Over the last two days, Google and YouTube executives have compiled an extensive list of ways to integrate the two features. There’s now plans to soon incorporate YouTube videos into Google search results, and to make YouTube part of Google’s AdSense advertising feature, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.”

Says Coolz0r: Good, at least the videos will start loading now and no longer slow down the blog. Oh no, wait…

“YouTube founder Chad Hurley, during the same call, said that it was Google’s “revolutionary ad program that inspired us.” Plus, he added, “we wanted to remain independent. By working with Google, that’s still the case.”

Says Coolz0r: Damn. At least make Google host the videos… for the love of blogs and loading time…

Google to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

Says Coolz0r: stock isn’t going to put butter on the bread, but okay. Let’s hope the AdSense brings in enough. Oh wait. There are hundreds of videos that violate the terms… hmm. A round of user-banning is coming up. The delete button is going to need replacement. Anybody knows a factory that produces ‘delete’ buttons? Major client coming up… :)

Is Google now responsible for all the illegal content? If so: lawyers, aim your arrows!

$1.65 billion. $1.65 billion. (I had to type it twice to fully comprehend.)

I thought YouTube was estimated on $1 billion. Did Battelle know? Even he thought $1 billion was way too much. Now it’s 65% more. Looks like the GOOG guys are trying to get rid of their stock. How much is there left to give away anyway?

Ah well. Good luck, YouTube, and congrats Google.

*continues living*

First of all, there’s the images. I always center my images with a simple <div> tag, and align them so that they kind of fill up the space. With the Live Writer tool, I can’t seem to have the image centered. The ‘inline’ function lets me slide the image between words, but that’s not what I’m looking for. So I’m hoping the Live Writer team will provide some simple align tools in the next update, just like they do in Word (left, center, right – easy as that). I don’t really want to work with the custom margins either, although it’s really cool that you can customize the position manually. But for me: plain and simple, and automated, thank you.

Of course it’s great that you can have your images with some nice effects, but here too I have some desires. I normally upload everything to the subdomain slash images folder (blog.coolz0r.com/images), and it’s great that the Live Writer tool allows me to set up a custom FTP job. Awesome. But. Apparently, as I’ve experienced with the previous post, the source pad of the image is no longer /images. It’s been changed to /images/BerlitzBabel_E4DD/image.jpg.

As far as I can tell, a new folder is created with the title of the post. So instead of uploading it straight to the images folder and adding it to the existing images, I now get an entire new structure (tree) in the images folder. Hmm. I ran through the setup settings again, and I clearly pointed it to the right folder, and I can’t seem to find the settings where it says it will create a new archive for every individual image, so I can’t turn it ‘off’ either. 

Then there’s the cool ‘Insert Map’ tool. Superfine, no doubt, but I don’t seem to get it to work right. I can browse to my house, find it on the map, but when I insert a pin and add a picture from Flickr to it I get a link like this:

Then when I don’t attach a picture it looks like this:

Weird. Must be something I’m overlooking, I can’t figure it out. I always end up somewhere in the middle of Flanders, even though I pinpoint my exact location. I’ve removed the pushpin because that also got totally misplaced and the Flickr image I attached didn’t load, even though it’s a valid image URL. Some work needs to be done here, guys!

As far as the complaints from others about the tabbed interface: I like it the way it is now. In WordPress, I don’t have tabs either. You can write, save, publish. I’ve never been editing multiple posts at once, and I’m not planning to do so in the near future. So it’s fine when that a new post pops up when I’m finished with the old one. Maybe a small detail: When I click new, instead of discarding the post I just published the Writer tool opens a brand new window, but the old post needs to be closed manually. Perhaps it can be fixed to open a new post in the same window and discarding the old post at the same time?

Other things I came across that I like:

• The extra editing options when inserting an image in the ‘effects’ tab when you click the ‘+’
• The option to add a watermark to the picture
• The fact that you can customize the image size, with constrained proportions
• The built-in spelling checker (don’t know if it’s multi-language) and the ease of adding words to it

That’s about it for this review I guess. If anything shocking comes up, I’ll post it, but for now, all I can say is you’ve just got to try this for yourself and enjoy!

The only downside is the compressed source code, which makes editing afterwards in WordPress a real pain, because it’s so unstructured. There’s also quite a lot of &-nbsp stuff that I usually avoid, which I can’t stop from being used. But those are minor details.

Download it here

Let’s have a quick run through the setup screens:

So, after the setup you’re all ready to to start blogging. One thing I noticed is that the installer file didn’t put a shortcut on my desktop or in the quickstart, so you’ll have to create a shortcut manually from within your ‘all programs’ folder. The interface looks like this:

Although you’re presented with a WYSIWYG editor, Live Writer also includes other views including HTML source-code editing and web preview mode. There’s also something really cool you can do with the images:

Writer makes inserting, customizing, and uploading photos to your blog a snap. You can insert a photo into your post by browsing image thumbnails through the “Insert Picture” dialog or by copying and pasting from a web page.

Once you’ve inserted the picture, Writer provides contextual editing tools to modify size, text wrapping, borders, and apply graphic effects. Writer also allows you specify a smaller thumbnail to that will link to a larger image for detailed viewing.

Photos can be either uploaded directly to your weblog provider (if they support the newMediaObject API) or to an FTP server.

I really like the effects and I’ll be testing it in the next posts on this blog. Another superfly feature is that you can enter a Map from Windows Live Local, all you need to do is enter an address, and it’ll put a nice integrated map in your post. Saves you a lot of time and makes it really accessible. I’ll be testing that as well really soon.

Overall feeling: as far as I’ve tested it (I’ve done about everything except publishing) the look and feel is really good. I think I’ll ask the admin in the agency I work at to install it on my laptop so I can play with this tool on the train while commuting. It kind of looks like ‘Word 2007′ and makes you feel at home. I like that.

Nathan did an extended ‘first-impressions’ review as well, so you might want to read that too. We’ll write more about it tonight or tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

Normally everything was under embargo, and I would have had enough time to test it all, but apparently some moron at ‘Inside Live’ decided to go live already, causing all the other bloggers that were included in the list to drop everything they had in their hands to go live as well. Thanks a lot, f*cker.

Live Writer Team Blog + Links

UPDATE: Jason has a review up as well. Check it out.

File Transfer

With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable. Learn more

Voicemail

If a friend isn’t around to answer your call, now you can leave a voicemail. You can even leave voicemail messages for your friends who don’t use Google Talk–they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file. Learn more

Music Status

Listening to music while on Google Talk? Now you can let your friends see what you’re listening to by selecting “Show current music track” in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does! Learn more

Nice :) Really nice!

Team 67 is the team of Henry Wissing, a dentist from Eersel (The Netherlands) and Frank Klemann, Rabobank.be’s General Manager. Both enthusiasts are experienced classic car rally drivers. The car they’ll use on their way to fame is a 1972 Toyota Celica.

The Amsterdam – Beijing Classic Car Endurance Rally 2006 is going to be one of the most spectacular rallies you’ve ever seen.

From July 14th until August 13th, one hundred teams will travel a distance of 17.500 kilometers (10.874 miles) with their classic cars and old-timers. The rally kicks off at The Dam in Amsterdam and is going to span 14 countries and 2 continents, ending gracefully on the Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

Next to the personal weblog of Team67, on Typepad, RTL7 -a Dutch TV station- and the Chinese channel CCTV2 will document the rally twice every day. IdTV, a Dutch production house, will co-produce reports extensively together with UK’s North One and CCTV. A 35-member production crew will use 12 cameras and will capture the entire event using choppers and cars. Approximately 1.000.000 Dutch viewers and a few hundred million Chinese viewers will be able to keep track of the adventures of Team 67 and the other 99 teams.

Team 67 has been given a brand new Nokia N90 by i-merge and promised to document and blog their experiences. If all goes well, you –dearest reader- will be served unique pictures and video footage from within the heat of the journey. The only thing we couldn’t do (yet) was include the smell of burning rubber and hot asphalt, but we’re working on that.

Thanks to Tanguy from TheseDays for helping with the Nokia setup, thanks to Maarten from SixApart and to de designers ‘upstairs’ who’ve made the blog look really slick.

Check out the adventures of Team67 !

It’s a bit weird to actually have your users create two different profiles I think. On the one hand it’ll generate truly dedicated users, on the other hand it’s not really user-friendly. Perhaps that’ll change too in the future. It’s the first time I hear about creating a new profile for mobile content for a service you’re already using. Suppose Hotmail or Yahoo would do that too… you’ll lose your overview and the data would become unmanagable, unless you can merge the data afterwards, but that would make it needlessly complicated.

You can now upload videos directly from your phone or PDA to YouTube. All you need is a mobile device that can take video and send MMS messages, and an Internet access or data plan from your service provider. We currently support uploads from Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

To get started, click on “Create Mobile Profile.” Login, or create an account if you don’t already have one. Once you’re logged in, you’ll create a mobile profile to set up the default information for your videos, and then our system will generate the email address where you should send them. This address will be unique to you and your profile, and you can have up to two profiles.

And what about downloading videos to your mobile device? Are the videos going to be ’slimmed’? YouTube doesn’t say anything about that (yet). It would also recquire your mobile device to have a recent Flash player and I can imagine that it might take a while for some videos to be downloaded. Nice move though. If the networks can support the traffic and can offer a smooth and continuous service, I think YouTube might have another boom in content. Citizen Journalism has been taken to the next level, let’s hope it generates some usable content.

On a sidenote, a project called YouTubeTalk (not affiliated with YouTube) is gaining momentum. It looks like an ordinary community forum that adds to the comment function of YouTube. All links from their homepage go directly to YouTube. In 10 days (it launched on May 1st) they gathered 1239 Posts in 118 Topics by 132 Members. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s that useful.

But by buying Massive, Microsoft is putting itself in a position to cash in both from the sale of games, and from the revenue generated by the inserted ads. This will also allow Microsoft to maintain more control over how the ads are placed and to consider new business models in which it could potentially allow the ads to subsidize lower prices on its game titles.

In-game advertising is a growing market. More and more games have links to the online world and the software can be tweaked everytime a player logs in or connects to the game servers. A lot of brands are already actively participating in this market and when Microsoft goes ahead with this plan, it’ll most certainly develop a nice cash stream. It’s an ad ad world we live in.

Closely connected to this announcement is the fact that Microsoft recently decided to incorporate the Ad-ID for it’s interactive advertisement. The Ad-ID has been developed by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).

Ad-ID provides the foundation for advertising digital trafficking and tracking, as well as digital connectivity. It is the equivalent of the retail community’s “UPC code.” By assigning a unique system-generated identification code to all advertising assets, including television, video, online, print, radio, outdoor, wireless, etc., Ad-ID improves the accuracy and efficiency of many advertising processes from delivery through billing, and will ultimately contribute to improved tracking and measuring advertising effectiveness across campaigns.

If you wonder why this is:

“Microsoft believes the future lies with identified, targeted, customized advertisements, and the best way to effectively track and measure results from advertising assets is by using Ad-ID – a universal code which provides end to end system connectivity.”

Read more in this .pdf announcement (90.5kb) from ad-id.org

Related:
In-game advertisement roundup

From the Unofficial Yahoo Blog:

Instead of huddling around your 17″ monitor and cluttered desk to view your Y! Photo album of the latest family gathering, you can show them from the comfort of your TV viewing room. You can also see pictures from on-the-fly Flickr searches. You can also play DVD’s or saved video files on your computer and watch them on your TV! Kind of eliminates the need for the ol’ DVD-player don’t it? And there’s a lot of Yahoo! Premium content in audio and video form that is easily accessible through Yahoo! Go – TV.
There’s more features to discover at the Y! Go – TV site.

VoiceIndigo is a mobile distribution service for podcasts which enables brands to reach out to the farthest corners of the mobile network edge, the blogosphere, and the audible web to transact with consumers via click-to-call, click-to-request, and click-to-buy.

MOBILIZE for Podcasters let you deliver your podcasts via the mobile phone.
Add a MOBILIZE button to your podcast’s website.

Also worth remarking is:

With over 1.7 billion subscribers, mobile users are by far the largest potential media audience in history. They can also be the best understood. We’ve developed Ambient Advertisingâ„¢, a patent-pending innovative new way to monetize audio content that benefits Listeners, Podcasters, Mobile Service Operators, and Advertisers alike.

via Textually

via AdFreak.

Disney is launching a US service that will enable parents to monitor how their children use their mobile phones. They will be able to track voice, text, video and picture messages and set limits on their children’s calls.

The phone will also allow parents to locate where their children are via a global positioning system.

Disney is targeting 20 to 30 million children with the new service. While the US mobile phone market is well established with 70% of the population already owning a phone, this figure is lower among teenagers.

About 45% to 50% of 13 year olds have a mobile phone, according to technology analysts Jupiter Research.

The new phones for parents, which will be sold over the internet, are expected to be available from June.

Disney has not yet revealed what it will charge for this service, but monthly fees from other providers are as little as $10 per month for each new family member.

Source: BBC News

• “As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks.”
  (Fredrick Dales at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, WA.)
• “What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.”
  (Lykes Lines Shipping)
• “E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business.”
  (Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)
• “This project is so important, we can’t let things that are more important interfere with it.”
  (Advertising/Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)
• “Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule.”
• “No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We’ve been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I’ll let you know when it’s time to tell them.”
  (R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/3M Corp.)
• “My Boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that only needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged and she couldn’t edit it. The disk I gave her was write-protected.”
  (CIO of Dell Computers)
• “Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.”
  (Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)
• My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said, “That would be better for me.”
  (Shipping executive, FTD Florists)
• “We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.”
  (Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)
• We recently received a memo from senior management saying: “This is to inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the memo mentioned above.” (Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)
• One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, “If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!” (New business manager, Hallmark Greeting Cards)
• “As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company’s training programs and materials. In the body of the memo in one of the sentences I mentioned the “pedagogical approach” used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR director’s office, and told that the executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn’t stand for perverts (pedophiles?) working in her company. Finally, he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired-and the word “pedagogical” circled in red. The HR manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his dictionary and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later, a memo to the entire staff came out directing us that no words, which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.” (Taco Bell Corporation)

Wikipedia Mobile:

Users of Pocket PCs, Smartphones and Java-enabled mobile phones running web browsers can now access a lightweight version of the Wikipedia on-line encyclopaedia. New Zealand-based company Instinct has created a mobile version of Wikipedia for mobile devices, currently available as a beta website.

Point your phone to this URL : http://www.3g.co.nz/wiki

PayPal Goes Mobile:

Paypal’s new Paypal Mobile service is apparently up and running, and from what PSFK says there’s really not a whole lot to it: you can either text PAYPAL (729725) with the dollar amount and recipients digits (i.e. “send 10 to 2125551212″), or you can do it manually by calling 1-800-4PAYPAL (1-800-472-9725), which is obviously far less exciting.

In-Game Advertising Goes Mobile:

Expect in the near future to see a rising interest for mobile in-game advertising and with new technology such as a new multimedia devices featuring excellent processor performance, display technology or 3G surround sound, in-game advertising can now be displayed to a very high quality.

ZoneTag Geocoded Moblogging:

Yahoo recently rolled out a great new moblogging application called ZoneTag. The application uploads images from your mobile phone to Flickr and automatically tags them with the location, based on the cell tower nearest you.

MSN/Hotmail users can now access their inboxes from their mobile phones. (you probably just have to surf to the hotmail url and log in) (no press release found yet)

Yahoo Goes Skype:

“Using the new Phone In service, subscribers get a personal phone number for receiving incoming calls to their PC from regular phone lines and mobile phones. Those signing up can receive unlimited domestic calls for $2.99 a month or $29.90 a year. With the Yahoo! Phone Out service, subscribers can make PC-to-phone calls within the U.S. and to 30 other countries for two cents a minute. To use the new services you’ll need to download the new client (available at http://messenger.yahoo.com/).”

… Users will also be able to access SeeMeTV, 3’s mobile TV channel, which shows and pays for customer-created content.”

MSN.co.uk has signed a three-month deal with 3 to create a branded online space where users can submit clips that will then be judged by other users in competition for a cash prize.

Read more on Guardian Unlimited | via PicturePhoning

Warning: Riya will only work if you

• Have high resolution JPEG’s with date and time from your camera
• Use digital photos of your family and friends not celebrity or web images
• Have many photos of the most common people in your photoset
• Don’t give it scanned photos, photos with bad lighting, or profile shots of faces
• They recommend you upload at least 1000 photos w/ full albums

Riya will take about a day to upload 4000 photos.

Requirements:

• 512 MB RAM
• Windows XP (Home/Professional/Media Center)
• Administrator Privileges
• Broadband Connection
• Pentium 4/Athlon/Centrino
• Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.0.5+

Learn more about Riya
Read the Riya Blog

Use the backdoor signup and skip the invite-only. | also on InsideGoogle

Windows LiveTM Ideas is where you can check out the very latest Windows LiveTM products—so new that they’re not even finished yet. So give them a try and then tell us exactly what you think. And don’t hold back. We need your help to make these products the best they can be.

Thanks for the scoop, Kris !

Thanx, PJ

UPDATE: it was only temporarily, so it seems. The problem only lasted a few hours.

The focus was on the user as a ‘limited user’, about restrictions and permissions you can set in the new operating system. The parental controls make it hard for kids to bypass the rules and restrictions that have been set by the administrative user. The amount of data you can monitor (sites visited, chats inititated, chat user identification, software used, game played etc) causes a real ‘big brother’ feeling for the protective parent. The only question that remains is: who’s going to teach the parents what and how to monitor the accounts that have been set up for their kids? Because very often the kids know more about computers than the parents do, so perhaps the situation can be reversed. I can very well imagine some kids will use this option to safely guide their parents on the internet, blocking out malicious sites and software and preventing installation of third party wares that are offered for download via pop-ups and fake warnings. Jurgen said: very often it’s the parents who are desperate and incapable of dealing with the huge amount of data that flows their way. I couldn’t agree more. Nevertheless, Microsoft takes it very far with the restrictions that are possible, and that’s a good thing. You’re still in control and you can determine for yourself how far you want to take it. That’s very important.

Also noted: opening the program files now requires consent. Received data is being transmitted to a virtual file that’s stored in a shared folder per user. This virtual sector has been created because legacy apps used to limit usage for non-administrators. The data needed to be able to be written away in the program files folder. That has been bypassed now. Also the IE7 runs in protected mode, preventing data to go beyond the local temporary internet files folder.

IE7 also allows you to set the default search engine to your favorite engine. You’re no longer obligated to use MSN Search, although this service too keeps getting better and better (also check out the new live.com). IE7 uses tabs, like Mozilla does, but also added mini-tabs, which are small previews (or large thumbnails) that give you an overview of the pages you’ve grouped or that are active in a session. There’s an integrated RSS function with a central database (but we knew that already).

The Print Preview underwent some serious changes too, you can now customize the page, clip off headers or footers and manipulate the entire content to get the result you’ve customized yourself.

Phishing has become a serious matter. Sites that are marked as bad make your address bar turn into a specific color (red, or whatever color you specify) and sites you suspect of being phishing projects can be reported to the central database, which is being monitored and moderated manually. If the reported site is malicious, the URL is added to the database so all the Vista users worldwide can be notified of this threat. Windows Update will make sure all the data is being adjusted.

XPS (name will change later) is Microsofts take on the portable document format and will make sure you can create legally bind documents (like PDF does now) and you can store them to modify them later.

The firewall is very accessible, easy to manage and now works both ways (and shows it). There’s an incoming and outgoing movement tracer and it’s very obvious what does what.

Games will be treated like music, where you can collect the sleeve and rating online, so that parents can set restrictions for their kids and prevent unwanted content to be installed and played.

The last thing they (Jurgen and Tony) showed was a demo for SuperFetch. What it does: it takes the load of memory that’s active and transfers it (for instance) on a USB stick. You could also select a portable HD and set the memory capacity to 30Gb, but experiments have shown it might in fact slow things down if you opt for the external HD. SuperFetch ‘copies’ your memory activity and mounts it on the USB flash disk, so that the apps that take loading time in fact see their loading time decrease. The available memory gets ‘larger’ (extended) through this artificial move, so that the computer runs faster and other apps have more room to breathe. That’s why they call it “speed up my system”. (I hope I got this straight, but this is how I think it works – remember I’m not an expert). That concludes the first session of the day.

Next was the ‘Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET 2.0 & Visual Studio 2005′ session with Stefan Schackow, the Program Manager from the ASP.NET Team from Microsoft. He owns the Membership, Role Manager, Profile and Web Parts Personalization features and is currently working on extending these services to both smart clients and the Atlas platform. This session was very technical and I’m not, so I’ll try stick to the things I’ve seen that I still remember.

There’s a PostBackURL feature that allows you to display a URL e.g. for a search function, for instance www.domain.com/search.aspx, and then when users type in a keyword, the fetched data can come from other aspx pages without the URL changing. Data from a products.aspx or services.aspx page can be reported on the same search.aspx page that was initially loaded. This is a feature I need to take back to i-Merge, because there’s a project online that can definitely use this. There’s also a built-in UrlMapping Module to rewrite your paths. It enables “vanity” URLs instead of querystrings and also enables easy moving of pages without 404s.

Another thing I took notes about is the so-called ‘no-compile’ page. It’s a new feature in 2.0 to enable .aspx pages to be executed without compilation, whereas in the first version .aspx pages were always dynamically compiled. I don’t really know more about it, sorry. It was way too difficult for me to understand. It was a very interesting session and Stefan flew over it very smoothly. His demos made it all seem so obvious and natural but when I take a look at it afterwards it’s almost Chinese to me. I don’t feel like I wasted my time there, but I think there’s not much more I could take home because I have no coding background at all.

This presentation is up for download, .ppt (767 Kb)

Next session was the Mobile Solutions with Windows Mobile 5.0 and Exchange Server 2003, presented by Tony Krijnen (the same guy from the Vista Mania session). Although Exchange 2003 already supported the wide range of mobile devices (as even Palm and Nokia offer the Exchange ActiveSync capabilities today) with the new Windows Mobile 5.0 system for SmartPhones and PDA’s great new capabilities have become possible. With these new capabilities you are able to enforce a pin lock on a device, remote wipe a device and of course now support push e-mail. In this session these various capabilities were addressed and Tony explained what you will need on the device and server to use these capabilities.

Tony definitely knew what he was doing. He toyed around with various mobile devices (plugged in with USB) and sent email from one device to another, opened powerpoint presentations and excel sheets on his mobile device as if he was scrolling through a list (really, it only took seconds to load) and showed off full contact lists that could be transferred to Outlook, including pictures. He also explained why he preferred a SmartPhone ever since they forced him to use one (because it can be used with one thumb instead of two hands), and then showed some extra features he particularly liked.

Pin-locking a device to prevent repeated requests that started to loop, or to prevent unrestricted access to the device, or remote wiping a device when somebody lost his tool and is afraid his data will be abused. Remote wiping is like a factory reset with data removal. Nothing remains on the device. This too was a very interesting session that explained a lot about the possibilities of mobile toys (business or pleasure). A very cool presentation, lots of funky features.

Last session of the day was the one presented by Dave Webster who is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft EMEA. He has worked on many development projects in the New England area as a Microsoft Principal Consultant for enterprise customers and ISVs before returning to the UK in 2003. His projects have been primarily in C++ and latterly C# and VB.Net and have used most of the platform technologies from Microsoft including Biztalk, Exchange, COM/DCOM amd MTS/COM+. Dave also worked on the very first Microsoft Digital Dashboard in the late 1990’s. He has a particular passion for working with ISVs and was part of the first dedicated ISV team in Microsoft Consulting Services in the US.

This session was titled: ‘ASP.NET 2.0 – What the bad guys will do’ and in fact it was a crash-course for reversed hacking, by which I mean he first showed us how to hack by inserting lines of code into the login field, and he then explained how to prevent this from happening to your own server or website. Again, this was a very technical session but it was fascinating to see how you could copy-paste (at Microsoft they call it ‘embrace and extend’) lines of code and simply hack applications. It seemed so easy to do. Dave showed Cross Site Scripting, SQL injection, Dictionary attacks, canonicalization attacks etc. and then discussed what ASP.Net has in the box to protect you against these attacks and what you still need to be wary of.

This session is up for download, .ppt (3.56 Mb)

Then there was the closing keynote presentation by Rafal Lukawiecki, a Strategic Consultant and Director who runs Project Botticelli Ltd. In his role as Strategic Consultant and Director at Project Botticelli Ltd, Rafal is responsible for analysing, planning and forecasting the changes in the field of Information Technology. Through direct association with his clients, Rafal is working closely with teams of up to 150 software developers, as well as with investors and their boards of directors. This work allows him to practice the best principles of Microsoft Solutions Framework, and Microsoft Operations Framework – the secrets behind Microsoft’s and many other IT companies’ success.

Rafal was very excited about the Visual Studio 2005 and pointed out teamwork is very important. Not only for the team, but also for the product that team is developing. He pointed out some examples of a team on the Microsoft campus (I believe in block 44) that reviews all the bits and pieces developers have sent in before they go home. This team of reviewers then generates a report on the work the developer has done and tells him what he should do when he arrives back at work the next day. Rafal pointed to the importance of such a review team. He also said ‘change’ is very motivational factor, because if you do the same work for too long, you’re more likely to make mistakes and that should be prevented. Also it’s very logical that you shouldn’t do the same work twice if you can reuse what’s been coded before.

Rafal said Microsoft the next big thing for the following years will be ‘identity’ and ‘access’. Users should be able to move their identities around and gain access to other products and services without having to register again. Microsoft is going to focus on and reinvent the identity concept, because the internet wasn’t made for identity, it was made for anonymity. Rafal explained it with this example: think of it as a tube of toothpaste and the toothpaste has been pressed out of the tube. If you want the paste to get back in the tube, you’ll have to reinvent and rebuild the tube. And that’s exactly what Microsoft needs to do. The dotnet passport was a great success, but it’s also an error. There should be an industry standard that delivers an identity that can be used all over the industry, but for that to happen the concept of identity needs to be thought over again. That’s going to take time, but it’s going to be the next big thing.

Tip: http://identityblog.com/

I’d like to thank Tom Mertens and Dave Boschmans from Microsoft for the good times and the opportunity to attend this event. Really, I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people. The only thing I regret is not having attended the presentations of Erwin Van Hunen and Wim Verhaeghen, but there were other things going on that I also wanted to see and hear. The ‘good’ presentations almost always fell at the same time so the choices were heartbreaking. Until next time, and thanx for the magnificent organization.

Cross-posted on InsideMicrosoft

First session I attended was the 2007 Office System Overview, which was pretty amazing. I really like the way Microsoft redesigned the user experience and it’s a big improvement. The contextual menu’s, the semi-transparent floater (mini-bar) when you select text in Word 12, the shrunken navigation menu… it’s going to be so much fun to use this, I can hardly wait to get it.
This session was very commercial and glanced through the new things a bit too fast, but it was clearly intended to be a ’showcase session’ for people who wanted to get a first look & feel experience. I was pretty amazed.

So, then there was lunch… and I met Maarten Schenk from SixApart who was wondering around foodlessly. We talked a bit until he had to go home to be productive and all that. Too bad he couldn’t stay. Apparently we have a shared friend, Jonas from Combell who is thinking about starting a blog platform. I hope that works out great for both of them. Clearly, Jonas has chosen the right person to handle this, so I’m pretty confident things will turn out to be very promising.

The Next session was the one that I liked best today, it was called: Office System: Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the 2007 Office System User Experience. Hans Verbeeck, a Developer Consultant in the EMEA .NET Platform Evangelism Group, really brought some good vibrations in the room. He is responsible for assisting the Visual Basic Developer Community in the move to Visual Basic .NET and focused on one of the benefits of the new UI. For the first time in many years, Microsoft has changed the user interface of the major Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access). The biggest progress here is that developers can customize and extend the UI, using a very declarative XML-driven model.

The session showed how you can build document-level and application-level UI customizations. This session described how the markup interacts with DLL-based code, and provides guidance for migrating existing solutions and developing new ones.

In this session Hans totally captured the audience with a presentation that ran like a train. Smooth, solid as a rock and super fast. He started with an evaluation of the Word interfaces starting from Word 1.0 (1989) with only 2 toolbars and running to the bloated Word 2003 version with 31 toolbars and 9 task panes. It has become obvious that the users have lost track of the meaning of all the options and that the need for a slimmed down version of the UI was urging. So Hans took us through the new Word interface, showing off the new features in detail, focussing on the groups (no more chunks, please) in the ribbon which can be edited, the mini-bar that semi-transparently pops up when you select text and the ribbon itself that changes contextually.

The mini-bar was originally called ‘the floaty’, but apparently a floaty is something that drifts around in a swimming pool, which really doesn’t need to be drifting around there. So it became mini-bar, because ‘floaty’ would make it seem a bit smelly.

When you insert a table, the contextual menu changes and shows some possibilities you can select to change the appearance. Hoovering the list instantly changes the source, displaying in real-time how the changes would look like if applied. Same goes for text editing options and styles. The instant previews are possibly the coolest thing a standard user could encounter. It would decrease the use of the ‘undo’ button with 80%, no doubt.

Here’s what the famous ribbon looks like

Another super fine feature is that the entire Office environment is XML based and the you can change a Word 12 document (for instance) to a .zip by simply changing the extension. The document then transforms into a compressed file which contains all the data, the styles etc in XML format. The document becomes very portable and transparent. You can easily tag the file, making future searches a lot less complicated and you can customly edit every piece of the code, adding or removing whatever you feel like. Rebuilding the document is done by changing the extension to .docx. The XML feature also allows you to create application ribbon extensions that load at runtime, in the entire Office environment (in every app, from Access to Word)

Hans also showed off the Excel 12 and ‘OMG’ the me-wantee feeling took over. You type in some data in the row like ‘client name’, ‘product name’, ‘price’ and ‘amount’. Then you enter a few clients and fill in the products. You select the cells and instantly turn them to a worthy table which you can then change with the same styled contextual menu with the real-time displayed possibilities. Another cool thing is that the complicated Excel formulas have become far more obvious. Adding a column for ‘totals’ for example can easily be done by right-clicking (I think) and then selecting the ‘insert formula’ thing (could be he used a shortcut, it happened too fast). The formula no longer is based on the ‘Cell X*Cell Y’ but can be replaced by the title of the column, in this case ‘price’*'amount’. That makes things very accessible to users that used to be frightened by the mathematical approach Excel used to have.

The new Word 2007 lets you save a file as .pdf, so you no longer need to rely on third-party software for that.

Another find thing is the transitional column header. In the previous versions of Excel, you always needed to freeze the title row so you could still see, when you were reading stuff below row 50, and still know what the hearders of the columns were. In Excel 12, as soon as you scroll down and the title row goes off-screen, the cells outside the spreadsheet (A, B, C,…) will automatically display the name you’ve given to the title cells. Very nifty !

Next thing in the demo was Powerpoint, which became even more easy to use. The menu looks a lot like Word, and Hans played around a bit wih the IGC graphics. Very attractive, very customizable, Highly adorable.

Presentation up for download, .ppt (1.50MB)

Like I said, this presentation was the best I’ve seen, and Jan from u2u (the coder who showed the XML features on the spot) really impressed me with his knowledge and fastness. That guy is brilliant. Absolutely stunning, the way he juggled with the code!

Third session I attended was the Live Communications Server 2005 in Close Up, but Frédéric from Digipoint (who arrived at slide number 7 or 8) and me ran out of that one because it was really boring and Ilse Van Criekinge from Azlan who presented it was just reading the slides and talked way too silent to actually grab our attention. The first ten minutes or so, she explained what instant messaging was and what you could do with it, needless to say I wasn’t really shocked nor impressed. After 20 slides we threw in the towel. Filed under boring.

Presentation up for download, .ppt (8.31MB !?)

So we waited for the Atlas presentation, Microsoft’s ASP.net 2.0 take on Java & AJaX. Impressive. Good stuff and very powerful. I did, however, expected a take that would be more implementable for regular web designers the way Java and AJaX are. Instead we got to see a drag and drop show for Visual Studio 2005. The results were quite fine-tuned and there’s a lot of potential in this standard-to-be. We just didn’t get to see it. It was like we only saw the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps the strenght of the product is within the fact it is so easy to understand and so easy to implement. Maybe we were waiting for the wrong thing. Maybe you don’t have to hard-code it. Maybe it’s so easy to use we kind of missed the point because we were expecting a difficult solution?

Atlas is a package of new Web development technologies that integrates an extensive set of client script libraries with the rich, server-based development platform of ASP.NET 2.0. Atlas enables you to develop Web applications that can update data on a Web page by making direct calls to a Web server — without needing to round trip the page. With Atlas, you can take advantage of the best of ASP.NET and server-side code while doing much of the work in the browser, enabling a richer user experience.

ASP.NET Atlas will make it dramatically easier to develop richer web experiences because there’s a higher developer productivity, because its great ease of authoring and maintenance and its seamless programming model integration. Atlas works everywhere. That’s exactly what we were shown, illustrated with the Live Local maps and the interactive toy car sightseeing map and Visual Earth I blogged about recently. This is something to keep an eye on. Atlas is going to be very big. No. It’s going to be huge !

Presentation up for download, .ppt (1.48MB)

At this time, Luc Van Braekel arrived at the scene. Of course, important people almost always show up ridiculously late to make a noticed entrance. The guy at the wardrobe thought Luc was joking when he offered his jacket for safekeeping, since the event only lasted for another hour and a half. Luc actually had to go ‘complain’ at the Microsoft people to ask them if they could ask the guy to please put away his jacket. To thank the man, Luc took his picture which he clearly did not like. I think if the dude had a knife or a pair of scissors he would have cut the jacket to shreds and pieces.

So, the threesome we were now went back to the main room to attend the ending keynote by Rob Creemers, a Dutch trendwatcher. The show was awesome. His presentation was called “The Networked Society”, and it was incredibly fast-paced. It was stuffed with quotes, press headers, pictures and videos and blasted through 50 years of communication, IT and development within the hour (and a bit). I was blown away by the amount of data he fed the audience and captured by his enthusiasm. Luc has written a good review of the entire keynote if you’re interested in another good article.

To see all the presentations of the entire day, check here on the event website. They’ve already listed the sessions that will be organized tomorrow (in a few hours, that is)

Here are some pictures I took during the day:

Cross-posted on InsideMicrosoft

Microsoft has developed a Skype-style free internet voice service for mobile phones that City analysts believe could wipe billions off the market value of operators such as Vodafone.

The service is included in a mobile version of Microsoft Office Communicator due to be released this year. It will take the form of a voice-over internet protocol (VoIP) application that allows Office users to make free voice calls over wi-fi enabled phones running Windows Mobile software. It uses the internet as a virtual phone network as well as accessing e-mail, PowerPoint and other Office applications.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer dropped his bombshell at the mobile operators’ annual 3GSM show in Barcelona last week. The significance of his remarks was missed because of his effusive and eccentric delivery.

This is so typically Microsoft. Once again, they’re not the first player in the market, but they’ll come up with some crazy all-in tool that wipes out many small players, possibly to then take on the major free VoIP services. I can’t wait to test this out. Definitely to be continued !

via [CustomerWorld]