A Microsoft VP once told me, "In the world of business, there are Pioneers and there are Settlers.  Microsoft needs both."  I've always gravitated toward the startup opportunities within Microsoft.  A few years ago, I was given the opportunity to help take a fledgling technology called, "WPF/E", name it, brand it, and launch it as "Silverlight", with my team.  The response has been phenomenal, with over 1M downloads/day and a developed balance of features for RIA-focused and Media-focused features. 

A number of months ago, I learned of a new opportunity that what right in my wheelhouse of consumer-focused digital media as a steward of user experiences in the Entertainment and Devices Division as Director of Product Planning for Ad-funded Experiences.  Looking back on the most personally rewarding times of my career so far, I've most enjoyed building teams that focus on the user experience, and deliver "free stuff" for consumers. One could argue my first attempt there was developing the original XP Digital Media Fun Pack and Powertoys, many of which included a small sponsorship message.  Following the acquisitions of aQuantive, ScreenTonic, and Massive Inc., it became clear to me where opportunity intersects with my personal interests.  Put another way, working on the Silverlight platform and seeing so many cool apps developed helped me to realize I missed having a hand in building consumer products myself.  It/s hard to leave the amazing leadership of Scott Guthrie, Soma and so many friends, but I'm not going far.

So what does the job involve?   It starts with working with many of the teams in Entertainment & Devices - Zune, Mobile, Xbox, and more to identify market opportunities where the consumer wins and brand advertisers get impressions.  This is a new area and we're going to step lightly and take feedback as we did with over 10M enthusiasts on Xbox Live who regularly download free add-ons for their games - Map packs, cars, tracks, and even feature-length movies sponsored by brand-name companies like McDonald's, Frito-Lay, Nissan, Ford, Nike, and many others.  The question is can we do the same thing for more media types and devices.  In a nutshell, that's my job - to put the fun in ad-funded entertainment experiences.

And I'm hiring. More on that later :)

At last I can talk about Live Mesh - Dave Zatz you got it right.  Many articles have now been written on the topic, such as Mary Jo's, On10's Video Demos, TechCrunch, the NYT's John Markoff, Scoble, and the Beeb so I won't rehash that here.  What I will say is that it's changing how I work fundamentally, even in it's nascent form.  I'm storing most of my documents and recent photos in the "Cloud" for easy and secure access from work and home.  I'm using Remote Access to "RAS" into my office computer from my Mac.  And when I've been away from home, I've been able to retrieve documents using the web-based UI.  And soon, sync with Mac and other devices. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Live Mesh is a computing platform, a merging of software + services that seems simple in concept. What winsock was to enabling the Internet on Windows, Mesh can and should be the same to personal sync, network app enablement and so much more.  It's hard to see what's on the Horizon (wink), but this is the platform that I really hope developers stand up and take notice of, give feedback on.  The Tech Preview goes out shortly.  If I have invites, I will offer them up here.

Congrats to the Live Mesh team and thanks for solving a major pain point.  If you're a consumer and asking, "Huh?" to all of this, check out the On10 Video.

Next week, i can finally talk about some tech that is truly changing the way I work.  How's that for a teaser? ;)

(Back from Blog Hiatus)  I have an Apple TV - I'm a gadget guy, I work on Digital Media, and of course, want to understand the space.  So I recently purchased a refurbished unit off the Apple online store, and fired it up.  The UI is minimalist, and overall I've been happy except for what I'll call, "The Curse".  Apparently, my Apple TV decides to lose its marbles regularly and just display the Apple logo- no error code, no nothing.  Clicking the remote with cause an auditory "bonk" noting it's working, but the bootup Apple logo is all I have on the screen. I figured it was just a refurb issue.  Then i started searching and found this thread with over two dozen posts from users reporting the same issue.  Apparently factory restore wasn't working and some folks have hunted it down to a possible HDMI handshake issue.  Either way, rebooting my TiVo Series3 and my Apple TV make me cringe...

Update: Version 2.0.2 of Apple TV Firmware is out.  I'm downloading now and will report back if it fixes the issues.

This sounded too strange to be true. I really like Charlie's interviews and the fact that he went on-air without a healthy dose of makeup to cover the black eye makes the story all the better.  Would I do the same for my Dell m1330? Maybe...

Yesterday was my 34th birthday and I had a wonderful time with family at home while our roof was being replaced (cedar shingles) with a next-gen composite roof (another topic for another time).  Despite the hammering, we had a great dinner and this year, my mom gave me a Thermapen, connecting my love of grilling and BBQing and gadgetry.  This device was originally designed for laboratory use and now is used by culinary professionals around the world. It displays actual internal or liquid temperatures in 3-4 seconds vs. the 20 most take today.  I had the opportunity to try one out at least year's Eggfest and have been pining for it ever since.

The packaging is well done- each unit is individually calibrated and noted in pen by an inspector, it includes an NSF certification and certificate noting its rated to over 500 degrees.  Flip out the temperature probe and it automatically powers up.  If you have a chef or grillmaster in your family, this is a must-have gadget for saving them from singed knuckles.

Ryan Stewart and Long Zheng summed it up nicely.  This kind of banter and candor is why I work at Microsoft.  A CEO who will go, "Monkey Boy" just to please his customers.  Guy had some really nice things to say about the new Microsoft culture which was great to hear.  I'll post the keynote here when available.

Angus Logan asks:

• Do you have media like *.mov files which Silverlight doesn't speak?
• Do you really really want that media in Silverlight?
• Do you have an abundance of bandwidth to push un-encoded files up to the cloud?
• Sick of melting your CPU to encode media? we can do it in the cloud.

On his site you'll find a video demonstration of the experience and details on the coming API's.  This isn't a replacement for Expression Encoder, rather I see a compelling service for everything from next-gen ad solutions for customers  looking to ingest a myriad of formats into standard video formats for broad distribution, to design/development houses looking to use Silverlight Streaming as a service for video delivery.  Congrats to the Silverlight Streaming team!

Learn more here.

http://tinyurl.com/33kl26  Ray Ozzie is speaking right now.

Thanks Jeff. 

The show officially starts in a few hours, but the events started last night. The night started off with a great dinner off the strip at a "foodie" approved Thai restaurant, "Lotus of Siam" with Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems. Twitter was white hot with updates from different events and ad-hoc get togethers.  Later I stopped by the Blogger Party and met up with a number of familiar faces and met some new ones. I took some grief for not blogging enough so will try and do better.  Ryan Stewart stopped by and we played Rock Band, jamming to NIN's "The Hand that Feeds".  I'm sure there's some irony in there somewhere. My performance was marred by a semi-functioning yellow button on the axe but we had a good time.

Late last night, an update mail went out internally asking most MSFTies to watch the keynote from the overflow room. Apparently attendance is packed to the gills with very few no-shows or last minute cancellations.  So I'll be in the "other" room if you want to stop by and say hello. Lots of great sessions and meetups happening today and tomorrow.  Sure to be a topic on the floor today is Job's comments about Flash on the iPhone.  It's long been rumored that Apple has been working to create their own RIA platform with Safari at the center.  With Jobs making comments such as "There's this missing product in the middle", one has to wonder if there's a connection with Apple's March 6th event?

Remember how I said there would be some exciting announcements coming at MIX this year? ;)  Last night (Pacific time), Nokia officially announced that Silverlight is coming to their S60 and S40 mobile phones on the Symbian platform.  This has been in development for a long time now, and will dramatically increase the number of devices that support Silverlight- S60 alone ships on over 150 million devices worldwide - you can learn more about the phones here.  Congratulations to the team - more announcements coming shortly and for those of you on-location at MIX this week, you'll see this in person ;).  See you there.

Outstanding idea hiding a full-fledged home theater system in a stylish end table.  This piece would make all of our other furniture hide in the corner in shame.  Cable management has to be a bear though.

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