Office Live Workspace is FREE!

Got to be a career highlight!

First impressions are that this festival is full on. There are people from all over the world here to learn, be wowed and experience some of the most cutting edge advertising on the planet- a lot of which is now digital!

We arrived last night and sped to Marco Polo’s a restaurant on the beach, a bit beyond the town, for a very cool and laid back dinner with the whole Microsoft Advertising Team that’s out here.

The up bright and early meeting the film crew that will help us interview a raft of folks from Microsoft execs to people on the street finding out what their expectations are of Cannes and what they’re looking forward to from the week.

Our cyber lounge at the conference centre is pretty cool! Lots of PCs and internet access and this Microsoft Surface table I spotted with two South Americans firmly ensconced next to with their Apple Macs wide open!

They look happy don’t they!

Jenny and I have started filming with the Media Brands crew and I think we’ve found our presenting feet…..well time will tell!

That’s me with the “I’m an FB” Tee Shirt on!

Now I’m off to the land of nod to dream up some questions to ask Biz Stone!

Check out more photos at Cannes Lions Microsoft Advertising Community and Microsoft Advertising on Facebook.

For all you UK (and French or Canadian) advertisers that wanted local data in the (previously known as the Add-In for Excel) Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool, you know can!

Check out what Carolyn’s been saying on the Microsoft Advertising Blog and take a look at this site specific to the UK!

What do you think? What else would you like to see added?

Do check out our Cannes Lions 2009 community site which includes blogs, photos, videos and Twitter feeds – as we ramp towards the event we’ll be adding more content and will be streaming Steve Ballmer live from our business forum during the week!

As Steve picks up Media Person of the Year we’d like to ask him some questions from our Twitter audience so follow @MSAdvertising and fire off some things you’d like to hear!

I got sent this cheeky photo and just had to Tweet it - http://twitpic.com/6jm02

[giggles]

A snapshot of Walt Mossberg’s interview with Steve Ballmer at All Things Digital - Yusuf Mehdi does the demos which draw gasps and cheers from the crowd.

Take note from Steve on how exactly to say BING!

It’s a given!

Twitter Search is great for finding out what’s being said out there and they’ve now integrated the functionality into the tool to make it easier to search and check out trending topics.

Now however, the guys from Mix Online have come up with the Archivist which is a very cool tool for mining for Tweets, saving them and exporting them to Microsoft Excel for reporting purposes!

They point out that Twitter will not keep these nuggets of insight for ever, so it’s crucial you save them somewhere.

As an example – Microsoft adCenter upgraded over the weekend, so I did a search on that found 328 tweets for that keyword.

There are a couple of “views” – the actual Tweets and avatars like above, or a trend line like below where you can see the spike in activity because of the new release.

A simple click of “Export To Excel” and you have a .TXT file you can open in Excel and play around with till your heart’s content!

Nice huh!?

Check out the documentation and download it here!

Now live at: http://entertainment.uk.msn.com/tv/realitytv/big-brother/

Check out videos, photo galleries, news and blogs!

The Summer starts now!