Christopher Griffin on Startup Thinking

I’ve been working with Seattle startup Cheezburger Network—creators of humor sites like icanhazcheezburger, failblog, thisisphotobomb, and others—for a while now, so I was especially thrilled at today’s kickoff of Microsoft PDC, our Professional Developer’s Conference. Martin Cron, a lead developer for the startup, was part of Ray Ozzie’s keynote address announcing Azure support for Wordpress. In addition to Wordpress’s Matt Mullenweg, who prefaced his own Azure demo by saying that he first looked out the window to make sure pigs weren’t flying, Martin announced a new Cheezburger site, running live on Azure, called OddlySpecific.

OddlySpecific emerged from a number of submissions to failblog that, while funny, didn’t really qualify as “fails.” Many were about oddly specific signage, so thus was born the theme of the new site. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Cheezburger crew—it never hurts that part of my job includes LMAO on a daily basis.

For a video stream of the event, as well as recorded keynotes and sessions, check out Microsoft PDC.