U Rank, which requires users to sign in with a Windows Live ID before searching, allows users to edit, organize, and annotate search results, then share them with others, giving Microsoft valuable data on what people are looking for when they perform searches. A bit more about
Microsoft's release of URank
Ok…so I know last week you were all wondering where Stefan was. To be honest he doesn’t remember and I am not in the business of keeping tabs on him anymore, so alas there was no video. However I still had Free T-Shirt Friday and we did have two winners from the week prior and last week! So if you are listed below I will follow you through the @bing twitter account so that all you need to do is Direct Message (DM) us your mailing address and your shirt size and we will get them to you as fast as we can get them from the Bing Shirt Shop (that doesn’t really exist but you know what I mean).
· Free T-Shirt Friday Winners – Them “The Academy Awards”
This week Stefan is back and took some questions from the forums as well as talked about some interesting stuff that the team is up to down at SXSWI, Mix as well as some cool stuff he saw over at Cray Inc. the Super Computer Company yesterday and he also gives us the #FTF theme for the week. Ok, the theme part ended up on the editing room floor on accident (my bad) so the Free T-Shirt Friday theme for the week giving a shout out to our friends down in Austin, TX for SXSW is “Music Groups.” Go to Bing and search for your favorite band, singer, indie rock group whatever is your thing and send us the result URL to us @bing via twitter and hash-tag (#) it FTF.
It’s been a little over 9 months since Bing launched back in June 09. In interweb years, that puts us at about 15, a raging teenager. And do we have a crush on big bad Texas. Dallas, you sure are a darling. But OMG OMG Austin WE LOVE YOU too!!!
As such (in our usual calm, collected voice), the Bing team is excitedly packing for Austin to join in the annual tech pilgrimage that’s SXSW Interactive. Our mission is simple – connect with you the community.
We want to chat you up all you cool interesting people doing cool interesting things, get the scoop from you on all the bubbling tech hotness, and maybe even drop a Milli Vanilli number with you (you will be Milli) at TechKaraoke. Where it’s at is where we’ll be at. But come to us too! Bing is hosting a number of cool & fun experiences throughout Interactive. Here’s a snapshot of Bing activities.
3/12 Friday 7-9PM: TechSet Party (with Bing Photo for Good) at Speakeasy (412 Congress Avenue)
3/13 Sat 4-7PM: Bing sponsored TWiST party (“This Week in Startup” the internet show hosted by Jason Calacanis of Mahalo)
Bing Photo for Good (located in Blogger’s Lounge in Austin Convention Center Room 19A. Open Sat - Tue 9:30AM-6PM): Everybody’s searching for something. Share your query and Bing will help make a difference in a child’s life. Bing will donate towards “Save the Children” efforts on behalf of children in Haiti.
Bing and Windows Phones are partnering with Check-inforCharity who will donate to “Save the Children” when you check in at the 25 check-in locations across Austin.
Bing Demo Booth in SXSW Trade Show Hall (Sat 12AM-6PM; Sun 12-6 PM; Mon 12-4 PM): Grab a plateful of Bing demo with a side of sweet swag.
Also, be sure to catch out friends at Foursquare who will be joining us at the Demo Booth and Bing Photo for Good to hand out killer stickers.
On Friday at NCCE Seattle we announced that our next homepage photo contest will kickoff on March 29 and this time there’s a twist. We’re asking students in the United States to submit photos to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and the winning photo will be displayed on the Bing homepage on April 22, Earth Day itself!
Justin Kraemer, winner of the Bing Home Sweet Homepage Photo contest
In addition to the grand prize winner seeing their photo on Bing.com, we’ve pulled together some great prizes for both students and their schools. Winners across the four age groups (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) will win a trip for two to the Microsoft Campus to take part in a Bing editorial team meeting where we pick images for future homepages. Additionally, each winner will receive equipment from HP and Canon to help build digital photo resources at their school. Prizes for individual winners and their schools across the four age groups will total over $70,000.
· 1st place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Lab” for their school.
· 2nd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Kit” for their school.
· 3rd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Starter Set” for their school.
And here’s the “everyone wins” part. There’s a great opportunity to help other classrooms in need during the voting stage from 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. If you do the math, we’re talking up to $100,000 a day to help schools across the country. Each day you can return to the site to cast another vote and have an opportunity to pick up another GivingCard.
Bing helps students explore the world with our rich homepage imagery every day, so we’re excited to see what the country’s students think we might all want to discover.
To find out more about the contest, including the submission and voting process and prizes for the finalists, visit http://earthdayphotocontest.com/. Teachers will be able to order free posters for their classrooms in the coming days, as well as take advantage of other contest resources on the site.
On Sunday night, I like many others will be glued to the television for those few hours to watch Hollywood honor the best of the best in the 82nd Annual Academy Awards show. Some people watch for the awards, some for the fashion, and other watch for the pure entertainment of the presenters, and this year, with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin hosting we are sure to have a very entertaining show.
As we have done in years past we are offering up instant answers in order to make it easier to navigate all the important information you might need to know about the show. Currently, you can get the Academy Award instant answer for the show itself, which includes information on the show, nominees and links to images and past show information. For those of you that miss the festivities, there will be a post-show instant answer with links to images and videos so be sure and check back for a quick look at the winners and other highlights from the show.
With ten nominees for best picture, I have a lot of catching up to do before Sunday. So while researching the picks, I found a few places very helpful. The first is www.bing.com/twitter where you can see all of the chatter on twitter that has to do with the Academy Awards, nominees, and the event parties. It is pretty interesting to see feedback and opinions about the show from people around the country in real time. The second is the Oscar Winning Actors Visual Search gallery. In this gallery, you can find information about who won in 2009 and who won the most awards overall. You should also visit MSN Award Buzz which pulls information from blogs, twitter and forums to create a fun graphic on each nominee and predicts the winner of each category based on public buzz. It is a must for those Oscar enthusiasts! Check out the MSN blog for all the details.
Since Stefan is off rubbing elbows in L.A. with the Hollywood elite for the Oscars and I am left here again to fend for myself, there will be no video or Fridays With Stefan. But we’ll still have Free T-shirt Friday and the theme for this week is “The Academy Awards” and all things related. To mix it up a little we want the entries to be RT’s (retweets) that you find on www.bing.com/twitter that have to do with the Academy Awards, add in your own commentary and tweet us at @bing make sure to include @bing and #FTF. We will be looking at all of the entries at the beginning of next week so tweet us all weekend and through the show.
Have a great weekend and Stefan I hope you are having a GREAT time in La La land!
O.K. - pop quiz: which social media game boasts an active fan-base of roughly 31 million players every day? Here’s a hint: it’s a happy place where you can plant virtual crops that can be harvested, or ask your neighbor to chase away raccoons. If you guessed Farmville, then you’re correct!
Earlier this week, we began an advertising pilot with Zynga, the folks who brought you Farmville. For a short time, we invited some people who were playing Farmville to join Bing’s Facebook community by becoming a fan of Bing. We also encouraged them to tell their friends about it. In exchange, we provided some farm dollars, which is the virtual currency used to buy things to build and maintain a farm. Here is what the ad looked like, once a Farmville user clicked on it:
In a 24 hour promotion, we added 400,000 new fans to http://www.facebook.com/bing. We were amazed by the response (and by how fast it went viral). But we always have room for more folks in the Bing community, so stop on by and join the fun.
We are excited to have the opportunity to work with Zynga on this advertising promotion, as an interesting way of getting more people to experience Bing’s unique ability to help make decisions, whether in Farmville or outside in the real world. We look forward to engaging more deeply with these users and helping them learn more about Bing.
Starting tomorrow, Bing will be participating in full force at what’s shaping up to be another stellar SMX West (March 2-4, Santa Clara CA). Every SMX show is a special one for Bing. But this one is super-duper special for one reason – we’re bringing Steve Ballmer! This will be Steve’s first ever conversation with the search community at an industry event. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and co-chair of SMX, sits down with Steve to discuss Microsoft’s commitment to search and how Bing is working to evolve the search experience.
In addition to Steve’s keynote chat, you’ll find Bing and Microsoft Advertising engaged with the community all across SMX in a number of ways. Here’s a quick summary of where you can find us.
· 12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Talk to a Bing Engineer” Steve Macbeth, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing
Bing is also sponsoring the legendary SMX community event SMX After Dark on the night of March 2nd starting at 9pm in the Santa Clara Hyatt pool side (better not rain!)
And if these weren’t enough, Ignite is coming to SMX West as part of Global Ignite Week! Ignite is the fun, high-energy evening of a dozen or so “speed presentations” where each speaker has 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about a topic. The speaker lineup is an impressive who’s who from around the search industry. If you’re in the area, come check it out by registering for FREE (an SMX badge will get you in too). Free drinks and light food provided. And if you can’t join us in person, be sure to catch the live stream.
We’ve been working hard to help your complete your search tasks more quickly. We’re happy to announce support for query history in Autosuggest today to help make that vision a reality. Autosuggest now supports suggestions from your query history. Many users search for a set of topics again and again. It could be you searching on your favorite hobbies, doing online research, looking up local attractions or directions – the particular query subjects are very specific to you. To make searching easier and reduce all those wasted clicks, many people found our history feature very useful to get them to where they’re going faster. So we experimented with providing your prior searches in Autosuggest and found it’s even more useful in to helping find what you’re looking for faster!
Search history in Autosuggest can help you in other ways too. Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks. In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week! Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile. You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase. With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off. We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks.
Previous search queries in Autosuggest show in a special color, purple, the same color your browser uses to display visited links.
You are in full control of your query history. We know your privacy is very important to you. You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option. You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest.
We hope you enjoy Autosuggest with History and that it saves you time and improves your search effectiveness.
It’s been an exciting 17 days! By the end of the day on Monday, we will have featured 50 homepage images, 200 hotspots, and athletes from all over the globe. You can relive the past 7 images (including hotspots) using the image viewer. Just click the arrows in the lower right side of the image:
And now that the games are officially done, we’re shifting back to our ‘normal’ programming. Starting Tuesday, we’ll bring you a different intriguing image each day to help you explore the world around you. Look for the hotspots to find out more about each image if you’ve got time; otherwise you can cheat and check the image caption.
If you’re new to the page and want a guided tour, see Welcome Home. Got an idea for an interesting Bing homepage? Send us a note in the comments – we’d love to hear from you!
Stefan has been in the UK this week talking with the Bing UK team and he has sent us this week’s theme and video from across the water. The Bing UK team is doing some great work trying to raise money for Sport Relief, for more information and you are in the UK go to www.givewithbing.com for more information. So take a look and make sure you catch the theme for this week’s Free t-Shirt Friday at the end. Tweet us back at @bing with the #FTF for your chance to win a Bing t-shirt.
(Please visit the site to view this media)
The strange cut outs in the back are of a British Pop Group called The Saturday’s (just in case you were wondering)
Where would we be if people like Columbus or Einstein hadn’t taken a risk on an idea or notion or if people like Jane Goodall or even Dr. Bing hadn’t followed their passions? As a global community, we have benefited from discoveries in science and technology, exploration and the arts in ways we don’t always recognize day to day. But without these advances and explorations, our lives would be dramatically different.
Since the launch of Bing we have partnered on projects that we believe support this idea. Through projects like 10,000 Rockets and our work with the Pacific Science Center on the Facing Mars exhibit we try to encourage kids of all ages to learn and discover through science and technology. Our latest partnership with explorer Eric Larsen is something that we hope will keep that interest and importance top of mind.
Eric leaves today from Ottawa on his journey for the North Pole which begins the second leg of his Save the Poles Expedition in an effort to raise awareness and tell his story about the climate change in these areas. He recently returned from his first leg to the South Pole and will be attempting to summit Mount Everest in the fall reaching what Eric calls the “Three Poles”. Accomplishing all three of these adventures in one year is something that has never been done before. Ever.
It is our hope that you will follow Eric’s progress with us and get the opportunity to learn and discover what it takes to follow one’s passions, to take risks and to make the difficult decisions designed to increase the world’s knowledge and make life better for everyone. We will be tracking Eric’s progress and creating a forum for you to get to know Eric and learn more about his trek.
OK…so maybe it is a bit of an overstatement but isn’t everything bigger in Texas? I’m packing my bags today to join some members of the Bing team in Dallas where we’ll talk to some local bloggers, SEO experts and local media to get feedback, suggestions and to just find out how Bing can be better for them. We really value your feedback and are always looking for ways we can be better. If our paths don’t cross this time, we are always following the comments in Twitter @bing as well as in the Bing Community Forums so keep them coming.
If you are in Dallas this week and would like to join us in a great SEO discussion, Duane Forester will be hosting a SEO meet up on Wednesday night at Central 214 so make sure you grab a spot and register at EventBrite. Following that we will be going out on the town so follow us at @bing on twitter for all the updates…we would love to see you.
In preparation for the trip, I am checking the weather down in Dallas with Bing’s enhanced weather results…have you had a chance to check it out yet? Go to www.Bing.com and enter your desired location and ‘weather’ or you can type in “weather in Dallas” and you get a more comprehensive weather result right there in the results page. We are now pulling information from three different weather sources, giving you the ability to compare sources, and dive into the 10 day and hourly forecast. If you want to dig in deeper you can click “Weather in Dallas, TX” for more details including the monthly averages. Personally this is super helpful especially as I am packing for my trip tomorrow.
This is my first trip to the Dallas area and I hear the team is taking suggestions on things that I should do while I am there. If you haven’t already, you can cast your vote on our Facebook page. And why do I have a feeling it will be something extremely embarrassing?
It’s that time again…it’s Friday which means we have to listen to Stefan again and get a chance to win a free Bing t-shirt. So, make sure you watch the video for this week’s theme and tweet us back your answer at @bing with #FTF in your tweet for a chance to win a Free t-shirt.
This is a great example of a winning tweet from a few weeks back:
Did you catch the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics last Friday to kick off the games? To access that and all the latest videos from the games and for a snap shot into all the Olympic excitement visit www.msn.com to view the Winter Olympics module at the top of the page.
There has been a lot of buzz in the hallways about favorite events and favorite athletes. So we thought we'd look at what people are searching for on Bing to see which events people are most interested in online. According to our search trends it looks like leading up to the games snowboarding is at the top of them heap, followed closely by hockey.
As the games continue, we wanted to remind everyone of the many ways you can take advantage of Bing and MSN and our partnership with NBC Olympics to keep up to date on all the happenings at the winter games.
Use Bing to find answers to your quick questions about the games. You can use the Sports Events Schedule Instant Answer to get the schedule for each sport at the Olympics. For example search for: figure skating schedule, bobsled schedule, etc.
Andwhen you search for terms like “Winter Olympics”, “NBC Winter Olympics”, etc. you'll see the WinterOlympics Instant Answer with information from the official Olympics site at nbcolympics.com, an immersive and high definition slideshow experience, a “Today’s Events” section with links to sports with events, and the medal count for the top three countries.
Now if you are on the go, MSN Mobile has quick access to the top news stories for the Olympics, pictures and links to the most recent Olympic video on NBC’s site, and a summary of the US medal count and link to all see all other countries. Just visit mobile.msn.com from your phone.
Now that you can access all of this Olympic information, test how much you really know about the games by taking the Winter Games Quiz on our Facebook page. It’s a fun way for you to learn about all the different Bing features that you can use to keep current on the Olympics, such as instant answers and the Bing Maps app. Once you take the quiz you can share your results to your Facebook pages and challenge your friends to compete for the gold medal status.
We hope that for whatever you are looking for regarding the Winter Olympics whether at home or on the go, that Bing and MSN can provide it to you.
Have you ever thought about all the content and media out there on the Web? Information that we use daily to help make decisions, like reviews of the best restaurant for chicken parmesan or the t-shirt shop perfect for a vintage G&R t-shirt? We all know that you can find nearly anything on the web in the form of blogs, websites, user reviews, tweets, etc.
But the Web is changing. In the past we have been forced to ‘disassociate’ all this content from its physical context. Sure, you can write a review of that great B&B. But once you do that, it escapes into the ether and loses its connection to the real world - the place that gave you the idea to write it in the first place. We thought there was probably a better way to reconnect all this data with its home, to provide greater context, and to ultimately help you use it to make a better decisions about things you’re trying to get done in real life, not just on a search engine.
We began talking about this idea of Spatial Search a bit back in December when we launched our new version of Bing Maps and today at TED, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Bing Maps architect will be unveiling some more work that demonstrates how we’re reuniting data with context. Some of what we’re showing is in research stage, some you can use today, and some you’ll be able to use shortly. But before we geek out on the features, it might be helpful to frame in a context. So, let’s do that…
The idea behind Spatial Search came from looking at human psychology and trying to understand how we as humans make decisions. We use all our senses: sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste. Today’s blue-link model doesn’t do a good job in tapping any of those senses and instead made you visually recreate models in your head to get through complex tasks. In other words, when you read a review of that French bistro, you had to manufacture everything: the street location, the ambience, where exactly in the city it was, and more. While we’re not working on smell-o-search (yet!), we do think we can do a better job with the ‘sight’ and ‘touch’ senses you rely on every day.
So when we think about Spatial Search, we think about the modes you all go through when you’re out and about, interacting with people and places rather than machines. First, you Explore: you orient yourself. You get a feel for what’s around and figure out your environment. Next, you Discover. Using your senses and visual cues you try and make sense of your surroundings. You look at storefront signage, street signs, and other clues to let you know where you might want to go to get your task done. Finally, you Decide: you take in and process all of the input around you to try and make the best decision for the task at hand. Maybe it’s the opening hours of the dry cleaners (oops – its closed) that tells you that you need to go to the bakery you can smell around the corner until it opens, and hop on their wi-fi network to get some work done while you wait. The challenge for Spatial Search is how we use technology to augment all those tasks, bring context to you so that information transforms into knowledge, which leads to actions taken to make your life easier and more informed.
For Exploring, we’ve made a number of updates to the Bing Maps platform to bring this idea to life through high resolution imagery from outer space all the way down to the front door of the bakery. Today at TED, we’re announcing a next step in this evolution of making this imagery more useful and interactive with the release of the technology preview of the Streetside Photos application. This tech preview mines geo-tagged photos from Flickr, and relates them to our Streetside imagery to show images matched to its original spatial context. Why is this cool? You’re now able to see what that club looks like at night (is it really THAT scary?), see if you’re really going to get a good sunset at that B&B you’re looking to book, or check out the crowds on a Saturday morning at Pike Place Market in Seattle or get a view of the same market from decades prior. As more people share imagery, our challenge is to reunite those photos with where they were taken – again, provide context to the data in the ether. Watch Blaise’s demo to see Streetside Photos in action.
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But we’re not just stopping at the street. Today, we’re also excited to demonstrate integration with the WorldWide Telescope, a project out of Microsoft Research. Once launched, you will be able to walk outside in Streetside mode, look up, and see what’s above – way above – right now where you’re standing. Constellations come to life as you pan – you can even set the time of day so you can see what you’ll see at 9pm – great for exploring with your daughter to get her ready for what she’ll see when the sun goes down.
At the same time as we’re getting more “universal” with World Wide Telescope, we’re also getting more intimate. At TED, Blaise showed the first results of our indoor panoramas work. This will provide an experience identical to Streetside, but won’t be limited to places you can take a vehicle. Whether you’re exploring Seattle’s Pike Place Market, or your favorite theme park, Bing Maps will give you the most immersive experience of the place. We’ve already given you a taste of this with the integration of Photosynths into Bing Maps (18,000 of them and counting), and you can expect Photosynth and Streetside to converge in a way that allows all of us to document the important places in the world – indoor or outdoor – and explore them in a completely natural way.
When it comes to Discovering, we launched our “Map Apps” gallery to bring that disconnected data home. From our Local Lens to Twitter, we’re bringing data back to where it can help you discover what’s in a physical area. And sometimes, there’s no substitute for absolute real-time. At TED we also demonstrated live Webcam feeds perfectly which enables real-time video to be overlaid seamlessly on street-level imagery, adding another dimension to the mapping experience. Imagine – you can see how long the line is at Five Guys before you head over for a burger. In the coming year, we think you will be pleasantly surprised with how far Bing takes this new technology. Stay tuned.
Finally when it comes to Deciding, we’ve just scratched the surface with Bing maps. We introduced innovations around our Opinion Index which lets you see just how good that Vietnamese Pho restaurant is based on what the community is saying. Our next step is to continue to augment the Spatial Search experience with these types of data. The potential for ‘augmenting’ your physical world with data pulled from everywhere, in real-time, and in context is exciting. The chance of getting lost diminishes greatly. You may never have to enter a fabric store only to realize you should have gone somewhere else to get your remnant. The ability to re-route before hitting a road closure due to construction will be right at your fingertips. The technology to enable the Deciding pillar of our Spatial Search strategy is daunting – but this is a key element in our quest to better understand how we naturally process information to make a decision. So that’s where we’re headed.
It’s going to take a little while to get there. But we believe our focus on your needs as searchers and more importantly as people will ultimately help us build technology to reconnect the wandering data to where it wants to be – the real world.
If you haven’t bought your gift yet, whether for a relative, your favorite pet or your significant other you might be classified as a “Valentine’s Procrastinator.” Not to fear you are not out of time yet. Today is the day (Feb. 10) to shop with Bing cashback to take advantage of some of the last minute insane savings (as long as the shipping is fast enough).
Now if you are “still” trying to figure out what to get that loved one you can check out the Bing Valentine’s Day gift guide or tune into Bing video 7 a.m. PST, today (Wednesday February 10) to get advice from the Victoria’s Secret Bombshells. Candance Swanepoel and Erin Heatherton will be giving hot tips on how to impress that special someone on Valentine’s Day and will be answering questions from the MSN and Bing fans in an exclusive webcast.
If you are a Valentine’s Day Procrastinator or not we hope Bing cashback can help you find that perfect gift just in time for the big day.
Kristin Meldahl – Bing
Microsoft Live Labs bring scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and the online community together to think about and build a better online world. Read more about our team and how we will shape the web in the MSN Manifesto : -
We wanted to say thank you to all those who have participated in the Thumbtack project and let our remaining participants know that we are currently in the process of retiring this experiment. We have learned a lot thanks to your participation and feedback and look forward to your continued enthusiasm and engagement on future Live Labs projects. The service will remain online through November 30th to allow participants to access and back up any information they would like to retrieve. In the meantime, you can access thumbtack normally here.
At Seadragon.com you can share any image on the web as a zoomable photo. Simply point Seadragon.com at any image you've got on the web, and in no time flat, you've got a zoomable viewer just like this one. Share the link on Facebook, Twitter, or through email or IM. Or embed it directly on your blog, eBay listing or virtually any site. Go ahead, click on the image below (or use your mousewheel) to zoom in, and drag it to pan around.
Seadragon.com allows you to share virtually any size image on the web, whether it is a five, ten or two hundred megapixels. Because the viewer uses the same Deep Zoom image technology available to developers in Microsoft Silverlight, no matter what size the image is it loads quickly. The embedded viewer adjusts dynamically to the layout of your page, or can be customized to a specific size with just a quick change to a script size, so now any size image fits perfectly on your site. And because Seadragon.com uses a dual-mode Silverlight & AJAX control, it works on virtually any browser--automatically using Silverlight to provide a smoother experience and better performance when available, and defaulting to a scripted viewer when it is not. Try creating one yourself.
Built on Azure
Seadragon.com is built entirely on top of Windows Azure. And not some super secret Microsoft-only version, but the same CTP version that is available for you to try today. The architecture takes unique advantage of Windows Azure's distributed nature and is a great example for what this new platform is capable of, even in its early CTP state.
One quick note for the first few dragons through the door: On occasion Seadragon.com may automatically suspend the creation of new images for a few moments (but we will continue to serve up images and embeds without interruption). If you encounter this message, please just check shortly as uploads will automatically resume when the backup clears.
Why does the service do this? Simply because we built on the exact same CTP version of Windows Azure that you have access to, which still carries a few temporary restrictions as a preview. These scale restrictions will go away with the official release of Windows Azure. But until they are available to everyone, we won't be using them either. Because that's how we roll in Live Labs.
We’d like to share a little news about Live Labs with you. We’ve recently made some changes to our organization, and a number of teams from within the lab will be joining product groups around the company. For instance, the social streams team will be joining MSN. Some of our engineers will be helping out with the next generation of Windows Mobile. And others are off to Live Search and Microsoft Advertising. The rest of us will continue our work on building new web experiences, as we always have. But moving great people and projects into the the product groups has always been part of our process, so today's news is entirely consistent with what we've always done.
Contrary to recent whispers and tweets, we are not shutting down, disbanding, dismantling, or anything of the sort. In the coming weeks and months we'll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more. Going forward, we intend to focus on a smaller number of projects relative to what we've done in the past, but invest in them at a much bigger scale. So to be clear, our most ambitious and exciting projects are yet to come. Stay tuned.
At Live Labs, research is an important part of what we do. Recently researchers Paul Bennett, Max Chickering and Anton Mityagin released some new data about a game project they did last year. To users, Picture This was a matching game. But to the researchers, it was providing valuable data about search and machine learning. They’ve now released the data in an anonymized form, so that other researchers can use it to try and reproduce their results without revealing any personal information about the people who participated. And along with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University, they're organizing a workshop at the ACM-SIGKDD Conference in Paris this June that will focus on similar games and other applications of Human Computation.
You can learn more about their experiment by checking out this page.
Infinite Canvas is a JavaScript application that frees visual storytelling from the usual comic format of squares on a page. It started to take off when Neil Gaiman (whom Ian describes as “one of the gods of the sci-fi/fantasy world”) tweeted about a piece he put up called “The Day The Saucers Came.” Now we’re starting to get comments like:
“I’ve just seen the future of how to present comics online”
“Loved the story. Absolutely awed by the format”
“If this catches on it could be very cool.”
Take a look at Infinite Canvas and see if you see the future of comics on the web.
We are now making most of the source code for the Web Sandbox project available under the Open Source Apache License 2.0.
Since the initial release of Web Sandbox we have received a great deal of feedback from the web security community. We have also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners and the standards communities that would like to adopt the technology when it is ready. Our goal is to achieve widespread adoption of Web Sandbox and to help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks.
See the Web Sandbox site for additional licensing details. thanks for your input to the project so far, and we're excited to continue our collaboration with you.
They say you know you've made it when you get skewered on the Colbert Report. Well, our congratulations to Photosynth--you've made it. (video after the break).
CNN used Photosynth technology during the inauguration. Here's Stephen Colbert making fun of it (and John King):
Want to see giga-pixel images on your iPhone? Now you can--with Seadragon Mobile.
Seadragon Mobile brings the same smooth image browsing you get on the PC to the mobile platform. Get super-close in on a map or photo, with just a few pinches or taps of your finger. Browse an entire collection of photos from a single screen. You can browse Deep Zoom Images that you can create from your own pictures or your Photosynth collection (or anybody else's).
Update: The earlier issues we were having with "Browse Photosynth" and intermittent failures viewing synth collections have now been resolved. Many thanks to everybody who reported the issues to us.
Here's a video of developer Ben Vanik talking about the promise of Seadragon Mobile. Or you can see his interview with our friends over at Channel 10.
Many of the projects we try at Live Labs are designed to last just long enough for us to confirm or disprove our assumptions—interactive experimentation helps us prove things that are hard to research any other way. Political Streams was one of those. The American election season provided a great opportunity for us to try it out, since people’s interest in political news and blogs was stronger than usual (in this case possibly the strongest ever). That allowed us to find out more about the workings of complex social information aggregators in a very short period of time. Thanks to those who joined us in Political Streams.
People have always had a need to make sense of the world around them. We want to identify, classify and clarify things. Lately that need has become even greater, since we’re being bombarded with information wherever we look. Now there’s a new tool to help you organize all that information: Thumbtack.
Thumbtack is an easy way to save links, photos, and anything else you find on the Web in a single place. Compare prices, colors, styles or locations at a glance. Grab the stuff you want from lots of different sites, put it into a Thumbtack collection, then get to it from anywhere you can get online.
Thumbtack uses machine learning and natural language techniques to understand the information you give it—it automatically extracts addresses, for instance, and the Address Gadget will then automatically plot that address on a map. Other gadgets help you compare items in your collection, or arrange them the way that’s easiest for you to see them.
It’s easy to use. Just start a new collection, add stuff to it, then send it to your friend via e-mail, publish it to the Web or an RSS feed, or embed it in your blog. Give it a try.
MSDN Live Developer Center. Windows Live Build compelling applications and websites using Windows Live Services.
Submit your site to Live Search. Generally our web crawler, MSNBot, can find most pages on the Internet. However if your site does not appear on Live Search, you can send us the address (URL).
Microsoft adCenter Labs
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Silverlight helps you create rich web applications that run on
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Justin Kraemer, winner of the Bing Home Sweet Homepage Photo contest
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