עמוד הבית

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/