10 So those crazy cats at Channel 9 are up to something new and somewhat secretive so far.

A mysterious source who will go unnamed (but will receive a beer at Mix06) showed me the picture to the right on Jeff Sandquist’s Flickr site. At first I wondered if he was having a child and naming it Channel

  1. But I dug a little deeper and saw a link to on10.net which includes a videocast.

From the video and the thumbnails which represent further clues that will be unveiled this week, it looks like they are producing some sort of television show (for developers?) hosted by some woman and Cl@y Aìken.

Actually, upon further review of the video, I don’t think that is Cl@y after all^1^.

Seems like Microsoft is really on this let the cat out of the bag slowly style of viral marketing these days. I believe this is quite independent of Origami, but I can’t help noticing the parallels in how they are taking advantage of the blogging community to slowly build out hype from the grassroots level. I personally think its neat, though I realize I am providing unpaid advertising for something I have no idea what it is. It had better be good! ;)

As an aside, I wonder when they’re going to be rebranded as Channel9 Live™. Their URL still contains MSDN but it’s only a matter of time. ;)

^1^ UPDATE: So I was right, it is definitely not Cl@y. In the beginning of the video, there was a bit of uncertainty, but at the very end, it is obviously someone much better looking and more female. Someone named Laura Foy who was on G4TV, which I’ve never seen but I heard about. Wasn’t it a show about computer games for geeks? Maybe On10 is going to be an XBox show.