Interesting enough, the Origami Team at Microsoft has a history of how this all began, the team lead by Dustin has put up this information on their blog.
Dec 05 – My team and I have an idea about doing a buzz/viral campaign to get enthusiasts interested in what we’re announcing at CeBIT. I pitch the idea to Michael, our marketing guy, and he agrees it’s a good idea so he and I start planning it.
Jan 06 – We hired a creative agency to begin work on the viral campaign. We tell them to leave it vague and open to speculation to generate interest. After some discussion we decided to have the campaign kick-off 2 weeks prior to CeBIT to give it enough time for people to find out about it. We also decide to host it on the origamiproject.com domain, because that is going to be the UMPC community site that goes live after the CeBIT announcement. Also, we knew it would take only a matter of minutes for someone to do a Whois lookup to find out it was a Microsoft site without explicitly spelling it out.
Feb 23rd – Week 1 of 3 teaser goes live on origamiproject.com, 2 weeks ahead of CeBIT announcement. JkOnTheRun seems to be the first post of it, but it is when someone posts the site on Digg.com that we start getting significant traffic to the teaser. We end day one with about 28,000 hits. Our original estimates are 10,000 – 20,000 hits over the entire 2 weeks.
Feb 24th – Interest picks up on the site, word spreads and we get a post on Slashdot.com. We end the second day with about 65,000 more hits.
Feb 25th – March 1st – Digital Kitchen Video is found on the internet and mainstream media begins to pick up the story over the weekend. By Monday we are showing up on front page news stories and many TV programs. Monday ends with another 260,000 hits, and Tuesday we get another 200,000. People start thinking week 2 is the unveiling even though the site shows 3 week segments.
March 2nd – Teaser campaign week 2 goes live, we hide the words “Origami Project: the mobile pc running windows xp� in the HTML source to help settle down the speculation and give a clue. More accurate stories begin getting written by the media. Intel decides to launch a teaser with a date that aligns to their IDF conference on UMPC.com. The Origamiproject.com site gets another 480,000 hits on March 2nd with people hoping to find out what it is.
March 9th – Teaser campaign week 3 goes live in accordance with the CeBIT announcement and unveils UMPC with photos of the devices. At this point in the campaign we have had more than 2 million hits.
Read more about this at: Origami Project
