than simply offering its assets to subsidize the $450 million project.

Traffic to WildTangent, the Redmond-based game network, leaped 35 percent from January to February, putting the site on comScore's list of the top 10 fastest growing U.S. sites.

WildTangent boss Alex St. John had a quick answer when I e-mailed to find out what's going on.

Expect an update on Seattle's broadband plans Wednesday.

That's one data point from a report issued today by Seattle's M:Metrics on iPhone usage.

The sound bite is that 85 percent of iPhoners used their devices to access news and information in January - consuming far more mobile content than other phone users.

But that's just one of the interesting nuggets.

Check out the bearish tone of Goldman Sachs' quick take on Adobe's smoking earnings report today:

I'm catching up on recent awards to local engineering luminaries:

Blist Chief Executive Kevin Merritt is calling bull on people who say they're working for a "startup inside" a big company.

"What they mean is that their team is working on a new project and maybe at the outset has decided to try to be less bureaucratic than other teams at BigCo,'' he said, then listed some of the differences between startups and big companies.

A sample:

I didn't realize how timely Monday's column on the future of digitized healthcare would be -- apparently it's electronic health record week in Seattle.

I keep waiting for a big tech company to buy SourceLabs, an open-source software and tools developer in Pioneer Square.

Maybe the new product it's launching today, SourceLabs' Self-Support Suite, will speed the process.

It's March 19, according to a post the tech press and punditocracy pounced on today.

Microsoft has said mid-March, thought it has already released the update to developers through MSDN, where it acknowledges the pack has been released to manufacturers.

Here's the top of today's column, a rumination on where Microsoft's software and services strategy could lead:

"A few years from now, when you drive into a McDonald's parking lot, your dashboard computer will start beeping.

"The computer is synced to your phone, and both devices have geographic location services. They know where you are and, based on your credit-card activity, they guess you're about to order another burger and supersized fries.

"But because you've subscribed to Microsoft Personal Trainer 2015, a premium feature of the online health-management system you've been using since 2012, technology intervenes. The services are gathering information on your behalf, using a new software platform that began taking shape in 2008."

I just had an interesting chat with MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, a Bellingham native and University of Washington alum who is in town for a DevJam developer event Saturday.

After talking about the MySpace Seattle office, which is growing like crazy, we got into ways the company's technology could help other News Corp. properties, like Hulu and the Wall Street Journal.

The Vancouver Island city has been dubbed the capital of Google Earth, according to a story in Time magazine that I found via CNET.

An excerpt:

The Tacoma Aroma next week will feature the smells of hot electric motors and WD40, during a student robotics competition at the Tacoma Convention Center.

The big-brained researchers data-mining blogs and social media are coming to town for a March 30-April 2 event: The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

For another take on Apple's moves to push the iPhone into the business space, check out the blog posting by Scott Gode, who used to lead Windows Mobile marketing.

The former Jobster chief executive has left Seattle and started a social news site called socialmedian.

This will give some Eastsiders something to be smug about: They already get the region's fastest residential Internet service from Verizon's fiber optic network, and soon they'll get TV service over the same pipe.

I love the idea of a neighborhood tech show around here, especially one for Ballard and Fremont, where the First Annual Ballard/Fremont Tech Fair is happening next week.

Finally, the Hulu online video service is open to the public, offering free and legal TV shows and movies online.

It's not a universal collection, but for the casual video watcher, there's enough free stuff to keep you out of the video store (online or off) for months.

When GridNetworks received $9.5 million in Series A funding in October, it didn't disclose two strategic investors involved in the deal.

Rounding out a garage full of top-tier automotive customers, Airbiquity today is announcing that its technology will be used in the next version of Ford's Sync system.

Scot Baker, a recruiter at Parker Technical, called with an update about the Lunch 2.0 event his company's hosting at its Chinatown office.

There's been a whole range of comments in response to today's column about how Steve Ballmer could influence the Sonics if he becomes majority owner of the team.

Most passionate were the people who told me to stuff it. A sample:

In a major upgrade of its popular "social publishing platform," Seattle's Wetpaint today added social networking tools to its wiki service.

The Xbox group (current and former) may fumble things now and then, but they seem to go overboard trying to make things right.

Passing its two-year mark, Amazon Web Services has 330,000 developers registered, up 30,000 from the previous quarter, the company said today in a release. Among the marquee customers name-dropped in the release are Nasdaq, the New York Times, SanDisk and RedHat.

An interesting tidbit:

Dare Obasanjo, the most fearless, non-anonymous Microsoft blogger, last night said he's taking an "indefinite hiatus" from his online diary.

This is a little awkward, but the chief executive of QL2, the company I profiled Monday, quit after a disagreement with its founder.

In showing off its WorldWide Telecope at annual TechFest science fair today, Microsoft Research played a recording of Harvard astrophysicist Roy Gould saying the project will have "as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo's telescope."