October 6, 2009, New York City. Tying into today’s worldwide launch of Windows Phone, Microsoft presents our first consumer oriented Open House at the classic and majestic Park Avenue Armory. The floor is set out in a modular design to provide interactive scenes and settings showcasing our greatest consumer technology. Scenes include a garage, home office and even a treehouse that highlight the greatest Microsoft consumer products that will be must-haves this Christmas season. We are hoping to make this a recurring event, so please share your feedback on what you would like to see in the future!

Robbie Bach kicks off the show and identifies some value add areas for the consumer:

• You could buy your daughter a Twilight themed Zune player, tricked out with a ZunePass subscription which allow her to download over 16M of her favorite songs, including ones that you and her listening to together while reading a specific book. Robbie comments that he has read over 30 books with his 13 year old daughter over the years, and the ability to customize the software and hardware enables him to enhance his special, unique connection with his daughter.

• Popularity of XBox continues to soar with new XBox games coming out, with 20M Xbox Live members today with 200k multi-player games played every week
• 1 out of 4 adults want a computer this holiday season
• Robbie mentioned that his family is geographically dispersed – son at school in California, in laws in Ohio, his wife is Dutch with family in the Netherlands, his parents in North Carolina. How do they stay together?  Windows Phone is the unifier for him.
  • merging workstyle and lifestyle together.
  • choice: 30 Windows phones in 20 countries. Digital keyboard, manual keyboard, touch screen. Choice of operating system: Verizon, Sprint, T-mobile.  Different price points.
  • Your phone is now an accessory – select a theme from well known designers: Vera Wang, Diane Von Furstenberg, Ron Arad, Isaac Mizrahi have created custom themes
  • New apps – Critter – a Tamagotchi like application for children, Midomi to capture snippets of music you hear in the air and then tie in with web services to identify the song.
  • Your phone is like your wallet, when you lose it it’s a disaster.
  • • 5% lost their phone in the freezer.
    • 21% flirt via mobile phone.
    • 22% use their phones in the public bathrooms. 
    • With MyPhone service you can log into a website and track your phone. Let’s say you lose your phone in a New York cab. You can simply login to a website and track where the phone is. You can watch it moving on the screen stuffed into a taxi seat.  You can force it ring remotely. You can lock the phone and erase your data remotely. Back up your contacts, text messages and pictures. And more.
    • The MyPhone service enables you to protect your mobile assets. To configure MyPhone follow these instructions
  • Also launching today, Windows Marketplace for Mobile hosts a series of applications that you can download to your phone. In fact, developers have a fantastic opportunity to win a Surface unit!! 

    “The Race to Market Challenge will reward the developer whose paid application earns the most revenue within the contest period and the developer whose free application is downloaded the most within the contest period. Winners will receive a prize package including a Microsoft Surface table and developer kit, free online marketing and promotion of their application, plus a one-of-a-kind trophy.

    The Microsoft Surface is a 30-inch tabletop multi-touch display that uses a camera-based vision system to interact with objects placed on its screen and lets users grab and move digital content with simple hand gestures and touches. The Surface developer kit includes the Microsoft Surface SDK SP1, Windows Vista Business (SP1), and all other software required to develop and test Microsoft Surface applications.

    Online promotion and marketing include custom-built advertisements of your application on Microsoft Total Access, WindowsMobile.com, developer.windowsmobile.com, Facebook, and Twitter.

    See official rules for contest details.”

  • AND, if you are a female developer or developing a female-targeted mobility application you will have a chance to win your own HTC device. Contact me for more details!

For more tips like this, LIVE and IN PERSON, come see us at the MSDN Roadshow !

How do you set up multiple devices on a mesh?  At this point you have read the first Windows Live tip: Why Mesh? and now you are convinced that you need Mesh.  You’ll need a Live ID (usually a hotmail, msn or live account) to login to mesh site. This is the 2nd in a series of Windows Live tips that cover how you can leverage the power of the desktop, with the reach of web based services.

Setting up your very own Mesh

Once you sign in, you’ll see your desktop (You won’t see as many machines as I do, naturally):

1. Click on the big Plus sign – Add Device.
2. Choose your operating system from the drop down. Although it says XP, Vista, it will work on Windows7 beta. And note, there is support for Mac. You can read more about the support for the different Mac Operating Systems on the Live Mesh blog.  You’ll also see support for mobile phones (more on that later).
3. You’ll be prompted to run the LiveMesh install executable. Choose Run to install the program. You will see a little blue icon pop up in your system tray, with a bubble indicating that Mesh is being prepared for use.
4. Once installed, you’ll need to sign your desktop in to connect with the services in the Cloud.  Click the Sign In button.
5. Give your computer a name to differentiate it from all the other computers on your Mesh, and click the button Add device :
6. Once your device connects, your system tray will light up notifying you that the device has been successfully added: That’s it. You are setup. Next we will cover how you set up folders for synchronization.

Windows Live Mesh is by far our most compelling beta Software + Services solution for empowering your every day life.  I shared several benefits with TechnoGranny earlier this year. Live Mesh extends the power of the Cloud onto  your desktop and devices by enabling  you to automatically sync files with people and their machines.  .

Why use Mesh in your professional business life?

At Microsoft, I use Live Mesh quite extensively to share material with my colleagues because I love the fact that i don’t have to VPN/RAS into my corporate network. Although, now with Windows7 DirectAccess, the old days of VPN problems (lack of public IP address when traveling in a hotel, slowness and cumbersome connection initialization) have gone away.  But the benefits of Mesh have not, here are some scenarios that I use quite often:

1. Sync documents with your team. Share and synchronize team documentation and post alerts and announcements with the team. As you can see, the beta has the look and feel of Windows in the Cloud, and yes, you can definitely end up with a cluttered Live desktop for those of you desktop shortcut fans:
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2. Work offline. Because Live Mesh is truly an S+S solution, you can extend leverage the power of Windows and continue to work with your documents offline.  When you reconnect with the cloud, your documents will automatically sync back up to the server.

Why use Mesh in your personal life?

1. Back up  your cell phone photos! I have Mesh on my phone and have it set to automatically back up the cell phone pictures I take. Although I have recently moved to MyPhone for backup, this feature is still one of the coolest demos to show. Stand in front of a roomful of people, demo’ing Mesh on the PC with a big screen behind you projecting your machine screen. Open up the  mesh folder for your cell phone picture sync.  As you are talking to the audience, take a picture of them with your cell phone. Suddenly they will see a picture of themselves pop up on the screen behind you, as I demo’ed with students back in February:
2. Socialize & Share multimedia automatically. Most of my family lives many many server hops away and sharing large photo and video files over email doesn’t make a lot of sense.  With Mesh, I can create a folder and invite them using their Windows Live linked email addresses. Then they can subscribe to that folder on their desktop and any time I drop a file into that folder, it automatically gets synced!

Why use Mesh as a student?

Earlier this year, I presented to a couple hundred high school prep students and demo’ed Windows Live Mesh. At the end of the session, I asked their feedback on what they thought of the technology and how it would be applicable in their lives. This is what they told me:

1. Collaboration on group homework
2. Field reporting /journalistic type activities
3. Working online/offline when you travel a lot on planes
4. Staying in touch & sharing video with families who may live in second world countries that have bandwith, yet not financial means to communicate

Mesh is definitely one of those products that has scores of uses, both professional and personal. In the next post for this series, we’ll walk through the setup process.