David Treadwell is the Corporate Vice President for the Windows Live Platform, and we caught up with him at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco to talk about Live Mesh and the Windows Live platform.  This interview was conducted on Thursday, April 24th, but I’ve been waiting to get a bit of time to attempt to work on the audio, and process the file.  We conducted the interview in a little “room” (think office type wall dividers with no ceiling) on the main floor of the expo hall, and the ambient noise was LOUD.  Actually my little video camera did a very good job of capturing the experience, but I did try to run the audio through some post processing to make it a bit more bearable (it was way worse than this ;) ).  Next time we’ll find a nice quiet corner.  Here’s the video:

And then of course when I got home I had to play with Live Mesh, by synchronizing some of the movie files I took at Web 2.0 Expo.  I dropped about 1gb of files (the largest was 230mb, most of the rest were less than 100mb) into a folder, synched it from my laptop to the desktop in about 10 minutes, where it proceeded to begin synching to the web desktop.  OK so that took 15 hours.

I’m on Comcast broadband cable here in Seattle, where the download speeds are good, but upload not so much.  Here’s a peek at a recent Speedtest:

Live Mesh synchronizes in the background, at low priority.  From my conversations with some of the Live Mesh guys, I’m not the only one to request a higher priority “synch now” button :).  I was expecting a couple of hours of reduced functionality with my connection, but needless to say I didn’t attempt any video editing or uploads to Soapbox on Saturday.

But this is pre-beta software, and it’s working amazingly well.  All of the files transferred flawlessly (though slowly), which is by design at this point.  Lesson learned about large files.  

But David was great to take the time to talk to us, we really appreciate it.  We’ve spent a lot of time recently on Live Mesh, Sunshine has been doing a great job on her series, with Part 3 coming up, but we don’t want to overwhelm you with Live Mesh coverage, so you’ll be seeing more from Web 2.0 Expo in the coming days and weeks.

Had a great time with the Live Mesh guys, though, and we’re working on doing even more with them soon.