I got my invite to Live Mail BETA.

Simply fabulous! And my Hotmail ID continues with a 2GB storage space.

Microsoft is turning 30 years old!  Three decades is a long, long time to stay at the top!

Here's a special: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/goingbeyond/indexFlash.html

Do check out the timeline.

I had read about Wine long, long ago. It is heartening to seem them finally dropping a BETA.

Check out http://www.winehq.org/

Wine is a fascinating project. It is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of the X and Unix platforms. This means that any Windows application can now run on Unix. They also have a program loader allowing Windows apps to run straight out on x86 systems. Cool stuff.

Check out http://appdb.winehq.org/ to see applications that have already run on Wine. Microsoft Money, Paint Shop Pro, several games, Internet Explorer, Dreamweaver, the list is endless.

With Microsoft Windows Services For Unix (which by the way took way less time to develop than the 12-year Wine project - I just had to say that!) and the Wine BETA release, can I dare to say that the desktop is almost unified? 

This is simply mind-blowing!!

For all those who thought start.com was just an imitation, for all those who did not believe, for all those who believed, for all those who thought Microsoft is way behind in the Web 2.0 race, for all those who thought a search giant is the future, for all those who love technology and computing, here's the next big thing - the present redefined and the future.

www.live.com

www.officelive.com

Here's the official announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-01PreviewSoftwareBasedPR.mspx

I love pizza. And there is this Pizza Hut close to where I live in Bangalore which is where I usually order from. Now, I wake up this morning and get to my mail box (read snail mail, not email) and find a nice brochure that read:

Hello Pandurang! Do you know how fresh Pizza is made?

And all of it was printed, not on a paper that was stuck on to the brochure, but actually printed on the face of the brochure. Though I had actually read the content of the brochure in a newspaper advertisement before, this one brought a smile to my face - just to think that they'd gone through the trouble to personalize these brochures and actually deliver them to the right addresses too.

It was a simple 'wow' and will sure go some way in putting Pizza Hut into your list of subconscious favorites. Probably.

Personalization has been around for quite some time now. The most popular personalization gimmicks started when the Internet caught on, with "Welcome, John Smith" messages to personalizing colors, fonts, themes, layouts and content.  All of it simple user profiling - I've coded this functionality many times myself.

But today, that is no longer a 'wow' factor. That's expected. Today's personalization, to create a wow, has to go notches above that.

An example is when Reason magazine printed 40,000 different covers to one issue of their magazine, each carrying a satellite image (similar to what you see in Google maps today) of the subscriber's home. That is ground-breaking personalization.

I think today's users need that kind of personalization to be realized by websites (or portals) like MSN, Yahoo and the like. www.google.com/ig is once again trying to solve an old problem in a more AJAX-based, stylish manner. But the real value-add would be when the personalization was context-based (and I don't mean the user entering search keywords and seeing feeds based on search results - that's just lame because I still have to define the keywords).

The need of the day is personalization that is really personal. Who will provide the answers?

www.windows.com - Wonder what this is a placeholder for?

There are some pages that are unlinked and very old (dating back to 2001) and the site looks like it is going to be the Vista one-stop website. Or is there something more exciting our way?

time.windows.com is still used for synchronizing time. None of the other sub-domains seem to be used (sa.windows.com, shell.windows.com, etc.)

If you downloaded Google Earth, you no doubt tried "visiting" your country (outside the U.S. and Canada) and were disappointed to just see wide satellite imagery that showed no rich detail.

Google Earth is now global covering every region of the world. You can visit Bangalore, India or for that matter, most major cities of the world and can see vivid satellite imagery (courtesy DigitalGlobe) showing you buildings, roads, bridges and what not.

Apparently, most countries aren't very happy about the satellite imagery being available to the whole world. Yeah, no doubt the Americans and the Russians always saw everything with their spy satellites, but now every Tom, Dick, Harry and you can see it too. And the Governments of these countries aren't very happy.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1243460.cms

http://www.webpronews.com/insidesearch/insidesearch/wpn-56-20050811GoogleEarthContinuesToRaiseSecurityConcerns.html

If you thought these countries were crazy - instead of embracing technology and opening avenues for a navigational system based on Google, they're talking about security issues and causing red tape - wait till you see this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/google_earth_threatens_democracy/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/20/google_earth_democracy_two/

Obviously not a pretty picture. Will Google be forced to take off this wonderful "feature"?

PS: I like what MSN Virtual Earth does with countries outside the US and Canada - it shows very good maps, with even city names of relatively unknown cities (I tried viewing India, of course), with no detail. Google Maps does not do that yet - though their own Google Earth does it. I wonder why!?