Some updates are going live on Windows Live Spaces tonight. Spaces is now available in 8 extra markets, there are options for birthday notifications for your contacts (Facebook does this well), a new ability to re-order lists (like moving something lower in your top ten), and new features on the Spaces home page. Also, new users who sign up for Windows Live IDs will automatically have a Windows Live Space reserved for them in their name, ready for them if they decide to use it.
Also, Windows Live Expo, their classified ads site, added the ability for anonymous users to contact sellers, widening potential buyers beyond those with Live IDs. They’ve also improved the search engine, returning search results that are more accurate and load 2-3 times as fast.
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Expo, Live, Spaces, Windows |
no comments
Version 2 of Windows Live Search for Mobile was released, bringing with it some improvements and enhancements. There are versions for Windows Mobile 2003, Windows Mobile 5 and above, J2ME, and Blackberry. There are new features and old ones I’ve decided to give a little more depth. I’ve got a slideshow GIF above and a rundown of each of the screenshots below. Go to wls.live.com on your device to download it.
The main menu. Note the new Movies icon. We’ll talk about that later. First, there’s a great feature that lets you find places by navigating through categories. Not only does this save you time typing (important on a mobile phone), but the organization makes it easier to browse and find things without having to be all specific with searches.
First you get categories of interest, then specific types within those categories. For example, in the Restaurant category, there are types of restaurants, like cafes and bagel places. You can navigate by tapping or with the directional pad.
Once you’ve gotten to the last category, you get a list of places in your area (something you can specify or choose at this point).
Choose one and you get a detail page on that place. You can choose to search near that place, save it, send it as a text message to a friend, or…
Get directions to it. These are turn by turn directions, and a click on the Map button…
And you get to follow it on a map, turn by turn. This map shows the map view, along with traffic conditions in red and yellow.
You can also switch to satellite map view. The text is surprisingly sharp, and the imagery isn’t bad either.
Now the cool new movie feature. Select it, and it gives you a list of movies in your area, and the other tab has a list of theatres in your area.
Tap a movie and get a detail page on the movie. Hit “More Movie Info” to go to a website about the movie.
Hit the theatres link for a list of theatres where it is playing, along with distance to there and showtimes, and get directions if you need them.
The preferences page is pretty smart. You see that you can use a GPS (only on Windows Mobile) so it’ll always know where you are for directions and searches, making this a damn cheap navigation system. You can also tell it to cache to your storage card, not waste space on internal memory. With a large storage card and the cache, performance improves significantly.
All told, it looks and works amazing. The older version was, on many features, better than Google Maps for Windows Mobile, and the new one is definitely the winner for now. If you have a compatible phone, go to wls.live.com on your phone to get it.
There has also been an update to the browser-based Live Search, with:
- A Single Search Box: Tell us what and where, if applicable and you’ll get the most relevant results from Instant Answers, Local, Web, Images to News and Spaces … all perfectly formatted for your mobile phone.
- Image Search: We’ve unleashed our image search capability on the mobile and you don’t even have to ask for it. Click on a result to see a copy of the image optimized for your your mobile (when necessary).
- Instant Answers: We’ve reserved some premium real estate for Instant Answers we’ve all come to love. Currently, we offer weather, finance, movie show times and Encarta Instant Answers and there’ll be more to come.
- Local Directory Listings: Get business and residential listings with ratings sorted by relevance. You can also narrow results by filtering on the most relevant categories!
- Web, News & Spaces: Last, but not least, we automatically search web, news and spaces for relevant results. Should you click on a result within these scopes, we render the destination site for viewing on mobile.
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Windows Mobile, Maps, Live, Windows, Search, General |
no comments
When Sony announced it was discounting the PlayStation 3 by $100, it introduced a new PS3 at the old price, complete with very minor extras. The extras, which would have been a good upgrade had their been no discount, made no sense as a second option, expecially considering that Sony had said that a second option doesn’t work.
Now, it all makes sense.
Turns out Sony didn’t discount the 60-gigabyte PS3 from $600 to $500, they just discountinued it. Sony will no longer be manufacturing and selling the 60-gig in the US, but remaining stock will sell at the $500 price point. Considering how poorly the PS3 has sold, the stock may last a few months, but at the lower price, it could be gone in a matter of weeks. Either way, when the stock goes away, all that will be left? A $600 PS3.
Microsoft was smart not to discount the Xbox 360. Sony didn’t discount, it just tried to convince consumers it had done so. Microsoft doesn’t need to discount, because Sony didn’t do it either. Sony, yet again, acts disingenuous and tries to spin things instead of being honest with its users.
There’s a reason I don’t like to buy Sony products, and I never have. I didn’t buy them before I knew what the MS in MS-DOS stood for, before I like Microsoft and before they were competitors. I didn’t buy the Walkman, the Diskman, the MiniDisk, ATRAC3 products, VAIO PCs, the PlayStation, PS2, PS3, PSP, or pretty much any Sony product ever. Sony wants to be Apple, but it fails in so many ways.
Did Sony lie? Certainly they were not being honest when they announced the discount, but I’m not sure if it was an out-and-out lie. Let me know what you think.
Coverage:
GamesIndustry.biz
Gizmodo
Joystiq
Engadget
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
2 comments
Kam VedBrat has found a genuine bug in the Office 2007 user interface, though he doesn’t seem to mind it all that much. The bug occurs because the developers left objects you could double-click in the Ribbon, but didn’t train the Ribbon to be properly aware of double-clicking.
If you collapse the Ribbon (ironically enough, by double-clicking it) in order to save space, then it will expand on a click to be usable and shrink back when you click any button in the Ribbon, keeping it small when you don’t use it. If you double-click the Ribbon, the first click will shrink it, causing the second click to occur on whatever is beneath the Ribbon, which can be a major problem.
This really gets bad in Outlook 2007 when you are writing an email message. Outlook puts interface elements below the Ribbon (both for good and bad purposes), and the element that needs to be double-clicked, the format painter, is right on top of the Send button! You double-click Format Painter because your email message needs heavy editing, and you wind up sending your message. Whoops.
Good thing I memorized the shortcut key for disabling wifi. You don’t know how many times that got me out of an email jam.
This problem could also be faced by less experienced users, who sometimes double-click on everything (my mother double-click URLs). The user interface designers need to enable the minimized Ribbon to understand and detect double-clicks and cancel out the second click, in the name of preventing unintended clicking. It’s a small bug, but it could become a problem for many.
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Outlook, Office, Applications, General |
no comments
Valleywag talks about the fact that has been thrown around recently that Facebook is a good buy because they will earn $100 million this year and turn a profit, and how that’s a bit misleading. The part people fail to remember: Microsoft made a deal with Facebook almost a year ago to provide advertising for Facebook, guaranteeing a certain amount of money to Facebook through 2009, so Facebook might not actually be making any money except the money that Microsoft owes them.
On the other hand…
Microsoft is in the unique position of knowing first-hand how much money Facebook can pull in through advertising. They sell Facebook’s ads, track their page view stats, analyze conversion rates, in short, they know everything there is to know about Facebook’s commercial viability. If Microsoft bought Facebook, you’d know that Facebook was doing better than everyone thought, because Microsoft is in position to make the most informed possible decision.
Of course, if someone else buys Facebook, Microsoft gets less than $10 million in return. They probably should have bought a stake in the company instead.
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Advertising, Corporate, General |
2 comments
A survery of 3,000 consumers by monitoring group Superbrands named Microsoft the top brand in the UK for the second year in a row, beating out Coca-Cola and Google. Interestingly, a parallel survey of marketing and media experts didn’t even put Microsoft in the top 10, which might show you how much these “experts” know about their target audience. I’m just surprised Microsoft did so well after the massive overcharging for Windows Vista.
The consumer top 10:
- Microsoft
- Coca-Cola
- Google
- BBC
- BP
- British Airways
- Lego
- Guinness
- Mercedes-Benz
- Cadbury
Lego? Man, people are weird.
(via The Raw Feed)
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Marketing, Google |
3 comments
Tech Dispenser, a blog portal run by ComputerWorld that I’m a part of, is asking their blogs to invite their readers to complete a survey so they can understand what kind of people read these blogs. It’s only three questions, and you can win $100 for filling it out, so please do me a favor and take the minute to do it.
There’s a seperate survey for this blog and for InsideGoogle, so if you read both blogs, I’d appreciate if you filled out both surveys. At the very least, you’ll get two chances to win.
July 18th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Blogs |
no comments
