Archive for October, 2007
The Halo 3 Soundtrack coming November 20
October 14, 2007Skydrive is now 1GB big
October 12, 2007My favorite Windows Live team released an update today with a bunch of small but useful features. The highlight of course being the 1 GB of storage space. Here is the summary
- 1 gb of storage space!
- Ability to share file and send invitation to anybody. Prior to this, only you could share with your hotmail contacts alone.
- RSS feeds!! – Yes you can totally subscribe to a folder via RSS feed and get updates!
- More information about the activities that happen on files
Microsoft 
Bill Gates Vs Steve Jobs presentation style
October 2, 2007Garr Reynolds’ from Presentation Zen has this interesting post titled "Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs". He goes on to compare the presentation style of "Apples" to "Oranges" (pun intended) and makes some interesting points. In other words, a pretty well-written post which compares the presentation styles of Gates and Jobs.
However the one important thing to remember is that Bill Gates is a technologist or an engineer and Steve Jobs is more like a marketing guy if you will. In some way this is analogous to an actor and a star in the movie world. Not necessarily every actor is a super star and not necessarily a guy with great charm who is a star is the great actor.
via MicrosoftWatch
Live Search 2.0
October 1, 2007Live Search turned two this month. The Live Search team has announced its next version which appears very promising than its predecessor. Not only is it significantly better than the current version in terms of results and experience, it is also up there. Satya Nadella, the chief of Live Search claims it is as good as Google and better than Yahoo! Personally, I am very impressed with what they have done and this does reinforce the fact that Microsoft is in this for the longer term.
It appears that the updates are being rolled out over a few weeks and so every one may not see it. But you can try it out @ http://www.live.com/?searchOnly=true&FORM=PRESS. This will put you temporary on the updated servers where you can experience the new search.
This update has the following interesting… well… updates.
1. The Look and feel – The team has done an excellent job with the new font selection, spacing and presentation in general. I am glad to see the dull blue font color go away! The homepage also looks refreshing.
2. The most important part. The results. Live Search team has quadrupled the index size. And the relevance is much much more better.
3. The web speller is much more good at suggestions. It can now detect if users did not include a space between two words.
4. Better stop words handling.
5. Improved verticals and better integration of web search with the verticals. This update is primarily focused on the following verticals.
- Entertainment – http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Britney+Spears&form=PRESS
- Shopping – http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Digital+cameras&mkt=en-us&scope=&FORM=PRESS
- Health – preview @ https://health.live.com.
- Local – Coming in October
- Celebrity xRank- A new destination to find how celebrities are doing in the search spaces. When I search for Aishwariya Rai and get an instant answer with xrank, Live search ought to be something right.
- Video search – A far more improved Video search with video thumbnails!
Over the coming weeks, I will blog in detail about the verticals as the Live Search rolls out. Stay tuned.
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