How Microsoft came up with the name Windows Phone 7 Series.  Funny cartoon considering that the “series” has been dropped from the branding.

Apache Project Server hacked luckily no source code was compromised, but machines were seized and passwords were stolen.

Infected XP owners left unpatched ensuring that machines don’t become unusable like last time.

MI5 staff who lack computer skills made redundant.  I’m kind of speechless…aren’t they two decades late?

What Can We Expect From Microsoft’s Windows 7 SP1?  Really cool streaming features with RemoteFX.  Full AERO experience on thin clients and virtualized installations.

Apple iPhone 4.0 OS Already Jailbroken?  Of course the dev edition is still in BETA so Apple will likely fix it before release.

Facebook meeting on safety with CEOP to protect children online.  CEOP has been a big success in the UK by providing strong guidance to service providers, parents, and teachers about protecting kids.

Boy sues mother for Facebook harassment as she argues ‘parental duty’.  Although I want to agree with the mom, changing your kid’s Facebook and email password is a bit much.  Maybe talking with your 16-year old over a drink would provide for a more amicable solution?  Oh yeah, you also might want to actually have custody of the kid too.  Wow.

Photographers are suing Google Books for unauthorized distribution of digital images.  Apparently paying the the actual authors of the books isn’t enough.  Makes me think, does any one person actually own anything anymore?  Copyright reform please.

Microsoft is working on CoApp to make it easier to build and compile open-source applications on Windows.  Many projects have a variety of dependencies on libraries that aren’t part of the project.  CoApp makes it easier to check and acquire these packages so that source code will actually compile.

Apple Gives Adobe The Finger With Its New iPhone SDK Agreement.  Isn’t fine print great?  Basically this wipes out a couple million dollars in investment by Adobe, Monotouch, and a few others.  Daring Fireball has a great article about why Apple would do this.  This is what happens when one company is years ahead of the competition, they abuse the power.

Thumbnail source:  http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg65/bmerich/AppleFingerBite.jpg

Silverlight Analytics in Silverlight 4 provides an open platform for any vendor to extract valuable intelligence about how the application runs.  One of the biggest capabilities with Silverlight is the ability to use applications offline.  Before Silverlight Analytics Framework, vendors would pretty much be in the dark.  Microsoft now eliminates this constraint.  If you are a technologist or businessman, wouldn’t you like to know how your customers are behaving offline when using your app?

Now doing what Microsoft does best, coding software, we knew that providing a great development experience would be key for vendors, but on the web, designers play a crucial role.  I would argue that application designers are probably even closer to the functions of the application than the programmers, but even if you don’t buy this argument, wouldn’t it be great quantify your worth as a designer?  Microsoft allows designers to realize this as well by integrating Analytics Framework behaviours directly in the design environment in Expression Blend.  You can now directly relate the quality of design work down to the bottom line.  What designer wouldn’t want this? A bad one. This “who’s who” list of vendors serves as a testament to the openness and excitement of this new functionality!

• AT Internet
• Comscore
• GlanceGuide
• Google Analytics
• Nedstat
• Quantcast
• PreEmptive Solutions
• Service Oriented Analytics

Design Goals

• Support out-of-browser scenarios
• Support offline scenarios
• Support multiple analytics services simultaneously without impacting performance
• Support for designers in Microsoft Expression Blend to add tracking to applications without coding
• Support A/B Testing
• Support SketchFlow Prototypes
• Support logging of video experiences with the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework

If you are interested in learning more, watch the breakout session video from MIX 2010.

Earlier this week I talked about Bizspark Camp UK and GigJunkie in the start-up highlight interview.  Today, I am happy to introduce you to Koodibook’s Richard Godfrey.  Richard was kind enough to not only talk about the company but also offer an in-depth demo of his photo album publishing service.

For those of you too young to know what a REAL photo album is, I’m talking about the physical, “holding in your hand,” wedding style albums.  Koodibook allows anyone to create hardcover photo books from pictures.  Now, this concept isn’t new in the computing world.  People like Shutterfly, Kodak, iPhoto, and many street vendors have been offering services like this for years.  However, unlike those days, most photos that people want to share end up on social networks today.  This is where Koodibook really stands out.  Essentially imagine being able to easily pull photos from any social network, photo site, or online storage system.  Koodibook allows for unmatched flexibility when it comes to what complementary services you use.  Their modular design allows for the inclusion of unlimited number of services.

If integrating with web services isn’t impressive to you, consider this.  Most photos that people possess today don’t actually live on the internet.  Whether you are a photographer, hobbyist, or a casual snapper, a lot of what gets shot stays on local storage.  One of Richard’s “secret sauces,” is the availability of a Windows rich-client based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (sample demo application).  Think of this as authoring software that allows you to customize exactly how the book will look and feel.  Now, you may say, “Viral, it’s 2010, it’s all about the web, I don’t want to download software.”  Normally, I would agree with you, but referring to my earlier point about photos being stored locally, which would you rather do, download and install a super fast piece of software that can manipulate photos locally, or upload hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution imagery over a slow broadband link to Flickr?

Of course, now being a WPF application, the authoring software is PC only, but the service does fallback on a great cross-platform Silverlight environment as well as a basic Flash environment, although the latter is pretty basic.  All in all, once an individual is done designing a great photo album, he can share it and view in online as well as on an iPhone via their app.

To close, Koodibook is not only a great service, its shows exactly what businesses can create in terms of software experiences in in a relatively short amount of time when they use flexible frameworks like .NET and Silverlight!

I’ll be dedicating a handful of articles on some of the interesting technologies that were presented at the event, but overall it was filled with laughs, awesome swag, great technical knowledge, and an inspired audience.  One of the start-ups, GigJunkie, jumped at the chance to show us their company and where Windows Azure can potentially fit in to solve the problem of scalability.

GigJunkie is a live bands database and social network allowing people to find great music gigs around their area and to share their experiences with the community.  The site itself has a really cool “hipster” feel with a great color scheme and strong stylized widgets.  The key focus for Gigjunkie is integrating their listing with other sites.  They’ve already been very successful signing up the likes of Bebo to provide more relevant music listings.  The idea is that quality listings and solid music reviews will make GigJunkie a trusted resource for any company that wants to offer rich information to their user base.

Watch the interview to see how GigJunkie works and how they differentiate themselves from more “faceless” ticketing companies like TicketMaster.  Overall, their service provides a strong value add to the event promotion side of live music, well above simply purchasing tickets.  I’m looking forward to buying my next pair of tickets after referencing GigJunkie!

Thumbnail source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miikka_skaffari/4173914180/sizes/s/

Whether you are talking about virtualization, server infrastructure, productivity software, collaboration, or development, almost every major enterprise technology has had an infusion of open-source style thinking. For example, Microsoft virtualization technology not only supports a Microsoft stack, but can also manage a VMWare environment extremely well. Hosting Providers who want to offer services under both Windows and Linux do so with Microsoft Hyper-V because of its affordability and resilience as a mature solution. On the cross-platform development end, Silverlight has been a true game changer, invigorating the hearts and minds of the rank and file while also inspiring former outcasts, exiles, and zealots who vowed never to touch a piece of Microsoft technology again. This progress was executed first via the enterprise channels, but consumers and web technologists have also benefited from the effects of, to coin a great American Republican catch-phrase, “trickle-down” prosperity. Realizing that the latest technical platforms on the web truly balance the scale between huge enterprises and small businesses, Microsoft is expanding its goal around making Windows a great platform for open-source projects by actively investing in their development.

If you recall, 2009 was the year that “pigs flew,” because it was the year that Microsoft made a top-down showing in interoperability with everything it did. Some of the biggest gestures included becoming platinum sponsor of Apache Foundation, contributing GPL code to the Linux kernel, and open-sourcing many strategic .NET frameworks under BSD. If you want a more comprehensive list, check out my presentation below. There are many core developer-focused technologies listed.

Coming back to the present, 2010 is a big year as well because Microsoft is investing in making sure the free ecosystem of open-source technology, both competitive and complimentary, works well regardless of a customer’s choice in software infrastructure. Umbraco and Drupal, are two popular CMS systems that are free and have a very dedicated community of users. In the case of Umbraco, which happens to already leverage .NET, Microsoft wanted to make it better, easier and more capable than something like WordPress. Sure, SharePoint will always be the official CMS of choice for the hardliner salesman at Microsoft, but one shouldn’t have to abandon the entire Microsoft ecosystem just to use free technology. What better way to improve the product than to invest resources with one of the key developers for Umbraco? See his diary below.

Umbraco Microsoft and me: Video diary 1 from Darren Ferguson on Vimeo.

On the flipside, Drupal is a technology that uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, and is based on PHP. The motivations to invest here are not as clear up front, but it only takes a little digging to realize that Drupal developers are actually a tech-agnostic bunch and just want to make Drupal a great CMS platform. So here Microsoft has sponsored a team of developers to provide feedback and improve integration with IIS and Silverlight. The idea being that the use of great technology shouldn’t be an “either-or” decision.

Choice always wins. Customers shouldn’t have to be forced into a set of technologies, and the accomplishments of 2009 and the work being driven in 2010 shows that modularity will be a key strategy for Microsoft to help make it easier for customers to use the best technology for the job even if it means helping products that compete. Competition and “Co-opetition,” differ by only one character, but this single character has lead to an innumerable number of changes at Microsoft.

Outages Take YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter Off-Line, web freaks out, but reassured a few hours later.

On the back of yesterday’s Telegraph article, Facebook responds. Facebook Does Not Cause Syphilis. What’s the phrase? Correlation does not lead to causation.

Shrouded in secrecy, Microsoft may have actually confirmed a courier tablet via jobs posting.

Ars Technica published an extensive write-up on Microsoft Research TechFest 2010. Almost all of the 19 projects from around the world have a summary as well as an associated video about the future of technology. Excellent read!

Thumbnail photo credit: Scott Beale / laughingsquid.com.

According to a Telegraph article, Facebook ‘linked to rise in syphilis’, though upon reading it, you may realize that the art of fact-checking is dead.  Syphilis is bacterial, not viral.

Eye-Fi Launches Pro X2 WiFi Card makes it easy to transfer photos and videos from a digital camera wirelessly.  Now with 802.11N!

British worker fired by Facebook!  Welcome to the new world of work!

Microsoft Game Room Opens on Xbox Live, check out the video!

‎Bill Gates Bets On Next-Gen Nuclear to solve world energy problem.  Solar was so last decade anyway.

‎Microsoft releases Messenger for Mac 8 Beta which will finally allow video chatting between PC and Macs using Live Messenger.

Bill Gates thumbnail source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nitot/3143449807/sizes/s/

Elvis thumbnail source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/acidzero/4313176314/sizes/s/