Thanks to the work of the Live Search Selection Team we now have full access to all the Fodor’s Travel Guides through our Book Search & new Travel Instant Answer.

Fodor’s books are now available in the Live Book Search.  There are approximately 120 titles in the series, covering most high-interest destinations.

- Tx, Maggie, Product Manager, Windows Live

So, where are you heading next? :)

http://www.live.com

This update is mainly a UI change.  Features are reorganized to enhance usability and at the same time, I notice a quite dramatic improvement in PLT1/2 load times.. maybe it's my perception :)?

I'll edit this post if I get more update from the search team,

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

I’m pleased to announce that the WL platform team has just released another application to help our users communicate in the online world.  This latest release is a instant messaging application on Facebook that leverage our Windows Live Messenger IM Control SDK.  All Facebook users could take advantage of this Microsoft branded application for free today, allowing them to connect with their Facebook friends on Windows Live Messenger. 

How does this work?

After you add the application to your facebook profile, you will see the following on your profile page.  When your friends go into your facebook profile, they could start an IM conversation with you by simply clicking onto the chat window, sign in using their WL ID, and their message will be delivered to your actual messenger client. 

Communication is limited between the two parties within the session and other people who visit chris’s profile would not be able to see our chat history.  Conversation is limited to text-only and no emoticons, no video, nor any other interactions such as winks, games, etc.  As you can see below as well, you’ll be able to add the profile owner to you Windows Live Messenger contact list directly from the app. 

Add it today! Be a fan! Spread the words! Start IM-ing!

These days have been crazy for me.  I just finished my master degree, began our 2009 planning process, finishing up on the sign in and win promos, prepping for energizeIT...  anyway, I'm glad that the first post after a month is to announce the 1st set of winners for signinandwin.

The bad thing about contest is that it's very hard to find the right person to claim the prize!  Call them up, get them to believe in you that it is not a scam, get them to sign the contest release form...  that's why it takes so long to release the winners.  Anyway, check it out at http://signinandwin.ca or go to the messenger tab and click on the "winners" link at the bottom!  Hopefully your name is on it!  More winners coming soon!

This is authentic, not a spoof, not a scam, not a spam (I hope).  Canada has launched a campaign that Windows Live Messenger users could win $1000 a day.  I'm not a lawyer so don't pick on my wordings, but you can learn more from here, http://www.signinandwin.ca.

The idea is simple, log into Messenger, click on the tab, and you are eligible for the draw. 

This is real, we will send you the prize.  What are you waiting for, click on the tab and sign up :)

Tell your friends about it too!

Invite2Messenger has come to Canada!

What is it?

A portal that allows users to access all their contact lists from different social networking sites, and invite them to join Messenger or add them to their contact lists.  You can try it out today at http://www.invite2messenger.net .  Currently we support Facebook only, but our plan is to expand this list to Hotmail, bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged. 

Sample Invitation

Start inviting! :)

OK I haven't been slacking off.  I forgot to charge my laptop last night and I couldn't blog during the session.

Encoder V2

One of the sessions I really looked forward to.  I've been playing with Encoder during V1 and found it really cooler, in fact, much cooler than blend / designer mostly due to the fact that it provides a lot of out of the box video encoding capabilities.  I got some sneak peek of Encoder V2 through various sessions yesterday but today I got a much more indepth discussion only focused on Encoder.

Update since V2:

Partial rebuild.  One big problem in V1 is that the re-encoding process may take a long time.  This is very bad especially when you only changed a really small thing and watched Encoder to recompress everything.  Now this is improved such that only the thing you changed is being recompressed.  If you only change, say the header / meta data, you won't need to recompile at all, neat!

Script Command.  This was briefly discussed is the previous sessions as well.  But this session really showcased the power of script command.  From providing closed caption to breaking chapters, all the way to firing up advanced Silverlight Controls (like the interactive polls in the demo), all of these could be controlled through script commands. 

Templates.  More advanced template editing.  Direct hook up with Blend to allow easy editing of templates.  Encoder will also ship some SL2 templates when SL2 becomes officially available.

Developing Rich Application with IE 8

More and more IE8 sessions :) 

First, IE 7 vs IE 8 performance, not only we increased the number of parallel connections, the parsing won't be stopped by script tags anymore.

Second, dev tools.  I talked a lot about it yesterday so I'm not going to reiterate.  One thing though is that debugging is associated with each tab / session, not with the entire IE8.  Not sure if this is big for you but this is certainly very big for me. 

Thirdly, HTML5 and DOM Storage,

-Connection Event fired up by IE [Event is raised whenever IE8 cannot get pass proxy]

-Asynchronous r/w access to local DOM storage.  Each domain has 10MB and no public storage.  this is a simple key-value pair in a local file but there's no limit in each key-value pair.

Fourth, XDR (cross domain request) and XDM (cross document messaging)

Last but not least ARIA, Accessible Rich Internet Application.

this is the least known to me in all the topics.  Basically from how I understand it it is a standard to mark up your webpage to enhance accessibility such as Screen Reader and other tools.  this is a new standard specifically focused on dynamic and scripted web content.

I can't bring myself to make notes of it.  Watch it yourself NOW.

Integrating Silverlight with Media files

This track goes in depth on some features in SL2 and Expression Encoder beta 2.  A few things that really amazed me is the seamless integration between streaming online media and playing local media files within one single app.  The second part that I find extremely interesting is the support of PlayReady.  there are also more information about IIS7 bitrate throttling and webplaylist.  If you are interested, read on.

IIS 7 Media Pack Highlights

Bitrate throttling - control how much of the media is sent to clients.  Burst of content is sent in the initial load times but subsequent content will be sent at a much lower bitrate.  This is great to save server bandwidth because statistically most people only watch the 20% of the content before the close the video.  (Don't ask me about the validity of the stat), so server doesn't need to send all these unseen data wasting bandwith.

Web playlist - Client side playlist with server-side state.  Client cannot alter state.  Client seek or skip entry.  This is very useful when you want to stream pre-rolls or advertising within you video..

Now we are onto ads, Silverlight, when combined with Encoder, actually supports ad targetting as well.  Keying on the sessionID, servers can server different prerolls or ads based on the different videos being played.  Not fancy enough?  It is also possible to targetting to a specific set of frames within a video using Expression Encoder 2 and the marker feature.  Server can associate metadata with a particular frame implement script commands.  Script command is just 3 string values :Time, Type and Command.  The Type and Command is a key value pair that client can read fro the video and fire off an event.  using myMediaElenect.MarkerReached  listener, and can check Type.and Text from the marker. 

In terms of PlayReady , online playback can be DRMed (PlayReady).  server can send a marker to client indicating the file needs a license, and client will contact license erver and exchange key.  If it is licensed the video will play.  Silverlight 2 doesn't support any offline DRM media request.

Coming up... Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls

1:00 PM IE8 Track

This IE 8 track goes much more in-depth about the new features in IE8 in addition to the key note session.  Some areas include:

Zoom capabilities: IE8 can zoom in to a webpage but at the same time keep the layout unchanged.  (i.e. IE 8 relayout the entire page on the fly)  For instance, even after you zoomed in 4X, you will still see the entire page and not section of the page. 

Activities: Webpage can configure something called "activities".  Basically that's a subset of the webpage that people can add it to their IE8 "toolbar" on the top and get instant access to it from any website.  On the surface it looks like a quick link, but underneath the cover activities enable much more than that:  One example is that there will be a contextual hook up when users right click on a particular content on another webpage.  For instance, if you have setup a mapping service in your website as an activity, when a user go to another webpage, right click on an address, he / she could directly send that address to your mapping service and bring back the result in a small preview window. 

Webslices: They are markup section of the webpage that contains dynamic information.  When a user subscribe to the update for webslices, he / she will be able to look at the content dynamically from the toolbar on demand.  It is done through hAtom

Compliances: CSS 2.1 compliant plus Box-sizing and vertical text support.  Moreover, developers can choose to display their website using full CSS compliant mode or IE 7 mode (to keep backward compatibility).

Dev tools in the box: Dev tools shipped within every copy of IE8, with real time debugging tool for CSS, HTML and JavaScript.  The idea is not to replace your existing debugging tool but allows you to go to any computer running IE8 and do debugging on the fly - complement your existing tools.

Performance - Increased parallel connection limit to 6 for broadband and 2 to narrow band.  There's also a huge performance increase in Jscript engine with notable increase in strings operations, function calls, etc. More importantly, IE8 supports HTML5 storage interface, and we implemented 2: Sessionstore (Tab/session specific) and LocalStore (Shared).  Websites can store 10MB / Domain for key/value pairs.

3:00pm Windows Live Sessions

This session was dedicated to Windows Live Platform and delivered by Angus Logan.  This gives an overview on WLP progresses since MIX07 when we first announced it, and also some hands on, technical walk through on how to integrate WLP into your site.  Strongly recommend you to look at the recording when it becomes available.

The first part of the presentation was from Coca Cola on a campaign that they will run with Messenger team for EURO 2008 Soccer in May 2008: euro2008album.com.  It looks fun, and I may steal that idea and run it in Canada :)

Since MIX 07:

Alpha to Beta:  Live Contacts API, Silverlight Streaming

Messenger Control Beta: IM Control, IM Presence, Messenger Library

CTP: Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio, Photo API, Application Based Storage

Standardization: AtomPub, WL ID delegated Authenticated model

Other nuggets: Current Windows Live Sign in integration takes users away from 3d party site and show them the WL branded sign in screen, that screen would be customizable in the future and could be branded under 3rd party styles.

Updates to WL Streaming:

Transcode in the sky: users can now upload videos of different types (such as .MOV, MPG) without using expression encoder.  The video will be uploaded to the cloud and will be encoded automatically.  [Very neat].  Users are entitled to 10GB of data and up to 5Tb of streaming a month with max bitrate of 1400kpbs

9:30am  - Ray Ozzie key note  - watch it live here.

9:56am - IE 8 announcement!!

IE 8.0:

- CSS 2.1 - our core approach to interopability

- CSS Certification

- performance - 2.5 times performance improvement in major benchmarks.

- HTML 5 - improvement of usability, connection event, HTML 5 DOM storage to save content locally. 

- New set of dev tools

- Activities and Web slices - eBay, Facebook demos.  You need to see the demo yourself.  I promise your time won't be wasted.

Beta 1 for developer is available now! http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8/

10:20: Silverlight 2.0 annoucement

- Silverlight reaches 1.5M install each day

- Improved HD video, TCO and monetization support, adaptive streaming [natively supported, client side to pick appropriate bitrate and encoding real time.

- IIS 7 - allow variable bitrate streaming [ progressive download into client machine ]

- Silverlight advertising template for VS 2008.  [Supports tracking natively],

- Video.show - free download through codeplex - demo that deploys Silverlight ads to web with tracking enabled.

- Silverlight 2 beta 1 available for download!  http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

10:40: DoubleClick with Silverlight

- DoubleClick instream product supports Silverlight 2.0!

- DoubleClick instream products allows tracking of video events (pause, stop, loaded, etc...) within Silverlight 2.0 apps.

- DoubleClick SDK will be available sometime in Q2.

10:46 NBC Olympics Site Preview

- 2200 hours for 17 days live and also VOD - who can do that? Of course, Silverlight :)

- Directly connected with Data, expert commentaries.

- Rewind and review video in real time, and even PIP.

- Community aspects: real time sharing, community most popular videos.

11:01 Announcing more [and more]* Silverlight Controls

- Provide high level controls like slider, calendar and other under open source license.  Use it, ship it, deploy it, do anything with it.  It also support full customization (CSS).

- Full intellisense and debugging support

- Final beta 1 build for Expression available today

11:04 AOL mail client using Silverlight

- Silverlight - need faster app than DHTML + AJAX!  And Silverlight nailed it over DHTML + AJAX.

- Personalization - Full skinning capabilities using Silverlight for the mail client. Protected isolated storage - much better/faster than browser cache.

11:10 Hardrock Cafe using Silverlight

- 2 billion pixels of image data.  Silverlight allows zooming in and out in a breeze.

- Super quick processing.- sorting and searching for images super, super quick.

Will be live this week, http://www.hardrock.com, make sure to check it out then!

11:17 Aston Martin Silverlight Integration

- Full 3D render model with 18G worths of pictures.

- Video content all embedded directly within control.

11:30 Cirque du Soleil and Silverlight

- Mash frontend up for database (textual, videos and metadata).

- Online and Offline integration is key  Synchronization provided by Silverlight (offline / online) is invisible to users.

11:40 Silverlight going into Mobile!

- Same tools, same code, and deployed to mobile as in PC.-Windows Mobile / non- WM devices.  Nokia will deliver Silverlight in their new product line including S60. Internet tablets, 40 series, etc.

demo - MIXER from Stimulant using Silverlight.

demo - Silverlight App on Nokia S60 from WeatherBug: http://silverlight.weatherbug.com

Finally, that's the end of the very first morning session. Stay tuned for the afternoon tracks.

Has been a year since I was last in Vegas.  21 deg Celsius, can't ask for a better time to be in Vegas.

Registration @ MIX - It's 2:00pm in Vegas and not a lot of people arrived yet.  I got my pass in 10 minutes, a huge improvement from last year's 30 minutes.

The goodies bag from registration..

This is the room where Ray Ozzie will give his key note tomorrow.

Rock band tournament tomorrow!  Nah, I won't be joining. 

The Sandbox is open today all day (well, 4 - 8).

Finally, I got to see Surface in action.. It definitely is the hottest section in the whole sandbox.

This is not a fancy product announcement but many people don't know this.  A good portion of my day is to evangelize our products, and a lot of times that include answering customer questions and addressing concerns.  A lot of times I receive questions like,

"How do I reset my Hotmail password"

"I forgot my password!"

"My friend got accessed to my account and changed my password!"

"Someone got accessed to my account and sending out random emails!"

"I can't view Hotmail from my browser / computer"

And these folks are panicking and they don't know what to do!  The lucky ones may know someone in MS or somehow found the feedback channel on Sympatico / MSN website and eventually get to one of us.  But a much better, well-supported way exists: http://support.live.com.

Any users (free or paid) users can log a support request at the above mentioned site free of charge, and a representative will contact your via email in a few days to help you out no matter what problem you have.  I'm not saying these reps could help you with *anything*, but they are equipped with all the tools and knowledge that cover most of the common problems like what I mentioned above.  All support tickets are tracked and monitored and we do reply to all of them.  I've often received complaints that the end users did not receive a response, but most of the times that's because they either overlooked the response or the email was trapped in the junk mail folder.

But seriously, the support team responds to each and every of them and they are not automated response :)  Most importantly, they are good.

The call to action here is to spread the words! :)  I know a lot of you reading this post are the tech support in your family / social circle.  Please! let them know that free support exists in Windows Live services and make use of them!

Finally, one of the things I personally look forward to has arrived. 

The Windows Live Messenger Library allows developers to fully customize most aspects of messenger.  Being a javascript client library, websites have full control over the user experience.  From the core textbased messaging, to managing contact list and presence, it gives you all the tools you need.  More importantly, it works cross browser and on Windows and Macs.  The biggest difference between this WLML and the previous Windows Live IM Control includes multiple participants messaging, application messages (emoticons etc),Javascript tagging no more anonymous messages (no HIP checking(?)).

Want to see it in action? check out a simple sample here.  Want more? check out ibloke.com's implementation here.

For the official value props you can always refer to Angus Logan's blog,

If you are a developer, check out the SDK now!

We’ve launched Windows Live SkyDrive into 38 markets sans beta tag today. In addition, we have upgraded all users to 5 GB of free storage!

Our latest release includes vast performance & scalability improvements, the top customer issues addressed, the aforementioned storage upgrade (from 1 GB) and a host of other changes. With the removal of the beta tag, we’ll be begin finally talking about WL SkyDrive publicly with press and partners.

We’re also ready for folks to start telling their friends & families. Please do!

You can find out all about SkyDrive directly on the website – skydrive.live.com – or by visiting SkyDrive's team blog. Feedback? They're listening!

What can I use SkyDrive for?

SkyDrive is designed for roaming your files online (think of how you use your USB keys today) as well as sharing securely with friends or sharing publicly with the whole world. The model is simple and easy to understand – create a folder, add the folks from your contact list (or type in their email address!) and presto – you’ve shared. Your friends will get an email about it, as well as be able to see you’ve created a folder they can access in their What’s New feeds on Windows Live Spaces. You can even embed files and folders into your blog, view your photos, and drag and drop the files you want to store online directly into your browser.

Can I share with friends who don’t have a Windows Live ID?

Absolutely. When you invite a friend who doesn’t have Windows Live ID, or when you invite someone who uses another Live ID than the email addressed, they can “fix up” the sharing to go to a new Live ID or to another Live ID they use.

Is SkyDrive available in my region?

Starting today, SkyDrive is available in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey in addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S.

What do you think about Windows Live Hotmail?  Good? Bad? Come on, I know you all have something to say.  We're currently running a survey for Canadians and the link could be found here.

https://www.msnfeedback.com/perseus/se.ashx?s=394BF1642BF07E99

It's just 12 - 16 questions (depending on your answers) and it should take you no more than 3 - 5 minutes.  Please help us out and let me know what you think!  I promise you I'll carefully review every single answer, and if company policy allows, I'll share some of the information in this blog afterwards.

So, please, help fill it out :)

If you are not from Canada, please send me your opinion directly and I'll follow up with the International PM :)

Jacky

Now that @live.XX is open for registration, I trust that you guys all have registered for 1 or more of those.  So how are you managing your multiple emails now?  Are you ditching your old ones?  Are you having problem managing multiples?  I was going to write up something to list everything that we have in our disposal to help managing multiple WL IDs, but today, I found something already online :)

http://www.windowslive.com/tips.html

It talks about Importing and Exporting contacts for different types of WL users, TrueSwitch (US only), using WL Mail, forwarding Emails, The only thing it's missing is linkedID, I'll write about it soon. :)

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 :)