Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand keywords. Today at TechCrunch50, Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced a new visual search feature on Bing which returns results as an interactive gallery of images.
For instance, if you type in “dog breeds,” it organizes them for you in a grid of images that you can scroll through using a slider on the right. When you hover over a particular image, it enters the name of that dog breed in the search box. And you can re-order the image results by size, breed, exercise needs, and Bing popularity. → Read More
Microsoft has announced that in late August it will be discontinuing availability and support for its once popular mashup creation application Popfly. In a blog post, team leader John Montgomery confirms the internal deadpooling, although he doesn’t call it the way we do. He writes that on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down.
Montgomery points developers to Microsoft’s Web Platform and Xbox development program as all projects that were created using Popfly will effectively be discontinued completely.
TechCrunch got an early look at the Silverlight-powered application when it debuted in private beta mode over 2 years ago. At the time, mash-up and widget creation tools were all the rage, with Yahoo introducing its Pipes web app just a few months prior. → Read More
I know Robert Scoble thinks Office is still not dead, but his excitement about the Office 2010 tech preview should be taken with a large grain of salt. Of course, it was fun to be treated to an old-media style press barnstorm of the flogosphere, and the bells and whistles — poof, don’t need Photoshop, nor iMovie neither, and how about those browser features, cool — certainly will play well in the enterprise. But you need a passport, pardon the expression, to determine what web features are allowed from app to app. Sorry, Web User, you are in a Word document and do not have permission to collaborate in the browser. What a pile of “Our customers don’t want that feature” that is. If that was the only thing separating Office 2010 from the brass ring currently reserved for Windows 7, Microsoft could call it a good day’s work and relax. O2010 certainly does provide some pressure points for Google Apps to ponder, but the one thing that would really sting Google’s hide is apparently nowhere to be seen. Silverlight Office is still MIA, and that’s no surprise. After all, we’re not supposed to realize SIlverlight is already the new Office. Once micromessaging apps appear in Silverlight, we’ll wake up like we are about realtime. With Silverlight 3.0 released, 6 million .Net developers can now port their code to Silverlight and embed their apps on the desktop. That’s the WIndows/Mac desktop. As Servers and Tools chief Bob Muglia told me a few weeks ago (video coming soon), Novell’s Moonlight Linux project is closing the delta between Silverlight releases. But look at the dynamics of the Twitter client market, where Adobe AIR apps broke out of the pack early (Twhirl, TweetDeck), and you’ll see why Silverlight 3 will capture a healthy segment of the Office clone market. Just as Seesmic Desktop’s new web client consolidates rich features with server side personalization, so too does O2010 start down the same road with Office. But not on the Mac, where ironically (no, its not ironic) all the media lives. So as much as I admire the tough love Microsoft is showing for Office-is-dead, they are priming the pump for collab-Office functionality that works cross-platform with richness. As much as Google wants to sell us HTML 5, they are stuck figuring out how to pay for H.264 while HTML 5 goes begging for a → Read More
Microsoft’s “Flash-killer,” Silverlight released the third version of its rich media application platform, Silverlight 3, on the web yesterday. This morning, Microsoft is holding the official launch of Silverlight 3, which is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform. The beta of Silverlight 3 was launched earlier this year.
Now Microsoft is taking the beta off, and rolling out the full-fledged version of Silverlight 3 to the public. We had the opportunity to speak to Director of Microsoft’s Development Platform Group, Brian Goldfarb, about the new features of Silverlight 3 and the strategies behind the development of the new product. We also were able to talk to Scott Guthrie, vice president in the Microsoft’s Developer Division, on camera about his perspective on the significance of Silverlight 3 and its potential to takeover main competitor Adobe’s Flash (see video below). We’ve been able to compile a complete guide to SIlverlight 3 with all of its new features and the customers and developers who are using these features to launch innovative products. And Microsoft will also be demoing some of the real-time capabilities of Silverlight 3 at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp today. → Read More
On Friday we wrote about how NBC were partnering with Microsoft and others to use the Olympics coverage as a test-bed for researching new user habits in viewing content between online, television and mobile. The web experience at NBC is powered by Silverlight, also giving Microsoft its first large-scale opportunity to gain distribution for the new web platform. It seems that there are very high expectations from not only NBC and Microsoft, but also advertisers, as Mediaweek today report that the online ad inventory for the NBC Olympics coverage is almost sold out. NBC says that 85% of all available inventory has already been sold, an extraordinarily high amount. NBC did not disclose exact details or numbers, but did say that they have signed corporations such as Mcdonalds, Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson, Hilton and Anheuser-Busch as video advertisers for the web broadcasts. Since the International Olympics Commitee sets strict standards on advertising during the games, overlays are not allowed so video ads will take the form of short and 30-second spots both before and after clips and shows. NBC paid $4.2 Billion for the exclusive rights (both television and web) to broadcast both the four summer and winter games between 2006 and 2012. NBC experienced disappointing ratings with both the Sydney and Athens Olympic games, and suffered losses due to unhappy advertisers. The issue with the games at the time was the time zone difference causing a huge drop in audience – as events were shown in early morning hours or in the middle of the night (in the case of Sydney). With the NBC and Microsoft web strategy, the audience can now be expanded to those watching at work, on the road or those who watch clips delayed – which will in theory result in an audience much larger than television-only (and in-turn more revenue). For NBC, web video and technologies like Silverlight are playing a big part in expanding their audiences and increasing revenue. Who would have though that the whole online video thing would ever be responsible for actually saving and helping a company like NBC? CrunchBase Information NBC Universal Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When it comes to casual games online, they tend to be built in Adobe’s Flash (see Kongregate). But Microsoft wants people to start creating Web video games in its competing Silverlight. Today, it is taking a step to make that easier by introducing the Popfly Game Creator. Microsoft launched Popfly last year as an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight. With Popfly Game Creator, it is adding a simple Web-based authoring environment for creating casual arcade-style games. The tool is built for non-programmers so that anyone can create a game, and is particularly aimed at kids and teenagers. It is entirely browser-based. You create a game using predefined templates that can be modified, and when you are satisfied, you hit play to run the code. The games run in Silverlight and will be hosted at Popfly, but are embeddable anywhere on the Web. Here’s a game Microsoft created for us with Michael as the main character. The Game Creator starts off with templates for about 20 different types of games—from space invaders and breakout to racing games and shooters. Game makers can populate their games with hundreds of characters, background scenes, sound effects and objects, or create their own from scratch. More details can be found on the Popfly wiki. CrunchBase Information Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications. Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism. Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears). Read Matthew’s blog, Just Browsing, here. Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet. → Read More
NBC announced today that they are working with Microsoft and MSN to build NBCOlympics.com. That announcement alone is a snoozer. What’s interesting is that they’ll be using the Microsoft Silverlight platform to “deliver deeply immersive user experiences.” The partnership was announced by Bill Gates at the CES keynote this evening in Las Vegas. The new site will host 2,200 hours of live event video coverage, with more than 20 simultaneous live video streams at peak times. An additional 3,000 hours of on-demand video will be available, including full event replays and highlights. Silverlight will be used for an “enhanced playback mode” and will allow full screen viewing “that is as good or better than anything on the Internet today.” There will also be metadata overlays that enable viewers to additional content like results, statistics, bios, rules and expert analysis. This is good news for Microsoft and their nascent Silverlight platform. What I want to know is how much Microsoft paid NBC to use this. It’s highly unlikely they chose it without an additional nudge. Testing a new platform at the Olympics carries significant risk. And since no one really uses Silverlight yet, this will require millions of people to download the Silverlight framework before they can use the advanced features of the site. → Read More
This is starting to get interesting. First Radiohead released “In Rainbows” Online, then Saul Williams released the Trent Reznor produced “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust.” Now it seems that movie studios are, at least to some degree, following suit. While filming “Jackass 2,” the crew apparently created enough content for two entire films. In the spirit of this new Online distribution model, Paramount and MTV has decided to stream “Jackass 2.5″ in conjunction with Blockbuster via Microsoft Silverlight. It’s essentially a collection of DVD extras and commentary, but it’s cut together like an extra of sorts, hence the 2.5. Highlights include The Cajun Obstacle Course, The Poof and a whole lot of homoeroticism. At any rate, if you’re a fan of “Jackass” and the movies, it’s about an hour of hilarity and it’s free. Jackass 2.5 → Read More
Microsoft PR sent out a link to this slick new Windows Home Server Demo this afternoon. Nothing really notable about it (although I do want one)…except the demo is in Flash. Microsoft has been pushing their alternative framework to Flash called Silverlight since announcing it earlier this year, even going so far as to have a new search user interface created that shows off some of the Silverlight features. Did the memo never get to the Windows Home Server team? Eat your own dogfood, or else no one else will. Of course, everyone has Flash on their computer, and few have Silverlight installed. So what does Microsoft want more – Silverlight installations or sales of Windows Home Servers? I guess the answer is – servers. → Read More
LiveStation, the Microsoft Research/Skinkers P2P IPTV solution we reported on last night, has sent out beta invites to a number of users. I’ve tested it and have included screen shots below. Frankly, there isn’t much to report. This is a Silverlight application and currently works only on Windows machines. If Silverlight is not installed on your machine it will be during the setup process. Once installed, a window opens on your desktop and BBC World News is shown. It is exactly like turning on a one-station television (only BBC works with the application currently). You can watch the station live, turn the volume up or down, see information on the show and what’s up next, and close the application. You can’t fast forward or reverse the program or pause it. There is no time shifting feature at all. It’s fun, but I won’t be opening it again until it includes time shifting capabilities and a lot more content. The company left a comment on our original post asking us and others not to compare it to Joost or Slingbox. In the demo video they distributed yesterday, however, the presenter brought up both of those products and made his own favorable comparisons to those startups. Screen shots below. → Read More
http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf The video above shows a demo of a new product called Livestation, a peer-to-peer live television broadcasting application built on the Microsoft Silverlight platform. This is a Microsoft Research initiative, built in partnership with a London company called Skinkers. In the demo, the presenter calls this a “Slingbox without the box,” and it is an apt comparison. However, the solution will require the broadcaster to work with Livestation, whereas the Slingbox allows users to broadcast their normal TV to IP connected devices. In its current form, this is not a competitor to Joost, Babelgum and the other time-shifted TVIP startups we’ve covered. The service shows live television only, although presumably it could also be used to stream time-shifted content as well. And while it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video. If you’re looking for a deployed “Slingbox without the box” check out Orb, which we’ve covered here and on MobileCrunch. Or go buy a Slingbox. → Read More
Microsoft will announce the private beta launch of Popfly this morning, a new Silverlight application that allows users to create mashups, widgets and other applications using a very cool and easy to use web-based graphical interface. We previously covered the launch of Yahoo Pipes and compared five different applications that let you mix data and build applications online. At the time we mentioned how this space was really heating up – and how Pipes from Yahoo simplified the creation of mashups and mini-applications by providing a drag+drop interface. Microsoft are the latest entrants in this market, and they have completely leapfrogged every other application we have seen so far. Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors above because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen. With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services. See additional screen shots and a link to a screencast on the Popfly overview page here. Seeing applications like Popfly coming out of Microsoft is something that I couldn’t have imagined all too long ago – and together with the recent Silverlight announcements (which we were also very excited about) the new Microsoft is really starting to come out through their product releases. Popfly so far seems to be another potential big hit from the new Microsoft under Ray Ozzie (Ozziesoft). Invites: While the private beta is very limited (even within Microsoft), we do have TEN invitations to send out. Leave a comment about how you would use Popfly and the best (or funniest) ten will be sent an invitation to the application. → Read More
The announcements around Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform yesterday were important to anyone who is thinking about where the web will evolve. For those of us watching the demos at the Mix conference the immediate importance of it was apparent – Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications. It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy. After the keynote, the main topic of conversation in the hallways centered on just how effectively Microsoft carried out its execution of Adobe. We didn’t cover the news as it broke – I was on stage at Mix and Nik Cubrilovic was denied a press pass due to a mixup and got in very late. There was a lot of early coverage but mostly from journalists who hadn’t been properly briefed on it or who rushed to post quickly. In preparation for the Mix Q&A, Nik and I had well over 10 hours of briefing on Silverlight, with very senior Microsoft employees (Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, Charles Fitzgerlad) as well as members of the product team that actually build Silverlight (Keith Smith and Brian Goldfarb). Nik wrote a very long post yesterday afternoon on Silverlight, long after the initial news broke. From a pageview standpoint, the post was a loser for us. We would have been far better off doing a one-paragraph post at 10 am announcing the news, and by the time we wrote in the late afternoon the buzz had worn off somewhat. I’m glad we waited to write. Nik (a long-time developer) was most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) and how fast it is (it blows away native Javascript routines – without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight). The news today about Silverlight is significantly more thoughtful. Microsoft-hater Steve Gillmor gives it a thumbs up and says “the engineering behind this is stunning.” Robert Scoble, who’s angry at Microsoft for not giving him a free pass to the Mix event, says “Microsoft “rebooted the Web” yesterday.” The list goes on. If you are a developer or an entrepreneur, take a look at Silverlight, download some of the sample applications, and take the time to understand how it can affect your product. Our overview post is here, and our podcast interview with the product manager who built it is here. Some of the most interesting → Read More
Update: Listen to our podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb at TalkCrunch. Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complementing it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform. During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio. When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web – in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages. The CLR The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it. The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in → Read More
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