עמוד הבית

Decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go.

4. Be a realistic optimist.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good.

6. Have grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle.

8. Don't tempt fate.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do.

On Tuesday, Paramount Digital Entertainment launched the Silverlight Enhanced Movies (SLEM) Windows Phone 7 application for the movie “School of Rock” which is now available in the app marketplace.   “School of Rock” is the first of 10 Windows Phone 7 movie apps to be made available – other titles such as “Zoolander,” the action-packed feature film “GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and the documentary “Waiting for Superman” will soon be available, with more titles to come. 

The new app was designed using Microsoft Silverlight multimedia technology, which gives Windows Phone 7 smartphone owners the ability to not only watch the full movie but:

· Create custom clips and share to social networks

· Use the Movie Info feature offering the ability to identify actors, objects, music and places in the movie, while providing rich, contextual information such as
bios, descriptions and even maps to the locations

· Ability to view the movie with pop-up trivia powered by the ‘Scene It?’ movie trivia game

· Bonus features and clips previously not available

Read the official announcement from Paramount about the Silverlight Enhanced Movies as well as the following blog posts about the innovative app which
shows just what is possible with Windows Phone 7:

· Windows Phone Developer Blog post for further detail on how developers used Silverlight to create the new movie apps.

· Official Microsoft Blog “Paramount to Rock the Mobile Apps Market on Windows Phone 7

· Media Insights Blog “Paramount Chooses Microsoft to Bring Movie Experience Mobile”

The most common question we get asked about the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is, "Where are the nodes physically located?"  We're happy to say that customers choosing to serve data through the network today are offered 20 physical nodes* to improve delivery of performance-sensitive content around the globe.  Below is the list of current locations; we'll update this list as our network evolves.

US/EMEA

US

• Ashburn, VA
• Bay Area, CA
• Chicago, IL
• San Antonio, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Newark, NJ
• Seattle, WA

EMEA

• Amsterdam, NL
• Dublin, IE
• London, GB
• Paris, FR
• Stockholm, SE
• Vienna, AT
• Zurich, CH

Asia-Pacific/Rest of World

• Hong Kong, HK
• São Paulo, BR
• Singapore, SG
• Sydney, AU
• Tokyo, JP

Offering pay-as-you-go, one-click-integration with Windows Azure Storage, the Windows Azure CDN is a system of servers containing copies of data, placed at various points in our global cloud services network to maximize bandwidth for access to data for clients throughout the network. The Windows Azure CDN can only deliver content from public blob containers in Windows Azure Storage - content types can include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, real time media streams, and other components of Internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries).

For details about pricing for the Windows Azure CDN, read our earlier blog post here.

*A Windows Azure CDN customer's traffic may not be served out of the physically "closest" node; many factors are involved including routing and peering, Internet "weather", and node capacity and availability.  We are continually grooming our network to meet our Service Level Agreements and our customers' requirements.

Originally posted at  - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/08/09/20-nodes-available-globally-for-the-windows-azure-cdn.aspx

The BizSpark startup of the day is SiSense, based in Israel. Below you will find an interview with Elad Israeli, Co-founder and CEO of SiSense. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!

Website: www.sisense.com

Tell us who you are and your role in the company:

Co-founder and CEO.

What did you do before creating your company?

Before co-founding SiSense, I served as a Product Manager at global IT services firm Ness Technologies (NASDAQ: NSTC). Previously, I was a Product Manager at Anysoft and, before that, I co-founded and led technology development at BiSense, a BI technology company.

How do you feel being the most promising ‘Startup of the Day’ per Microsoft BizSpark?

We are very excited to have SiSense named 'Startup of the Day' by Microsoft BizSpark. We bring an entirely new approach to business intelligence and it is gratifying to be acknowledged by a site such as BizSpark.

What is your company’s mission?

SiSense is leading the way to a new era of business intelligence where fast and flexible BI is available to any business user analyzing any type or amount of data. With SiSense’s do-it-yourself approach to BI, BI evaluations and evaluation and implementation projects are fast and inexpensive, requiring little or no investment in IT resources, consultants or new computer hardware.

In 140 characters or less, tell us what your company does:

We enable fast, easy do-it-yourself BI over any amount of data from any number of sources, with no need for data warehouse or OLAP projects.

How did you get the idea for your company?

Long and hard past experience with traditional business intelligence implementations coupled with the advances in hardware and software technology led us to believe BI can be done with a saner approach, minimal upfront investments and short implementation cycles. We designed our products along these guidelines.

Read the full interview with Elad Israeli Co-founder and CEO of SiSense at - http://www.bizspark.com/v2/Blogs/Microspark-BizSpark-Startup-of-the-Day/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=233

The BizSpark startup of the day is BEST IT Solutions LTD (Quilink), based in Israel. Below you will find an interview with Yevgeny Safovich, CEO and Co-Founder of Quilink. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!

Website: www.quilink.com

Tell us who you are and your role in the company:

My name is Yevgeny Safovich and I am the CEO and co-founder of Quilink.

What did you do before creating your company?

I have over 14 years of experience in the field, specializing in e-collaboration. In my last role before Quilink I had a pleasure of managing a group of brilliant people in Comverse. We were responsible for all Microsoft related technologies in IT department, developing large scale distributed enterprise solutions. I hold a degree of B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology.

How do you feel being the most promising ‘Startup of the Day’ per Microsoft BizSpark?

I am very happy that Microsoft has recognized the potential of Quilink, and nominated us the most promising startup of the day!

We carefully designed Quilink to perfectly integrate into the Microsoft environment and together with other Microsoft products provide a complete solution for Contacts Management. Therefore this recognition by Microsoft is an important milestone for us.

What is your company’s mission?

Our mission is simplify and enhance connections between people and businesses worldwide, by keeping their contacts always at-hand and up-to-date.

In 140 characters or less, tell us what your company does:

Quilink brings an innovative solution for search, sharing and organization of contacts for businesses and private users worldwide.

The BizSpark startup of the day is YubiTech, based in Israel. Below you will find an interview with Danny Weissberg, CEO and Co-Founder of YubiTech. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!

Website: www.yubitech.com

Tell us who you are and your role in the company:

I am the CEO and co-Founder of YubiTech. I have also established the Open University Entrepreneur Club.

What did you do before creating your company?

I have extensive experience in high-tech development and management with Check Point, Radvision and Mercury Interactive. I hold a BSc in Civil Engineering from the Technion and a BA in Computer Science from the Open University.

What is your company’s mission?

YubiTech plans to be a leader in the mobilization market, offering its breakthrough solution to port business applications to any mobile device in record time.

In 140 characters or less, tell us what your company does:

YubiTech's innovative approach is based on a simple and intutitive drag & drop designer tool that enables IT managers/distributors/system-integrators to mobilize existing business applications (such as ERP/CRM and proprietary) in record time of a few days, without writing a single line of code.

Read more at the official BizSpark Blog -  http://www.bizspark.com/v2/Blogs/Microspark-BizSpark-Startup-of-the-Day/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=231 

Join Justin Smith, Program Manager on the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) team, on a whirlwind tour of the new features of today's Labs release of ACS. Just to whet your appetite, here's a list of some of the news touched on in this video:

• Support for identity providers such as Facebook, Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, OpenID providers, and ADFS 2 instances
• Support for a wide range of protocols: WS-Federation, WS-Trust, Oauth WRAP
• Seamless integration with Windows Identity Foundation
• Brand new management portal and OData-based management API
• Tools for helping developers embed identity providers selection UI in their applications

What are you waiting for? Tune in!
Once you have watched the video, create your account at http://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ and start experimenting: it's free, there are no tokens to redeem, and there's no waiting time. Instant gratification!

Overview

Revolution 9 has four key themes:

1. Improve the user experience – For this, we “borrowed” Nishant Kothary, our design guru, as well as Nick Finck, Kevin Tamura and others at Blue Flavor and Matt Brown from Things that are Brown to build our site design. Here’s Nishant in his own words on the Revolution 9 user experience:

   “If you cull any redesign endeavor down to its bare essence, you are left with a simple question — How will this improve the user’s experience?  This question is the natural and the right starting point for pretty much every redesign project.  Unfortunately, it quickly gets lost in the noise of people, process and politics.

   What makes the Channel 9 redesign so unique is that the question truly did remain at the forefront through the entire process.  And it helped us stay true to our overarching redesign credo—the new Channel 9 needs to be clean, clutter-free and visually put the focus back on content.  From a rock-solid information architecture to the extremely clean and high-contrast color palette and typographic grid, the new design attempts to put the focus back on what’s most important about Channel 9—the content. Oh, and we gave the Nine guy a little facelift while we were at it .“

2. Improve quality, reliability, and performance – We’ve been getting this feedback for a while now and Revolution 9 was a good time to take a step back and make sure that we have the right architecture, process, and instrumentation in place to measurably improve this. Here a just some of the improvements coming with Rev 9 that will improve quality, reliability, and performance: Moving to Azure as our hosting platform, 1,300+ unit tests for production code, using memcache for caching, and the instrumentation we’ve added to monitor real-time usage.
3. Improve discoverability of content and site features – One of the key pieces of feedback we had in our user survey was that niners couldn’t find content on the site and there was no easy way of browsing content. With Revolution 9, we’ve added the Browse page (full details below) that lets you search and filter by tag, show, author and more. We’ve also improved the discoverability of features like ratings and download links.
4. Improve the experience for content creators on Channel 9 – While our primary audience is viewers of Channel 9 videos, another important customer of Channel 9 are the people who create content. With Rev 9, we've added some key features for content creators, like the ability to schedule the time a video is published, the ability to set content as “obsolete” so that customers don’t waste time trying to get a Beta 1 demo to work on the RTM version of a product, or the ability to add custom time-codes to a URL so that you can jump to any point in time in a video.

Show me some pictures
Now that you have an idea on the motivations behind this release; let’s look at some screenshots of the new pages and features!

The Home page
Here’s a quick before and after view of the home page

for further screenshots and reading  - http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/C9Team/A-screenshot-tour-of-the-new-Channel-9/ 

על קצה המזלג, להלן עיקרי החידושים:

· הכרזה על זמינותו של פתרון חדש ממשפחת Azure הנקרא- Windows Azure Platform Appliance. פתרון זה מאפשר לספקי שירותים גדולים, ארגוני ממשלה וארגוני Enterprise להריץ את מערכת ההפעלה Windows Azure ובסיס הנתונים SQL Azure ב-Datacenters שלהם בכדי לספק שירותי ענן פרטי, שירותי Hosted Cloud או להריץ יישומים עסקיים, מבוססי אינטרנט ורחבי היקף. ה-Appliance יאפשר להריץ יישומים על גבי מאות עד עשרות אלפי שרתים שיעברו אופטימיזציה וספציפיקציה ע"י מיקרוסופט. כך לדוגמא נחשף כי חברת eBay יישמה את הפתרון וכן נחשפו מספר שותפים אשר יישמו את הפתרון ויציעו באמצעותו שירותי Cloud, ביניהם HP, Dell ו-Fujitsu .. בשלב זה הפתרון יוצע באופן מצומצם.

· הכרזה על Windows Azure Data Marketplace (שם קוד ‘Dallas’) אשר יאפשר למפתחים ועובדי ידע ליהנות משילוב תכני פרימיום ביישומים העסקיים של הארגון, מכ-30 ספקי תוכן, ביניהם: WeatherBug, CDYNE ו-data.gov . שירות זה יאפשר לספקי התכנים להיחשף לשווקים חדשים, ליהנות מתשתית סקלבילית, שירותי Billing גמישים, Storage בהיקפים גדולים ועוד. השירות יהיה זמין לקראת סוף 2010.

· הכרזה על Windows Azure Application Assessment Tool אשר יסייע לשותפי מיקרוסופט להעריך שיקולים חשובים בהעברת אפליקציות ל-Windows Azure Platform

· הכרזה על Demo Showcase - כלי זה, המבוסס על תשתיות Azure , מוצע במסגרת MPN (Microsoft Partner Network) ומאפשר לשותפים להוריד, ליצור ולשתף מוצרים ו\או דמואים. כיום הכלי מציע מעל 460 דמואים ומעל 85000 הורדות במהלך FY10

מידע נוסף התפרסם באתר יחסי הציבור של מיקרוסופט, בבלוג הרשמי של מיקרוסופט וכן בחדר העיתונות של כנס ה-WPC .

טיקטאקטי מציעה פתרונות פרסום אינטראקטיביים על גבי תוכן עשיר כגון משחקים ווידאו הכוללים בין היתר שתילת פרסום סמוי תוך שימוש בטכנולוגיות מציאות מדומה. השימוש ב-Windows Azure כפלטפורמה כוללת אפשרה לטיקטאקטי להגדיל את רמת הביצועים ללקוחות ב-400% תוך חיסכון ניכר בהקמת תשתיות, ניהול מסדי הנתונים ומערך ה-System.

טיקטאקטי הינה חברה טכנולוגית שבסיסה בישראל. החברה נוסדה בשנת 2007 ומספקת פתרונות כוללים לפרסום על גבי תוכן עשיר במידע כדוגמת משחקים וסרטים מקוונים. טיקטאקטי מציעה את פתרון הפרסום שלה על גבי משחקים מקוונים באופן המאפשר לענות על הצרכים המשתנים של מסעי הפרסום השונים. תהליך הכנת משחק אורך מספר שעות בודדות וכולל בחובו קדימון, פרסום בין שלבים ופרסום בסוף המשחק. משחקים ממומנים ושתילת פרסום סמוי הממומנים ע"י חברות מסחריות אורך אף הוא מספר ימים בודדים. פתרון חברת טיקטאקטי אינו מצריך עריכה מחדש של קוד המשחק ואו שימוש בערכות פיתוח ייעודיות. טיקטאקטי תומכת במשחקים מקוונים הבנויים בסביבת פלאש והפועלים בסביבות סרגלי כלים, אתרים ומשחקי פלאש הניתנים להורדה.

“Windows Azure הנה הפלטפורמה היחידה המספקת פיתרון לבסיס הנתונים הכולל יתירות מובנת ואפשרות ל-Scale Up, יתירות מלאה ואוטומטית לשרתי האפליקציה, וניהול מלא מבחינת SYSTEM מצד נותן השירות” ניר חגשורי CTO חברת טיקטאקטי

Windows Azure מאפשר הפחתה ברורה ומיידית בעלויות הנובעת מביטול הצורך לרכוש תשתיות חומרה, שטחי אחסון, תוכנות, כוח אדם וכד' ; מספק סקלביליות בלתי מוגבלת (Scalability) ; מאפשר פיתוח בסביבה מוכרת תוך חיסכון תיפעולי משמעותי וקבלת פיתרון מקצה לקצה לשירותי גיבוי, אחסון או ניהול ה-SQL וה-System באופן כללי.

להמשך קריאה - http://www.microsoft.com/israel/casestudies/tictacti.mspx

Just wanna let you know that we’re up with new Israeli Azure campaign… further info at the this site -  http://www.microsoft.com/israel/azureplatform/ 

If you haven't tried Azure yet, this is the time!