Wet String and Sellotape : Search, Offtopic

SharePoint Seattle Conference - UK Party Information Here!

Mike P — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:41:20 GMT

Roll up Roll Up all UK attendees of the Seattle SharePoint conference - we have confirmed the venue and timing for the UK soiree - an evening of sophisticated discussion, sporting activity and of course fine food and refreshment!

Date: Monday 3rd March - 6pm until midnight

Location: Garage Billiards click to get the precise map

Dress Code: Whatever you Like :)

Note: Please bring a form of UK Government issued ID

Please come along and meet the UK MOSS team - we look forward to hosting you!

New Microsoft Action Pack - details here!

Mike P — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:44:38 GMT

24,000 of our 34,000 Registered Partners currently subscribe to Action Pack, our quarterly toolkits of software and sales and marketing materials. These are created to help our partners stay competitive, meet their sales goals and grow their business. So what is in the new action pack?

New Rules and how you get it:

To enhance the value of Action Pack, from March 1^st, all of those renewing their subscription must take a course and pass an assessment to renew. Partners must take one specific Microsoft online course from the required Partner Learning Centre course list and complete its associated assessment with a minimum score of 70 per cent. To continue receiving Action Pack, partners must pass an assessment every two years. Courses are all 100% subsidised and take no more than 60 minutes. The assessments will take no more than 30 minutes to complete.

If this might be of interest to your readers, in your blog posting would it be possible to highlight the following:

1. All information regarding the Microsoft Action Pack resides at: www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/actionpack

2. We have made available to partners a enrolment and re-enrolment guide from: www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/actionpack

3. If partners have a query regarding their Action Pack subscription, they should call: 0870 60 70 700 (press option 1)

Enjoy!

Opportunity Of a Lifetime - Play at Wembley...?

Mike P — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:55:51 GMT

Quick post - do you fancy a dream come true by playing on the hallowed turf at Wembley? We had a channel team last year and raised over £59,000 for the Wooden Spoon Charity.

Fancy taking part then....send a mail to Donna Chubb @ i-dchubb@microsoft.com with your bid - the top 15 bids will get to take part!

Offer closes this week - top 15 win, charity is the NSPCC, starting bids at £500.

The Future of Web Search

Mike P — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:16:57 GMT

A very simple post here, amazing work from the Microsoft Live Labs team - simple and really cool graphics using Silverlight. I love the following:

The Halo skin (okay so I am a sucker!)
The graphics around the different types of content search
The accuracy and speed

Try it out for yourself, I suspect this is all powered from the same www.live.com search that is hugely revamped over the last few days - check out the mapping functionality which is such a huge step change on where we and the market have been, below a sample query:

Nice work :-)

Rumourmill...Microsoft to buy Yahoo?

Mike P — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:47:03 GMT

Seen some press reports about Microsoft potentially buying Yahoo..

BBC

Yahoo shares up on Microsoft talk
Associated Press:

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=AP&Date=20070504&ID=6846679&Symbol=YHOO

Reuters article:

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=OBR&Date=20070504&ID=6846019&Symbol=YHOO

Scoble has seen it and posted here: MSFT to YHOO? , as he says loads starting to get blogged out there.... now I wonder...!

Curiouser and curiouser..... :-)

So what is the Live Maps response...

Mike P — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:59:31 GMT

So I guess I thought I would check what Live Maps did and happily here's the result:

http://maps.live.com/?q=london%20to%20san%20francisco&mkt=en-GB&FORM=BDRE

Phew!

London to San Fran with Google maps...

Mike P — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:54:03 GMT

This made me smile, doubtless there are similar 2.0 errors in Live Maps:

http://tinyurl.com/2yqwz5

Step 37 is a cracker:

Lol :-)

Quick apology...

Mike P — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 20:11:00 GMT

Righty ho, so not being the most technical person in the world I have been trying out a few different blog writers/posting apps to varying success. My favorite was Live Writer until I realised that it does sometimes cut off URLs hence the apology to you all for some frustrating posts where you cannot follow my links!

This should all be over now as the boys and girls in Redmond have let me try out some funky new version of LiveWriter which totally and utterly hums! Thanks to Joe Cheng and the gang in Redmond for helping me look less stupid (tough I know).

Normal service is now resumed ;-)

Scottish Innovation at it's best....so inspiring to spend some time in Glasgow and Edinburgh...learnings we can take from Google to bespoke system builders to new business start ups!

Mike P — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:48:00 GMT

Right so get yourself a digestive biccie and a nice cup of cocoa as I wax lyrical on some time in the Lowlands of Scotland. For those of you from an international bent, this is where I was for the last few days:

http://maps.live.com/?q=edinburgh&mkt=en-gb&FORM=L...

Both myself and the product manager for HPC were up speaking with 6 or 7 partners all working around the topics of HPC and one a last minute addition around Search. Some of the things that struck out at me were the following:

The Innovation in the Scottish market and the support from the government offered for technology businesses - http://www.icass.co.uk/fundinginnovationspur.html
The tremendous business experience in the region - lots of entrepreneurs who have been in Silicon Valley and returned to Silicon Fen with the same spirit for technology and changing the norms of social interaction (reminded me of our own Blue Monster crusade inside of Microsoft Blue Monster)
I won’t bore you about all the businesses and people we saw but leave you with one personal meaningful experience of a partner who told me about his friend who is currently suffering from Leukaemia and using technology to share with the world his story, you can read about Douglas' gritty story here: http://www.paynehq.com (NB: not for those who are easily offended) Some goodies will be on their way Douglas and best of luck from me

Fantastic few days, great experience and great people - best of luck to you all. Now I know some of you will be saying what was the learning from Google - well, I will share that with you when I and we have completed our discussions – wouldn’t want to go off half cocked now would I :-)

Thanks to James and Rayo in the Scottish Office for all your help!

Enjoy!

Microsoft gives to charity every time you search - save this link and send to your friends!

Mike P — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:54:20 GMT

Give to ninemillion.org with every search. Each time you search here, Microsoft will contribute to ninemillion.org, a UN agency-led campaign providing education and sports programs for the nine million refugee youth around the world.

http://click4thecause.live.com/Search/Charity/Default.aspx

Set the link above as your home page today and rest assured that every time you search we will pay to ninemillion.org on your behalf!

Enjoy!

Off on hols - be back at the end of Jan...excuse the radio silence!

Mike P — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 09:30:00 GMT

Just a quick note to say I am off on hols and will be back at the end of Jan..

Got plenty to discuss - if you are heading through Heathrow and are off to Hong Kong or Dubai then check out the new digital passport trial - seriously cool, guess who is number 290ish on the list :-)

You can read more about it here: www.misense.org

Enjoy!

Want a great update on what is in Vista - great review and update from the BBC..!

Mike P — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:40:00 GMT

Liked this view on the new bits in Vista from the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6160327.stm

Check out this section: and of course this bit:

but I really like this:

Have to say the files and folders search is sooooo nice – makes you feel like storing files wherever you like just for the hell of it!

Enjoy!