Strategy and Architecture Council : Live Services

Silverlight and Live Messenger at Photobucket

dpeuswr — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:30:05 GMT

Photobucket has collaborated with Microsoft to build Photobucket Visual Search (http://photobucket.com/visualsearch), making use of Silverlight, Windows Live Services and Photobucket's Open API platform. Photobucket Visual Search uses Silverlight to provide a rich and entertaining search experience, by displaying photos and videos in an easy-to-browse interface. The experience shows up search results, as well as related terms, helping users to find images they might not have in the past.

Recognizing that photos are about sharing a social experience, Photobucket decided to use Microsoft's new Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit to socially enable this Visual Search experience. Windows Live Messenger has over 320 Million active users, with over 32 billion social relationships between them. Sharing an image with friends on Windows Live is as easy as a click of a button with Photobucket Visual Search.

Read the full post at David Chou’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou/archive/2009/07/12/silverlight-and-live-messenger-at-photobucket.aspx

Photobucket Visual Search Launches!

dpeuswr — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:21:48 GMT

One of the reasons why I love being an evangelist is figuring out how we get great projects done on our platform – this one has me particularly excited. I’ve been leading the project for the last 6 or so months, coordinating between our great clients at Photobucket and our fantastic design partner, EffectiveUI. Photobucket, the world’s largest photo website, is launching Photobucket Visual Search today, powered by Silverlight and Windows Live.

From the very beginning, Photobucket recognized that images are almost always social – it’s why they became the defacto standard for image hosting on MySpace and other social networking sites. Photobucket is always looking for ways to make the social experience more rewarding – in this case, they turned to Microsoft for help.

Read the full post on Will Tschumy’s blog at http://ux-strategy.com/2009/06/18/photobucket-visual-search-launches/

Silverlight and Bing Maps Used at Grubb & Ellis

dpeuswr — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:01:00 GMT

Today is a time in history where there are more economic factors disrupting the real estate market and operations than ever before. To mitigate this trend and ensure real estate and financial professionals have all the information necessary to make critical decisions, more and more data is being provided to help improve business intelligence. However, this resulted in creating mountains of charts, graphs and documents that need to be reviewed from multiple systems, in order to present a clear perspective of assets, locations, and their operations. This sheer volume of information adds significant overhead to the users and professionals that depend on them.

To address this issue, Grubb & Ellis Company worked with Microsoft and speakTECH, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, leveraging Microsoft Silverlight and Bing Maps for Enterprise, to create a new tool called Spotlight.

Read the full post on David Chou’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou/archive/2009/07/07/silverlight-and-bing-maps-used-at-grubb-ellis.aspx

John L. Scott Real Estate Enables Online Social Networking with Live Services and Silverlight

dpeuswr — Sat, 30 May 2009 01:55:00 GMT

John L. Scott Real Estate (JLS) is delivering a unique social networking solution, called JLSconnect, that makes it easier for buyers to shop for a home, and it will help JLS agents win new business and keep customers. By building this new solution using Microsoft software and a Software+Services approach, John L. Scott was able to deliver unique customer value quickly and cost-effectively. The company has easily repackaged existing Web functionality, combined it with new capabilities provided by Microsoft Live Services, and delivered it all through a user experience powered by Silverlight and optimized for the task at hand: collaborating with family, friends, and a John L. Scott agent when shopping for a home.

Read the full article on Sam Chenaur’s blog at http://blog.samchenaur.com/2009/05/26/john-l-scott-real-estate-enables-online-social-networking-with-live-services.aspx