With the recent launch of Messenger 2009, I’m sure you guys are burning, burning with feedbacks, suggestions, and any other questions you may have.  I just want to quickly put up a post so you can get all Canadian specific contact information so you can direct any of your concerns / feedbacks to the right channel. 

* A rep would get back to you within a few days.  Please make sure that email doesn’t go into your junk mail folder.  Please don’t put feature suggestion here.  It will go into the wrong pipeline and your feedback may not be passed to the right person.

** Please don’t expect a direct email reply.  For questions about the product please use the technical support channel.  But I can guarantee you we take your feedback very, very seriously. I personally review Canadian specific feedbacks on a monthly basis.  So yes, someone’s reading your feedback :) Your verbatims will help me understand what you like/dislike about messenger so I can submit feature request for the next wave of messenger.

As Olympics are behind us, I’m sure a few of you are having the same feeling as I do – emptiness.  No more checking up on medal counts during after work hours, waking up early to catch a few games, watching endless replays…

Anyway, was going through a few discussion alias and found the following created by our popfly team, found it pretty cool and want to share with you guys.  My personal favourite is the track and field :)

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Try to light all 14 torches by clicking on them!  Watch out, they’re fast!

To Play: http://popfly.com/users/team/light%20the%20torches

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/team/Light%20the%20Torches.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Pick countries to go head-to-head in this game of Foosball Soccer!

To Play: http://popfly.com/users/team/soccer

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/team/Soccer.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

Ready… Set… Go!  It’s the 100-meter dash, pick your country and hurdle across the Finish Line to Victory!

To Play: http://popfly.com/users/team/track%20and%20field

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/team/Track%20and%20Field.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Help Rocket Chicken score his longest Long Jump and win a Gold Medal!

To Play: http://popfly.com/users/team/long%20jump

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/team/Long%20Jump.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Test your ‘Strength’ by keeping the barbell off the floor and trying not to turn red in the face!

To Play: http://popfly.com/users/team/weightlifting

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/team/Weightlifting.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Forget Tyson vs. Holyfield, this is the real Boxing match of the century: my Xbox versus your Playstation.  It’s Battle of the Game Consoles!

To Play: http://popfly.com/users/team/boxing

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/team/Boxing.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Spin, jump and twirl through the air without ever leaving your chair!

To Play: http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Gymnastics

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Gymnastics.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Dive through the water and hit the target – harder than it looks!

To Play: http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Diving

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Diving.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Mirror your teammates movements with this synchronized swimming game!

To Play: http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Synchronized%20Swimming

To Embed: <iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Synchronized%20Swimming.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

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Enjoy and hope you will have some fun :)

http://blogs.msdn.com/officeoffline/

As I’m sure you know, Microsoft’s fiscal year starts in July and what that means is that we’ve to start our planning, budget allocation, marketing campaign planning, product investigation before July comes.  From a strategic perspective it seems fun and entertaining that we got to see and learn on all the new products coming down, all the positioning and messaging and plan out the local execution, but seriously, from an execution perspective it’s tons of work and coordination and it’s no fun.

While I’m glad that it’s all done, I just want to share a set of comic strips that I came across accidentally…  OfficeOffline.

My favourite is this..

And this…

Today, SkyDrive is now live in 24 additional locations, bringing our grand total to 62 countries and regions!

We welcome new users in Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

Updates with this release>

· Comments. You can leave comments on any file in SkyDrive and see all of the recent comments people have left for you.

· Captions. A picture's worth a thousand words, but sometimes you need a few more. Now you can add captions and descriptions to your files and photos

· Browsing widget.  When you click on any file, you can speed through all the files in the folder:

· Larger photo previews - we've made the photo previews even bigger.

· This release also has some other features like Details view and Photo Thumbnails view incorporated from the other teams, plus more bug fixes. So spread the good news to your family and friends. 

virtualawrence, thanks for the reminder and I owe you one:)  I actually missed a few updates/announcements on the Live Maps front as I was swarmed by the signinandwin campaign.  My apologies to Maggie, PM for Maps, who has been feeding me updates continually. 

April 1st - Wordpress plug-in to Virtual Earth (yes I've been missing updates for Maps THAT far)

I’m very excited to announce a new plug-in for Wordpress blog sites which allow bloggers to insert Virtual Earth maps inside a Wordpress Blog (Beta).

This plug-in is compatible with Windows Live Writer (when you use Writer to insert a post in Wordpress) , it’s mean when you insert a maps from Writer to a Wordpress post, the plug-in become the maps to a Virtual Earth Map instead of a static picture.

You can download plug-in from :

www.vivelive.com/wordpress/wp_livemaps_2_11_2_3.zip

www.vivelive.com/wordpress/wp_livemaps_2_5.zip  (wordpress new version)

-  Juan Antonio Roncero Martín - LIVE product Manager | Microsoft Spain

April 23rd  - Bird Eye View Launched!

Our Local experience on Live Maps has just launched today,  when you go to Live Maps and do a business search – click on any results and you’ll see the new Local Search experience.  This is a pretty cool user experience and we are now able to give user more in depth information about the business that they are searching for.  Feel free to try it out and let me know if there is any question!

An example:

http://maps.live.com/localsearch/Default.aspx?what=pizza&where=Toronto%2C%20Ontario%2C%20Canada&mkt=en-ca&FORM=LLDP

As a separate note – the long waited Bird’s Eye imagery is also launched.  !reas included are ~

Canada:

Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Victoria, Edmonton,Vancouver.

- Maggie, Windows Live Product Manager, Canada

If you guys have been following the CES press releases, you will know that Zune will come to Canada in Spring 2008.  I've to admit, I didn't know it before yesterday.

3 skus will be available:

· Zune 80 GB. The black Zune 80GB has a bright 3.2-inch screen

· Zune 4GB & Zune 8GB. The slim, ultra-portable Zune 4GB and the Zune 8GB will both be available in a variety of colours.

· Zune Originals. You will have the option to customize and purchase their Zune player with laser-engraved designs and personal text options through the Zune Originals online store.

Each of these have wirelss sync, FM tuner, wireless music sharing, video syncing from media center....Zune market place will not be available until later the year.

Fact sheets

Zune 4GB and Zune 8GB

Zune 30GB

Zune 80GB

It's Friday afternoon at 5:00pm  (EST), I'm sure all of you have some free time at hand now and wanting to do some personal development in a fun and interactive way.  If you are interested in Silverlight and want to learn more, I've a great site for you. 

http://www.visitmix.com/University/silverlight/firestarter/

It's a site launched under the MIX university currently with 8 videos covering all aspects of Silverlight: from high level what-is to the development workflow in VS, you can now spend the rest of your Friday afternoon is a very productive way :)

By the way, you need to have Silverlight player installed :)

With the Windows Live unified installer beta launched in the market, I'd like to spend some time going over some of the best features that I like the most on these products.  In the this post I'm going to talk about Windows Live Photo Gallery (my personal favourite).

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a program that essentially replaces the Windows Photo Gallery (which comes in standard with Windows Vista), and it works on both Windows XP SP2 and Vista.  It allows users to organize/view/rank their pictures easily and more.  I'm going to cover some of the interesting features below.

Panoramic Stitching made easy

I walked around Union Station in Toronto this morning and took the pictures above and ran photo stitching on it. I'm genuinely surprised by the quality of photo stitching within WLPG.  Notice that the pictures I took are very rough, different lighting, different angles, and I intentionally left an area un-captured.  Windows Live PG still did all these for me. 

The result is here:

And video is here.  P.S. The photo stitching (with Camtasia running on my machine) took around 2 minutes and to save us time I've edited that time out.  Just don't want to give you a false sense of the stitching only took < 1 sec :))

Anyway, my suggestion is that next time you are on a trip, make sure you try to dump those pictures to WLPG and see what it can do for you!

One click sharing to web services and direct online printing

Another feature that I really like is that it simplifies how I need to upload pictures to Web services, and online printing.  As demo in the video, you can add an album to Spaces in a few clicks, it also works with some other photo services as well.  More importantly, spooling pictures for online print is super easy.  In the following video, I used Fuji as an example, but you can use any photo printing partner you like. 

And by the way, you can get WLPG here: http://get.live.com/wl/all

I just got this email 2 minutes ago and I admit I haven't viewed them yet.  But just want to share some news with all of you.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/agenda.aspx

What are we doing in the local CA office?  Who are we? What do we do day to day?  Inspired by D. Trump's book, here's a log for my day Sept 12, 07.  8:45am - Arrived at our office at Yonge and Adelaide, Toronto.  Got a cup of instant coffee and ready to start my day.

9:00am - Check up on emails.  Around 35 of them and most were from US and Ireland.  Some about the @live.XX domain launch, some of them about user communication about Hotmail auto-upgrade which is happening right now and some are regular maintenance stuffs. 

Some creatives for our user communication for WL Hotmail autoupgrade:

9:45am - Following up on a critical situation from a bank about WL HM is having some issues in their environment.  Got into an emergency call with the Partner Account Manager, our emergency response team and our dev/ test team.

10:30am - Got pulled into a discussion around Windows Live Hotmail sign up flow.  Do you guys realize that during the sign up process we never asked you to fill in your occupation? (there's not even an optional field!)  Anyway, worked with the sales team to gather some data, and chatted with the dev team to see what we could do.

At around the same time, got some really nice feedbacks from our MVP about Windows Live Mail.  Relayed the message to the feedback team.  Thanks Robert for your comments :)

10:45am - A calendar entry popped up to remind me that I have to blog :)  Spent 15 minutes to think what's breaking news in the last 3 days and nothing really hit me.  Spent 10 minutes to go over 300 RSS feeds from Digg, LiveSide, LiveSino, Valleywag, and all our product team's sites.  Still didn't have an idea.  So here it goes, my diary for the day.

Discovered a potential problem with our Live.ca domain launch.  Basically there are some mobile handsets out there that are not equipped to handle @live.ca addresses.  Our Mobile manager is pulling his hair out for this. :)

11:00am - A conf call to discuss Windows Live @EDU offering.

12:00 noon - Got a request from our trade marketing manager to find a Windows Live branded booth for her trade show.  Sent a random request to US, UK, Singapore....

Also got some initial feedbacks from the team on the crit sit at the bank - we've located the problem in fact, it has already been opened a bug was filed before.  Great.

12:30 noon - meeting with Ryan and Jean-Luc David, our Evangelism folks to promote Live Platform

1:30pm - Just done the call.  Some really nice planning that Jean-Luc has!!  I can't wait for the tour that he's going to host in October! The tour will feature live demos on developing web apps, security, usability, AJAX controls, debugging, coding patterns and best practices... (flip me an email if you need more info on the tour). [disclaimer, all info tentative!]

Got some traction from the dev team on fixing that crit sit.... Things are moving along well today.  Well, time to get lunch.

2:00pm - back from lunch, another 22 emails sitting in my inbox, sigh..

2:30pm - Got a request to describe Single Sign on integration for WL ID.   I accepted the request without asking much about it cause I thought it's gonna be easy.  Haha, not at all.  Found a 93 pages technical doc and I'm supposed to summarize into a 1 pager. 

3:30pm - While still reading on the SSO integration, started another thread for a MS Office promotion in WL Hotmail.  Folks, expect some promotion of that sku in WL HM interface soon :)

4:00pm - finally finished reading the 90 pages doc and did my 1 pager summary.  It's not as bad as I thought it would be and it actually was a pretty good learning.  Better yet, it gives me some idea what I should write about later this week - expect a blog about SSO from me soon.  Time to get a coffee from Tims.

5:30pm - Just finished working on a presentation deck.  It's designed to give a brief overview on the entire offering of WL @EDU.  While I'm putting together the deck, I've gathered some pretty interesting data from ComScore. 

5:45 pm - Found a booth for WL from US!  But from the description of the booth seems too big for our purpose and the shipping cost will shoot through the roof.  Anyway, the trade mktg mgr is gone for the day.  I'll wait for her reply tomorrow.

6:00pm - Finished up on the rest of the email threads - I'll call it a day.

That's it, that's a typical day in WL.  There are more exciting ones but hey, my heart can't handle too much excitement everyday anyway.

Hope you'll find this piece interesting...

This is going to be a lame post as I'm just direct linking Mitch's blog without additional personal comment, but hey, you guys are tired of me singing and praising WL products, and it's good once in a while to read what others think outside WL! :)

View article...

Sympatico / MSN -  movies has sponsored an exclusive screening of the film “Before the devil knows you’re dead” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292963/).  The screening will take place at the Elgin Theatre.

We’re also conducting a “spotter program” where branded pins/buttons will be handed out at film fest ticket line-ups.  Those spotted wearing the button have a chance to win a Microsoft® LifeCam VX-3000 web cam.  Winners are also entered into contest to win a VIP evening out including tickets to the screening, transportation, hotel accommodations and more.  Check out the webpage at http://redcarpet.sympatico.msn.ca

t At O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) Microsoft unveiled a new web property that will articulate the next step in Microsoft’s open source (OSS) strategy.  It will provide transparency into Microsoft’s balanced perspective on OSS and host evidence about Microsoft, the OSS community and the interaction between the two. The new site will be located at http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/

 /opensource is intended for anyone interested in understanding Microsoft’s perspective on OSS.  It will include targeted resources for IT Pros, Developers and NGO/government entities in particular.  OSS technical content will continue to be hosted on Port  25, the community site for the  Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.

This is an odd ball post as this is not about Windows Live...  Just stumbled on this website about Vista certifications: http://www.productsofchampions.com/.  Very interesting way of presenting what means by being "ceritified", plus a few funny videos.