For those of you who have been paying attention, Microsoft is slowly moving towards using the internet as their platform rather than the actual machine you use to access it. Basically, in the long run, we should be able to access all of our stuff from anywhere, using any kind of computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac or even mobile devices. Techcrunch has a very complete article about it and I wasn’t quick enough to get into the first beta round so I’ll just write a summary of features here.
Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.
Live Mesh provides you with an online virtual desktop to which you connect your computers and any other device you want to use to control it. Right now, only Windows XP and Vista are supported but Macs and mobile devices should be added this year, as well as the capability to connect your xbox or even a picture frame.
The current product is definitely oriented towards developers and supplies all the necessary APIs to start building applications that will make good use of Live Mesh. Essentially, you could use it to not only sync files and folders, but entire applications. This would really take the desktop out of your local PC and move it online, allowing you to truly work (or play) from any machine you choose.
I can’t wait to see more of this product, but I will have to wait for openings in the beta which is full right now. In the mean time, the article I mentioned above is very thorough and has some screenshots.
Not too long ago, I covered the Microsoft Online Portal Solutions offering Exchange and Sharepoint capabilities as web services. Microsoft just announced that the Office suite will now also be a part of this approach. This is no surprise since Bill Gates mentioned that we would be seeing more and more of this from Microsoft to keep up with the competition, but also to offer more choices to the customers. The yet-to-be-released product, code named “Albany” will be a bundled installation available on a subscription basis.
With just a few clicks, “Albany” subscribers will be able install the whole package, which includes Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, giving them the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for their personal and school projects; Windows Live OneCare to help keep viruses at bay and their computer fast and healthy; and Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery so they can connect and share with others. Albany also installs the Microsoft Office Live Workspace connector on the Microsoft Office toolbar, so users can save documents to their own dedicated online workspace and invite friends and classmates to collaborate and share.
Right from the start, we can see that the main difference here is that the product does not run directly in a browser like Microsoft Online, but is offered as a subscription-based download with updates for as long a you are a member. This is certainly a brand new approach for Microsoft who have always offered software on a license based model either per seat or per user.
The target audience for a product like this is limited because it is not for businesses and not everyone is inclined to having a bunch of Microsoft products pushed onto their machine. Microsoft’s point of view is that they are bundling the office software with a software segment that most users are willing to pay to get as a subscription: Security - They also aim for people who like to always have the latest version of everything installed on their machines.
Microsoft will be adding products to this new model to broaden the target audience and to better compete with their closest competitors for the online suites: Google and Zoho. A business version should also become available.
The beta version of Albany will become commercially available later this year and and pricing has yet to be established.
While we are in this line of thought, might as well cover another application that uses the Adobe Flex framework and that deals with financial data. I spoke about Spiceworks.com and iexpenseonline.com in my last two posts, so this application is a bit more for developers, but could have some very interesting results for the end-users.
Intuit has just announced that they are joining the “Platform-as-a-service” band wagon with Amazon, Google and their closest competitor, Salesforce.com. The Quickbase development environment offers developers the opportunity to use intuit’s Quickbase as a platform combined with the Adobe Flex Framework to build applications for end-users.
Quickbase is not the new product, but the fact that it is going to be available for developers to use openly and to publish their own applications directly for all quickbase users to see, is new. One great advantage that Intuit has is that large user base for Quickbooks. The apps developed will be web add-ons for Quickbooks users sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Developers not only get the power and reliability of the Quickbase platform, but the visibility to Quickbooks users. Users are already familiar with quickbooks so a minimized learning curve is also important.
Take a look at the quickbase website; there are videos and some demos of applications that can be built using the Quickbase Development Environment.
It’s no secret that I am a fan of Google’s impressive array of online applications and, when it comes to desktop applications, they do an excellent job as well. Google Earth is one of those applications and an even more impressive one if you stop and think about the massive amounts of information that are required to make it possible.
Google Earth 4.3 was released this week and there are number of new features to make this a worthwhile upgrade if you like the application. Google Earth Blog has a great review with screenshots of this version. The best way to get a good look at the features without doing all the work yourself, is probably the videos on Youtube: This one by Google, and this one by Frank Taylor which is embedded below.
The most important new features are:
Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world
Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature
Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level
Improved Streetview
Imagery dates
All of these features a pretty clear in terms of what they offer, but the Streetview feature is probably one of the coolest in its presentation. When you get to the street level of a city(a city which has streetview and pictures to go along) you can see “spheres” representing the images that you can walk into at that specific spot. Once inside the image, you have a picture-quality view as if you were standing there.
One thing I was waiting for and that is now available though, is the imagery dating which allows you to know when the images you are looking at were taken. This way, you’ll know if that’s really your car your seeing!
According to Neowin, the long awaited Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is almost here. Although unconfirmed by Microsoft just yet, the dates would be the following:
April 14, 2008: Support becomes available for the release version of SP3
April 21, 2008: OEMs, Volume License, Connect, MSDN and TechNet
April 29, 2008: Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Download Center
June 10, 2008: Automatic Updates
For most of us, this would mean we could get an official release of SP3 on April 29th and for those of us who need to test SP3 for larger environments, we should have until June 10th before it gets automatically pushed out to customers.
Yesterday, I went to the Montreal edition of the Heroes Happen {here} launch event by Microsoft. This is the launch tour for Microsoft’s next-generation server platform Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.
I always enjoy going to these launch events because you get to see the actual products and their features in real life and in fairly accurate representations of the real work environments. This one was no exception, but I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see. The event was split into two different “tracks”, namely the IT Pro track and the Developer track. I usually attend only the IT Pro sessions because they are much closer to my every day occupations, but I decided to go to the last dev session because I wanted to get a good look at Silverlight. The word “Silverlight” was not even mentioned one single time during the final session I attended which was the Web Developer’s session!
The first session was an overview of the new features implemented in Windows Server 2008 and that will certainly be tomorrow’s article because there are quite a few things to cover. The most interesting one for me is the ServerCore feature which allows the installation of a server without any GUI at all. This allows to run a server on less powerful hardware and still benefit from the product’s features. They also covered the new features of SQL 2008 and VS 2008 briefly. This session was the best one because there was a lot of attention to the new features and how they can be implemented quickly and easily in many businesses.
The second session was a more technical look at the Server 2008 specific features and a few live demos so that we could see them in action. The only problem is that a few of these demos didn’t work as planned. Granted the problems were not necessarily because of the software but mostly because of the presenters, It’s not as convincing as when you get to really see it work. The ones I was most curious about worked for the most part, but I’d still have liked to see a bit more polished demos for a launch like this. I went to the Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch last year and, let me tell you there was a huge difference in the style of presentations and depth. You can’t blame them since it’s not for the same crowd… Yesterday’s presentation was for a much more technical and forgiving crowd when it comes to software and scripts not working the first time you try them.
For the final session, I was supposed to see the Hyper-V products, Microsoft’s virtualization environment for Server 2008, but I opted to go on the Developer’s side to see the web developer’s features in SQL2008 and Visual Studio 2008. That session was very interesting for me because I do not have a chance to use these tools as much as I would like, but I can see they have listened to what users have been asking for. The new CSS management tools and the javascript/AJAX capabilities alone are worth an upgrade, no questions asked.
Overall, it was a very good day and it was pretty much what I expected. Interesting presentations, free lunch and a day of learning and seeing lots of geeky stuff with a couple of friends… Can’t go wrong with that. Microsoft has some great products coming our way and I look forward to them.
Just as previously reported, Facebook has begun rolling out their IM client on some selected networks. This was the only available information since the complete roll out schedule has not been made public. it is to be released to limited networks first for load testing and bug-hunting, and then rolled out to broader networks.
The new chat bar appears at the bottom of every page and cannot be removed. The client has all the regular functionalities that you would expect such as the ability to show yourself as offline and lets you know who is available for chatting.
The integration is very well done and should prove to be a great addition to Facebook. I know that it will give a good reason to many people for leaving a browser with Facebook open all the time. You can find a full post about the features with screenshots here if you can’t wait to try if for yourself. You can “pop-out” the chat windows to allow many chats at the same time and a better visibility and the status window shows your friends letting you know who is active or not.
Mini-feed items will also appear directly in your chat windows for the person you are chatting with if they are related. So if you are chatting with someone who does something on your profile, you get instantly notified.
I hope the networks I am in get this very anticipated IM Client rolled-out because I am really anxious to try it out. Not that I have that much chatting to do, but I like the technical integration that they have made and I want to try it out even more for myself.
The Guinness World RecordTM for the world’s lightest mobile phone has been awarded to Modu for its tiny and sophisticated mobile phone.
Modu was awarded this prestigious honour after careful consideration by the Guinness World RecordsTM judges, who declared that: “The lightest mobile phone is the modu, which weighs 40.1 g (1.41 oz).” Guinness World Records added: “modu’s dimensions are 72.1 mm (2.8 inches) x 37.6 mm (1.4 inches) x 7.8 mm (0.3 inches).”
The Modu Mobile phone is the first modular cell phone which allows it to be so small. You can slip it into various Modu jackets and Modu Mates which allow additional functionnalities and an entirely new user experience. Although it is the lightest in the world, the Modu still has all the standard functions of any standard mobile phone and is very easy to use.
I personally find that small gadgets like these do offer some enhanced portability options because of their size and weight, but with the “small and sexy” comes the “fragile and easy to lose”. I haven’t had one in my hands(yet) so I can’t say for sure, but I’d probably be a little worried about easily breaking it during normal use.
In a recent public appearance, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, announced that the next version of Windows, dubbed Windows 7, might be ready for next year. Windows 7 is the successor for Windows Vista and the original schedule was for about 3 years after the release of Vista. A 2009 release would mean almost a year in advance from the proposed schedule and Microsoft has a track record of being late rather than early.
Naturally, not much information is available about the inner workings of Windows 7, but Microsoft maybe trying to speed up the next version in order to correct many of the problems encountered by users of Vista.
In response to a question about Windows Vista, Gates, speaking before the Inter-American Development Bank here, said: “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version.” Referring to Windows 7, the code name for the next full release of Windows client software, Gates said: “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”
Perhaps Bill Gates was refering to the fact that they would have a TEST version available or a first public beta instead of a widespread public release. I think it would be pretty surprising to see another major release in such a short timeframe, but then again, the public reception of Vista certainly requires a little bit of damage control.
I would expect Windows 7 to be somewhat like XP was to 2000: same functionalities but with most of the kinks worked out and a more refined interface.
Techcrunch just reported that Playboy now has an iPhone version of their official website, Playboy.com. I always say that music and technology go hand in hand, but sex is also a great partner (pun intended) for technology as well. Some statistics indicate there are over 4.2 million porn websites, roughly 12% of the internet. Keep in mind that statistics like these are very difficult to get so the numbers may be off or outdated, but I don’t have a hard time believing that the Adult Industry occupies a large chunk of websites.
The website is built with an interface designed to look like the rest of the iPhone so you feel right at home, at Hot-or-Not clone to find out which playmates are the best, nightlife adviser and Playboy radio. Playboy radio is an MP3-based online radio show.
This isn’t the first contact between Playboy and the iPhone. In june 2007, Playboy had announced a free pack to “make the iPhone even sexier” which was called iPlayboy. The pack contained 12 “sexy non-nude wallpapers” for the sleek Apple handset, a special photo album with another dozen photos of Playmates, an episode of Playboy’s Sirius Satellite Radio show, and a video customized for the iPhone’s interface.
Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.
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