Today the world’s most popular browser just got a whole lot better.
We launched in English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, and then follow with another 21 languages in mid-September. You can download IE8 Beta 2 now at http://ww.microsoft.com/ie8.
The bottom line is that IE8 is faster, easier and safer. To get a feel for the new IE8 experience, check out the videos here, download the product, and try it out. Here are my 5 personal favourites:
· Accelerators - Highlight an address, click the blue button and hover over “Map” or try Right Clicking a Page and Choosing Translate with Windows Live. Check out the new IE Gallery that has cool accelerators and slices from Digg to FaceBook to Ebay
· Web Slices - Visit Live Search, search for “Sydney Weather”, hover over the rich search result and click the green button. Click it to add a Weather Web Slice to your Favourites Bar.
· Search Suggestions - Go to your Instant Search Box (top right) and type a search to see search suggestions in action.
· Navigation - Use the new Smart Address Bar to quickly find sites you’ve visited before. The Smart Address Bar searches your history, favourites AND feeds for pages that match what you’re typing.
· Security: IE8 has the best security features in the market today from its updated Smartscreen phishing and malware filter to domain highlighting to the industry leading cross-site scripting filter so I feel my machines, my identity and my family will be safer on the Internet.
Download IE8 Beta 2 here today!
The biggest frustration I have at Microsoft is showing amazing innovative technology to customers, press and just family and friends and then getting the same question over and over …so when can I get it??
Sometime we take too long to make it available…I understand why…we need to make it “perfect”! but that still leaves me wanting to give give give!
Well finally I am giving ….. ! I have been talking about Photosynth now for what seems forever…and finally its here!
This is what I need you to do…..go here and use it now!! Finally Xmas has come…a little early! :-)
CrunchGear posted this today and I thought it was fascinating….
From CrunchGear :
Say you get in a car accident and they need to do an MRI to determine if there’s damage to this or that in your brain. That MRI generates a ton of data, and until recently the only way you could view that data was on a specialized workstation meant just for that purpose. FiatLux, a Microsoft offshoot with modest funding, has created a way to take advantage of the extremely powerful GPUs and processors in normal PCs. Essentially they’ve made a layer that allows DirectX to display complex medical data as if it were just a game or 3D modeling program. If this gets rolled out, it would not only save hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it would make medical imaging faster, easier, and more portable.
Sorry for the dead silence lately …been ill with what my wife calls the Man Flu…dont know what that is? check this out
You’ve probably heard about Microsoft Surface…if you haven’t have a look here. I think its pretty cool. Would love to have one in my lounge room!
Tones of coverage today about Surface appearing in a host of Sheraton hotels. If you see one and get to play with it…I’d like to know what you think.
Do you hate Vista? Have you not upgraded yet because you heard bad things about it…
then you need to click here NOW!
Been on holidays for the last couple of weeks and when I take a break, I mean I take a break! No digital anything! Infact I usually go “old school”, I read books, listen to old records, renovate something around the house and might even play some sport.
However now that I am back, I need to catchup on tones of stuff, and its with great pleasure to announce that we have appointed a new Leader for Virtual Earth in Australia.
Peter Ulm has been with Microsoft for over 11 years and probably one of the most respected execs in the subsidiary. Well some people respect him, I just try to beat him in golf every moment I get!
VE is a super business for Microsoft and has awesome technologies like I have posted several times before. Peter is the best guy to lead this business and I am looking forward in him succeeding in it.
Checkout some of the PR around his announcement here.
Good luck Pete!
I’ve been a big fan of these guys since I heard about them earlier this year and I wont search Wikipedia without using them.
Microsoft need to differentiate in the search space to gain momentum and share. Doing the same thing as everyone else is not the right approach. Powerset helps us do that. Currently they do contextual searching for Wikipedia, but the aim is to use their technology and expertise in searching the web in a far more intuitive and human way!
Checkout the announcement here but more importantly checkout Powerset
http://www.powerset.com
I would normally not blog about sporting events …but hey this only happens every 44 years!!!
As a frustrated Spanish supporter, I have never ever seen them raise a trophy before. This morning watching the game at the Spanish Club in the city with over 1000 Spanish fans, it was great to see them finally win!
Enjoy the highlights here!
http://video.sbs.com.au/player/twg_new/index.php?menuId=84&loggerId=15997
Viva Espana!!!
Bill Gates retires from Microsoft this friday. A lot has been said about his retirement and I know most people here at Microsoft will miss him. Certainly since I have been here (18 years now) I have seen how his driven this company into one of the most life changing companies in the world.
I have had the pleasure of meeting Bill on several occasions. Its super impressive when he actually remembered my name last time I saw him. He will leave a deep void in our leadership, but I cant imagine he will let go completely. This is his baby and I am sure he will keep an eye out if anything goes wrong. But until then, lets all let him change the world again this time with his amazing philanthropy.
Fortune did a great slide review of Bill’s Microsoft career with the man himself narrating. Check it here
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/gates_microsoft/index.html
Also you might be interesting in this great video. It looks back to Bill's career building Microsoft and his vision in his new venture.
Enjoy
How much do you know about Search and Give?
Search and Give is our way of giving back to the community – each time a user conducts a search from the www.searchandgive.com page Microsoft will donate a penny to a selected charity, school or community organization.
Since September 2007 we have raised over $314, 000 and users can select from over 900,000 charities or schools.
No longer part of the Live Search Club, Search and Give has a new home, its own destination with a new clean look and feel. It is an exciting redesign. www.searchandgive.com
The new site officially went live last week and we are thrilled with the early results! We have already tripled the number of unique users and search queries.
There are a few new features to call out:
- More money donated – Your designated charity gets one-cent just for looking for things online – now with up to 500 searches per person a month.
- Over 1 million organizations – We’ve grown our list of eligible organizations to more than 1 million. We’ve also made it easier to find them with a new UI that allows for faster lookup by name, EIN or quick picks.
- Watch your community grow – Track your donations, the total donations, and the total number of contributors for your chosen organization, and experience being a part of the community of giving.
So we are asking for your help to make this program an even greater success by sharing this information with your friends and family today . Please:-
1. sign up for www.searchandgive.com today and identify the non-profit, school or church of your choice. Bookmark the site so that you conduct your searches from search and give and watch the donations add up!
2. Tell 10 friends today!
Our hope, is to see this program grow exponentially thus we can redistribute some of the dollars coming into search to the local schools and charities that YOU are passionate about supporting.
Live Search Farecast – the airfare forecaster
Last week at Advance08, Live Search Cashback was not the only big announcement from Bill Gates . . . Additionally we announced the released integration of the recent Farecast acquisition.
Travel is a critical commercial vertical inside search. We purchased Farecast, a world class meta travel search site, just a few weeks ago. The Live Search Farecast integrated launch delivers an instant answer and a vertical destination for travel. Live Search Farecast results can be found at http://farecast.live.com and via Instant Answers in the main Live Search results page.
How does Farecast work?
Farecast offers unique features to help you Know When To Buy™, When To Fly™, and Where To Stay™—all based on science, not marketing. And now it's available from most major U.S. and Canadian cities to destinations worldwide. Our smart travel search also allows you to easily compare, sort, and narrow down flight and hotel results for hundreds of websites.
Airfare Predictions
Hotel Rate Keys
Search Multiple Travel Sites & Buy Direct
Users can see graphically a prediction of airfares for the next 30 days – allowing them to decide when to book
And according to a third-party audit, we're 74.5% accurate.
Users can see on a map a range of hotels location and the rated room price:
Users have the option to compare air fares and accommodations rates on a variety of online providers with the click of a mouse
Microsoft will explore the possibility of also incorporating an ad-funded rebate option for travel services in the future.
Give it a go
Today Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer demonstrated a snippet of what Windows 7 looks like.
Here is a short video of what was demonstrated.
Lots of Surface technology incorporated. Nice.
RSS to News Search & Browse
It has been one our most requested features and we are please to deliver. We now have RSS feeds for Live News Search and Live Search News Browse working!
To subscribe, you go to http://search.live.com/news/ (and http://search.live.com/news/?mkt=en-us for international readers) , click RSS icon in the upper right hand side of the page, and either
- click “Subscribe to this feed”
- or copy the URL into your RSS reader.
On the News front, this release enables RSS not only with our original News Search but on browse as well:
Launch of our NEW MSN Toolbar
We are proud and excited to announce the RTW of the new MSN Toolbar! And we want you to be one of the first to get the MSN Toolbar up and functioning on your screen.
The MSN Toolbar launched this week in the US, in the coming months we plan to rollout in key selected international markets. The product brings together key features across OSG - MSN editorial, Live Search and Windows Live communication services. Also, it is built on Silverlight to enable an innovative UI. MSN Toolbar gives consumers persistent access to valuable content and search options without leaving the web page they’re on.
The new MSN Toolbar is packed with new features to delight, including:
- Enter terms in Live Search box
- Perform through channel ‘flyouts’
- play with Search Fun (same as Club Live)
- Access AList through a toolbar button
- click on “Search” –button after the toolbar pre-populates search terms entered into competing engines.
Wide variety of content: 8 popular editorial channels, updated via RSS feeds
Breaking news alerts: gleaming red News button lets consumer know when something happens
Install the MSN Toolbar and share it with your family and friends as well.
Had a great interview with Gordon from http://radio4smallbusiness.com.au about Live Mesh. Gordon hosts a wonderful internet radio station designed for small businesses and he introduces technology as a key component for small businesses to be successful.
My old friend Frank Arrigo wrote a very nice and unexpected blog about me on his very popular blog frankarr the other day and I thought I might return the favour!
For a lot of people out there, I dont have to introduce you to Frank, he is renowned in the blogsphere and recognised as one of the most famous commentators and brains in the developer world - he even nearly got himself into Wikipedia - but I've known Frank way before the net was even around and his popularity within the developer community was in its infancy....
Frank will tell you that he started a few months before I did at Microsoft some 17 years ago...I dont know about that but... one thing is for sure Frank hasn't changed a bit. More so when I dug up this photo of Frank (thats the one on the right :-)) and me (the one with actual hair and on the left), on our first ever US trip to the inaugural Systems Engineers (SE) Forum (now a monstrous TechReady). The other two in the picture are Julian Benjamin from NZ and Shuk Chan who is still with Microsoft working with our ISV community.
The best thing about Frank is that he is probably the nicest guy I know. I dont know anyone that would ever have a bad thing to say about him. Infact its even harder to find any dirt on Frank...there just isnt any!!!...and trust me I know plenty of others :-)
Frank and his wonderful family (Hi Moira) are in the US now for their second stint over there...but I am looking forward to his return and this time working together in bringing home our retarded cousin (ask Frank what that means) :-)
I love you too my friend.
