So the tech and geek crowd is a little underwhelmed by the new $300 million Microsoft advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld that kicked off tonight. It's mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It's a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years. So what's the deal? In an email we've obtained from Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte to all employees, he talks about the goals of the campaign. The overall goal is to inspire consumers and "tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today." This first phase, he says, "is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity." The ads are just an icebreaker, he ads, to reintroduce Microsoft to consumers. Later this month they'll do a deeper dive, which I assume means talking about features. One thing's for sure - the ads have sparked conversation. Full text of email is below:

Wixi, the social filesharing network that debuted at TechCrunch40, has finally been released to the public. The site offers a media-centric virtual desktop that allows users to play their media files from any computer that supports Flash, and also serves as a service for file sharing between friends. Any users that sign up by October 1 will get unlimited storage for life, while members joining after that date will need to pay $5 a month for the privilege (though they will still be able to get a free account with a 3GB limit).

Those Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft advertisements started today. CrunchGear's Doug Aamoth recorded the first ad during the Giants/Redskins game and put it up on the site. This is reportedly a $300 million ad spend. Seinfeld gets $10 million. It's a cute and cuddly situation comedy about shoes. Has a couple of moments. No mention of Microsoft or Windows other than "are they ever going to come out with something that will make our computers moist and chewy like cake so we can just eat them while working?" A butt wiggle by Gates followed. Overall, I give this a 0/10. These ads can't be all tech or they'll lose the audience. But I can't imagine this will sell software, either.

Pushing beyond its mobile Skype service, iSkoot has purchased social.im, and instant messaging client that let's you IM all of your Facebook friends. iSkoot already has a partnership with Skype to bring the VoIP service to mobile phones, including Skype-branded mobile phones in other countries. With social.im, it will add a Web-based IM service that taps into your social network.

Since Amazon released its video on demand service earlier today, I've pored over each and every section of the site to determine if it has what it takes to supplant Hulu as the best online video service providing professional network content. And after doing just that, I've quickly realized that it doesn't. Amazon has done all it can to solidify its stance in the online video market. First, it launched its Unbox service to compete with film streaming and now it has tried to compete in on-demand streaming of TV shows and movies. And by making TV shows and movies available online to be streamed directly to your computer, it's quickly becoming apparent that Amazon is not necessarily focusing all its attention on iTunes, but on what it perceives to be the next frontier in video: online streaming.

After so long in gestation, the 2008 election season has actually kind of snuck up on me. And what with the App store being released, I thought there would be a ton of politically-orientated apps out there. Incredibly, there are virtually none, and certainly none this cool. Take a gander at Election '08.

We're all gearing up for TechCrunch50 next week, and with all the startups and venture capitalists at the conference we thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about what it takes to get VC funding these days and whether or not venture capital even maters as much as it once did. I will be grilling a panel of VCs on what they are looking for these days, how spooked they are by the liquidity drought, and how the venture capital game in general is changing. The VCs on the panel will be Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Raj Kapoor (Mayfield Fund), Ross Levinsohn (Velocity Interactive Group), Sumant Mandal (Clearstone Venture Partners), George Zachery (Charles River Ventures). I've got plenty of questions for them, but would also like to know what you would ask them. Submit your questions in comments, and I will select some of the best ones to ask the VCs on stage. (If you like a question that's already been submitted, you can second it (or refine) by replying to that comment). Here are some questions to get the ball rolling:

Online file storage and sharing service Box.net is helping to put the "cloud" in Dell's first netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9. With only 4GB of built-in hard drive space, Dell needed some way to boost capacity. So it placed a default Box icon on the desktop that leads to 2GB of free internet storage (twice the normal 1GB that Box provides for free).

As online advertising spending continues its meteoric rise -- the Wall Street Journal is reporting a healthy gain of 20 percent in the second quarter alone -- not every form of advertising is enjoying such success. In fact, as economic troubles continue, more and more advertisers are only willing to spend money on search ads and are increasingly ignoring other forms of advertising. According to eMarketer, search ad spending will reach $10.4 billion this year, more than twice as much as advertisers will spend on display ads. More importantly for Google, search ads will represent 42 percent of all advertising spending, while display ads will account for just 21 percent of all online advertising.

One year after it launched at TechCrunch40, Cake Financial is rolling out a new design today and a load of new features. One of the most interesting is a new stock index called the Cakedex that is based on the top 100 holdings of the top performing investors on the social investing site. Over the past five and half years, the Cakedex would have outperformed the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, and the Nasdaq. Although, over the past 90 days, it has been underperforming the major stock indexes. Next year, the company plans to launch an exchange-traded fund based on the Cakedex so that people can actually invest in it. Can the top investors on Cake do better than the market? The Cakedex was actually introduced in May, but is now integrated into Cake's new design timed with its first birthday. In addition to Cakedex, other new features include: Cake Take: A stock rating system updated several times a day, based on the real-time buying and selling of stocks by Cake's members. Cake has ratings for 2,033 stocks, mutual funds and ETfs (versus 3,069 for Schwab and 4,074 for Morningtsar). Cake Scout: A stock recommendation system that uses collaborative filtering to show you what other Cake members with similar holdings and risk profiles are buying and selling. Each recommendation includes the Cake Take stock rating.

socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception. First off, the new socialmedian will make it easier for users to get content onto the site and enable bloggers to better promote their content. Dubbed “News-Streaming," socialmedian's latest foray into bringing only certain content to its users is quite complex.

Overlay.TV, a startup that lets users augment streaming videos with customized text, audio, images, and links, has launched to the public. The service overlays videos from a number of video sharing sites with a new layer containing this customized content, which can be used for entertainment purposes or as an easy (and potentially effective) means of monetizing video. To use Overlay.TV, you first give the site the source URL of the video you'd like to modify. Overlay then streams this video from the original host (the site doesn't host any video content, so it shouldn't have to worry about the copyright violations that plague sites like YouTube). After loading the video, users are free to add their own content as part of a new layer with options that include text, links, custom images, and clip art. The site includes some basic timeline functionality, so you can set specific times for each item to fade in or out, but it can be hard to finetune the position and timing of each element.

Raptr, the social network that revolves around gaming, has launched in public beta. The robust site allows users to keep tabs on what their friends are doing throughout the gaming world, and also offers gaming recommendations, accomplishment updates, and a host of other features. The site is designed to appeal to casual and hardcore gamers alike. In fact, Raptr avoids using the term "gamer" entirely, instead choosing to describe itself as a "social platform for people who like to play and discover games" - founder (and former competitive gamer) Dennis Fong says that many people associate the word "gamer" with a hardcore audience, but Raptr is for everyone.