Wait no more! The latest bits for Windows Live Client for your Windows Mobile are available for download. To get yours now, point your mobile browser to http://wl.windowsmobile.com
If you have Windows Live already installed on your device, you will need to uninstall it first. To do that, go to Settings->Remove Programs, select Windows Live entry from the list (if any) and click Remove. If you don’t find Windows Live on the list, then you are good to go.
With Windows Live client you will be able to:
- Synchronize Live contacts with your contacts on the device
- Synchronize your Live email (msn, hotmail, live)
- View graphics, web links and contact photos in emails
- Respond to emails with voice recordings
- Upload photos to your Windows Live Spaces
Go ahead, give it a try and let us know what you think!
Source- MSDN Blog
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The Windows Live Calendar team has been working hard the last few months on a cool update to the Windows Live Calendar beta. After many more bowls of udon noodles, lots of lattes and many late nights …we’re live! Everyone on our team is fired up about the release and we’re looking forward to your feedback. Give Windows Live Calendar beta a try by clicking the calendar tab in your Hotmail account or by going directly to http://calendar.live.com if you haven’t done so already. New coolness delivered in this update includes:
- Birthday Calendars that automatically create events and reminders for your contacts’ birthdays. (Make sure to add birthdays to your contacts. Add the birthday to your own profile, too: http://spaces.live.com/profile.aspx?action=edit&mode=activecontacts. That way others who subscribe to your contact update will get a reminder about your own birthday!)
- iCal Subscriptions that allow you to show calendars that update automatically from around the web. (This will be up and running very shortly!)
- Holiday Calendars that are automatically added to your account depending on what country you’re in. Many more are coming, but in this update, there are holidays for: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Russia, France, the United States, Spain, German and the United Kingdom
- A number of user interface changes including the ability to right click on calendars in the calendar list and to reorder that list
- Improvements to accessibility functionality, including better tabbing and F6 key support
- Additional print views that allow you to print from the day, week and month views
- The ability to directly connect to the Windows Live Calendar beta via the calendar tab in Windows Live Hotmail
Source- mailcall.spaces.live.com
Another big day for Virtual Earth in the portal space. Granted, it’s our own search portals but it’s great to see the platform getting more use and exposure worldwide. Live Search Maps China has expanded it’s offering (just in time for the Olympics). Live Search Maps Australia just launched (shortly after we added Bird’s Eye coverage for Australia).
The Live Search Maps China site (or DITU) has the following additions and improvements:
- Real-time Traffic in Beijing
- Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
- Transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic).
- Expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities.
- Geocoding and Local Search
- Data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues.
- Support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage.
- Olympic query relevance improvement
- Local search category refinement
- Map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.
- Expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now.
The Live Search Maps Australia site is new and includes data from Virtual Earth, NineMSN and Yellow (Pages). If you get redirected to Live Search Maps (US) you can access the Australian site via Ninemsn.com.au, click "maps" above the search box and search for an Australian city or place.
Source- MSDN blog
We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.
Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).
We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.
That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.
Source- Live Search Blog
Steve Clayton rightly points out that Live Mesh got an update during the night, which I’ve seen on my three PCs that are in my own Mesh. At the moment there is no official changelog of what’s been updated, but one thing I have noticed is that if you’re using Vista, you no longer have to have UAC turned on, which is great news for a lot of users.
Source- Liveside
At the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to open a Search Technology Center (STC) in Europe in its fiscal year 2009. The new center will be designed to help accelerate Microsoft’s investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace to the benefit of both the consumer and the advertiser, in line with Microsoft’s recent announcement in the U.S. of Live Search cashback.
“As I stated in my May 18 memo about our Online Services strategy, today Microsoft has 68 percent reach to Internet users throughout Europe through our online assets and strengths in display advertising; however, we’re not yet where we’d like to be in search in this critical geography,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft. “Success in search in Europe is paramount, and we see the investment in this new Search Technology Center as an important step in doubling down on our long-term investments.”
The center will actively work with the global Live Search organization and be dedicated to advancing the state of the art in search technology by delivering a locally relevant, more intelligent and powerful search experience to online customers around the world. Modeled after the Search Technology Center in Beijing, China, which opened in October 2005, plans for the new European hub are indicative of Microsoft’s commitment to give Live Search customers a highly relevant, localized and interactive search experience.
The location of the European STC has yet to be announced; however, several cities are currently being considered as the hub, with the expectation that a smaller numbers of engineers contributing to the STC could be placed in multiple countries, possibly including, for example, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The goal is to create a highly versatile and challenging European center of excellence for Microsoft’s research and development leaders.
Source- Microsoft Press Release
Now all of eBay’s "Buy it Now" offers will be eligible for cashback rewards. With eBay’s expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you’ll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save.
You’ll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences:
- There’s an eBay ad with a cashback gleam (the cashback icon in the image here).
- Instead of going into the Live Search cashback experience, you now go directly to the advertiser’s website, which in this case is eBay.
- The cashback gleam follows you throughout your eBay shopping experience. This is good continuity for the consumer and something we want to do more of, but it takes a bit of work on the advertiser side to enable this.
We want to learn from two experiences in the cashback program. Depending on customer and advertiser feedback, we’ll make the necessary changes to deliver the best user experience over time.
Indirect cashback experience This is the experience that went live last month. Consumers research a product category on Live Search and then click a Live Search cashback ad to head over to cashback for the best deal. We’ve had a lot of feedback that we should do a better job integrating our product research capabilities with our cashback experience. So we’ll work hard to do that over the next few releases.
Direct-to-merchant cashback experience The other experience we envisioned for cashback would integrate directly with advertisers from the search results page. In this experience, advertiser’s ads will appear with a cashback gleam. When shoppers click the gleam in the ad, they head directly to the advertiser’s site. Obviously, this streamlines a bit of the purchasing process but requires some custom development on the partner website to enable it. We took this approach with eBay and are exploring it with other advertisers as well.
We’re excited to offer consumers more money-saving cashback rewards with eBay and look forward to hearing from you on how best to implement new features and functionality to the cashback experience.
Source- Live Search blog
Announcements aplenty at TechEd 2008 in Orlando today. Somasegar’s been writing about his keynote with Bill Gates and Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is shipping this week with a go-live license for production! This means you can legally land apps in production even though it’s beta code - I guess this helps get us round the fact that NBC are using the technology to stream HD content for the Olympics!
Here’s a summary of what they announced:
- Silverlight 2 Beta 2 with go-live license
- Working with Big Blue, closer integration between DB2 and Visual Studio
- CTP of the Microsoft Sync Framework that powers Live Mesh
- CTP of Project "Velocity" - app cache platform for rapid access to disparate data
- Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2 - making it easier to build upon WSS in Visual Studio
Check out his full blog post here.
Ankur Mittal | July 22, 2008
