Microsoft’s adCenter Labs organization this week showed off prototypes of
leading edge online advertising technologies at its fourth annual Demo Fest
event on its Redmond, Washington campus.
The company has adCenter Labs
for “incubation” of technologies and demonstration projects in Redmond as
well as in India and China, and holds the annual event to show off some of
its experimental prototypes.
Microsoft adCenter is the company’s online-advertising unit, offering branded technologies for serving and selling pay-per-click ads, similar to Google AdWords.
Among the technologies demonstrated at this year’s event was a prototype
multi-touch screen computer – similar to the company’s Surface
computer — that could be used as an information and coupon kiosk in a
mall, for instance.
Besides dispensing coupons and directions, the demo, dubbed Air Wave,
could also be used along with a Webcam to let consumers virtually “try on”
accessories such as sun glasses, the company said in a statement.
Another demo application, referred to as “intelligent bug ads,”
automatically examined a video and calculated where in the scene a custom ad
image – either a still, an animation or movie — could be inserted without
interfering with the viewer’s experience.
Other demonstrations featured one that used speech recognition to analyze
videos and to serve textual ads that relate to the content discussed in the
videos – while another was designed to identify offensive or sensitive
content on a Web page and block display of contextual ads related to that
content.
