Mix 10 was a significant conference for Microsoft, and even though there wasn’t any Windows Live news (even in the hallways, where the only response to our questions of when was “soon”), both Windows Phone 7 Series and Internet Explorer 9 figure to play prominently in the Windows Live story, and in a way Mix 10 set the stage for the changes to Windows Live we have been anxiously awaiting.

We met up with a lot of old friends, some face-to-face for the first time.  Special thanks to Chris Wendt and  Vikram Dendi of Microsoft Translator (we’ll be implementing the new Version 2 of the Microsoft Translator API here on LiveSide soon), Lonn Lee from Windows Live, Ori Amiga from Live Mesh, Anand Iyer, Loke Uei Tan (fixed spelling, oops) and many others from Windows Phone, Mark Brown from the Web Platform Installer, Chris Pendleton from Bing, Ted Johnson, Ryan Gavin, Dean Hachamovitch, Tony Ross, Jason Webber (and a number of others) from IE, Jean Luc David from DPE, Nic Fillingham from Channel 9, and many many others who all contributed to some great hallway conversations.  Angus Logan was lurking and successfully eluded us this year, but that won’t last long, we’ll be hunting him down soon.  One last very special thank you to Steven Sinofsky, who took the time to stop by “press row” before and after Tuesday’s keynote and talk to bloggers and journalists about IE9.  The information not only from the sessions but in these conversations and chance meetings really are what makes Mix and conferences like it a unique experience, and while we’ve yet to hear Wave 4 news, we set the stage for many conversations to come.

So what’s next?  Well the conference season is in full swing, and although we won’t be able to make many of these shows, we’ll be following them closely.  We’re going to stop by and check out TechFlash Live next week, with ex-Microsoft Advertising VP Brian McAndrews, and to check out some killer Ping-Pong.  Bing has a lot coming up soon, according to Chris Pendleton, and they will be at Where 2.0 at the end of the month, and a number of conferences after that, so expect more news from Bing soon.

Windows Phone 7 Series will be keeping the gang hopping all summer.  They’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo in May, and probably every conference and county fair between now and launch “this holiday season”.

And at some point, the Windows Live guys are going to have to come out of hiding.  It’s too bad we can’t get them all together at a conference like Mix, as we’re going to have a lot to talk about, “soon”.

All the MIX10 keynote & session videos are now available at http://live.visitmix.com/videos. Each session will eventually be offered as a high-quality WMV, a regular quality WMV, and as a MP4 file for mobile devices. For most sessions, the PowerPoint deck will also be provided.

To make it easier on Windows Phone developers, Charlie Kindel is keeping a list of all the Windows Phone ones.

Speaking about Windows Phone, Scott Guthrie had some fun on stage showing a Windows Phone 7 app that turned Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into a dancing marionette! Ballmer himself recorded the audio for it: “phone developers, phone developers, phone developers”

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Long Zheng has the new Windows Phone 7 Series promotional video that was shown at MIX this week.

Extra: Windows Phone Wallpapers (1024x768)

The Bing iPhone App apparently was never meant to be available outside of the United States and is now removed from all App stores besides US. A Microsoft spokesperson told Neowin the following:

"When we released the iPhone application we inadvertently made it available to all countries in which the Apple Marketplace has a presence. We noticed the error within 24 hours and took steps to remove availability for all countries except for the US"

There are plans to release international versions of the Bing iPhone application, but when is not known at this time.

Windows Live Wave 4 has been leaked. While the whole world, including loyal MVPs and trustworthy beta testers (Former Windows Live Butterflies) are waiting patiently for Wave 4, someone who does have access just leaked it!

Over on livebetas.net Bruno Silva posted screenshots of just about any app in Windows Live Essentials, he has this leaked build on his own PC.

Now we know which apps are in it besides one, Companion. What would this be? Your guess is as good as ours!
 
We are not going to post the whole slew of screenshots here, but if you want to see them, head on over to livebetas.net.

I just have one thing to ask: Isn’t it time for a “public” beta?

Today, the Bing team released the WorldWide Telescope mapping application for Bing Maps. Originally demoed at TED in February by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the new application is the latest release supporting Bing’s Spatial Search vision.

The WorldWide Telescope application allows you to view most of the features available in the Silverlight client right in Bing Maps. That means real time information about how the space is moving over the Earth!

Clicking on the Start Here button brings up a mouse pointer, which you can drop anywhere on the map.

Once you do, the the constellations and stars above said place on the map will show up. Of course you can navigate around just like you normally do on Bing Maps,  grab and drag around. But that’s not all! Now you see the constellations and starts, but what are the called, what is it you are looking at?
 
See the question mark icon next to the date and time? Click it and another control will appear which you can drag and drop on the constellations to get their name. If you click the question mark again the control gets switched off.

Don’t know what to look at? Try the collections shown in the panel on the left! Fly to will fly you right there! How cool is that?
 
Even more information on this new Map App is given by Chris Pendleton. You can give it a go by going to www.bing.com/maps/explore, next click on Map Apps and select the WorldWide Telescope Application.

While we thought My.Live.com (also known as Windows Live Personalized Experience) was supposed to be discontinued yesterday, it seems like Microsoft has quietly delayed the date to March 30, 2010, fifteen days later than the original planned decommission date:

This provides users who wasn’t aware of this (pretty hard not to notice the red bar on your homepage!) extra time to backup and export their feeds to an OPML file for use on other sites or RSS feeds that supports this format. Unfortunately, the service they recommend you to migrate to, MyMSN, does not support OPML import. Here’s a step-by-step guide provided by Microsoft on how to export your OPML file:

To export to OPML, follow the steps below:
1. Click on "Add Content"
2. Choose "Advanced Options"
3. At the bottom of the options box, select "Click here to export to OPML"

While we’re unsure of the exact reasons of this delay, we do think that the original planned decommission date do tend to coincide with the first day of MIX 2010, and don’t forget that rumours were previously flying around about seeing Wave 4 bits at this year’s MIX (although reality proved us with great disappointment). So our speculative question comes in – is this delay somehow related to Wave 4? Do remember that Windows Live Events will also be fully decommissioned in April 2010. Are these dates purely coincidental? Or are they preparing for something big around these dates? We shall wait and see…

It appeared briefly last week, then got pulled…what oh what would that be? Silverlight for Symbian!

The good news is, it is back! You can now download Silverlight for Nokia Symbian (S60 5th Edition) devices such as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 Mini.

Silverlight support for Nokia Symbian devices includes:

• The ability to view Silverlight applications in the mobile browser.
• Tools to build Silverlight applications that target devices.

More info and download: http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/silverlight

In amongst all the Windows Phone and IE9 goodness (and a distinct lack of Windows Live news), we had a chance at Mix10 this week to catch up with an old friend we’ve never actually met face-to-face, Vikram Dendi of Microsoft Translator.

First, as Vikram explains in this video, Microsoft Translator is the technology that powers Bing Translator, the Microsoft Translator widgets and APIs, the translation in Office and a number of other Microsoft technologies, but finds a home in Microsoft Research.

At Mix this year, Microsoft Translator introduced new a version 2 of its API and the web widget, :some new collaboration tools that will allow users to make suggestions or even changes to how a translation is presented on a site.  We talked a bit about Microsoft Translator with Vikram shortly after his Mix session

Vikram Dendi at Mix 10

(just a note we’re hosting the video again on Azure, but the tools on this laptop are a bit limited so we don’t quite have the full experience).

We’ll be updating our Translator experience as soon as we get back, and will have some api key codes if you want to use the new api tools on your site, just leave a note in the comments and we’ll see what we can do!

btw here's the Mix session

Today at MIX10, Dean Hachamovitch unveiled the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview including expanded support for HTML5, hardware-accelerated graphics and text, and a new JavaScript engine.

Starting at MIX10, developers will be able to track Microsoft’s progress and provide direct feedback on the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview by evaluating new code refreshes approximately every eight weeks leading up to the beta release. Developers can download the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview at http://www.IETestDrive.com (note: requires Vista Service Pack 2 or later).
 
The Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview includes the IE9 Test Drive website which holds a series of tests. I had a play with it, just like they did in the keynote, and must say when comparing performance with other browsers it’s pretty amazing!

Do note that this is not meant for every day browsing, the UI is very minimalistic, it doesn’t even have an address bar. You are supposed to run it next to another browser to compare the tests (go to http://www.IETestDrive.com in any browser and run the tests for comparison). Don’t worry about your current IE8 install if you want to have a look though, it won’t touch it!

To enable developers to build immersive, cross-platform Web and mobile applications that use data delivered from the cloud, Microsoft also released SDKs for OData, http://www.odata.org, and announced the availability of “Dallas” CTP2.

Missed out on the keynote? The Day 2 keynote will be is available on demand later at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/VideoGallery.aspx

As usual, lots going on here in Las Vegas, with the usual internet connectivity issues, rogue software updates, long hallways, and too much to do in too little time, but we survived Day 1 intact, and now we’re on to Day 2!  Expect plenty of news from Internet Explorer, some news about Azure, and a few surprises.  Later today I’ll be posting a conversation we had yesterday with Vikram Dendi from Microsoft Translator.  BTW if you’re interested in trying out the new v2 of the Translator tools, we’ll have some invites to pass along in the coming days.

But for now, let’s get on with the liveblog!

The first day of MIX10 is behind us. For those of you who’ve missed it (like myself), the full video of the Day 1 keynote is available on demand now! Let’s take a look at what went on on Day 1!

Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Application development

The keynote was all about Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 application development. By combining Silverlight features for rich application development and the XNA Framework for games, Windows Phone 7 Series empowers millions of developers and designers to build visually stunning and immersive applications and games, while taking advantage of device-specific capabilities.

Specifically, developers will be able to take advantage of the following features:

- Accelerometer, an intuitive control that responds to motion
- A Microsoft Location Service to provide developers with a single point of reference to acquire location information
- Microsoft Notification Service for pushing information to the phone, regardless of whether or not an application is running
- Hardware-accelerated video with digital rights management (DRM)
- Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming for the industry’s highest quality content viewing experience
- Multitouch
- Camera and microphone support

Several tools and resources became available to developers:

Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework v1.1 (media player for IIS Smooth Streaming)
Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework
Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, containing Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP, Windows Phone Emulator CTP, Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP and XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP
Expression Blend 4 Beta
The Windows Phone Developer Training Kit
Get Started with Silverlight 4 (RC now available)
Learn about Silverlight for Windows Phone

Also announced is that Pivot is coming as a control to Silverlight this summer. We’ve already been playing with Pivot, check out our little side project!

Microsoft showed how developers and designers will be able to bring applications and games to market with a new Windows Phone Marketplace. As deployment of those applications will be limited to only the Marketplace, some concerns arose. Long Zheng spoke with a Microsoft representative to clear some of these up. Criteria for WP7S developers will be published by Microsoft and Microsoft states if applications “meet the criteria” they won’t deny any applications on subjective grounds. The Marketplace will allow private distributions of applications to support both beta and enterprise scenarios later this spring. The Microsoft representative also hinted at a method to “unlock” Windows Phone 7 Series devices, although not easily, but presumed will allow loading applications using a USB cable.

News Press Release - Microsoft Outlines New Opportunities at MIX10 for Developers to Create Compelling Experiences
News Press Release - Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Tools Roll Out at MIX10

Microsoft Translator

But that’s not all that happened on Day 1! There was also news from Microsoft Translator!

Microsoft is pleased to announce, the availability of the Collaborative Translations Framework – a technology that combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation. At MIX 2010, we are announcing the latest version of our translation API (v2) and built on top of that, a new version of the pioneering translator widget that we released a year ago.  In addition to bringing real-time, in-place translations to your web site, the Microsoft Translator web page widget v2 adds collaborative features that help tailor the translations delivered to fit your site. 

In addition to the collaborative features powered by the Collaborative Translations Framework, the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API includes a “batch” interface to translate large amounts of data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL and the addition of “Translate-and-Speak” – a text-to-speech functionality. We are also adding an enhancement to our Bing Translator user site, where you can use the “Translate-and-Speak” functionality whenever you translate into one of the supported languages.

So what exactly got announced?

1) A simple to adopt, highly customizable widget that site owners and webmasters can place on any webpage – and it not only helps to instantly make the page available in multiple languages, it also allows the owners with the help of their community or professional translators to tailor the the translations to their site’s content.

2) A broad set of powerful translation APIs in SOAP, HTTP and AJAX flavors so that developers can pick the best one to fit their requirement. Functionality includes language detection, single and batch translation, collaborative translations and text to speech. All you need to get started is a Bing Developer AppID. In addition, the Microsoft Translator Silverlight control for translation will be available as part of the Silverlight toolkit.

3) An update to Bing Translator translation service, which adds the “Translate-and-Speak” functionality for a set of languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian). Perform a translation on the site and you will notice a speaker icon to click on to hear it spoken.

The Widget is for anyone with a web page. If you can paste a small snippet of code into your page, you will be able to display the widget to your audience. Each MIX 2010 attendee got an exclusive invite code in their attendee bag to enable Collaborative Translations features in their widget. If you are not attending MIX, you can still get a widget for your site, and add yourself to the Collaborative Translations feature invite list. Invites will be sent out as soon as some more become available.

Pre-MIX10, the team already told about the decal they’ve put in the goodie bag MIX10 attendees get, and made the design for that available to everybody as desktop wallpaper in two versions, a light blue and a dark blue version.

Downloads Dark: 1920x1080 /1440x900 Light: 1920x1080 / 1440x900

Collaborative Translations: Announcing the next version of Microsoft Translator technology – V2 APIs and widget

So far day 1, if I forgot something feel free to let us know in the comments below! Already excited for Day 2?

Day 2 will start in a few hours, and just like yesterday we’ll have a liveblog up again bringing you the news as it happens.

Hey, we're in the front row! Just got in to the main hall for the first day of Mix 10, Long should have pictures up soon. We're going to go ahead and post this iframe now, just to make sure everything is working..

and yay we're up and running!  BTW you can watch the keynote live here:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/liveEvent.aspx

While we may or may not hear about Windows Live Wave 4 at MIX10 this year(we do try to keep our hopes up though!), recently we’ve received a few tips from sources close to Microsoft about the upcoming version of Windows Live Messenger. Some of them confirm several of our speculations we’ve posted before, while some adds to our knowledge of what we haven’t heard of before. Here they are, in summarised form:

• Interoperability with Facebook chat – We’ve seen that little “Connect to” button on the bottom-right corner of the new Messenger window, and we’ve seen Facebook to play a large role in the “social pane” of the new Messenger. What we’ve heard is that Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 will officially interoperate with Facebook chat (in addition Yahoo! Messenger and Office Communicator), allowing users to communicate with their Facebook contacts directly using Messenger. After adding Facebook using the “Connect to” button, your Facebook contacts will appear in your Messenger contact list, under a separate category labelled “Facebook”.
  
  What this possibly means though is that your Windows Live contacts are not fully integrated with your Facebook contacts. For example, a person may be online on Messenger as well as Facebook chat, but might appear as two different contacts on your Messenger contact list. Guess we’ll have to live with that given that it’d be quite complicated to match your Windows Live contacts with Facebook’s contact. We wonder if any other social networks or protocols will be supported though!
• Video Messages fully integrated with Messenger and SkyDrive – We’ve heard that you will be able to record Video Messages using Windows Live Messenger, and Messenger will seamlessly upload the video message onto SkyDrive, and send the link to the contact(s) your video message is directed to automatically (as seen on the right).
  
  We’ve seen that SkyDrive will support video playback, and it is great news to hear that video messages will now use SkyDrive as the unified storage platform (as opposed to the current Video Messages, where the videos are stored separately from your SkyDrive storage). However, what we don’t know is how much we’ll be able to share our video files uploaded. We’ve heard rumours that you can embed your videos uploaded to SkyDrive using Silverlight player, but will SkyDrive allow us to publically share our videos (think YouTube)? If so, how will copyright issues be dealt with?

These definitely sounds like great news for Messenger users – as both of them seems to be features that people have asked for for a very long time (not to mention Tabbed Conversations is coming too!). Let’s hope that we’d be able to get our hands on the next version of Messenger really soon! Stay tuned at LiveSide as we bring you the latest on Wave 4!

Chris Pendleton announced that you can now embed Bing maps Twitter Maps on your site:

We've just released an update to the Twitter Maps application in the Bing Maps Application Gallery. NOW, you can embed our Twitter Maps functionality into your own web site. This means you can be cool by having a Bing Map on your web site, blog, favorite social networking site with the Tweets you care about. And, WOW, it’s super easy.

Easy eh, let’s give it a go!

1. First off we go to Bing maps and get to the location we want. With MIX10 coming up, let’s go for Las Vegas!
2. Next we load the twitter map app: click Map Apps, then on the Twitter Map App
 
3. We will want tweets from MIX to turn up so in the search filter we put “MIX” (without quotes)

Click submit.
4. Alright, now it’s time to get the embed code. Click Embed in your site on the bottom left.

5. Next we can set the map location (Fixed or Anywhere) and the dimensions (height and width).
 
We’ll leave it on the defaults for now.
6. The embed code (under point 4) is produced, which we can copy and paste (Ctrl c, Ctrl v) into our site:

There, all done. Now you can follow tweets coming from MIX10 right here! It was easy indeed!

Thanks team for this update, lovin’ it!

Edit: I wonder why there are no tweets showing up in the embed code right now, whilst there are on Bing maps with the app and in the preview!
Would it be the Fixed code? Trying Anywhere below (with refined search filter to MIX10).

Apparently it is! Team, you got some fixing to do!

Mix 10 starts on Monday morning (at 9am Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-7), as Daylight Savings Time starts in the US on Sunday March 14), and we’ll be there to liveblog the event (we’ll have a post up on Monday with the live blog embedded). 

We want to say right off the top, that while we would love to hear lots of Wave 4 news at Mix, we’re not holding our breath.  This Mix is about Windows Phone and Silverlight 4 and Internet Explorer 9, and Microsoft isn’t about to dilute the message beyond that.  We would love to bring you lots of unexpected Wave 4 news (and we’ll be patrolling the hallways and the back rooms seeing what we can dig up), but if you voted for a Wave 4 beta at Mix, you may be disappointed.

So what will we see?  Obviously this Mix is a Windows Phone gala, and we’ll be hearing lots about Windows Phone 7 Series developer experience, and a big push to get developers to start writing apps for the new phones.  Lots of tools (even Express versions, we’re hearing), lots of detail on Windows Phones.   

Day 1 will have a focus on Windows Phones, from Joe Belfiore, who introduced Windows Phone 7 Series at MWC.  Scott Guthrie is keynoting, too, and we’ll be hearing more about Silverlight, both on Windows Phones and more broadly.

Day 2 will be all about Internet Explorer 9.  Lots of rumors swirling around about IE and HTML5, etc.  Will Microsoft join the “standards compliant” party?  What can Microsoft do to differentiate IE, and stem the tide of users switching to other browsers?  Dean Hachamovitch will hopefully be showing off at least a glimpse of the latest version of IE.

The keynotes will be highlighted by an appearance by Bill Buxton, a fan favorite from previous Mix conferences.  “Metro” is going to be a big topic in the coming months, and we’ll hear a lot more about design.   And we’ll hear a lot of talk about tools, including a “special surprise” Doug Purdy has been working on.

As we’ve said before, we’re hoping to meet up with people from Microsoft Translator and Pivot, with sessions on both scheduled, catch as many Windows Phone sessions as we can, and work the hallways for the latest news on what’s coming up.

You can watch the keynotes live on live.visitmix.com, and get real-time commentary from Ed Bott, Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, Ben Rubenstein, Long Zheng, and yours truly on our live blog.  We’ll be up front for the keynotes this year, hopefully all wired up and not fighting the wifi!

We’re all chomping at the bit for new Windows Live toys to play with, obviously,  when something as seemingly minor as a new Hotmail sign-in page generates no less than 4 tips (as always we really appreciate it)!

Sometime today (our first tip was at 3pm), the Hotmail sign in page was updated, nothing really new in terms of features, but the furniture has been moved around a bit, and things seem a bit snappier:

The new page doesn’t feature any of the “single sign-on” features we spotted back in January, but it could very well be in preparation for them.  Of course it could also be that someone in Redmond is as anxious for new bits as us, and couldn’t wait to go live with …something.  Anyway, thanks for the heads up to Julian, Maurice, Nathan and Orion!

Motorola announced a global alliance with Microsoft yesterday. They will deploy Bing services on their Android powered devices. This new offering beholds a pre-loaded Bing bookmark on their mobile phone browser and an enhanced search widget with Bing integration.

"We believe that consumer choice is one of the most critical components to ensuring a rich and seamless client experience," said Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services, Motorola Mobile Devices.

Search and Maps capabilities through Microsoft will initially be available in China, starting in Q1 2010, through either pre-load or over-the-air updates for devices already in market.

Source: engadget

The first of 3 TV ads for Bing in the UK will air from Wednesday 10th of March across ITV, Channel 4, Five and their portfolio of TV services as well as Sky Media and IDS digital channels including Bravo, Dave, GOLD, Living TV and Good Food. 

(Please visit the site to view this media)

It is the one mentioned earlier in which a woman appears overwhelmed by information when asking for “directions to Euston Station.”

Hat tip to Steve Clayton

Microsoft is rolling out the new MSN homepage to its US users over the next few weeks. The new MSN homepage cuts through the clutter with a clean, new design and offers search, news, local and social networking – all in one place. The team gathered 70,000 pieces of customer feedback was and issued over 30 updates since preview!

One of the changes is a touch of blue highlighting the top of the page. The team heard from some MSN loyalists that they missed the traditional blue background, so they experimented with different versions of the design and ended up with this one.

Some of the new features on the revamped page are:
- TrendWatch Highlights the day’s top trends and movers on Twitter
- Hyper-local Tweets which uses Bing to  highlight tweets from your location
- My Cities lets you personalize MSN Local and save up to 3 cities to follow

The Bing search box is also prominently there as the team saw double-digit increases in Bing search queries coming from the new homepage.

Want to know more about the many features of the new MSN homepage?

Take the tour or preview the new homepage.

MSN Homepage Launch Begins Today

Today we noticed a tweet coming from our good friend Long Zheng who noted the following:

While this is not surprising as Office Web Apps is part of Windows Live SkyDrive (or to be potentially called Windows Live Docs), it does leaves us some speculation as to when the final version of Windows Live Wave 4 will ship. When Office Web Apps was released as technical preview back in September last year, Microsoft announced that the final version of Office Web Apps would be released “in the first half of 2010”. Not only this, but the Office 2010 blog also recently announced that Office 2010 final will become available to businesses on May 12, and to general consumers by June 2010. Given that Office Web Apps is supposed to be released around the same time as Office 2010 (albeit it is on a different development cycle), by induction, this means that Windows Live Wave 4 should be released around the same timeframe.

Of course, this is all but speculation, although we do believe this is quite a realistic one, given rumours that we’ll be hearing about Windows Live Wave 4 bits around the “MIX timeframe”. Stay tuned at LiveSide as we bring you live coverage straight from MIX 2010!

The big news for Windows Phone 7 Series is still to come at Mix next week, but today at the Game Developer’s Conference, Microsoft unveiled XNA Game Studio 4.0, part of a comprehensive plan to get app development for Windows Phones on a roll.  New to XNA Game Studio 4.0:

Hardware accelerated 3D API’s on Windows Phone 7 Series

Visual Studio 2010 integration with our toolset

Added buffered audio support to the Audio API’s

And much, much more!

We admit to not having had much time to play with XNA, but it’s definitely on our list.  You can learn more about XNA at the XNA Creator’s Club site (edit: added link, oops), and once the details of the Visual Studio integration etc. come to life at Mix, you’ll be able to start developing games for the PC, Xbox Live, and Windows Phones, all working seamlessly together, very cool!

You can read more about XNA on Mike Klucher’s or Shawn Hargreave’s blogs.

The next Bing homepage contest got announced at NCCE Seattle. This time the Bing team asks students in the United States to submit photos to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. The contest kicks off on March 29 and the winning photo will be displayed on the Bing homepage on Earth Day itself, April 22nd!

Not only will the winning photo be displayed on the Bing homepage, there are also prizes for individual winners and their schools:

· 1^st place: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Lab” for their school.
· 2^nd place: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Kit” for their school.
· 3^rd place: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Starter Set” for their school.

First place winners across the four age groups (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) will also win a trip for two to the Microsoft Campus to take part in a Bing editorial team meeting where images for future homepages will be picked.

But that’s still not all, charity is thought about too! During the voting stage, April 13th to the 19th, Bing will give a $5.00 GivingCard for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. Voters can then decide what classroom projects (like math, science, art, reading) will benefit from Bing’s donation. How nice!

The website is already up, so students (and teachers), go on check it out at http://earthdayphotocontest.com

Bing Earth Day Photo Contest Rules

Back in 2008, Microsoft introduced the Windows Live Solution Center (WLSC), originally intended to focus on problems and solutions specifically for Hotmail. Today upon visiting the website, it seems like Microsoft recently updated Solution Center to support all Windows Live services. Not only this, but Microsoft is making WLSC the “evolution of consumer support for all Windows Live products”. What this means is that Microsoft no longer offers Windows Live email support to its users, and instead the Windows Live support team (those tagged with “Windows Live” or “MSFT” in their username in the Solution Center) will provide 24/7 support to its customers using the forums on Solution Center. Do note that email support is still available for Windows Live paid subscription customers for Billing enquiries and problems. Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ as to why Microsoft decided to change their Windows Live customer support offering:

Why did Microsoft change Windows Live support offering?
Microsoft understands that users don’t want to email a support agent unless they absolutely have to.  Users want the ability to solve their own problem – and solve it quickly. Windows Live Solutions Center brings together the expertise of skilled moderators, Windows Live employees, and knowledgeable customers.  Customers will be closer to the latest information than ever before. WLSC deepens customer relationship by offering timely and relevant solutions along with educational resources; reinforcing the Microsoft brand values and fostering loyalty and earning customer trust.

How does this make getting support easier/better?
Customers now have access to all the latest support content and the Windows Live communities, which includes moderators, at all times.  Prior to WLSC, a customer had to wait for an agent to respond to their question before getting an answer via email. Now that same customer using Windows Live Solutions Center can get answers faster than ever before; whether it’s an error message that links right to a WLSC solution, or a solution to top issues, or a community providing expert answers to other similar questions, WLSC is a whole new way of bringing experts and answers together.

When a definitive solution to a known problem or a blog entry from one of the Windows Live team is available, it will be marked as a “Microsoft Certified Solution” in the Solution Center, enabling users immediate access to solving common problems or obtain the latest information on Windows Live services. If customers require additional support or need to provide personal information, 1-on-1 private messaging between customers and a Microsoft representative is also available.

You can visit Windows Live Solution Center at http://windowslivehelp.com

This morning our friend Picturepan2, as he likes to be called, posted a couple more Wave 4 screenshots, which to be honest are pretty much just more of the same (although the Windows Live Photo Gallery image manipulation is starting to look very cool) – we’re getting to the point where screenshots aren’t quite cutting it, we need bits!  Here’s the shots:

(still lots of placeholders in the Ribbon, but we could use that “blemish remover”!)

What is a bit more interesting, however, is that Picturepan2 is reporting that this post is apparently now blocked in China by the “Great Firewall”.  This seems awfully strange, since LiveSino.net has only been blocked once before (for a post on how to get live.com addresses, and that post was up for a year before it was blocked, not entirely expedient), and while we bet there are at least some people in Redmond who wish they had a Great Firewall of their own, we doubt that the Chinese government cares much about Wave 4.  Picturepan2 tells us tonight that sometimes the GFW picks up keywords that cause a post to be blocked.  Maybe something in the post triggered the action (none of the other Wave 4 posts are blocked, and the site remains up), a glitch in the system, as it were.

Or just maybe Microsoft has cut a deal with China: “you block Wave 4 screenshots, and we’ll censor Bing”…(we’re JUST KIDDING!!)

Microsoft is readying a new ad campaign for its “decision engine”, Bing, in the UK, set to begin soon and run through June, according to NewMediaAge:

The TV campaign will run regularly for a month and then in two-week bursts until mid-June. It will be backed by a digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and on media including social networks.

The campaign, run by JWT, will be similar to the ads run in the US, with confused searchers overcome by “information overload” told to “Bing and decide”.

Bing has been making modest gains in the US, after a similar campaign started things off last June, but Google holds an even more commanding lead in the UK, with over 90% search market share, with Bing holding only about 3%.  According to an article in The Guardian UK, Bing is ready to “take on Goliath”:

"This is a big moment – we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath," said the managing director and vice-president of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, Ashley Highfield, adding that he believed Bing met a real desire from both consumers and advertisers.

Some pundits have already noted, after a mention in the Guardian article that one woman appears overwhelmed by information when asking for “directions to Euston Station”, that Bing has some work left to do there, too (although a search for “Euston Station” yields better results).

We’d love to see how these new ads differ from the ones that ran here in the US, so if you’re in the UK and spot one, let us know in the comments (bonus points for links to where we can watch it, too!)