Add to My MSN

Click OK to add this content

Content Preview: rss

China's #1 Web company announces Silverlight plans

587 days ago

Tencent Corporation announced plans to use Silverlight for a series of services and media experiences on their portal and in their client apps. Tencent is an amazing company, largely unheard of outside of China, but arguably the most potent brand here in China, in the form of "QQ", which is what they call their instant messaging application and a series of related social applications for blogging, media, shopping, etc. The QQ brand touches over 300m unique users, more people than in all of the United States. It's been incredibly exciting for our team to be working with the Tencent team because of the scope of what's possible for Silverlight in terms of transforming the UX of so many applications types. In the demo that they showed publicly this week, along with their announcement of choosing Silverlight for a series of apps coming in the months ahead, they showed Silverlight integrated with their IM client, within their blog app (for embedable media playback controls, ...

China's #1 Portal bringing Silverlight Music Experience

587 days ago

When it rains... Sina, another of China's heavyweight web properties (they are the #1 portal, specializing in news and blogs), announced Silverlight plans and showed a kick ass music search/playback/browsing experience that took inspiration from the "deepzoom" catalog concept seen elsewhere (such as HardRock site) but took it to the next level with awesome interactions, dynamic results that come in from general web search, and integrated media playback. What was particularly interesting was how quickly they build the app, with their product unit manager claiming that once the visual designs were done, they build the working prototype (with real web service integration) over the weekend! Extra points for integrating his powerpoint slides into the app itself, as a series of DeepZoom objects in the collection--got a big laugh/"ahh" from the audience at the press event. Can't wait to see the app live, expected within a month. Here's a video recording of the ...

Yahoo! Japan Silverlight Demo

594 days ago

Yahoo! Japan (Japan's #1 website by unique users and brand impact) demoed a killer UX concept today using Silverlight, a visualization front end for search and tail content that otherwise is hard to navigate/discover across their massive content repository. Very creative UI concepts, and great integration of some of Silverlight 2's killer features such as DeepZoom and high def videos. A video of the demo is posted online: http://www.microsoft.com/japan/products/expression/creatorsEX/gallery_y.html

VOD in Japan with "Gyao Station"

594 days ago

Continuing the theme of Silverlight wins in the region, the Gyao (Japan's leading VOD portal, owned by USEN, a large film distributor in market) application that went up in February is a nifty mini-portal that culls media options available for playback into a subject/gallery with nice UX. The app is data driven so Gyao has been very happy using it to program content from their "tail", "new arrival", or "promotion" inventory. This app is only really viewable/consumable to its fullest when you are within Japan IP address, given the content protection/rights issues associated with a VOD app like this. http://www.gyao.jp/newarrival/

Silverlight in Asia

594 days ago

Well life and work sure do take up a lot of time, but if there ever was a reason to make time for this work related blog effort, that time must be now! The parade of amazing Silverlight applications coming online here in Asia is really heating up. I want to give a shout out first to my favorite Silverlight 1.0 application anywhere in the world , Korea's mNet music video gallery/mashup. What's so great about this particular app is that it has a database of over 1m music videos/clips from mNet's long running inventory of Windows Media format media assets--great example of how companies with installed base of content can put that online in a richer interface using Silverlight, without any recompressing/transcoding of media. The UX of this app itself is super slick--great search/sifting with paged results, drag and drop a clip onto the main window for a PIP (picture in picture) playback effect with great performance, including full screen, overlay ads are inserted in periodically. ...