Bing Maps, Botnets, Buxton and Developers, Developers, Developers – Weekend Reading

Last week we added an hour to evening daylight, and now we’re just hours away from officially hitting spring. I know much of the country hasn’t been seeing very good weather – flooding in Fargo, storms in New York – but in Seattle we’re watching the spring flowers come out, and some of my more adventurous colleagues are even eating their lunch outside.

It’s been another busy week.  MIX10, our event focused on web designers and developers, took center stage with a focus on the Windows Phone 7 Series developer opportunity, and the release of the first platform preview for Internet Explorer 9.  The Microsoft News Center has more details and live.visitmix.com gives you the whole MIX10 experience – like you were actually there. 

Here are some other things this week that you might have missed:
 

SXSW. Microsoft Research’s danah boyd led a really interesting discussion on privacy and publicity in the context of social networks. A really thought provoking presentation on a critically important topic so the transcript is well worth a read.

Bing Maps.  The Bing Maps team continues to roll out some really cool new technology. The latest additions are fresh photos of 2.6 million square miles of the planet. The oblique angle at which the newest photos are taken create an amazing “you are there” feeling. It’s still a big planet, but with Bing Maps, it feels a little easier to navigate.  And Bing Maps no longer just maps the world.  Now you can look up, as well, and see the stars in their orientation over your location on the map with the integration of Worldwide Telescope.

March Madness.  It’s hard to avoid.  It seems like every conversation is about the office pool, and alumni rivalry.  MSN is your source for all things about the NCAA tournament, including the latest stats and scores, bracket updates, and much more.

Botnets.  And here’s another update to a story we ran three weeks ago about a Microsoft team’s efforts to take down the Waledac botnet, suspected of generating an amazing amount of the spam that sometimes fills our mailboxes. That work seems to have paid off, with reports that Waledac is now completely crippled. You can read more about the lessons we learned from this success.  It’s a fascinating story.

Lastly, I want to call out a great piece of one of the keynote events at this past week’s MIX10 event.  One of the keynoters was our own Bill Buxton, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research. Buxton gave a great demonstration on what it means to “keep it real” when creating a user interface. Plus he showed a little bit of his musical side, and wowed developers with a demo of our Project Gustaf. Scroll to the 1:39 mark on the video to catch his presentation. Bill generated a lot of buzz this week.  See why.

 Have a good weekend.

 

Posted by Dominic Carr
Director, Microsoft News Center.

 

 

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