venkatna's (Venkat Narayanan's) WebLog

Live.com News and technical details

300,000 servers in a container farm

This is cool - Microsoft has 300,000 servers in a container farm in the Chicago Data Center. It has...

Author: venkatna Date: 05/08/2008

Live Search at the Daytona Endurance Race

I am a huge fan of Formula 1 racing, and don't follow races in the U.S. that much. However, I just...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/22/2008

Windows Home Server - Need to get me one of these

I have been looking at getting the HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server. Right now, all my data is...

Author: venkatna Date: 12/06/2007

List of all Microsoft Team Blogs

Brandon LeBlanc has gone to some trouble to get a list of all Microsoft Team Blogs in one location....

Author: venkatna Date: 09/18/2007

Speeding up Web 2.0 applications

My experience with web 2.0 applications is limited to Live.com homepage (www.live.com) and...

Author: venkatna Date: 09/10/2007

Tafiti - Silverlight based Search Engine

Microsoft has released a new experimental Search Engine at www.tafiti.com. This looks like it is...

Author: venkatna Date: 08/22/2007

Windows Live starting to look better and better

This is exciting. Windows Live, for a long time has been confusing for a lot of people. Sites did...

Author: venkatna Date: 08/09/2007

Performance of Web sites

Yahoo Developer Network has a good post that details a number of things you can and should do to...

Author: venkatna Date: 08/05/2007

Crossroads Guitar Festival - on MSN

People that know me, know i am a huge Blues fan. I am particularly fond of the guitar. My favorite...

Author: venkatna Date: 07/28/2007

MSN Health and Fitness gets cool new dashboard on Search results

It seems like Microsoft is putting the Medstory acquisition to good use. MSN Health and Fitness now...

Author: venkatna Date: 07/11/2007

Keyword Suggestion Platform getting great reviews

Looks like the Microsoft Ad Lab research center folks have been busy. They released a new Keyword...

Author: venkatna Date: 06/16/2007

Halo 3

Halo 3 marketing starts - https://www.halo3.com. This should be fun to follow. - Venkat

Author: venkatna Date: 06/15/2007

PopFly now has blocks for Live Search. These are what are available now: Block Description Live...

Author: venkatna Date: 06/15/2007

Visualizing Global Web Performance with Akamai

Akamai has released their web performance visualization tools to the public. This is a very...

Author: venkatna Date: 06/11/2007

End of Start.com

I first started working on start.com two years ago, when we started with a small agile team and did...

Author: venkatna Date: 05/17/2007

Live Search Club

This is interesting. We (Microsoft) seem to have released a new site where you can play games and...

Author: venkatna Date: 05/14/2007

Where are the bears going?

SuperBowl! (in a sing-song voice) :) Have you ever had a feeling where you cannot wait for something...

Author: venkatna Date: 02/03/2007

Collections and Templates

We have recently released some templates (basically a ready made page) and celebrity homepages that...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/25/2007

Search for a good cause

Live Search has a couple of programs going on to enable you to contribute to charity. All you have...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/23/2007

ASP.Net Ajax Ships

This is big news for a lot of people in the Ajax community. This is a free download. You can find...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/23/2007

Seattle Wind storm

We have had a fun couple of weeks here in Seattle. We first had snow (heavy for Seattle) a couple of...

Author: venkatna Date: 12/16/2006

Live.com Growing up

The product i work on, Live.com, is growing up. We now have a product tour. The product tour has...

Author: venkatna Date: 12/02/2006

Finally, i can come out of a blogging coma!

We have finally shipped our V1 product. Live.com is officially out of beta. You can find more...

Author: venkatna Date: 09/15/2006

A Very good list of web 2.0 companies

I have been meaning to blog this for a while - I found an exhaustive list of web 2.0 companies a...

Author: venkatna Date: 07/01/2006

New Gadget Developer SDK

We have also released a new gadget developer SDK at microsoftgadgets.com. The SDK has a lot of good...

Author: venkatna Date: 05/26/2006

New updates to Live.com

We just released some new updates to Live.com. Sanaz just posted about the changes in our team blog....

Author: venkatna Date: 05/04/2006

some stats on Live.com

Live.com has been around for a little bit now. A lot of people have created gadgets for the site....

Author: venkatna Date: 04/11/2006

Back from vacation

I had taken my paternity break recently and spent a lot of quality time with my daughter. It was a...

Author: venkatna Date: 04/10/2006

Best time in a product cycle

We are getting pretty close to releasing another version of Live.com. I think this is about the best...

Author: venkatna Date: 02/25/2006

Zillow.com - Awesome site

Zillow.com lets you find out how much your home is worth. This comes from Richard Burton, who was...

Author: venkatna Date: 02/09/2006

Tiny Things and Saving Ewoks

Man, Rory just cracks me up. This was just about the best post i have read. I really havent written...

Author: venkatna Date: 02/03/2006

Updates to the live.com page

We made some updates to the Live.com page late Friday. We are working on a much larger set of items,...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/29/2006

Building a gadget for Live.com

I have been meaning to write about building gadgets for Live.com. The instructions are out there,...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/11/2006

Bill Gates CES Keynote Vs Rose Bowl

This is unfair. The CES Keynote by Bill Gates starts at 6.30 PM PST. The webcast is available at...

Author: venkatna Date: 01/03/2006

New release for live.com

We had a small release today (small on the UI changes, pretty significant in new support). We now...

Author: venkatna Date: 12/15/2005

Google has gadgets now

Well, they are calling it modules. I have been spending some time looking at their documentation and...

Author: venkatna Date: 12/14/2005

MSN Homepage and Validation

I just got an email from Dan about the MSN Homepage passing validation. I worked on this page for...

Author: venkatna Date: 12/14/2005

Live.com Gadgets information

We had a release a couple days ago to sandbox gadgets and some other small bug fixes. An unintended...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/26/2005

Changes that may break gadgets on live.com

We released a number of changes today that could potentially break some gadgets on live.com. We had...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/23/2005

RSS Extensions, SSE and Microsoft

Ray Ozzie wrote about the SSE extensions to RSS that Microsoft is advocating. I am excited to see...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/21/2005

Xbox 360

I stood in line for the last Xbox launch, but I am not doing that this time. I will still get one...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/21/2005

Do you search on Live.com?

I was wondering about this. We have what i think is a cool feature on www.live.com, where we don't...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/21/2005

Gadgets for Live.com

Sean Alexander has a posting today about all the gadgets available for Live.com. I am amazed by what...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/08/2005

Live.com Oops bug

We released live.com and immediately got dinged for a lot of errors when reading feeds, among...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/04/2005

Catching Up

Whoo. What a month! It has been a pretty hectic time for me lately. Good news is it is all coming to...

Author: venkatna Date: 11/01/2005

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