Viral Friday: Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft

Viral Friday is the weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 10 most popular viral videos, commercials or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.

This weeks Viral Friday #1 position goes to Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft. Last Sunday Microsoft founder Bill Gates held his 12th and last ‘keynote speech’ at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Prior to his speech Gates showed the audience a hilarious, seven minute lasting video about his last day at Microsoft. The runner up spot is for Mark Malkoff Lives in IKEA. Actor, comedian and filmmaker Mark Malkoff (31) was looking for a cheap way to spend the night in New York City. An IKEA store in New Jersey offered him a place to sleep for a week. Cloverfield Clues Cloverfield Clues completes this week’s top 3. Next Friday the mysterious film by producer J.J. Abrams, the man behind the Alias and Lost series, will finally have its opening night. For over six months we hear the wildest rumors about this enigmatic project.

Do you want to see this week’s list from 1 to 10? Go on then, and have a look! We’d like to hear your opinion about the virals. Have fun!

1. Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft

Last Sunday Microsoft founder Bill Gates held his 12th and last ‘keynote speech’ at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. In July 2008 he will end his career at Microsoft and dedicate his life to his charity fund “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation“.

Prior to his speech Gates showed the audience a hilarious, seven minute lasting video about his last day at Microsoft. Several celebrities contributed to the farewell video, including Brian Williams, Steve Ballmer, Matthew McConaughey, Robbie Bach, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Kevin Turner, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. At the end of the evening we see Bill, accompanied by ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, playing his electronic Guitar Hero guitar. (Source: De Morgen)

2. Mark Malkoff Lives in IKEA

Actor, comedian and filmmaker Mark Malkoff (31) was looking for a cheap way to spend the night in New York City, as his own flat needed disinfection. He could not sleep at his friends and he could not afford sleeping in hotels. His spouse found him a place to sleep, but Mark wanted something different. He thought it would be interesting to spend a week in an IKEA store. He never thought the Swedish home products retailer would allow him to, but since last January 7th Mark lives in IKEA’s New Yersey store! Mark can stay till Saturday and and is followed by a camera crew. His adventures can be seen on the following website: MarklivesinIKEA.com.

Malkoff got famous with the “171 Starbucks” documentary, in which he visits all the coffee shops in Manhattan in one day. (Source: Het Laatste Nieuws, Zoetheid.web-log.nl)

3. Cloverfield Clues

Next Friday the mysterious film by producer J.J. Abrams, the man behind the Alias and Lost series, will finally have its opening night. For over six months we hear the wildest rumors about this enigmatic project. The rumors started after a teaser trailer aired in July 2007. It is known the film is about a monster attacking New York, and all the viewer sees seems to be filmed by eyewitnesses with camcorders, just as in “The Blair Witch Project“.

Besides the websites (such as slusho.jp and tagruato.jp) and teaser trailers which were released by Paramount Pictures last year, eight viral news videos appeared on the internet last week. They all report about an attack by the Cloverfield monster on the Chuai Station oil rig in the Atlantic Ocean. (Source: MovieMarketing)

4. Celine Dion is Amazing

Some of us still have to be convinced about how amazing Celine Dion actually is. Well, this video makes the convincing part a lot easier! A celebrity that does “the claw”, “who let the dogs out” and the “chicken dance” on camera simply is amazing! In just one and a half week the video gathered almost half a million YouTube views, Celine Dion fan clubs better be ready for the tidal wave of new members this is going to cause.

5. Whopper Freakout (Ghetto Version)

One month ago Crispin Porter + Bogusky from Miami came up with a brilliant marketingstunt: Whopper Freakout. With a hidden camera they filmed the reactions of people who just had been told Burger King stopped serving the world famous Whopper sandwich. In the zeven minute lasting video severla Americans react very disappointed, angry and sad. Together with his friends stand-up comedian Asa Thibodaux from Minneapolis came up with the hilarious spoof “Whopper Freakout (Ghetto Version)”. In just three weeks time the video gathered about 500.000 vieuws on YouTube and MySpaceTV.

6. Firefox Users Against Boredom

Mozilla launched a viral marketing campaign, to promote the use of their browser Firefox, titled “Firefox Users Against Boredom“. Part of the campaign is the viral video “Rise Up! Rise Up!” which was recorded with the help of several celebrities, like Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday and Leslie Hall of “Gem Sweater“. With this song the stars let us know that IE is just a boring option and Firefox makes people happy. On the fake blog they show several statistics to prove their point.

7. Burton: Sabotage Stupidity

Burton launched a daring new campaign, called “Sabotage Stupidity” which challenges snowboarders to ride in one of the four American resorts which don’t allow snowboarding. Boarders that do so have to capture their experience on video and upload it to the Sabotage Stupidity website, the best video will be awarded with $5000 in cash. Although there are not many (none…) videos uploaded yet, several very influential sites wrote about the campaign, like Kottke and (source) Adverblog.

8. Lost: Find 815

To promote ABC’s hit series “Lost” several billboards promoting the series were “vandalized”. Graffiti ‘vandals’ sprayed “Find 815.com” on the billboards, leading people to the Find 815 website. The site contains an alternate reality game, starring a guy called Sam Thomas searching for Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, the crashed plane from Lost. (Source: Wired)

9. Carlsberg Sport

A first preview of Carlsberg’s new sports beverage “Carlsberg Sport”, which the Danish brewer introduced earlier this week, can now be found on YouTube. The brewer hopes the beverage will gain huge brand awareness in very short time and spend millions to reach their target group. This has to ensure a distinct position of Carlsberg Sport in the Lemon/Lime category. Carlsberg also removes their beverage Onside from their selection, this one wasn’t the success they hoped it would be. (Source: Markedsforing)

10. Wonderbra: Optical illusion

Last year Wonderbra scored two viral hits: In March with the badly functioning billboard and in November with their spoof of the Cadbury campaign. The latest viral of the ladies underwear manufacturer does reasonably well with 25.000 views in three days time.