Toyota robot balancing when pushed...

Charging your devices wirelessly...Intel is getting more serious

Imagine never pluging in your smart phone, laptop or electric car for charging.  Recent article in MIT technology preview prompted me to write a little post on this.  Charging batteries without wire has been subject of research for many years but with proliferation of devices (smart phones, portable music players, net/notebooks, etc) we are seeing an increase in R&D work in this area.  The theory is pretty simple. Intel has been working on this for some time now (see a cool demo and Intel CTO explaining how it works).

Live Mesh Wins Crunchies 2008 Innovation Award

Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell flew down to San Francisco to pick up our award.  It is great to see how Ray has helped changing Microsoft's image among the Silicon Valley crowd.  It feels good to be recognized for all the hard work for the past two years by the industry.....

Watch the award ceremony, results of the vote and other winners.

Offline Web Applications among top 10 emerging technologies

According to MIT published Technology Preview, Offline Web Applications are among the top 10 emerging technologies of 2008.  Another sign that application models like Mesh-Enabled Web Applications are becoming strategic for both Microsoft and the industry....

5 lessons learned from the first 30 years.

Interesting lessons learned from Microsoft's more successful strategies that contributed to our growth.  Directions on Microsoft is an independent organization that doesn't shy away from  criticizing Microsoft strategies from time to time (that is their job - to be independent), but when credit is due, it is due and there are lessons to be learned:

1) Question the rules. Change the game.
2) Create win-win partner situations to grow fast.
3) Don’t neglect your customers’ most important need: a better price.
4) Make it easy for partners to customize your product.
5) Business isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Be persistent.

Full article is here: Five strategies Microsoft got right

Join us for a "Live" Live Framework webcast...

Join us for a Live Framework Getting Started Webcast on December 8th.  The webcast is open to everyone.  Bring your questions, feedback, storys, ideas, etc...All you need to join is a web browser and a phone line.   Looking forward to chatting with you all.

Am I a pessimist or an optimist..

With everything going on I can't stop thinking of this Winston Churchill's quote:

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty"

Well said......

How we make decisions......one interesting perspective

And now on something completely different.   Interesting RadioLab podcast on Choice, for your weekend run.....

Why Mesh-Enabled Web Applications

Earlier at PDC 2008, we unveiled Mesh-Enabled Web Applications among many other cool technologies that come under the banner of Windows Azure, Live Framework and Live Services. My breakout session on this topic was well received with hundreds of attendees who asked a bunch of excellent questions at the end of the session(link to the video and slide deck are in an earlier post on this blog). Some folks called the session "The most interesting announcement to me was that you will be able to write mesh enabled web applications that run “outside the browser” and can run in an offline mode" and we continue to receive positive feedback from a diverse group of folks, while listening carefully to all types of feedback.

In my session, I showed how to build an app once and run the same app on multiple platforms (inside a Web Browser and offline on Windows Platform).  Why does this matter to anyone? This approach maximizes your application investment and minimizes your short and long term development and maintenance costs. Today, almost every well known website out there have a downloadable rich client to complement their web offering. Ebay has Ebay Desktop, Amazon has Unbox Video Player, I just wrote this blog post using Live Writer Beta which of course is a rich Windows client app used to write blog posts that are hosted on websites, there are many more examples of this model and they are growing fast.  

You get the idea. Why do these websites have to do this? Generally speaking, these websites build rich clients to extend their web experiences into devices and desktop (What we call Cloud-to-Client) so that they can provide a much richer user experience than what can be delivered within the confines of a web browser. They want to harness the power of devices.  This often requires additional investment in native code to create the rich clients for various target device types and platforms.  Once you build a rich client to complement your website, your hard problems just begin. For example, one of the most difficult of those problems is Data Synchronization.  The data that your user generates/updates on the client has to be synced with the website so it is avaiable when you want to access the data from a device that does not have the client. The other problem is sharing and identity management.  Once your user has some interesting data, they want to share it with others.  Live Services have many things to offer here.

In my session, I enlisted why I think websites do this and described how Live Services offer multiple solutions to address these challenges. In the proposed approach, rich web applications like Silverlight Apps can be synchronized and taken offline to run on the desktop, delivering a more native experience similar to rich client applications. Another very important thing to consider here is that, Live Services approach is not only about offline experience, it is about providing an Occasionally Connected experience where your app experience will not change based on the state of your connection to the Internet.  These apps can easily plug into Live Services such as Synchronized Storage to where data storage on the client is always performed as a local operation agaisnt local database throuhg APIs provided by Local Live Operating Environment.  This model lets you share code between the website and rich client versions of your app (basically they are the same app) as well as taking advantage of other Live Services that provide at-scale social, device and other mesh capabilities. The proposed model has some interesting value propositions that are appealing to a wide range of developers and applications ranging from Enterprise ISVs to Small/Medium Business ISVs to Web 2.0 social app developers.

You can start using Live Framework and experiment with these apps to see it for yourself. To get you started with the experience and application lifecycle, we have created 4 apps out of the box. Here is a screenshot of those apps (called Mesh Pack)……enjoy. BTW, I just won a challenge to build one of these apps from scratch using Visual Studio, and got the app deployed to run at-scale in our datacenter in under 5 minutes.

Visual Studio Tools for Live Framework

If you don’t believe building a Mesh-Enabled Web Application is super easy check out these step by step walkthroughs from around the web:

• Professional Visual Studio walkthrough
• Chris Koenig simple getting started
• LiveSide.net Quick and Dirty walkthrough
• Katrien’s walkthrough
• ….

Learn about Live Serivces....attend a Jump Start event

Register for a Live Service Jump Start event in your home town, TODAY!

 About Live Services
Live Services enables developers to engage large audiences with rich social sharing embedded experiences, and to connect the power and scale of the Web to rich client experiences across a world of digital devices. Live Services:

1. Provides access to over 400M users and the experiences, relationships and data they care about.
2. Uses an open standards programming interface and resource model that spans the PC, phone and Web (cloud).
3. Enables data synchronization and local accessibility across many end points, including PC, phone and Web.
4. Enables Windows applications and technologies to locally access Web data, enabling new and rich Web experiences.

Mesh Applications are born. Come and see them at PDC 2008

I have been busy. Extermely busy, and you will know why very soon.  I will be presenting a session on Mesh-Enabled Applications at PDC 2008 in LA.  But what are Mesh-Enabled Applications?  what can you do with them?  how do they provide pure goodness and value to developers? and why do I care....  Mary-Jo Foley seems to have some ideas but I am making no comments.  The best way to find out is to attend my session at PDC. I promise you will not be disappointed.

Here is the session description on PDC 2008 website.

Come learn how to extend your existing web applications and get them to live and breathe within Live Mesh. Mesh-enabled web applications can be accessed from anywhere through a web browser as well as run locally (and offline) on a user's desktop and can take full advantage of many Mesh value-add services such as a dedicated sandbox, online and offline synchronized storage, auto deployment and update, identity, application catalogue, social computing and more. Learn about the architecture and lifecycle of applications which live in the Mesh and how to Mesh-enable your Silverlight 2 and JavaScript application.

Looking forward to seeing you there.......

Live Mesh is Live

We just went live! 9:00PM, April 22nd 2008.  Check out our blog.

If you are visiting Web 2.0 Expo next week and work on Software+Services, drop me a line......

Microsoft Reveals a Web-Based Software System (The New York Times)

Redmond casts Mesh to catch developers (News.com)

Ray Ozzie delivers with Live Mesh (Scobleizer)

Ray Ozzie: Introducing Live Mesh (Channel 9)

Live Mesh: it’s everything we told you about (and a lot more) (Live Side)

Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 22-25

Looks like I am going.  I will write more about what I will be showing/talking about closer to the date but from the list of the sessions, It is going to be a lot of fun......... 

How Microsoft thinks about Live Services Platform

Check out how David Treadwell draws an analogy between Windows Platform evolution and our investment in Windows Live Platform, in this LiveSide interview.

The Bank Job is a Must See

This is a fascinating and most controversial story about a true-life bank robbery that happened in Baker Street, London, in 1971. The money and valuables stolen were never recovered and story was prevented from ever being told because of a D-Notice government gagging order, allegedly to protect a prominent member of the British Royal Family.

Robert Rowlands, an amateur radio operator, recorded the actual conversations between the bank robbers! Here is the real audio recording of the bank robbers talking during the robbery. You can hear the lookout chap complaining about the weather and wanting to go home in the middle of the robbery!!

Read more about the robbery here.

Facebook, Beacon and Privacy

I just bought a movie ticket on Fandango.com and instantly saw a "profile story" in my Facebook.com account. Fandango did NOT ask me if I want this event to be sent to Facebook. At first, I got freaked out a bit because I wasn't sure what data Fandango has sent to Facebook.  Is my credit card number safe?, etc.. Later I found out that Facebook allows me to explicitly decide, if I want the profile story be added to my News Feed (OK!, not too bad) and data that Fandango sent to Facebook is really not a big deal (just the movie name). Still, I am not comfortable trusting Facebook to get "profile stories" from the any web site that I interact with and I certainly would have appreciated if Fandango had asked me before telling Facebook about my purchase....Privacy continues to be a big challenge for Facebook.....On this occassion, I am not happy!

Welcome Social Mesh, Device Mesh

Today, at MIX '08 keynote speech, Ray Ozzie, our Chief Software Architect, described a path that will result in the release of the project that I have been working on for sometimes. He said

“I see MIX as the first of a number of key launch milestones. Kind of on a path, with a series of events culminating at PDC (Professional Developers Conference) this October, a path that will bring many of the key elements of our software plus services strategy from incubation to life.”

Later on, he hinted more on the type of Software+Services that may be released in upcoming months. He talked about three core principles that drive the reconceptualization of our software in order to embrace the new world of Software+Services. He called the first principle “Social or Device Mesh” and went on to say how interpersonal nature of the web will ultimately impact everything we do. Everything! < Developers listen carefully....> including a “Centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications”. Finally, he talked about what I personally have been working on and feel very excited about.  He described it this way:

“Imagine an App Platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time now, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless Mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.”

There are good reasons that I cannot give more details, but trust me, developers are in for a big treat by having the ability to build applications on this platform…can’t wait to tell you more…

TechCrunch was quick to publish this post with some screenshots of the presentation slides.....

Interesting scalability read

If you have been spending a substantial amount of time figuring out how to build massively scalable services in the cloud, you will find these posts interesting.....They basically tell the story of Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Vox, etc and their scalability challenges....

http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

Even better (thanks Alex):

http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2007/04/29/3616/the-top-10-presentation-on-scaling-websites-twitter-flickr-bloglines-vox-and-more

Love my new Roland V-Drums

They are super cool.  I found playing drums as good stress reliever and it helps with better body coordination.  Nice engineering work is done on every component of this set. Each piece is thoughtfullly made and connected to the rest of the set. Mesh-head tom and snare pad give it a real playing feel.  However, the set still does not sound as good as an acoustic ones. Ruby puts on a very funny look when I play with my headphones on.  She starts dancing around the drum set wondering what the heck I am doing.  I have to get my camera out and make a funny YouTube video of her in that state.