Archive for Live Services
July 3, 2008 at 11:02 am ·
Filed under Technology, Live Services
According to the awesome guys of the Live Search team, we recently bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. The exciting part of this rather administrative announcement is that Powerset adds natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
As they say on the Powerset blog: At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.
Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale.
That famous Wikipedia demo they talk about has been reviewed and tested by Ars Technica and they were pretty impressed with it. Powerset’s potential and passion are more than welcome, and I’m looking forward to seeing their technology melt together with ours to make the entire search experience better. Here’s a demo from their features:
May 19, 2008 at 10:17 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Community, Live Services, Photography
This Saturday (the 24th of May), I’m organizing an event for amateur-photographers in downtown Amsterdam. The day starts around 12 noon with a welcome and introduction at ‘De Rode Hoed‘, a pretty classy venue naar the waterside. Around 40 photographers will be divided into 4 groups of 10, and will then board a ship that will be docked right outside the building. Right then, the challenge starts. Every group will take pictures over the course of 2 kilometers, so that in total we’ll span an 8 kilometer route from the boat. All the pictures will be collected and then stitched together using Windows Live Photo Gallery to form the world’s largest panoramic picture. The end result will be put into a DeepZoom viewer so it’ll become scrollable and zoomable and it will be sent to the Guiness Book of World Records.
The day is sponsored by Zoom.nl, Kodak, Canon and Olympus. They’ll be present to show off their latest cool gadgets and cameras, and at the end of the day some really cool prizes will be handed out in a raffle. Govert De Roos will be present during the day to guide the photographers with some tips and tricks, and he’ll host the closing keynote when everyone is back from the boat, around 5 PM. After that, there’ll be a walking dinner and a moment to network or talk to the sponsors.
If you’re an amateur photographer and would like to participate in this project, surf to the dedicated Live Space for more information (in Dutch) or send an email to photo-event@live.nl to enroll.
The event is co-hosted by the OSG and DPE department of Microsoft -The Netherlands.
May 16, 2008 at 2:28 pm ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services
Microsoft’s consumer and online division in Europe announced the official release of Messenger TV to 21 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom).
With Messenger TV, we are bringing two of the most popular activities online – watching videos and chatting on IM. This new service lets you watch MSN Videos with a friend as you have live text conversations about the videos you are watching together. Similar to watching television with your friends, you can watch videos and chat about them as you both see the same video at the same time. But the best way to understand Messenger TV is to visit http://MessengerTV.msn.com or to start the activity while chatting to a friend in Windows Live Messenger. With Messenger TV, you can select any of the videos that are available from MSN Video, build your playlist, and watch the videos with a friend.
With Messenger TV, you can also:
- Blog about the videos you see and like by clicking the “Blog to Spaces” button. Clicking this opens your browser with your Windows Live Spaces blog already written, complete with a thumbnail of the video and a link to watch it so all you have to do is click “publish” from within Spaces to share the video with your friends and family who visit your Spaces site.
- Send e-mail to offline friends with links to the videos you see and like by clicking the “Email Video” button. Clicking this creates a new e-mail in your default e-mail client, such as Windows Live Mail, with a link to the video so all you have to do is click “send” to share the video with your friends and family.
- Search for other videos to watch online by entering a word or two in the “Search for videos online” box. The search results open in your browser with search results displayed on http://video.msn.com where you can continue watching videos that are found as a result of your search.
Nice little gadget to make your Live Messenger activities a bit more fun!
Check out LiveInEurope to stay on track more releases and features
May 16, 2008 at 12:54 pm ·
Filed under Video, Technology, Live Services
National Geographic Magazine is partnering with Microsoft to bring Stonehenge to life using the super cool PhotoSynth tool. The idea was to take a series of photographs and jigsaw them together in a 3D environment. Photosynth combines hundreds of high quality digital images and lets you browse them in a smooth way, so you can zoom in on details or zoom out to have a situational overview. The National Geographic Magazine team made a video about their collection and they’ve put it online on their site:
Video link
May 6, 2008 at 3:01 pm ·
Filed under PR, Live Services, Photography
The script writers of CSI:NY used Photosynth in last week’s episode. That’s really cool :) Here’s how the story went and where the product has been used:
“A guidance counselor at a Manhattan prep school is murdered while the prom is taking place in the gymnasium.
Forensic scientists for the New York police attempt to recreate the crime scene by uploading hundreds of camera phone thumbnail photos snapped at the dance onto a computer.
The PC screen fills up in a concentric square pattern, revealing a wide shot of the gym at the center. Investigators can manipulate the images to show close-ups of the scene from every angle.” (Source)
Photosynth is one of my favorite tools at the moment. Pretty soon, when they release the new client, I’ll publish the demos I’ve recorded about this technology. I can’t show them yet though, so you’ll have to sit on your hunger for a couple of months. All I can say is that it’s really really awesome :)
Screenshot of CSI:NY
Link: Photosynth
May 6, 2008 at 11:10 am ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services, Photography, Digital Life
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools provides a set of tools for photographers to perform various tasks with their images—including RAW captures. The current version enables you to quickly geotag your photos, view and edit metadata, and more, leveraging the power of Windows and Microsoft Live Local. Very closely related, this cool Outlook plugin just saw the daylight: Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot is a new software add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook that allows photographers to add details of the client and equipment for a photo shoot appointment in Outlook. This allows photographers to greater leverage the power of Outlook when managing their photography.
Pro Photo Tools includes the following features:
- Geotagging with flexibility
As geotagging gains popularity, photographers want to be able to quickly identify the location for their images. With Pro Photo Tools, you can gather location information from a variety of sources and apply it to the metadata in your images.
- Determine location name automatically
With Pro Photo Tools, you can automatically apply the actual name of the location where a photo was taken based on the GPS coordinates. Instead of numbers, you’ll have the “real” names, and that information can then be saved in the metadata for your photos.
Determine GPS coordinates from location name. Just because you haven’t always had a GPS receiver doesn’t mean you can’t assign GPS coordinates to your photos. In fact, using the power of Microsoft Live Local you can determine the GPS coordinates where any photo was taken based on location name information in the image metadata. The GPS coordinates can then be added to the metadata for your photos and the photos plotted on a map.
- Identify location on a map
For the maximum in flexibility when assigning a location to an image, you can navigate to the precise location where you took a given photo and tag the photo with that location information based on a specific position on the map.
- View images on a map
As cool as it is to have GPS coordinate information connected to your images, to really get a sense of place with your photos, you need to view them on a map. Pro Photo Tools utilizes Windows Live Local to display your images on a map of the world, including the ability to view your images on a normal map or a satellite view of the world.
- Edit image metadata
Metadata has become increasingly important to photographers as a way to manage and organize their images. Among the many things it enables is a rich capability to search for images. You can now update a wide range of metadata for your images using Pro Photo Tools, and that metadata gets stored in the actual image file, so wherever your photo goes, your data goes.
- RAW support
By leveraging the Windows Imaging Components (WIC), we’re able to provide support for any RAW file format (in addition to TIFF and JPEG) for which a codec has been developed. And that includes most RAW file formats. Not only can you view your RAW images within Pro Photo Tools, you can also update metadata—including GPS coordinates—directly in the file. The updated metadata is stored within the RAW file, not in a cumbersome “sidecar” file. (For information on obtaining codecs for your RAW images or other file formats, visit (Codecs for Windows )
- Extensibility
Pro Photo Tools was built with extensibility in mind. Rather than creating a one-off tool, we created a framework we can leverage for future tools. This will allow us to add additional functionality in future versions of Pro Photo Tools more efficiently. That means you’ll get more features sooner.
Downloads:
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools
Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot
Very closely related cool stuff:
Microsoft Photo Info
SyncToy v.2.0 Beta
HD Photo Plug-In for Photoshop
May 6, 2008 at 8:44 am ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services
Finally, the official Windows Live Messenger App for Facebook is here. There’s been quite some unofficial apps present, but I never installed them because I don’t really like to give up my password and Live ID to some third party dude. Even if he doesn’t harvest the addresses, I still think it’s a bit tricky. BUT, no more of that. The official app is here! On April 29th, Microsoft released the Windows Live Messenger Facebook Application. Members of Facebook can chat with their friends using this application that runs on the Facebook site. Once you have installed the application, people who have access your Facebook profile page can initiate IM conversations with you (it is based on the Windows Live Messenger IM Control. One side of the conversation happens on the Facebook site, the other side in the WL Messenger client). You can invite your Facebook friends to add the application and join Windows Live Messenger. The application also shows the WL Messenger online presence of your Facebook friends who have installed the application (it is based on the Windows Live Messenger Presence API).
The application will be promoted worldwide in partnership with RockYou. RockYou will only promote the application to existing Facebook users. This is an opportunity for Windows Live Messenger to acquire new users.
April 26, 2008 at 10:03 am ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services
MSN launched the A-List page, a page where you can find one hot topic per day. The related queries at the top and below are other popular searches and headlines including the top web searches, the top people searches, the top videos, the top MSN.com headlines, the top movies and DVD rentals, the top five in Sports, the top Deals, the top health stories, the top tech stories, and more. Really nice to have an updated list page like this that shows you in a glance what’s happening on the MSN pages.
Check it out
April 25, 2008 at 11:15 am ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services
It’s still limited in access, a closed beta so to speak, but it’s out there to play with and I’m sure they’re working really hard to make it scale and stable. So pretty soon, it’s ready to be tested on a larger audience. What is it? Well, Live Mesh of course! Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about— available wherever you happen to be. With Live Mesh you can synchronize folders across any or all of the devices in your ‘mesh’. You can connect to your home PC from work, manage all your devices from the web. With your Live Desktop, you get free online storage to make it easy to sync and access folders from the web. You can also connect to remote PCs. It’s very easy to add and share folders, with quick access to the latest updates across your mesh. For shared folders, you can see who’s changed what when, post messages or chat instantly with others who are active in a folder.
Nic got a chance to hook up with the team and released this pretty nice preview:
April 11, 2008 at 11:24 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Live Services
Some significant improvements have been made to the maps.live.com service, and they’ve been pushed out just a few hours ago. If you’ve been heads-down and haven’t had the opportunity to poke around the product a bit and check out some of the great new work that’s been done, I think you’ll be impressed, and I can’t wait to see this rolled out on an even bigger scale. Here are just a few examples:
- 3D : Improved world realism by ‘densifying’ city data with much richer textures and 3D trees.
try: Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Dallas
- App: Supporting Safari 3 and IE 8 (try using Google Maps in IE 8 native mode).
- Collections: Use MSR’s MapCruncher technology to take your own personal map and overlay it anywhere on earth, then upload it to the collections database to share with the world through search.
try: Crunch sample including Seattle Transit
- Directions: Traffic based routing now uses MSR’s ClearFlow technology to predict side street traffic based on what is happening in the live feed we get from traffic.comtry: SeaTac to UW.
- Geocoding: With reverse geocoding support it is now easy to get an address from anywhere on the map, Just right-click on a building in the map and choose 1-click directions or drive to… and you’ll see a real address as the end point.
- Platform: JavaScript API support for all our new features, including Safari 3 and IE 8 compatibility.
- Search: Now including new review data from Zagat and Yelp, two of the best sources for restaurant review information, directly in our reviews listing.
try: Reviews of Papa John’s in Redmond
I love where this is going :) really! It’s things like this that bring the fun back to online demos. By the way, if you haven’t installed Virtual Earth yet, now is the time to do so (the map will prompt you as soon as you hit the 3D button). Tip: hold down the control key as you move the mouse, it’ll allow you to pan around.
If you want to know more about this update, the API update or the full list of released features, head over to the VE Platform Blog.
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