June, 2010

New Bing Map App: Imagine Cup 2010

imageThe Imagine Cup 2010 finalists are in. Open to students around the world, the Imagine Cup is a serious challenge that draws serious talent, and the competition is intense. The contest spans a year, beginning with local, regional and online …

Microsoft KIN: so much for that idea

KINlogoMicrosoft announced today that it was effectively killing its KIN phones, according to numerous news reports.  Verizon will continue to sell the phones, but there will be no European expansion, and the KIN team will be folded into Windows Phone …

Adding Polylines and Polygons in Bing Maps Apps

Currently the Bing Maps App SDK .chm documentation covers how to add Pushpins on the map, but not polylines and polygons.  When creating your entities, rather than passing in a PointPrimitive instance to the Entity.Primitive property, you can pass in …

PivotViewer available for download!

We first saw Pivot, the Live Labs project that presents visual information in fun new ways, last November at PDC, and then this year at Tech-Ed, Live Labs announced that a new “PivotViewer” Silverlight control would be introduced, …

Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone passes one million downloads!

Wow, lots of iPhone users are using Windows Live Messenger from their iPhone. In just 5 days over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that got released last week.

But not only iPhone users …

MSNbot to become Bingbot on Oct. 1st. 2010

On October 1st, 2010, the Bing web crawler will come out of beta. At that time the crawler will also be rebranded from msnbot to bingbot.

The updated user agent will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

The HTTP header From …

More on Messenger Connect

Angus Logan, Sr. Technical Product Manager for Messenger Connect, has been busy today sharing lots of information about the new set of APIs that allow developers to interact with Messenger and Windows Live.  In a blog post on Inside Windows

It’s official: Over 99% of you have #NoHotmailYet

Today in a blog post at Inside Windows Live, Hotmail’s Mike Schackwitz updates us on the Hotmail rollout with the news that it is going purposely slowly at first:

Two weeks ago, we started the Hotmail rollout with a

Bing’s first year: good for advertisers?

In a newsletter sent out to Bing advertisers, Microsoft Advertising shared some good news about the first year of Bing:

  • Bing advertisers are reaching a motivated audience; Bing searchers spend 42 percent more than the average search user in the

Upcoming changes to Windows Live re: Twitter

As some of you already noticed, there have been some changes to Windows Live in regards to Twitter: the service was available as one of some 75 social networks that you could bring into your Windows Live feed, but it …