There’s been so much hype and so much talk revolving around Microsoft’s Live Services. Live Mesh has even made it to the keynote feature of this year’s TechEd in Sydney. So what is Live? Simply put, Windows Live is a collection of services that we use every day from Live Messenger (MSN) to Live Mail, Live Search, Live Maps, and pretty much everything else that has the word ‘Live’ in it.
What Microsoft is doing though, is more than just providing these services – they’re also making it easy for people to make use of creatively, building on top of them as a platform. But at the speed they come in, it’s pretty easy to become lost in this strange new world.
So that’s were Live Services Jumpstart 2009 come into play. It’s a FREE 2-day training session that’s coming to 11 cities around the world, dedicated to demystifying all things to do with Live Services and the hottest new Software + Services architecture.
So Sydney’s pretty lucky to be one of these 11 cities to host this event, on 8 – 9 Dec 08, 8:30am – 6:30pm, at Four Points Sheraton, Darling Harbour. Since this is the ultimate place to get free in-depth technical training, spaces are limited -Register now!
A few days ago, I wrote about the event by Microsoft China Research and Development Group. Having attended this even today, I found that it wasn’t what I have expected it to be. I was hoping for a presentation about the role of Microsoft Research, and what MSR China does. But in fact, MSR China is a subsidiary of a much larger group called Microsoft China Research and Development, and this presentation today was more like a careers talk without any specifics. But nonetheless, it’s good to see at least 4 students from Sydney Uni turn up today. Most other people were from Macquarie Graduate School of Management though.
Anyhow, there are good points that are worth taking from today’s presentation.
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Not long ago, I saw a multimedia playback software on Andrew‘s laptop that had a user interface design that far surpasses the typical Windows UI. One of the best feature I really liked about it was the Album Art wall, which is a dynamic mosaic that is automatically generated from the music you have on your computer.
When I asked which software it was, Andrew told me that it was “just Zune”. Sadly, the Zune as in the device is not out in Australia (yet), but still it’s possible to just install the Zune software and use it as a really good looking player. Then if you do something like what Long did, you can even get around the region restriction and get access to Zune Marketplace as well.
I recently installed the Zune software, and sure enough it was pretty. I think it looks much better than Media Player, and it does what I need it to do (i.e. play music and movies) 99% of the time. The other 1% is my complaint that it uses so much CPU – surely it doesn’t need both my 2 GHz cores just to play music.
We can expect many great things from Zune – Ballmer’s recently confirmed that Zune is coming to Windows Mobile, and that means your phone as well if it’s a WM phone. With no specific timeframes given, we’ll just have to wait and see what Zune’s up to.
Some news just came from a reliable source – Steve Ballmer (yeah the CEO for Microsoft) is going to visit Australia – namely Sydney 
– early in November to speak to developers. I wonder if he’s going to do that Developers, Developers, Developers… speech again.
Much has been said about Live Mesh, and it’s now your turn to experience the Mesh Magic. Drop me an email, and I’ll share my Mesh Magic with you. It’s a folder, but it’ll let you get a feel of what it’s like to have everything all in sync.
What do I want to make of Mesh Magic? It’s going to have all the information that you’d want to have at hand. Here’s a few to start off with:
- My uni notes
- #!SUITS stuff
- Slides from previous seminars and demos
- Anything else that might be useful in the future
- (It’s now your turn to sync and share)
So what are you waiting for? Experience.
Events, Microsoft, Software | Edmund Tse | 
16 Oct 2008 20:53 | 
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