‘Cross The Breeze

There’s always one difficult part about going to conferences and blogging and that is that you hear so many interesting things you want to talk about, but no time to do so because you’re paying attention. I do have some time right now though before going to the official MIX party at TAO in about an hour or so I thought I’d share some first thoughts on the conference.

Together with most of the European invites of Microsoft to MIX, we arrived in Vegas on Monday night as we had a pre-conference scheduled in on Tuesday, the day before the official start of MIX. The pre-conference is a unique opportunity to get up close with some people that will present at MIX later as well but given we’re with about 200 people it makes it more accessible to get into a conversation. In the afternoon we had the choice between some activities, for which we chose to go for the “High Rollers” - a training basically on gambling, to get you started ;) This training took place in the Stratosphere Tower, a nice enough opportunity to take some pictures and stitch them all together in this panorama.

Today MIX officially started. We had the keynote in the morning with Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie which got covered pretty good live by Duncan Riley at Techrunch. I’d say check out their post to get an idea of the keynote, or watch the video. There’s one thing that struck me the most and that was the Hard Rock Memorabilia demo, using the Seadragon technology within Silverlight. You can see it right here, make sure you check it out. Really cool, trust me.

After the keynote (and the following lunch) I went out to see Lou Carbone again. I saw him at MIX07 already and found it a fascinating speech, reason enough to go see him again. Unfortunately, his MIX08 speech was the same as last year. Still very good, but been there done that.  Too late to go anywhere else so and my next session was in the same room anyway. Next up, David Armano with the Fuzzy Tail. David and I have been in touch occasionally through the AoC and on Twitter but here in Vegas we finally met in person which was good. The Fuzzy Tail wasn’t new to me as I followed the development of the presentation on his blog a couple of months ago, still good to see it presented by the man himself.

Other than that we saw some cool stuff related to the new IE8, we had again some demo on the Surface - always fascinating - and finally we joined the other MIX attendees for the official MIX party in TAO.

More images from MIX can be found on my Flickr account, and for more news and videos you should check out the MIX website.

See Free-Burma.org for more information.

Today Microsoft launched Tafiti, a new demo/experiment showing in a cool way what you can do combining Live Search with Silverlight. I hear you thinking: not another search, or Microsoft, huh!, … but I think you should take a look at it.

Tafiti, which means ‘do research’ in Swahili apparently, allows you to search the web like any other engine when it comes to the results themselves. But the way these results get presented and the way you can drag into ’shelves’ where you can collect them is quite interesting.

I did a search on ’silverlight’ and the view on top is where you see the news results of it, nicely presented in ‘newspaper’ style. In the carrousel on the left you can choose other verticals (web, images, …) and on the right you have the ’shelves’ I mentioned earlier with some results stored on the first ’shelve’. You can actually open up the results on a ’shelve’ which shows all of them in one view and which has a blog it & email it buttons so you can send them through right away.

I’m going to play around with this a bit more myself, but make sure you do as well. I think it’s an interesting exercise. You can see a video of Tafiti in action at On10.

Tonight Microsoft (who I work for) made an exciting announcement in the social networking space. Bebo is going to integrate Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Contacts into it’s service and is the first social network that is doing so (with hopefully more to follow). Bebo which is present in the UK (biggest social network there) and in the US will allow it’s 36 million users to enter their Live Messenger account in their profile page. This way you can see a user’s presence and start and instant conversation with or without having a LiveID yourself (’IM me’ function). With 280 million active Live Messenger users there’s probably going to be a big overlap, especially in the UK so I’m curious to see how many Bebo users will start using this.

Technorati Tags: bebo, microsoft, windows live, messenger, liveid, partnership, uk, us, integration, announcement, pr

Windows Live Folders is a new Windows Live service (that is only in beta in the US now) which offers password-protected online storage. Since the password projection is done through your LiveID (aka Passport) you have your Hotmail contacts or Live Messenger buddies linked to the service as well.

Folders comes in 3 ways:

1. Storage for yourself which you can use when you want to access files from multiple computers
2. Sharing files with friends is where you can store files that you want to share with one or more friends on your Messenger buddy list. In addition to that you can add ‘reader’ or ‘contributor’ permission to each folder you set up this way
3. Sharing files publicly

Now I’ve just set up my Live Folders and I’ll share my experiences with it later. If you want to give this a try as well, make sure you sign up for it quickly as the team is only expanding the beta for a limited time now.

Here’s what you see once you’re logged on, I didn’t have any files up there when I took the screenshot hence the 500MB is still available which isn’t the case anymore now :)

Technorati Tags: windows live, folders, online, storage, secure, protected, sharing, filesharing, messenger

Finally it’s here. Congrats to Drew and Gavin for setting this all up! I’ve written about the project before on a few occasions so I’m not going to bring that all up again, the book is here, so just get it now ;)

My fellow countryman Luc ‘Mindblob’ Debaisieux has a good wrap up on the project so far with some key links:

• Drew McLellan’s latest words on the ebook.
• Gavin Heaton’s latest post.
• Arun Rajagopal’s description of all the authors.
• Matt Dickman’s Google Map locating all the authors.
• The Age of Conversation site.
• Age of Conversation alphabetic list and info.

The book was also featured on AdAge, with a preview and an interview with Drew and Gavin. Don’t forget to take a look at my special Age of Conversation page where you can find all the authors again.

Technorati Tags: aoc, ageofconversation, book, blogging, bloggers, marketing, adage

I just read the press release of MSN around the streaming of the Live Earth concerts across the globe. These concerts are the most watched entertainment event in online history with more than 8 million people that watched part of the live coverage that was exclusive on MSN. This resulted in more than 15 million streams during the event and with the on demand that you can still watch we’re now already at more than 30 million streams. The event streaming peaked with 237.000 people watching simultaneously at a certain time with is a new record. Now I believe that’s pretty impressive, here’s the full press release… and here’s the link if you want to watch part of the concerts again.

This is a nice interactive billboard campaign for BBC World in the US.

[Via ADpunch]

After announcing last week that I-Merge changed brand to Boondoggle, there’s more interesting news coming from BoonDoggle. Stef Selfslagh (ex-Openhere) will be joining BoonDoggle as their Creative Director! Stef is the person who created ‘The Break-Up’ movie together with my colleague Geert and he has won a couple of national and international advertising awards so I’m sure he’ll be a great addition to the BoonDoggle team. Congrats.

Here’s ‘The Break-Up’ again and also another great ad that Stef created a while ago for Zazoo condoms. This last spot was ‘top rated video of all time‘ by the YouTube community (now still second) and has been viewed over 2.7 million times. Check them out below!

Technorati Tags: selfslagh, boondoggle, zazoo, thebreakup, bringtheloveback, creative

The news is out! We all knew something big was about to happen with the Belgian agency I-Merge and today is the day: I-Merge becomes Boondoggle and opens a new office in Amsterdam at the same time as well.

Why the new name for i-merge?
Pieter Goiris , CEO Boondoggle: “The name i-merge was generally perceived as having too strong a link with the internet as a medium. The talent encompassed by our agency goes much further than mere ‘media expertise’. Our vision on communication revolves around the guiding principle of the consumer. Everything we do is based on recognition for the consumer’s impact on his/her surrounds. These days, it’s people that make the brand. That’s a vision that goes beyond digital media. It is a vision on communication ‘in itself’. The internet was the impetus for change in the way people and brands communicate, sparking a trend that has since continued beyond its own bounds. Consequently, our services have also evolved, which is why we have chosen a new name, independent of any particular medium.”

Congrats to the whole I-Merge team and especially to my blogging buddy Tom De Bruyne who will run the office in Amsterdam. I’ll try to get used to the new name now ;)