Ryan Storgaard's Blog : Windows Live

Mix08 Keynotes - Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, Dean Hachamovitch, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Ballmer

stoey — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:18:30 GMT

Ray Ozzie Keynote

Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer Keynotes

Some keynote snippets:

"Web Developers! Web Developers! Web Developers!"

"Softball" question from Guy Kawasaki to kick off the Q&A with Steve Ballmer

Ballmer on Windows Server and PHP

"For those of you that do have PHP skills, we're going try and make windows server the best place to land PHP applications..."

Technorati Tags: Mix08,canadian MIXers,Steve Ballmer,Guy Kawasaki,Ray Ozzie

Hello Bonjour Hola Ciao こんにちは Hallo 你好

stoey — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:44:39 GMT

Have you checked out Windows Live Translator Beta yet?

I absolutely love the UI features! My wife and I have been all over Latin America and I everywhere we go I pick up a local newspaper everyday and in the evening I kick back with a cerveza or two and my "dictionario" and see what sense I could make out of what was happening in Mexico/Guatemala/Cuba/Dominican/Costa Rica... So for me, translate.live.com is awesome as it's not just copying and pasting text like BabelFish or Google. You can manipulate the UI in a bunch of interesting, and very helpful, ways. Here's some screenshots of what I mean:

Head over to http://translator.live.com

Then, as you'd expect, you can simply paste in the text if you'd like, select the to/from language and hit "translate". But here's something better....

Notice the "Translate a web page" portion at the bottom? In this case, I pasted in one of the newspapers from the Domincan Republic. Hit the translate button (and ensure you've selected "Spanish - English" in this case) and you'll see that one of the views you can choose is a side by side layout that allows you to hover over text to compare the original with the translated. Awesome!

let's try one of the other views... I really like the "Original with hover translation" as it leaves the page in Spanish, and only when I hover over the text does it translate.

Notice the highlighted Spanish text and the English translation above it?

You can also do the reverse and see the entire page translated and then hover over with your mouse to see the original language.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows Live, Translator, Microsoft Research

Online Services Strategy Manager... What the heck does that mean?

stoey — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 03:38:07 GMT

Hello blog, long time no write...

For those of you who haven't heard, last year I took on a new role at Microsoft Canada as Strategy Manager for Search and Online Services. It's a very cool job as it spans a LOT of product teams, technologies and business units at Microsoft. At the same time, it's a bit daunting as... well umm... there are a lot of products and business groups to deal with :-) So last year I was pretty heads down doing a lot of internally focused coordination on some key areas, like Enterprise Search with SharePoint 2007, as well as working very heavily with the Online Services Group on some very exciting stuff you'll hear a lot about shortly.

If you're curious, here's a bit of a breakdown of where I spend my time (and therefore what you'll see surfacing on this blog)

Software and Services Strategy
- This is pretty much the centre of gravity for my role. Essentially I spend a lot of time being a bridge between our Enterprise product and sales teams and our Online Services product and sales teams.
- As Ray Ozzie put it:

"Services is going to be a critical aspect of all of our offerings from Windows and Office on the client to Exchange and SharePoint and Dynamics and other things on the server, and in order to gain leverage across all of our offerings, we're taking a platform approach to services, giving each of our products the common benefits of cost, speed, scale and monetization that a platform approach offers."

Commercial offers based on Windows Live
- This has been, and will continue to be, a big part of my time. My group is working with our Online Services Group and creating commercial offerings around Windows Live. Here's a few examples (and I'll elaborate on each of these in the near future)
Live Search
Live Maps
Windows Live product suite
Enterprise Search

and trying to keep up with lots of other interesting things like AdCenter, adlabs, livelabs, Microsoft Research, and of course that crazy DPE team I'm still on ;-)

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows Live, Software and Services