Eric Hoffmans Blog

Working with the Media and Entertainment Industry - A tale of IE8 success and future investment

EricVHoffman — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:06:01 GMT

For the last year I have worked with many of you in the Entertainment, Media, Telco and Consumer Entertainment industries "lighting up" your existing web properties with customizations around the most popular browser in the world - IE8. At Microsoft we are continually trying to improve our products and with IE8 this is no exception - I received some really candidate feedback in the course of building out these customizations(Web Slices, Accelerators) that will be taken back to our core IE team and folded into our existing IE9 browser. Yep - IE9 is out and in beta form - while it is not complete we can still make changes and take your input seriously. After working with over thirty different companies in the Media and Entertainment industry - two main themes emerged as areas for improvement - speed of load time and rendering and how can you help me retain and attract more eyeballs. So in IE9 we are definitely working on the speed and rendering of rich media scenarios and finding even better ways for you to connect with your industry –

Stay tuned for more information on this - but in the meantime - check out the wide array of entertainment and media companies in our showcase gallery - www.ieaddons.com - to mention a few - ESPN, Discovery, NFL and WSJ

Internet Explorer 8 - The Real Hidden Value to this Browser

EricVHoffman — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:00:00 GMT

As a field lead for the adoption of Internet Explorer 8 working with some of the most progressive companies in the Media and Entertainment verticals I have been able to gain some surprising insight to how these companies view the browser world. To most media and entertainment companies in the US most are rapidly developing a strategy for 3 and even 4 screens - most still amass most of their revenue dollars by their broadcast or printed media form factors - but as more and more consumers get access to Wi-Fi hot spots in airports, coffee shops and yes - even on vacation - what major resort doesn't offer wireless internet now. So of course - most major players in this field have extensive web pages with rich content with video, pictures, and are over indexed on social networking - but they still often tell me then want to increase their web traffic to offset the enormous investment they have made. As we all know - in order to maintain the same display advertising that has carried these companies throughout the last 7 years or so has dramatically receded - so the real question they ask is - IE8 is just another browser - how can it help me drive new views, deeper engagement and still provide a safe and performant experience.

Today more than ever consumers have a wide choice of browsing options that offer performance and site to site compatibility - so why is Internet Explorer 8 any different - sure it’s faster and even most secure browser to ever hit the market but the real hidden value to Internet Explorer 8 is all the added traffic and engagement fringe benefits that come with it. Let us start with the concept of a web slice - the ability to put your brand on the chrome of a consumers browser and no matter where somebody browses - they are always just one click away from your page - this is something the caught folks by surprise - the popularity of web slices has been increasing steadily over the past 6 months and almost ever partner that I work with in the space has either created a slice or is in the process of building several. If this simple development effort was not enough - Microsoft created an entire portal dedicated to showcasing these web slices. Check out www.ieaddons.com and you will see some of the cool slices companies in this space that have been created. No one could have imagined that just but writing the code for slice - often can be done in a matter of a hour or two could stretch your brand to so many people - We have been able to help some major players in the entertainment field increase their traffic by over 25% by just creating a series of web slices. Over the next couple of weeks I will dig deep into a few specific partners who have embraced the real hidden of this platform - and I call it a platform because it is a browser a marketing tool and a better way to connect with your audience.

Software Architects Patterns ...

EricVHoffman — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:58:00 GMT

60 MINUTE WEBCAST LUNCH SERIES

Register for 1 or all 3…your choice!

ARCHITECT COUNCIL | Pragmatic Patterns for Architects

“Cloud computing will supersede traditional IT”, “SOA will enable business agility”, “my way or the highway”, etc. We’ve all heard this type of proclamations before, as many look to the “next big things” in technology to exact sweeping changes and solve many issues; truth is, technologies and tools aren’t as instrumental in influencing progress, as the design and discipline in applying them to specific issues. When used appropriately, technologies and tools can be powerful enablers that bring about change.

One of the things we hear a lot working with the community is a desire for more guidance about how to use the technology instead of just talking about features and functions. To address this, our team has put together a series of live webcasts on June 9^th – 11^th which will focus on guidance and patterns for some of today’s hottest topics.

DAY 1 – June 9, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Moving to the Cloud

Larry Clarkin & Wade Wegner

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should be moving to the cloud? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud. Based on real-world projects, the session explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.

DAY 2 – June 10, 2009 at Noon PST

Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism

David Hill

Prism provides guidance, via design patterns, to help you build robust, flexible and modular Silverlight and WPF applications. These patterns support unit testing, separation of concerns, loose coupling and the ability to share application logic between Silverlight and WPF applications. Prism includes source code for the library itself, extensive documentation, and a sample application that shows how the patterns work together in a real-world application. It also includes a Visual Studio add-in to help you easily share code between WPF and Silverlight. This session provides an overview of Prism, and shows how you can use Prism to design and build composite Silverlight applications.

DAY 3 – June 11, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Parallel Computing

David Chou

With recent advances in cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, distributed computing, server virtualization, multi-core processors; we are now seeing parallel computing techniques being implemented across the spectrum. It’s moving towards mainstream applications such as internet-scale web applications, massive data processing, graphics rendering, but the myriad of choices also present a number of questions on when and how to utilize parallel computing. This session explores the architectural patterns and trade-offs between different forms of parallel computing including: approaches for utilizing them to improve application performance, optimizing the use of existing infrastructure, and applying concurrency towards day-to-day enterprise information processing needs.

WEBCAST AGENDA

11:45 AM (PST)	Open for Dial-in
12:00 PM (PST)	Day’s Content
12:50 PM (PST)	Q&A
01:00 PM (PST)	Raffle and Close

REGISTER

To register, please click on the link below for each day:

	Title	Event ID	Link to Register
Day 1 6/9/09	Patterns for Moving to the Cloud	1032416875	http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032416875&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
Day 2 6/10/09	Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism	1032416983	http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032416983&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
Day 3 6/11/09	Patterns for Parallel Computing	1032416984	http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032416984&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

We will email you with the LIVEMEETING information and log-in detail a few days before the actual event. We will use the email address you provide in the registration. Thanks!

SPEAKER BIOS

Larry Clarkin - SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Wade Wegner - SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft, tasked to collaborate with organizations in the advanced and emergent areas of enterprise architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, and cloud computing, as well as to support decision makers on defining technology adoption strategies. You can reach Wade at his blog http://www.architectingwith.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/wadewegner.

David Hill – PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team

David Chou – ARCHITECT, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism organization at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in many areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, RIA, distributed systems, security, etc., and supporting decision makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture. Drawing on experiences from his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems and Accenture, David enjoys helping customers create value from using objective and pragmatic approaches to define IT strategies, roadmaps, and solution architectures.

Microsoft and The New York Times release Silverlight/NYTimes API toolkit

EricVHoffman — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:58:00 GMT

Microsoft and The New York Times are excited to announce the recent availability of a Silverlight /NY Times Open content API’s toolkit for the development community at the May 5^th Microsoft Enterprise Developer Conference in New York City. The real significance of this partnership is that for the first time web portal designers and developers can include a variety of The New York Times media content within a rich expressive Silverlight user interface eco-system. This unique mash-up satisfies what developers and portal architects desire the most – compelling news content, an expressive, immersive user interface and frictionless integration. Probably more importantly is that this New York Times Open API/Silverlight toolkit empowers developers to be creators of how news content is presented and consumed. News media organizations like The New York Times are increasingly adopting a new trend to combat the tough market conditions in the media industry - looking at citizen journalists, and their own communities to help craft content and ultimately drive traffic and new communities to their content.

While at the Enterprise Developers conference we asked Derek Gottfrid – Senior Software Architect for The New York Times what his thoughts were behind this alliance, - “The NYTimes Silverlight toolkit provides an easy to use interface for using The NY Times APIs. Silverlight and The Times APIs provide a powerful combination to developers interested in creating compelling news applications.”

You can get the new Silverlight/NYTimes toolkit at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/NYTimesSilverlight . The NYTimes REST based family of New York Times Open API’s that includes content for best sellers, movie reviews, top stories and many other interesting content areas is available here - http://developers.nytimes.com. You can take a finished example of the Silverlight/Times toolkit for a test drive at http://xmldocs.net/nyt. If you want further technical information on how the kit was actually put together get it here - http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2009/05/05/the-new-york-times-silverlight-kit.aspx.

Like many sectors of our economy news media content providers are not immune to tepid economic conditions. Financial tycoons like Warren Buffett recently stated that there is one industry in particular he will no longer maintain financial positions – news content providers – stating that most people under senior citizens age are ingesting news content in such a wide array of mediums it is difficult to quantify and even harder to monetize. The federal government is also taking notice of the ailing print media industry – Senator John Kerry as recently as this week is sponsoring a study to look into the rapidly changing landscaping in the news industry. It is clear that how we view news content is changing and initiatives like the Silverlight/NY Times Open API toolkit sets its sights directly at addressing what consumers are really after – compelling news content in a very flexible environment.

Silverlight 3 - the tipping point ...

EricVHoffman — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:39:00 GMT

As my role as an evangelist for Microsoft I get the unique opportunity to meet and work with some of brightest CTO's, CIO and software architects in the world. It occurred to me recently that we have really reached an interesting place with Silverlight 3 - I like to think of it as "tipping point" - the level at which the momentum of something becomes un-stoppable. Every day thousands and thousands of installations are occurring of the Silverlight player while simultaneously we are seeing more and more development organizations take their prototypes to early betas and sneak previews. This is even being seen in the Developer community - with MySpace just releasing an Open Social/Silverlight toolkit that allows developers to unleash the power of Silverlight within the broad and diverse communities of MySpace. Read more about this release here -http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2009/03/30/silverlight-for-the-myspace-developer-platform.aspx

We are at the convergence of features needed to make Silverlight 3 a real contender in RIA space and a viral/awaking with the community that I directly work with - which defines the tipping point. Many of you as IT decision makers are facing tough questions - the equal opportunity recession has made every organization really think hard about where to put its resources. This frequent topic of conversation comes up frequently when I meet with partners - what is the current adoption of Silverlight ? - Do enough people already have the player installed ... and the answer is - many do and more are occurring everyday. The issue that IT managers must see now is we are at the turning point for Silverlight - want to be the leader in your particular vertical - then take this blog post as a beacon - if you have been thinking about taking your social networking or hum-drum portal to the next level of engagement - now is the time. So still not convinced we are at a tipping point for this technology - then wait until next year ... add some more CSS or images to your site to spruce it up - mean while your competition will release a super new RIA application based on Silverlight that allows them to take the experience out of browser and un-cover interesting new ways to monetize their presence in the cloud.

Take a day and check out some of the new features of Silverlight 3 – here are some of the best places to get information

http://Silverlight.net

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/03/18/silverlight-3-whats-new-a-guide.aspx

Gearing up for MIX09

EricVHoffman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:43:00 GMT

This will be my third MIX conference - but the first time as a Microsoft employee and honestly it is truly one of the best in the industry. Everybody is feeling the recession - but like you - many of us are finding a way to cut in other areas to make to Vegas. MIX09 is the really to me the premier web developmet conference - by developers and for developers. Microsoft typically has something up its sleeve to announce that even employees like me are not aware of. For those great partners who we work with in the Communication and Media sector - look forward to learning, socializing and just enjoying the new technology. I would not be surprised if there was some mention of Internet Explorer 8 and the partners who have embraced this technology and likely a few sessions on Silverlight.

Don't forget to visit the keynotes each morning - you will want to get there early- even though the room is enormous - it fills up quickly.