A few things you need to be aware of with the new tools and code for Push Notifications in WP7:

1. In your WP7 application’s WMAppManifest.xml file, ensure you have listed out the capabilities that your application will be utilizing. In this case, for your application to support Push Notifications, at the least you’d need to add the following to your WMAppManifest.xml:

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
</Capabilities>

2. Your application needs to have an entry for the publisher. Perform the following steps since the default entry for Publisher is empty by default (changes in bold and red):

   <App xmlns="" ProductID="{5286c8f1-e346-4a8b-a0c9-1b37aa9bdc9d}" Title="PushTest" RuntimeType="SilverLight"
   
   Version="1.0.0.0" Genre="NormalApp"  Author="ai" Description="pushtest" Publisher="ai">

3. There are a couple of changes in the actual payload that gets sent. Inside the application that actually posts the notification (through Microsoft’s push notification server) to Windows Phone 7, the payload now needs to look like (changes in bold and red):

   string toastMessage = "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nX-WindowsPhone-Target: toast\r\n\r\n" +
   
   "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>" +

   "<wp:Notification xmlns:wp=\"WPNotification\">" +

   "<wp:Toast>" +

   "<wp:Text1><string></wp:Text1>" +

   "</wp:Toast>" + "</wp:Notification>";

   I’ve used an example payload for a Toast Notification above, but similar changes apply for other types of notifications.

That’s it! I’ve tested this with the ‘Push Tweets’ sample app:

Related articles:

1. Changes in the April release of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools
2. MSDN: Send a Push Notification for Windows Phone 7
3. Push tweets to a Windows Phone 7 device (via push notifications)
4. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh

@ai

Foursquare is one of the leading location aware applications out there today with a rapidly growing user base. They’re really hot right now – they exploded dramatically at SXSW this year. We take it for granted when things “just work” – I can’t recall Foursquare having any kind of downtime at SXSW in spite of the explosive usage they saw that week and this is a huge testament to their dev team that managed the required scale so well.

Some of you may have seen the Foursquare Windows Phone 7 app that was demo’d on stage at MIX last week. The app looks amazing and “critics agree” ;)

Here’s what the app looks like. For your information, it’s around 11.10pm right now on March 24, 2010, and I’m at my hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, NV for CTIA Spring.

Now this is something that’s a little different from what you may have seen before. You can see where your nearby friends are on a map. I’ll be honest with you – it was till I was using the Foursquare app on Windows Phone 7 when I first got to Vegas that I new Brett Petersel was in Vegas for CTIA. I happened to notice another pushpin on the map, clicked on it, and it was him.

Tonight he happens to be at the Benihana which is near the Hilton:

At MIX, I’d put out a teaser about the ‘Society’ tab within the app. Now, some time back, the Foursquare team told me about their firehose. I asked Naveen Selvadurai about a practical use of the firehose within a mobile app, and his response: “that’s your job! ;)” So I thought to myself – when I’m at an event, like CTIA, what I want to know is where it’s going down right now. Where are people checking in right now? So here’s how we use the foursquare firehose within the WP7 Foursquare app.

Clicking on the Society tab, takes me to this screen:

The number of checkins is a real-time view of checkins that have been accumulated in the past few minutes. Panning around on the map a little bit to see where the action is tonight:

Just a few minutes later, I refreshed the map again. I guess Aria’s the place to be at tonight (at least right now):

This application was written in C# and Silverlight and is an example of how we can push the boundaries of user experience and consuming real-time data within a Windows Phone 7 app. You like?

@ai

PS: Talk about Foursquare exploding, I saw this in the Las Vegas Hilton:

I believe in Dave McClure

A slight tangent off the main topic… I feel the need to help you understand some of the champions behind this movement. Especially that of Dave McClure’s…

As many know, the interaction portion of SXSW is the ultimate event for a tech geek. If you’re involved in technology, you want to go to SXSW. The unfortunate part is that the event has grown ridiculously over the last few years. Apparently SXSW is one of the only tech events that is seeing substantial growth in terms of number of attendees year-over-year. That poses a problem for young and cash-strapped entrepreneurs this day in age. Affording to stay in Austin during SXSW isn’t exactly going to be cost-friendly.

When I was in Austin for SXSW, I met a couple of young entrepreneurs (I haven’t run this post by them, and so I feel it’s appropriate to conceal their names for now). They have a small but fast-growing startup. I was curious to know how these young kids who’re working on a startup that isn’t making money yet, could afford to come to Austin during SXSW. They said Dave McClure helped them – he pulled out his credit card and had them charge their passes (and/or airline tickets, can’t remember now) to his card. As far as I know, this company is trying to get Dave to be an advisor (and maybe an investor) but as of then, Dave wasn’t an investor or an advisor to the startup.

This is unsolicited – Dave would’ve never mentioned this to me. I’ve known one of the kids working on this startup for a little over a year. If he wasn’t comfortable, he wouldn’t have mentioned this to me. This is how much Dave believes in startups and this story warmed my heart. His calling is to help startups.

So he helped a startup – big deal, right? Yes, big deal. The man’s got a family and is involved in at least 19 startups that we know of (if I remember correctly, he worked with over 40 startups last calendar year alone). He helps organize Startup2Startup, a monthly event for entrepreneurs to learn from one another. He helps organize the Geeks on a Plane trips. I stalk follow him on Foursquare – almost every checkin has something to do with meeting a startup somewhere. Dave McClure believes in startups, and I believe in Dave McClure.

There are some key “activists” who are a part of this organization.

Brad Feld

Brad is an investor based in Boulder, CO. I first met Brad through TechStars, a seed-stage investment program and startup accelerator based in Boulder. From Brad’s blog:

from StartupVisa Momentum

…

I have no idea how to address the entire immigration issue in the US.  However, I strongly believe that we should make it easy for people to start new entrepreneurial ventures in the US.  As a result, the EB-5 is an interesting visa to consider.  The simple version is that if a foreign national invests up to $1,000,000 in a US company that creates at least 10 jobs, the foreign national can apply for the visa.  This seems backwards to me.  Rather than grant the visa to an investor, let’s grant the visa to the entrepreneur.  If we change the EB-5 so that foreign nationals starting US companies that are backed by qualified US investors can apply for the visa it seems like we can preserve the general construct of the EB-5 while applying it to a more compelling recipient (the entrepreneur).

…

Other related posts on this topic by Brad:

• StartupVisa Video and Congressman Jared Polis Comments
• I Don’t Understand Our US Immigration Policy
• Solving the H-1B Visa Issue

Manu Kumar

Manu is an investor based in the Silicon Valley. Manu is an immigrant and has a great story of being a successful entrepreneur turned VC:

from My story and support for the Founders Visa

…

I have chatted first hand with founders of companies that are from Singapore, Ireland, India and various other countries who have to contend with visa issues. These visa issues often become one of the significant hurdles to pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams here in the United States. I am now a bonafide citizen of the United States and as a US citizen, I feel strongly that the best thing the United States can do is to attract and retain the smartest people from all over the world. Having a Founders Visa would not only encourage the formation of new ventures that would create jobs and prosperity in the United States, but would be one more way for the US to attract and retain top talent from all over the world. PG, Brad and others have already addressed how the vetting and qualification process can work to ensure that the right people are allowed into the US. Modifying the criteria for the EB-5 visa category such that the investment dollars can come from US-based venture capital firms seems to be the most efficient way to make a Founders Visa happen.

…

Paul Graham

Paul is a partner at Y Combinator, a seed stage venture fund. Paul’s probably been one of the few people who has been vocal about this initiative from a very early time.

from The Founder Visa

…

Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. If we assume 4 people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that’s 2500 new companies. Each year. They wouldn’t all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.

…

Eric Reis

Eric is another strong proponent of the Startup Visa movement and helped lead our trip to DC.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is a popular VC and a prolific blogger.

from Startup Visas

…

His risk taking and the innovations of him and his partners and team members are creating a business in the US and creating jobs and wealth that will largely stay in the US. And he cannot even get into our country right now.

This is nuts. I’ve got an issue with our immigration policies generally, but specifically we should modify our rules around Visas for founders and key team members of startups that are at least partially based in the US, particularly if they have been well financed by angels and VCs.

…

Other related posts on this topic by Fred:

• Lightweight Advocacy
• The Startup Visa (update)

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek is also a prolific blogger and has insightful posts about entrepreneurship.

from The Startup Visa And Why The Xenophobes Need To Go Back Into Their Caves

…

After all, this visa is about creating American jobs and moving innovation here which would otherwise happen in other countries. We can boost the economy without any cost to taxpayers. It’s not about admitting H-1B visa holders who sometimes make Americans compete for high-paying jobs, but bringing in entrepreneurs who expand the pie for everyone. Not only do the Democrats support this, but so do the Republicans (their thought leader, Newt Gingrich blogged about my previous TechCrunch post on immigration and his staff told me that he was a supporter of the startup visa). So this seems like a no-brainer.

…

News Articles

The movement has been all on the news wires. Here are a couple of recent pertinent posts:

• BusinessWeek : VCs Push StartUp Visa Act

• InformationWeek : Startup Visa Act Proposed To Create US Jobs

Current State of Affairs

On February 24, 2010, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) & Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced The Startup Visa Act in Washington. The full text of the proposed legislation is here. This follows US Representative Jared Polis (D, CO-2), who has introduced a similar bill as part of comprehensive immigration reform in the House – H.R. 4259, the Employment Benefit Act of 2009. Later, HR 4259 was included in the overall House Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill.

I’m told that it will take a monumental effort for a bill to become a law. There are bigger fish to fry, understandably so. But we’re much further along than we could’ve ever imagined being at this stage.

The White House is…

As I’d mentioned earlier in what’s turning out to be an epic blog post, McClure, Ries and Feld helped us get to DC and meet with senior leaders of several government entities such as the USCIS, Department of Commerce, Small Business Administration and many others. It was bad-ass enough that we actually met these folks in the White House. What was even more surprising to me was how they met with us…

Fundamentally, everyone we spoke with, got it. This is an open and young government. Maybe more open than any other government out there (not that I have a lot of experience). From the get-go we were greeted by extremely friendly people and everyone took the time to meet us and know about each of us. It was very obvious that some of these were touchy areas that they couldn’t dive into more detail about. But it was so amazingly refreshing to hear directly from people working on some of the hottest areas that are in dire need of reform. Some of us noticed that a majority of the representatives we spoke with were probably in their mid to late 30s. I’m purposefully avoiding going into more detail as we were specifically asked to keep some things off the record and I want to respect their ask.

At some point during the conversation, one of the representatives leading the discussion told us about how we’ll soon read about this being one of the White House’s efforts to be more open and receptive to change (parapharsing) (which made me wonder – were they doing this and being so nice and receptive because they had to? Only time will tell…) But I want to believe that this is a sign that the government finally gets it – that when true change is needed, the government will ensure this law will go into effect without ‘baggage’ holding it back.

@ai

[Photo Credits: Crunchbase.com, StartupVisa.com]

Not to oversimplify things, but, you can think about creating an application using the following iterative process:

While I can’t help you a whole lot with the ideation, I want to drill into a little more detail about how you can Design, Develop and Test your app, and eventually Distribute and Monetize your Windows Phone 7 app. The easiest way to think about how to design and develop for Windows Phone 7 Series is to break it down in to the platform piece and the tools piece.

The Platform

Silverlight and XNA

As we’d mentioned earlier, the primary development platforms will comprise exclusively of Silverlight and XNA. The Silverlight platform will be a superset of Silverlight 3 with some specific APIs and features that cater to the phone. The .NET Compact Framework, as we know it today, will not be exposed in Windows Phone 7 Series.

Location and Push Notification Services

The need to get a device user’s current pinpoint location has become increasingly important to mobile application developers. We’ll be exposing APIs for developers to get a user’s current location. The API in turn will use a variety of techniques, including GPS, Cell Tower Information (where possible) and WiFi based lookup (where possible).

Developers also want to be able to asynchronously send information down to devices that have their applications installed. This is typically information pertinent to an application and the services they expose (like informing a user asynchronously that a friend may have posted something on their Facebook wall, for example). To enable this scenario easily, we have the Push Notification Service, a mechanism for sending information over HTTP directly to the phone, regardless of whether or not the application is running. This information in turn can be used to send notifications to the user in the form of a ‘toast’ or by updating a live tile on the start screen.

Example of a Live Tile

Hardware Design Specification

One of the biggest questions I keep getting is about the type of Windows Phone 7 devices that will be hitting the market. This is obviously a sensitive area for developers – the software looks great, what can I expect from the hardware?

There is a single Windows Phone 7 Series hardware specification – hardware manufacturers will use this specification as a baseline to build devices that will run Windows Phone Operating System 7.0. Developers can count on the fact that all Windows Phone 7 Series hardware will include

• a powerful processor,
• 256 MB of RAM with a minimum of 4 GB Flash,
• 802.11 b/g wireless,
• capacitive only screen,
• 5 sensors – A-GPS, accelerometer, compass, proximity and light, and,
• two options for kinds of screens; WVGA at launch and HVGA coming shortly thereafter.

The Tools

With previous versions of Windows Mobile, there were a myriad of issues with trying to acquire the right tools including things like the cost of actually acquiring the tools itself, localization issues, performance (of the emulators) and many more. Charlie Kindel, the developer platform lead, and Drew Lytle, lead program manager on the developer platform, talk about how they wanted the tooling to be “friction free” – easy to acquire, easy to install, easy to get developing.

You can head over to the http://developer.windowsphone.com portal and download a free tool, called the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview, that will bring down the requisite pieces for you to able to developer for Windows Phone 7 Series. This download is about 3MBs big. These requisite pieces are also free and will include:

• Preview of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone if you do not have Visual Studio 2010 installed, Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio 2010 if you have Visual Studio 2010 installed
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator

Designers are a crucial piece to our application development story. Especially since Silverlight is one of the key developer platforms on board, we want to enable designers to be able to do their jobs well. Expression Blend is a tool that helps designers design Silverlight based applications. Today, we have a preview of Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone available which is also free. Christian Schormann is the authority on our team on Expression Blend – be sure to read his blog post on Expression Blend 4.

All that said, now imagine being able to use Expression Blend to design your applications, Visual Studio to complete the development and being able to create a sweet Windows Phone application that you can easily test on a highly performant emulator. *drool*

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

Windows Phone 7 Emulator

Distribute and Monetize

Once you’re done designing, developing and testing, you want to be able to distribute your application and possibly monetize. There are two components to this piece, one is the developer portal where you can submit your applications, the other the Windows Phone Marketplace client that will help you acquire applications from your device and/or your computer. The Windows Phone Marketplace will be the exclusive way to download apps to your Windows Phone 7 Series device (we will provide avenues for developers to ‘unlock’ their phones for testing purposes). We will furnish information on submitting applications to the Marketplace at a later time.

On the device, the Windows Phone Marketplace is it’s own hub. The layout is beautiful, and it will help consumers discover apps and games easily. There are also hooks to discover relevant applications through other hubs, like being able to find a music application from the Music and Videos hub, for example.

One of the key features that have been added to this implementation has been the ability for developers to programmatically support a trial mode within their application. This way consumers have the option of trying before they buy an app. Developers will also be able to ‘deep link’ to the applications they have developed and furnished on the Marketplace from their own website, thereby making it easier for consumers to download apps.

And, students who are registered for Dreamspark can register on the Windows Phone Marketplace and submit up to two applications for free.

Ideate, Design + Develop + Test Today

• We have a bunch of resources going live to help you get going. Your one stop shop to get all the required content is http://developer.windowsphone.com
• Charlie Kindel’s post: The Right MIX
• Charles Petzold is working on the first ever Windows Phone 7 Series development book, titled “Programming Windows Phone 7 Series”. An e-book will be made available shortly – stay tuned.
• I want to constantly highlight applications that you are developing for Windows Phone 7 Series both on my blog as well as the Windows Team Developer Blog. So, let me know once you have an app cookin’.
• Tim Heuer’s post: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 development
• Michael Klucher’s post: Windows Phone Developer Tools + XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available Now!
• Christian Schormann’s post: Introducing Blend 4 – For Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone
• Be sure to follow our developer team @wp7dev, or individually, Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), Shawn Hargreaves (@shawnhargreaves) , Michael Klucher (@kluch), Andre Vrignaud (@ozymandias), Loke Uei Tan (@lokeuei) and Christian Schormann (@cschormann).

@ai

now playing in my head: Steve Ballmer screaming “Phone Developers” (a la the Marionette Windows Phone 7 Series app)

Developers want to

• create applications easily,
• be able to get to market quickly, and,
• have a clear path for distribution and/or monetization.

We used these as our guiding principles as we set off to build the platform.

The Developer Platform is (also) different

On Windows Phone 7 Series, the primary development platforms will comprise exclusively of Silverlight and XNA.

Silverlight

Since it was first announced back in 2007 as a cross-browser cross-platform browse plugin, Silverlight has  become one of the most widely accepted and acclaimed developer platforms. For the first time through XAML, the primary markup language that powers the design for Silverlight applications, we were able to  provide a great story for designers and developers to work together better. We want to be able to bring that power of Silverlight to our phones.

XNA

The number of people playing games on their phones has doubled in recent years. Naturally, we wanted to enable our  developers to build the best of breed, performant 2D and 3D games to target our phones. Using the XNA Framework, developers can create high performing games and target Windows Phone 7 Series.

Multiple “Screens”

With Silverlight and XNA, we’re on course to enable the best scenarios across multiple screens with the consistency of platform. Silverlight helps power applications on PCs (through the browser and out of the browser) as well as Windows Phone 7 Series. XNA helps power applications on the Zune, XBox as well as Windows Phone 7 Series.

A New Beginning

The inclusion of these platforms on the phone introduces a new beginning to our developer community. We’ve heard time and again from developers who’ve wanted to create rich applications for Windows Phones but have been limited by the capabilities of our platform. The challenges our developer community faced with the multitude of devices and the varying specifications of these devices also posed problems. And so, change was imminent.

There are definitely more pieces to the platform, like the tools, or the specific feature set that will be exposed via our APIs, or the Marketplace. We’ll be discussing all of these in much more detail at MIX.

You can read more over on Charlie’s blog – Different Means Better with the new Windows Phone Developer Experience

Be sure to follow our developer team @wp7dev, or individually, Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), Shawn Hargreaves (@shawnhargreaves) , Michael Klucher (@kluch), Andre Vrignaud (@ozymandias), Loke Uei Tan (@lokeuei), Christian Schormann (@cschormann). I hope to see you at MIX!

@ai

It’s been so very interesting to read all the press leading up to today. Some speculation, some hype, some rumor. Today, we’re announcing Windows Phone 7 Series – a different kind of phone operating system.

The genesis

The Windows Phone 7 Series was built fundamentally with the end-user, the consumer, in mind. The Windows Phone team is committed to building an operating system, which handset manufacturers integrate, and carriers sell to end-users. In the past, somewhere along the way, it may have appeared that our immediate end-users were the handset manufacturers – our end-user is the consumer. While we still want to enable innovation in the hardware space, we also want end-users to benefit from a consistent and brilliant software experience from the phone.

The creative mastermind behind most if not all aspects of this experience is Joe Belfiore, a name you may recognize as the lead of the Zune.

Given said, here are 7 things about Windows Phone 7 Series that excite me the most. Narrowing this list down to just 7 was extremely hard, that said, there’s more of where this came from.

Seven

1. Design

   The Windows Phone 7 User Experience is different from what you may have experienced before, not just with Windows (Mobile) Phones 6.X, but others. Bottom-line – the experience is intuitive – whether you are navigating on the phone, taking pictures, sending and receiving mail, looking up a person to see their latest Facebook status or trying to purchase an application, things just plain work in an intuitive fashion.
   Today, with the majority of the phones out there, all you see are pages of icons. Every now and then I find myself staring at an icon for a few seconds before I associate the icon with an application. The icon is useful to me, but not as much as the name of the application I’m about to launch. That said, the User Interface in Windows Phone 7, as JoeB likes to say, is predominantly typographical. You’ll find clear and concise text in several menus, like signs at airports or terminals that are meant to help you get to your destination quickly and easily.
   The Start experience is one that we’ve always believed is invaluable. At a glance, you want to get vital information. If you need to perform involved tasks, you may want to launch an application. The Live Tiles feature is meant for just that. More importantly, end-users can add and remove tiles to the start screen.

2. Consistency

   The experiences I’ve described above are meant to be consistent – when a user picks up a Windows Phone 7 Series device, any Windows Phone 7 Series device, the interface the user will get to experience will be the same.
   While the software experience will be consistent, users also have growing expectations of hardware, and rightfully so. We’ve set forth on defining a base Hardware Design for phones running the Windows Phone 7 Operating System – the devices will have 3 buttons along the bottom of the phone – one for going back (to whatever you were doing last), one for getting back to the Start screen, and one for Search (more on Search below). There are several consistent hardware features you will see in Windows Phone 7 devices, such as a 3.5mm headphone jack, a minimum of 5 megapixel camera, sensors like an Accelerometer or A-GPS, 480×800 resolution, capacitive dual symmetric multi-touch screens, etc.

3. Pervasive Search

   The name says it all – one click of the button on the bottom far right, and you are taken to Bing, to search locally on the device or search on the web, with the option of searching for items that are contextually location aware.

4. People are more than just contacts

   I use the ‘contacts’ feature on my phone today to call, text or email someone. This information about my contacts primarily comes from our Exchange server. While contacting a person is key, today that’s just not enough – I want to know what pictures have they recently posted, what are they currently doing, or what does this person look like today? While I prefer text to icons with applications, I prefer photographs to names of people when I’m looking someone up.
   That said, the integration with Facebook and Windows Live lets a user ‘pivot’ on a person on your phone – you’re not just looking up a contact, you’re learning more about them by associating with the social networks they might be on. I don’t need to launch a specific app just to learn about my sister’s latest Facebook status update, for example.  

5. Marketplace++

   We all know that the notion of an on-deck Marketplace where users can discover applications, games and music is paramount both for users and the developer community. The Marketplace experience, everything from what you see on the device to the portal that developers get to use to submit applications, has received major facelifts. As much as I’d like to, I can’t dive into too much detail just yet, but the experience will want users to keep using the Marketplace.

6. XBox Live Integration

   Game changing – no pun intended. From what we’ve heard, this is a dream come true for XBox gamers.

7. Zune Integration

   The reviews for the ZuneHD have been amazing. The experience that the Zune player provides is nearly unparalleled and it is fully integrated into the phone. Your music and videos go with you on your phone.

If you haven’t already, have a go at this Channel 9 Video with JoeB demoing the experience:

Developer Platform

The developer platform on Windows Phone 7 Series deserves its own section and mention. This is the team that Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) leads, and Loke (@lokeuei) and I amongst others work on. We have so much to share about this topic, that we thought it deserved its own conference, really. So, come to MIX, and hear the likes of Charlie, Scott Guthrie, Loke and others talk about the application platform. Let me wrap this up by saying, based on what you’ve seen and heard, you’ll want to develop for this platform. Watch ’#wp7dev’ or follow ‘@wp7dev’ and ‘@ckindel’  for more.

Excited?

I hope the Windows Phone 7 Series excites you as much as it does us. We’re hoping to provide more details about the application platform soon enough so that you can start developing.

I hope to see you at MIX!

In the meanwhile, here are blog posts from fellow Windows Phone 7 Series team members:

• Hello from Seattle (@ckindel)
• Predicting the Future (@shawnhargreaves)
• Multiple Screens is the New Main Screen (@gameozymandias)
• Windows Phone 7 Series – Show and Tell

@ai

now playing in my head: “Stronger”, Kanye West

Prerequisites

The app is only available for touch screen Windows phones today. The .NET Compact Framework v3.5 is a pre-requisite for you to be able to run the application on the phone. You’d also need a phone that runs either Windows Mobile 6.1 or a Windows Mobile 6.5.

Get me them goods

You can get the goods by emailing admin@touchality.com or submitting your email address in this webform: http://touchality.com/WinMoSquare/

Futures

This is a beta. We definitely want to add features to expose the leaderboard, add new friends on the fly, and incorporate any new APIs that Foursquare may expose. There are also plans to submit this application to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and that will happen as soon as we hit v1 of the app and we’re confident that we’re beyond a beta.

Demo

Here I’ve installed WinMoSquare on an HTC HD2. I’ll let the screen captures do the talking as far as the functionality of the app itself goes:

Last but not least, I want to thank the team at Touchality for developing the app. Foursquare away!

ai

PS: And thanks to @kylemce for the name “WinMoSquare” :)

At SXSW this year, I noticed a few trends –

• everyone was exchanging business cards with everyone else,
• by hour 2 of being at the event on any given day, people would run out of business cards,
• by the end of each day, I’d have my pockets full of other people’s business cards, and,
• almost everyone I met was on twitter.

I make a conscious effort to convert physical business cards to contacts on Outlook. I really really do. But when you have over 150 business cards that you’ve collected over a week, you are limited in terms of what you can do with those cards.

The problem

(I’m going to try to use the “Dave McClure technique” of explaining the problem and the solution. Granted, I don’t have any numbers to back up my claims at this time.)

Business cards.

1. It’s cumbersome to carry around 100s of business cards.
2. The cards you receive some times never make it in electronic fashion to your computer.
3. You’re wasting paper by using business cards.
4. Some times when you meet that really important person, you almost instantly want to acknowledge the fact that you met them. I’ve noticed this as a trend as well – every now and then at a conference someone would ask me what my twitter handle was, and would want to send me a message right then and there. I’ve done this myself, here’s a personal example:

   

5. Some existing business card solutions almost force you to exchange this information in an electronic fashion instantaneously. That doesn’t really translate to how business cards work in the real world today. When you exchange physical business cards with someone, you are not obligated to electronically exchange this information as well. You’re expected to go back home and maybe transfer this on to your computer. Some solutions require you to hand out your phone number – that’s way too personal. Twitter handles are not that personal. I was really impressed that Shoeboxed slipped me an envelope under my hotel room door at SXSW this year, and prompted me to send them my business cards (which they should’ve parsed and converted to electronic format). It’s been over 6 months and I still haven’t heard back from them about the business cards that I’d mailed to them.
6. In some instances you don’t know how you met this person. Some people are prudent enough to carry around a pen, and usually make a note behind a business card.

The solution

Announcing TwtMycard – exchange business cards over Twitter. 

Here’s how it works :

1. Sign on to http://twtmycard.com using your Twitter credentials (we use OAuth).
2. Submit your profile information or upload a vCard, which we will parse for you.
3. You can set your profile to be public or private. If your profile is set to be private, your profile can only be seen by people you have explicitly sent your card to.
4. Follow @twtmycard (the ‘bot’ will automatically follow you back).
5. When you meet someone who you want to share your profile information with
   1. ask them for their twitter handle,
   2. send a direct message to @twtmycard with their handle.

      For example. I’ve just @ksmarshall, and I want to share my card with him.

      

   3. TwtMyCard will then send that person (ksmarshall in this example) a message with your profile information. The bot will act as a proxy, and send a tweet, @ message, to the recipient. That way this tweet doesn’t show up on YOUR twitter stream.

      
      (note that tweet was sent by @twtmycard, not by me)
      

   4. That’s it! Since my profile is public, visit http://twtmycard.com/anandiyer and you will see this :

      

What’s under the hood?

First off, my friend Kevin Marshall (@ksmarshall) deserves a HUGE pat on the back for this. I first had this idea first at SxSW and had created an ugly-as-sin prototype several months later. I’d coded it using WebForms in ASP.NET and C# and hosted it on Windows Azure. I shared the idea with Kevin, who basically threw away all my code and rewrote the ENTIRE thing in ASP.NET MVC and of course made it look ridiculously pretty.

There’s a front-end Windows Azure web role that you get to see, and a background worker role (we call it the ‘bot’) that wakes up every few minutes, reads all the direct messages (since the last time it read DMs), parses the message, and sends @ messages to the recipient with a link to the sender’s profile.

All the profile data is hosted on Azure Table Storage.

Future

TwtMyCard is VERY much a beta an alpha project. There’s still a decent amount of work to be done.

1. Add Microsoft Tag Support.
2. Cancel your account.
3. Add EULA and information about user privacy.
4. Add context to your tweet (so that you can recollect how you met this person)
5. Support changes in Twitter uids

Have ideas for us? Add it on our uservoice page.

What does this mean for Kevin and I?

Neither of us are quitting are day jobs. Period. This is purely a passion project. We’ll continue to work on it on the side. Maybe :)

In all seriousness, this project has NOTHING to do with my employer, Microsoft Corp., or Kevin’s employer, Clarity Consulting. These companies should not be held liable for anything related to TwtMyCard. Please dont hold us liable for any data you store on TwtMyCard. While we promise to not use your information maliciously, we cannot be held liable if something goes wrong – this is very much an alpha product.

Start using it now!

http://www.twtmycard.com

-Kevin and “ai”

Switching gears… I attended Startup2Startup this evening, an event Dave McClure puts together every month. The title of this month’s talk was CeWebrity DeathMatch: Jason Calacanis vs Guy Kawasaki on “Is Apple Becoming Big Brother?” This obviously interested me a lot, given my new role on Windows Mobile, the recent issues that have surfaced with Google Voice on the iPhone etc. The conversation this evening jumped around quite significantly, but a few things Guy Kawsaaki said, especially about Dan’l Lewin and Microsoft, really stood out:

Disclosure : I used to (indirectly) work in Dan’l Lewin’s organization on BizSpark till about 2 weeks ago.

Dave McClure (@ 55:58) : How about Microsoft these days? I was actually surprised that there weren’t that many hands  that were going up about Microsoft being evil, because, … I’d say they’ve had a little of the edge taken off lately. I don’t think they’re as on top of their evil as they used to be.

Guy Kawasaki (@ 56:12) : You know I think a lot of that is because … well, I think one of the smartest things that Microsoft has ever done is create the Mountain View campus. And at that Mountain View campus which they, you know, you can use that conference facility all the time, it’s really cheap and it’s really convenient [Dave McClure adds, “it’s a lovely facility”]. And so now, rather than think there’s these evil people in Washington, now there are these people in Mountain View, we’re going to a conference there, and they’ only charging us for food, 20 bucks a head, so life is good. Dan’l Lewin single handedly is changing the impression of Microsoft in Silicon Valley because now they’re making sort of warm body contact, it’s not just, oh, Bill Gates is plotting the end of freedom. In Seattle.

At some point this evening, Guy had made a comment that resonated very well with the table that I was sitting at. Guy said that he never consciously says anything bad about a product, a company or a person – it’s just not in his nature to do that. And that really showed this evening. While Calacanis and him were involved in somewhat serious banter, it never occurred to me that Guy was trying to talk anyone down. Even when Ross Mayfield asked a question about what Google and Apple can do to be more open, Guy didn’t really talk either of those companies down – he simply responded by wishing they would be more open, more open like Microsoft:

Guy Kawasaki (@ 01:02:38) : Maybe Dan’l Lewin is the only open guy at Microsoft, and it’s all an illusion, but my impression is that… I have to tell you that in all the dealings I’ve had with Microsoft people, I’ve never thought that they are evil. They were very friendly, they were efficient, more efficient than Apple people, and, they didn’t carry on with this air of superiority.

Here’s the video from the event this evening.

As a Microsoft employee and evangelist, I had a huge grin on my face when I heard these comments. I was surveying the room as Guy was speaking and saying these positive things about us, and I saw a lot of people nodding in agreement, including Jason Calacanis. For the past few years that I’ve worked at Microsoft, I can’t remember when a week has gone by and someone here in the valley didn’t have something positive to say about Dan’l. This social capital that Dan’l has accrued over the years is obviously doing wonders for Microsoft and the way we’re being perceived here.

Thank you, Guy.

“ai”

PS: Some of you may recall that Guy had made similar comments when he interviewed Steve Ballmer at MIX a couple of years ago:

GUY KAWASAKI: I will tell you, you know, Dan’l Lewin and his crew down in Mountain View, I think they’ve done wonders for your image in Silicon Valley. Just having that facility and basically anybody can rent that facility and use it, so now where Microsoft was this Evil Empire up in Washington, now it’s in Mountain View, and you use their facilities, and it’s got great food, cheap, fast, great A/V. It’s a really nice facility. I just hope you have more of those facilities around, because I really think that just letting people use the Microsoft facility and seeing Microsoft employees touching them, has done wonders for you in Silicon Valley. (Laughter.)

Mobile partners from around the globe are committed to updating or expanding their portfolios to include phones with Windows Mobile 6.5.

• In North America: Mobile operators AT&T, Bell Mobility, Sprint, TELUS and Verizon Wireless, and phone manufacturers HP, HTC Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung and Toshiba Corp.
• In Europe: Mobile operators Orange, Deutsche Telekom AG and Vodafone Group Plc, and phone manufacturers Acer, HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba
• In Latin America: Mobile operator TIM Brazil, and phone manufacturers HTC, LG Electronics and Samsung
• In Asia Pacific: Mobile operators NTT DoCoMo Inc., SoftBank Mobile Corp., SK Telecom, Telstra and WILLCOM Inc., and phone manufacturers Acer Inc., HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba

What’s new in 6.5?

• Consumer oriented features – A Windows phone lets you get your work done and still have fun, wherever you are. We have been working on making Windows Phones more consumer friendly while retaining our strong enterprise focused applications, such as Outlook, Word, etc.
• Stay connected – Connect to powerful online services so the information, contacts and apps you need are always at your fingertips.
• Better UI, Better UX
  • A new home screen with customizable widgets that display glance-able updates, such as news, weather, traffic and more, from your favorite Web services.
  • An improved user interface focused on finger touch and the ability to cut through clutter to accomplish what you want. Windows phones enable a number of gestures that take advantage of the new physics engine to make it fun and easy to use the phone with your finger. Windows phones support resistive touch, which can be operated with one hand and uses pressure to activate the touch feature.

Lock Screen


Today screen

Programs Menu

• New Browser – Internet Explorer Mobile, a powerful new browser where websites will look the same on your phone as they do on the PC so it’s easy to check in for a flight, get directions or pay a bill from wherever you are. Internet Explorer Mobile is built on the same technologies as its desktop counterpart, Internet Explorer, and brings the mobile browsing experiences on par with what people expect from their desktop computers.
  • High quality mobile browsing – Using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, Internet Explorer Mobile displays Web pages on the phone in the same quality as on the desktop, allowing consumers to experience their content in the layout they enjoy. Panning and zooming capabilities, as well as mouse navigation for non-touch phones, helps people easily find and enjoy what they are looking for while browsing the Web.
  • Rich media experiences – Internet Explorer Mobile will support the rich experiences that many Web pages are built on, such as Adobe Flash. This will enable people to view Flash-based video content, like YouTube, at the same level of quality as if they were using their desktop computers.
  • Desktop consistent AJAX support - Through the support of Jscript version 5.7 in Internet Explorer Mobile, developers will now be able to deliver desktop-consistent AJAX Web experiences up to date to that of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Mobile devices.
  • Best-in-class mobile Web transactions – With the newest experiences in Internet Explorer Mobile, Microsoft brings the mobile Web browsing experience on par with what people have come to expect from their desktops – the ability to easily view Web pages and multimedia on the Web and complete transactions, from banking to Facebook updates.

Internet Explorer rendering http://bing.com

Internet Explorer rendering http://united.com

• Sync your on-device data – My Phone, a free service, which provides Web sync of valuable data from the phone, like pictures, music and texts, to a Web portal for safe keeping and sharing.
• Download and install apps easily – Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a new, rich application marketplace available on Windows phones which allow people to easily find, install and experience the applications you want

Which phones are upgradeable to 6.5?

Some current Windows Mobile 6.1 phones will be updateable to Windows Mobile 6.5 if they meet hardware requirements. Ultimately, it’s our partners’ decision whether their phones will support the upgrade.

The Samsung Jack with AT&T, the HTC Diamond 2, the HTC Touch Pro 2, and LG phones Eigen and HQ, along with four new Windows Mobile 6.5 devices from Acer have announced to offer Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrades.

Why “Windows phone”?

As we move into the consumer space, we need to adjust our language to be more approachable and friendly. Windows phone fits naturally into consumer language and users can easily relate given the popularity of the Windows brand.

When will My Phone be available?

My Phone is available today for all users of Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1 phones will and can be downloaded at http://sn1-p1.myphone.microsoft.com/. My Phone will be available on Windows phones beginning on October 6, 2009.

My Phone Sync Screen


My Phone Syncing

What is Windows Marketplace for Mobile?

A rich and integrated marketplace for searching, browsing and purchasing mobile applications from Windows phones based on Windows Mobile 6.5, or from a PC, by simply using a Windows Live ID. For developers, the marketplace presents yet another opportunity to generate revenue by selling applications, but now with direct access to millions of Windows phone users. For mobile operators, it provides opportunity to increase data plan attach rates and generate a new revenue stream from application sales.

ISVs and developers will set their own price for applications, some will be available for free. We’re doing all we can to help generate revenue for ISVs and developers to encourage innovation and attract shoppers by delivering strong value and a great experience. Our model will encourage developers to sell their applications at a price that reflects their true value to customers.

What is the Race to Market challenge?

When you submit your mobile app to the Windows Marketplace, you’ll be eligible to win the Race to Market Challenge and exciting prizes. The Race to Market Challenge will reward the developer whose paid application earns the most revenue within the contest period and the developer whose free application is downloaded the most within the contest period. Winners will receive a prize package including a Microsoft Surface table and developer kit, free online marketing and promotion of their application, plus a one-of-a-kind trophy. Visit http://www.mobilethisdeveloper.com/ for more details.

Stay connected

• Twitter – @wmdev
• Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/wmdev
• Our website – http://developer.windowsmobile.com
• The Windows Phone Blog – http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/default.aspx
• You can also meet members of the Windows phone team in person at these events:
  • Mobilize on 9/10 in San Francisco, CA
  • TechCrunch50 on 9/13 and 9/14 in San Francisco, CA
  • CTIA Wireless on 10/7-10/9 in San Diego, CA

“ai”

Update: Here is Stephanie Ferguson’s launch announcement post: Windows phones are Coming on October 6th! and our PressPass announcement : Microsoft to Deliver New Generation of Windows Phones on Oct. 6

Windows^® Marketplace for Mobile is Microsoft’s mobile application and games store that will be released with the launch of Windows Phones later this fall providing over 30M Windows phone customers with a convenient and confident way to discover and download the apps that make their phone theirs.

· Senior Product Manager, Windows Marketplace.  This senior product manager role is responsible for driving strategy and execution of deployment and market development partnerships with Mobile Operators and other distribution partners in partnership with our field and business development to expand and grow the reach of Windows Marketplace worldwide.  Redmond, WA

· Regional Merchandising Manager (RMM), North America. The RMM, North America will drive day-to-day Windows Marketplace merchandising strategy and execution in the North America region.  Key responsibilities include planning & executing the programming of all available Marketplace promotional inventory for the region, as well as driving strategic promotional initiatives with developer and mobile operator partners.  Palo Alto, CA

· Regional Merchandising Manager (RMM), Europe. The RMM, Europe will own and drive day-to-day Windows Marketplace merchandising strategy and execution in the European region.  Key responsibilities include planning & executing the programming of all available Marketplace promotional inventory for the region, as well as driving strategic promotional initiatives with developer and mobile operator partners.  The position, while focused on the European region, will be based locally in Palo Alto.  Palo Alto, CA

· Merchandising Manager, Affiliate Programs. The Merchandising Manager, Affiliate Programs will define and lead a global program to enable regional Microsoft field teams to participate in Windows Marketplace merchandising to end users in their regions, as well as potential direct merchandising efforts in select markets or with key mobile operator partners.  Key responsibilities will include 1) Providing Microsoft field teams with the necessary tools, processes and resources to influence or execute Marketplace merchandising to end users in their territories; and 2) Defining an growth strategy and operational plan for the program, including budget & resource requirements, prioritization of markets and other phased approaches as necessary.  Palo Alto, CA

· Production Manager – The Production Manager will develop and manage key publishing support services for the Windows Marketplace Merchandising team on a global basis.  This key leadership role will own processes related to global publishing execution, asset production, localization and verification.  Palo Alto, CA

· Senior Product Manager, Sell-Through Services. This senior product manager role will be responsible for growing Windows Marketplace downloads and sell-through on a global basis via research and analytics programs, new merchandising strategies, and coordination with promotional assets across Microsoft.  Key responsibilities include: 1) Developing a centralized services function to provide market research, sales & campaign data, and other relevant analytics to Regional Merchandising Managers to inform and measure the effectiveness of merchandising decisions on a market, regional and global basis; and 2) Designing and implementing strategies to improve the efficiency and reach of merchandising activities, such as business rules for targeting, rotation or merchandising to multiple markets simultaneously.   Flexible.  Redmond or Palo Alto

Feel free to drop me a note with your résumé if any of these openings catch your eye.

“ai”

Why now?

While BizSpark has been a roaring success, and I could do broad marketing and evangelism for as long as I live, for the last couple of years I have been wanting to move back to focus more on a single product. BizSpark served as the platform for me to spread my wings and really lead a program for the US subsidiary, and I learned a lot along the way. In fact, if it weren’t for the success that we’d seen there, my good friend Loke Uei Tan would not have tapped me on the shoulder and referred me to the job.

It should be no surprise that mobile is a very hot area. My good friend, Kedric Van de Carr (now with Smaato), who is very involved in the mobile community in the Valley, has been telling me for months about how hot the mobile industry is and how it’s going to grow. The numbers don’t lie.

If you recall my post about the Microsoft Career Discussion, Microsoft is extremely supportive of your career plans and how you want to progress. I burned into my career plan that at some point in the near future, I wanted to move into product management and that I would like to learn more about businesses worldwide. This is step 1 in realizing that career goal.

Windows (Mobile) Phone? Really?

Yes, really. I won’t be necessarily the first to admit that we have a big battle ahead of us. We have been quiet on what we’ve been working on, but I’ll do my best to change that and be transparent when and where we can. The iPhone is a phenomenal device, Android is hitting its stride with its second generation, Blackberry and Nokia have strong footholds with their loyal audiences and Palm is resurging. Om is writing us off because of discussions he’s had with a manufacturer. But Microsoft is not one to sit back and just watch, and we have a kick-butt story with 6.5 and beyond.

What would you do, if you were me?

I know everyone’s got a ton of opinions in this area, and there’s seems to be a fair amount of speculation. I completely understand that we could be doing a better job of communicating about our strategy and the future, and I’ll work on that. But what is your take? What can we do to help you better leverage the Windows Phone experience from an application or a consumer perspective?

Want my old job?

Oh, and, do you know anyone who’d want my old job? You’ll get our program manage Startup oriented evangelism efforts (BizSpark). If you’re interested, and live in the SF Bay Area, drop me a note.

I’m really excited about my new job. And if you’re a mobile app developer, hit me up!

“ai”

Soon after that incident, I decided to create a “notfriends” facebook list. I’m not one of those egotistical people – I generally add everyone as a friend, and don’t think about who can see what on my profile. But since this incident, I realized I should control who sees what on my profile. Today, after going through a few more friend requests, I decided to ensure that my privacy settings were in fact working and to my surprise, I find out they are not.

1 – I created a new list called “notfriends”

2 – I edited Facebook’s privacy settings and added people who I didn’t know at all to the list “notfriends”. I edited my privacy settings to block ‘notfriends’ from seeing photos, videos and personal information.

3 – I impersonated a member of the “notfriends” list to see what they can see (used the “View Profile As” feature). And guess what, the privacy setting didn’t take. Maybe the impersonation setting was not working? (I’ve deleted the name of the person who I’m impersonating in the image below)

4 – So, I created a new dummy profile called “Art Ignor” and added this “friend” to my “notfriends” list. This friend is NOT in any of the Facebook networks I’m in. I also used another computer to test this (to ensure there were no IP caveats or browser cache issues that could tamper with the settings).

5 – Logged in as “Art Ignor” and viewed http://facebook.com/anandiyer. Guess what, Art Ignor can see all of my profile in spite of being in the “notfriends” list.

6 – I edited the privacy settings and explicitly denied “Art Ignor” permission to see my videos.

7 – Logged in as “Art Ignor” and checked out my videos. And, guess what:

I even waited several minutes (to ensure that the setting has ‘propagated’). No luck.

Facebook, what am I doing wrong? I’ve edited complicated ACLs using Cisco’s IOS CLI, and maybe that’s part of the problem that I don’t know how to use your UI. I don’t want to be an ass and “delete” friends I’ve met on Facebook (although I may not know them). As an evangelist I want to keep my channels of communication open (Dave Morin would empathize), but I want to restrict what some people can see. Please, please, tell me I’m doing something wrong and that your privacy settings aren’t actually broken.

ai

PS: I’d twittered about this possible hole in Facebook time back when I was first tinkering with the privacy setting:

[ad]

We’ve heard from startups who exclusively use the Mac platform, but occasionally need access to Windows for development or test, having trouble downloading software in spite of being enrolled in BizSpark. While startups who are eligible to join BizSpark can access MSDN (our online software portal), the ability to download software from a browser that isn’t Internet Explorer hasn’t been an option unfortunately. Until now…

Now startups who are enrolled in BizSpark and use Macs (or non-Internet Explorer browsers in general) can get Windows through the ‘Top Downloads’ page on MSDN: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/securedownloads/bb608344.aspx (you’ll need an MSDN account to access the contents on that page)

Here’s what you will get to see today (I’ve logged on to MSDN’s Secure Downloads from Safari on a Mac using credentials through a BizSpark account):

Once you click on one of those active links, and the download will kick off:

You can then use the virtualization software of your choice to install Windows in a VM (or using Bootcamp).

Excited about all the buzz Windows 7 has been generating – guess what, Windows 7 Release Candidate is also available through MSDN for BizSpark accounts:

The BizSpark portal just got a nice facelift as well, so head on over and join BizSpark today.

“ai”

PS: Special thanks to Cliff Reeves and Soma for their help in getting this solution together so expeditiously.

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StartupSF

StartupSF will debut at its new location in Microsoft SF on June 4, 2009 from 6-9pm. And our guest speaker for this opening event is Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic. Loic’s presentation is titled “How to Launch a Product with your Community” – learn first hand how to use various community building techniques to build your product, service or brand from the ground up.

Date: June 4th, 2009 (Thursday)

Time: 6-9pm

Location: Microsoft, 835 Market St, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94103

Registration Link: http://startupsf0609.eventbrite.com/ (see below for a chance to win free passes)

Price: $10 online in advance / $20 at the door (StartUpSF is a not-for-profit event with all proceeds going to charity. All proceeds from this event will be going to GreenPeace)

Note: Food & Drink included

Open Mic for Startups

A few startups will have the opportunity to utilize 5 minutes of “open mic” time to give their company’s elevator pitch, as well utilize demo tables where they can showcase their product or service. We are currently accepting applications for Demo Companies for this event and those interested should fill out the Contact Form over on StartUpSF.com.

Free Passes?

Would you like a free pass to StartupSF? I have a handful of passes, if you’d like one please email me: anand.iyer@microsoft.com. First come, first serve.

Follow us

To keep track of StartupSF updates:

• the StartupSF blog
• StartupSF on Twitter
• BizSpark on Twitter

“ai”

[ad]

It looks like Microsoft’s anti-open-source bubble really has burst.

Our anti-open-source bubble, Matt? For a writer who has written about our Open Source strategies a few times, I’m surprised to read that Asay thinks we have an “anti-open-source bubble”. And to quote Asay himself from an article titled “Muglia: Open Source to permeate Microsoft” he’d written in February ‘09 (about 3 months ago):

The reality is that more and more of Microsoft’s products already do include open-source software (including MSN Messenger and Visual Studio), but it’s still refreshing to hear Microsoft acknowledge what most enterprise software companies–including proprietary software companies with much to lose from open source–already know: open source is mainstream.

In 2006, Gartner talked about the importance of code reuse, a phenomenon perfectly suited for open source. Microsoft, by acknowledging that it would rather borrow some open-source code than reinvent every software wheel, is simply being pragmatic.

Open source is not the "cancer" that Microsoft used to call it. It’s just a great, efficient way to develop and distribute software.

Welcome to reality, Microsoft. We’ve been patiently waiting for you to arrive.

While Powerset (and NLP capabilities) are definitely an important portion of our search offerings, it’d be a stretch to deduce from the Register’s original article on Powerset using Hadoop (which is a phenomenal framework for data intensive apps, I might add) that “open-source software appears to be the default choice”. I honestly don’t know what the default choice is, but as several of our senior leaders have said before, you should use the tools that help you do your job best. And I want to reiterate, Microsoft is not against Open Source technologies (see my post “Microsoft Software and Open Source – not mutually exclusive”).

And somehow in between all this, Asay refers to CIO.com’s article about “Microsoft losing its focus” not really clarifying how or what this has to do with Powerset using Hadoop.

I’ve seen FUD like this being spread before – there was this article back in 2005: “It’s unofficial: Microsoft bets business on Linux”. I was excited when I learned that we’d added Powerset to the Microsoft family, and it so happens that Powerset had chosen to use Open Source technologies as they built out their product. Microsoft’s focus is to do what it takes to build out a good online business, of which search is a core part.

Oh, and as for “prime rival Google embraces open source unreservedly”, I happened to notice that Dave McClure’s tweet seems to have gotten retweeted quite a bit:

Update (5/8/09, 2pm PDT): According to Asay’s tweets, it appears that Asay was in fact looking to write an article that would be “inaccurate” and “not boring”:

And it appears that tweet was in response to this one by @offwhitemke:

“ai”

[ad]

At Microsoft, if you’re the Program Manager working on the Excel macro strategy, even if you’ve been at the company for less than six months, it doesn’t matter – you are the GOD of the Excel macro strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get in your way. Period.

I’ve also previously confessed my bro-mance for Jeff Atwood. Smart, witty, great writer – love the guy. Anyhow, I digress…

It is no surprise to anyone that StackOverflow is a roaring success due to the combined efforts of Jeff and Joel. As many of you may know, StackOverflow is built using the WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) stack and StackOverflow is also a BizSpark startup. It’s always comforting when someone praises your products, especially when it’s unsolicited. So when my good friend, Greg, sent me a link to this video of Spolsky speaking at Google about StackOverflow, I was really intrigued. In the video, Joel talks about StackOverflow and it got really interesting starting at around 24:56 in to the video ((I did my best to transcribe what Joel was saying):

“We were really obsessed about performance – we knew that getting fast answers and the site being “snippy” and “snappy” and quick and stuff like that was important. So here’s the technology stack that we actually used – [we] built on the Microsoft stack. The performance, I know you guys don’t use it that much here, but the performance of C#, which is a compiled language is just ridiculously good. This entire site is serving 16million pages a month and we’re doing it off of 2 servers, which are almost completely unloaded. So we’ve got a ton of headroom on those 2 servers – one server is a webserver, the other server is running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and they’re both 8 core Xeons. But, there were a lot of oppositions that went in there but no matter what people say this is a pretty good stack. And one of the things that I’ve always been concerned about is if you start building a technology like this using the Microsoft stack you are going to pay for a Windows Server license, lots of SQL Server licenses, which are 5000 bucks for every box that you put out. And the idea that you could possibly use a larger number of cheaper computers and use Open Source products which are free certainly occurred to us. On the other hand when I compare our performance to similar sites that are running on the open source stack, we are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and maybe that’s because they are not good programmers.  But just in terms of the types of queries we are doing and stuff, the Microsoft stack is actually, appears to be paying for itself – in terms of reduced hardware.”

Since StackOverflow is in the BizSpark program, they are entitled to all kinds of software, including Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (specifically what Joel calls out the costs for) to use in production for pretty much no cost (companies pay $100 when they exit the program) for 3 years. Can you beat phenomenal performance, reduced CPU usage and great productivity which now comes at no cost up-front?

“ai”

[Update: Corrected a broken link]

[ad]

• a best .NET application,
• a top PHP application, and,
• a community winner.

What could a contestant win?

The winning submissions will:

• Be featured on www.azure.com as well as at major Microsoft events
• Be featured in a video interview on Channel 9 with the application author
• Winners will be announced at Structure 09
• Receive cash ($):
  • .NET Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
  • PHP Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
  • Community winner: $2,500 Visa gift card

Who are the judges?

The .NET and PHP category of applications will be judged by industry leaders, Om Malik and Michael Cote. We are inviting the community of web and software developers to decide the third overall community winner via online voting.

• Michael Cote is an analyst at RedMonk covering primarily enterprise software, specializing in open source, IT management, software development, collaborative, the web, and social/collaborative software. He is RedMonk’s IT Management Lead. Read more about him on his blog.
• Om Malik is the founder and senior writer for the GigaOM Network. Prior to that venture, Om was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine in San Francisco writing telecom and broadband related stories. Visit Om’s blog.
• You are also critically important and will decide the overall Community winner. Community voting will end on June 29, 2009 and the winners of the community voting will be announced on June 30, 2009. Recruit your friends and fellow developers to vote for your application and spread the word by sharing your experiences during the contest through your blog or use "#newCloudApp" as a hashtag on Twitter.

How will the winners be judged?

Entries will be evaluated based on

• user experience and user interface,
• innovation and creativity of the application,
• applicability to cloud computing, and,
• real-world applicability of the application.

From Steve Martin’s blog:

For the .NET application category, we want to see a great .NET application running on Windows Azure using ASP.NET or Silverlight to incorporate additional Azure services such as .NET Services and Live Services.  Incorporate other Microsoft, 3rd party services, or other cloud services and author a unique web, mobile, or desktop application. 

For the PHP contest category running on Windows Azure, we want to see a PHP application taking interoperability to the next level by integrating with other Azure services, 3^rd party web services and APIs, and services provided by other cloud providers.

What are the contest dates?

StartupWeekend brought together around 200 of the most talented people from the San Francisco Bay Area together at Microsoft’s offices in SF this past weekend – all with the common goal of building a startup in a 54 hour time span. Andrew Hyde, the founder of StartupWeekend, kicked off the event at 7pm on Friday which was followed by an introductory discussion by a set of speakers, some very familiar and popular names in the valley – Connie Chan, Dave McClure, Katherine Barr, Mark Jacobsen and Christine Herron. Tyler Willis, one of the main organizers of this event, did a great job of moderating this discussion.

[photo credit: antoniocapo, kyeung808]

Following the discussion, Hyde moderated a series of lightning pitches from the audience – essentially anyone who had an idea for a startup got the opportunity to propose their idea to the audience in a short 30-60 second pitch. There was absolutely no shortage of ideas (there were probably around 30 pitches). What made this lightning pitch session exciting however was the real time feedback the expert speakers provided to those pitching. There was some great learning to be had here. For example, Antonio Altamirano describes McClure’s style of an ideal pitch: “Take 80% of the time to describe the problem and 20% describing the solution.” Once the ideas had been pitched, the originators of each of the ideas went around seeking team members to work on these ideas with over the weekend. This was a stark contrast from StartupWeekend last year, where everyone voted on one idea to implement over the weekend and split up in to groups of development, project management, marketing, biz dev etc. This go around, there were several teams working on several startups.

[photo credit: antoniocapo, kyeung808]

About 50 or so hours and several cups of coffee and later, the teams pitched their ideas to another full house. There were 23 pitches in all, and honestly, I’m in complete awe with the number of ideas that were implemented this weekend. This is truly the startup capital of the world.

FounderShack is a website that helps you find co-founders. It’s for people who are passionate about solving a common business problem. The website looks trivial to use – users submitting ideas have to short videos of their pitch and to be matched the other party has to do the same thing. Hopefully the next StartupWeekend will use FounderShack to connect people at the event. http://foundershack.com
“Digg for Deals” (working title) is making bargain hunting easy. The site helps you narrow down on the deal you love. The opening page shows you deals, with an initial filter. Then you click on either “Warmer” or “Cooler” and you get two more products that are similar in nature, but are probably more like deals you may be looking for. When you click on an actual link for a product, a little built-in toolbar appears on the top of the webpage (like the new Digg toolbar).
BigPonzi– this was more of a demo for the sake of a demo. Huge shout out to Dylan Field and Daniel Brusilovsky, a couple of teenagers for putting the demo together.
DemoClarity helps bring clarity to the process of ‘democracy’. The site offers a summary of different legislations, media relevant to the legislation, discussions relevant to the legislation etc. At the bottom of the page are two buttons using which you can either Support or Oppose the proposed legislation. You can also sign a petition and spread the word with your friends. The site also lets you stay informed, and see more issues that are related to the legislation you are perusing. The site provides real value by serving public interest and educating the public. http://democlarity.com
Hubb.Me is like bit.ly or tr.im, but it lets you share more than just one link. You can create a ‘hubb’ on the site, and share it via twitter. When users click on the’hubb’ link they can then check out each of the links in that hub. Hubb also provides an easy tab navigation bar as you start visiting each of the sites in the Hubb so that you know the next site you need to visit. The site integrates with Google Analytics, and you can create a ‘Hubb’ in seconds. http://hubb.me
TwitFitLog lets you use twitter to send fitness logs using pseudo tweets (“@fitlog #run 3 miles” for example). Twitfitlog then records your tweets and presents it to you on a website in a clean manner. FitLog will eventually introduce some game elements, like challenging yourself or challenging someone else, which I believe will draw users to the site as well as retain current users. http://fitlog.pbwiki.com has a lot of what the team has thought about. http://twitfitlog.com
SnoozeMail lets you “snooze on your email”. Users can go to snoozemail.com, register on the site, authenticate (IMAP is a requirement at the moment). Emails that you have snoozed will re-pop up in your inbox (via another email) thereby sending it to the top your inbox. I seem to be the only one in this boat, but this is a service that I don’t see myself using any time soon and that may be because I have (unfortunately) found the most efficient way to work through my email. I think services like these, while very clever, are still band-aids on top of this very broken problem called ‘email’. The presenters mentioned that they may look at a ‘freemium’ model for monetization in the future. http://gosnoozemail.com
OurBlockTV provides a crowdsourced approach to “neighborhood watch”. The idea seems to have cropped up when one of the founders tried this himself by setting up a webcam outside of his apartment window. The hope is that a community based network of webcams will empower citizens to help fight crime and save lives. Users of the service can upload their videos, which will go in to a moderation queue and eventually get published on to the site. Apparently users can get weatherproof cameras for fairly cheap ($49). I can see some legal problems cropping up here, but apparently the initial feedback seems to have been really good. http://adamsblock.com
Img.gr is a photo tagging tool for twitter. It is very similar to facebook photo tagging, but you tag users in their photos using their twitter handles. Once on the img.gr website, you can draw a rectangle around what you want to tag, which brings up a drop-down of your twitter friends so you can tag them. Here is their presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/driveafastercar/imggr-san-francisco-startup-weekend While questions around untagging and some other concerns arise, regardless, I can see myself using this service in the very near future. http://twitter.com/imggr
LiveCut is an ambitious project that helps you get legal downloads of music from the concerts that you see. Let’s say a group of friends go to a concert, on either side of the stage will be a song number or a ‘performance id’ that you can then text message to LiveCut. LiveCut will then respond with a viable way to acquire the song. The model has been well fleshed out with monetization capabilities (and therefore incentives) for artists to want to use it. LiveCut wasn’t developed this weekend, the founder was simply pitching it this evening. http://livecut.com
FeedTheChef is an RSS reader for an average internet user. The interface looks nifty, with an inbox feel in the left pane, and a view based on “importance”. There isn’t a requirement to know about feeds or RSS – you simply key in the URL on the website, and it automatically brings in the feed for you. FeedTheChef is basically bringing together an online version of a personalized newspaper. If the UI is done right (and I think we got a sneak peek of a very slick horizontally scrolling UI), I think they can easily attract users. http://feedthechef.com
MonkeyCalling lets you ask questions and get answers instantly by calling phones of people you want to survey thereby helping you get ‘fresh responses’. MonkeyCalling works on the basic premise that the phone is still very much the most immediate form of communication. The founders described the service as a “personalized call center in the cloud”. MonkeyCalling has used @twilio for the voice integration, and as creepy as the text to speech sounds I can’t wait to start spam-calling my friends through this service. http://monkeycalling.com
RadioKi shows you radio stations online that are currently playing the music that you want to tune into. Once on the site, you can simply type the name of an artist or a band, and the site automagically sifts through several radio stations to show you which radio station (online or not) is currently playing that artist’s song. The founders are using Yahoo Pipes underneath to exercise a giant workflow to sift through all the different channels. Eventually, they want to pull in information from other sources like Wikipedia etc. to show content relevant to the music being played. My big question is, if you know the name of the artist or the song you want to listen to, why not use imeem? http://radioki.com
Gabi is a native desktop application that is about “Greater Access, Broader Independence”. Gabi provides technology for aging independents. Gabi plans on selling subscription services to care providers which provides basic video conferencing, mobile components (to help track via GPS), a video assistance center that contacts care providers in case of emergencies and much more. Gabi was another company that wasn’t developed this weekend and was simply pitching. They are looking for $300K in seed financing. http://Gabinow.com
CheapParking is a mobile application for finding low cost parking using location based services on your mobile phone. The application provides mobile applications to find real time parking information. There are solutions out there help you find garages, but not necessarily the cheapest garage. Using the app, you can find the cheapest one based on proximity, with the list always sorted by the cheapest match first. Their first cut is an Android based app. It is likely for large events (like ballgames) that cheap garages are sold out, but the founders tell me that they plan on incorporating capacity information as well soon enough. The app will sell for $1.99, and $4.99 for “multiple” cities. http://cheapparkingapp.com
KivaiPhoneApp does exactly as the name sounds. The application allows anyone with an iPhone to become a social investor. The app gives existing kiva users a cool way to stay in touch with their investees. http://kivaiphoneapp.com
ProdNv lets you give better gifts, and get better deals. Their first implementation is using BestBuy’s APIs and a Facebook application where you can track products you want to either get or give. Using the application, you can navigate to bestbuy.com, and add a product to your “envylist” for example. This will add the item to your Facebook productenvy page, which you can share with your facebook friends. The founders also demonstrated a twitter based app, whereby you can send a tweet to the twitter bot, @prnv which processes your pseudo-tweet. http://prodnv.com
Encritter tries to solve the twitter privacy problem – wouldn’t you like to twitter something to just a subset of your friends? Encritter tries to introduce layered privacy on top of twitter (the founder calls it ‘EaaS’ – encryption as a service). Using the web app, you can encrypt (using 128 bit AES) a message that will look something like this: “?encritter_XXX” that you can tweet to the twitterverse. Your friends would have to know the key that was used to encrypt the message to decrypt and read it. The real question is, how do you share the key (or password) with your friends? Or more importantly, what happens when twitter introduces “groups”? http://encritter.com
Beer2Peer – ugh, I spilled my coffee and totally missed this demo L I heard a lot of cheering and rara from the kitchen though. http://beer2peer.net
TinyUPC lets you register every UPC for every product you make or use or distribute so consumers can easily find out all information about that product. The site lets you generate a Tinyupc.com/UPC. I didn’t quite gather the practical application of this or why producers out there would want to use something like this however. http://tinyupc.com
indinero is Mint.com for businesses. That’s it. I couldn’t tell what was unique about the service for businesses per se, but the founders tell us that ‘cash flow analysis’ for example is something that Mint.com cannot provide you with today. http://indinero.com
Yoola is Yelp for EULAs. The founders of Yoola claim that you’ve probably accepted over 1000 EULAs not having read them entirely. Yoola gives you the facts of a EULA in 0.03 second. All you would have to do is copy-paste the EULA from a site on to Yoola.com and click on ‘Get Facts’. If the site has a similar EULA in its repository, it will tell you what the pros and cons of the EULA are. The refreshing fact about Yoola is that the information about the EULAs is crowdsourced. I’m very transparent about my favorable bias towards Yelp, so when the founders mentioned that they were a Yelp for EULAs, I was immediately sold. If a certain EULA is not already on the site, you can create the thread.
Spelunkr (working title) lets you get detailed information about your twitter friends. It lets you analyze your followers and more detailed analytics will be provided in future releases.

So there you have it – approximately 200 people, 23 (or so) startups, one weekend.

“ai“

PS: Maybe the event should be called “StartupsWeekend”?