May 16th.

The session was held at Soho in London (Very close to the nude bars ;-) )

Kicked off at 6:30 pm and ended at around 10. A number of select bloggers and website owners were present. This dude called Zack recognized me as the guy from Hack MSN Spaces.

Well getting to the presentation...

Phil and Koji had come  from Redmond. Phil started off my giving an intro on windows live services that are to be rolled out soon. All of them are in their beta stage or really early stages of development while some are in advanced stages. A total of 17+ services will be rolled out in different markets.

Windows Live mail beta got an update making it much faster.

MSN Live Messenger/ 8 has also reached public beta stage with 8 million users already, a far cry compared with 210 million MSN 7 - 7.5 users.

www.local.live.com, Microsoft's answer to Google Maps is getting an update for European Markets starting with UK. The update being in the resolution of satellite pictures. This will give us access to high-quality Ariel photographs.

Koji gave a 45 minutes presentation on various applications and how to build little gadgets and stuff. More on the programming side. One interesting thing he had made was the handwriting search feature. Instead of typing your search. You write it with a special pen on the screen and the computer with astonishing accuracy converts it into letters and gives you search result using msn search but it can be configured to use Google as well. Also words written higher on the gadget than other words will get more search result preference. It can also recognize shapes.

Well I don't think I really explained it very well, it may be the wine and the good food they served then...

At the end..

Windows Q&A was shown. (It is in Private Beta atm)

Somewhat like Yahoo Answers. You sign up for it and create a profile. Then you ask Questions about any topic you like. People will answer to your questions if they feel like and your question will be active for 3 days. They may extend this in the final product. This is very early stages only. The UI was sleek like other live services and pretty easy to navigate although Phil had problems with it :p

You can answer to other people's questions and also vote on their answers. You receive 'Kudos' points for your participation. A more of a digital rewarding system to drive up engagement for answering and putting questions. This can later be used to buy stuff like virtual swords on Xbox 360.. just an intelligent guess/ Rumor.

A MSN Messenger for mobiles was shown. You can text, send pictures and even audio.You can have a Display picture as well. One cool feature that no one knew or tired until suggested was, what happens if you press the nudge on the msn messenger on windows while chatting with the person on the phone msn. The phone VIBRATES!! Cool.. Other Mobile services will also include RSS reader, Live search and Mail.

Well it was pretty much wrapped up after that. Getting to know each other. And maybe more such sessions will be help in the near future. Heaven a communications agency from France handled the event and also interviewed most of the geeks (incl. me) present there.

[Pictures in the Photo Album]

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