Skydrive received new updates today. It’s now available in 62 countries and regions, with 24 new ones added today: Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Ukraine, Venezuela, Serbia, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Updates:

• Comments. You can leave comments on any file in SkyDrive and see all of the recent comments people have left for you.
• Captions. A picture's worth a thousand words, but sometimes you need a few more. Now you can add captions and descriptions to your files and photos.
• Browsing widget.  When you click on any file, you can speed through all the files in the folder.
• Larger photo previews - we've made the photo previews even bigger.

In the picture above you see Click to add a caption (Captions) and the browsing widget on the right (quickly browse through the files by clicking the arrows). You also see Add a Comment (Comments).

There are also new views added and bugs were fixed.

Full article

SkyDrive Home

Last week, in a memo to employees, Microsoft President Kevin Johnson outlined plans for Microsoft’s continued push into the online services business:

We have been executing against the core strategy I first presented at our Financial Analyst Meeting in July 2007 to go after the growing opportunity in online services and advertising. Four pillars have formed the basis of our strategy: 
1. Consolidate ad platform and win in display
2. Innovate and disrupt in search
3. Deliver end-to-end user experiences across PC, phone, and web
4. Reinvent portal and social media experiences

And indeed, what Microsoft is trying to do is to “disrupt in search”, most clearly evidenced by the announcement of Live Search cashback.  Here’s Satya Nadella with a demo, from Advance08:

I’ve been getting a little more familiar with the little video camera I picked up a few weeks ago. Today at the Advance08 advertisers summit at Microsoft in Redmond, as part of the keynote with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella, Satya showed off Farecast, a recent acquistion that is now integrated into Live Search, and I pointed the little Sanyo toward the stage:

A new Windows Live Mobile homepage has just been launched into beta over at http://mhome.live.com. Thought its just the first milestone, the new page features several nifty features. These include:

• The “What’s new” summary, showing recent updates made by your friends
• Ability to query Live Search direct from the homepage
• Easy access to the other mobile Windows Live services (mail, messenger, spaces)

Key here is the implementation of the “What’s new” feed, that is also currently available on the PC through spaces.live.com. This is something that Facebook has developed into a must-have feature for social networking, especially by making it available through their mobile site.

Obviously this is just the first beta for the new mobile homepage so the currently implemented features are the basics. We’d expect to see more advanced features like photo update notifications and mailbox previews in the next milestones, but the question is whether the team can innovate in this area.

Click to enlarge the screenshot, or check it out at http://mhome.live.com on your mobile device.

In April, Microsoft acquired the award-winning travel web site Farecast. Today the new site launched! Live Search Farecast helps you find the lowest airfares by predicting when is the best time to buy, so you can time your purchase for the greatest discount.

The search will provide you with quite an extensive lists of possibilities as it searches several sites (334 results for mine). As if that’s not enough you can also compare Farecast prices to other sites like Expedia.

Good thing you can show flights by airline company too or limit the list by the number of stops. You can also narrow it down by limiting the Price Range, Flight Quality or duration. No predictions though for me…

It’s also made easy to book the flight of your choice. Simply click on Select in the result list and you will be taken to the site of the Airline Company where you can book your flight. Microsoft will also explore the possibility of incorporating a cash rebate option for travel services booked and purchased through Live Search Farecast, possibly through Live Search CashBack, which Kip posted about earlier.

Live Mesh has received a Service update which fixes several bugs, you will be notified to update automatically. Most notable one, for most anyway are the language ones:

· Fixed date format and removed region requirement. You still need to set your OS language to English.

That means you no longer have to change format (Date/Currency) to English (United States) to be able to use Live Mesh! Previously if you forgot that Live Mesh would not connect and you’d get an error message telling you to check your network connectivity. You also do not need to change your System Locale anymore!

· User names with non-US-ASCII characters are now supported.

Other very notable ones are regarding Silverlight: the version error with the Beta release and Play and Pause buttons being swapped around have been fixed.

For a full list of updates read: Live Mesh Team Blog - Service update: New build released

Live Search CashBack, at least one of the big announcements slated for tomorrow’s (Seattle time) Advance08 advertisers conference, is up and running now, at least for the moment.  Apparently not having learned from the multiple early sightings of the new Live.com page, the Live Search team seems to be trying to beat us at our own game, they just can’t seem to keep a secret.  The program, which will pay cash back for purchases made using Live Search, is described in the FAQ like this:

Microsoft Live Search cashback is "The Search That Pays You Back". Find great deals on millions of products from hundreds of brand name stores that you know and trust. You will be able to earn cashback savings based on a percentage of the product price. Your savings will be paid to you via your choice of a deposit to your PayPal account, direct deposit to your bank account, or a check in the mail. It's that simple!

CashBack is accessible through the live.com home page:

And a quick screenshot from the “See how this works” page:

At first glance this does not appear to be a US only offer, the terms and conditions list numerous countries.

We’ll have more as the official announcement takes place tomorrow.  For now you can see if you can access it at http://search.live.com/cashback

Update:
From the Terms of Service -  17. Live Search cashback:
You can participate in the Live Search cashback service, subject to the then-current participation age, country of residence and other requirements described at the Live Search cashback web site.

Today, at Advance08, Microsoft unveiled a new brand name, Microsoft Advertising, and a new logo, which amazingly enough seems to fit into an overall scheme of recent logos.  Take a look at these:

(there are more, thanks to VasiS for noticing in the comments)

This month’s Fast Company magazine has a cover story on Alex Bogusky and Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency recently hired to run the $300 million dollar ad campaign Microsoft is planning for this summer.  While none of these logos and designs are from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the new campaign may shed further light on how Microsoft is preparing to present itself to the world.  Clearly someone is paying attention to the ridicule that Microsoft has brought upon itself by not paying attention to consumer focused issues like branding and logos, and how much effect those issues are starting to have on even Microsoft’s core businesses.  Would Vista be doing better in the enterprise if it wasn’t being assaulted by the consumer press and by rivals like Apple? Perhaps not, but there are clear indications to the contrary.

While some of the advertising and marketing gurus here at Advance08 might have something to say about a brand strategy that’s still not quite there, for Microsoft these recent logos seem to have made a quantum leap forward in bringing a consistent theme (and a set of simple product names) together.  Kevin Johnson mentioned Microsoft’s struggles with branding in his memo to his team, issued last Sunday:

4. Fix our online branding - Our brands are fragmented and confusing today, and we recognize a need to clarify and align our online branding. We are now driving forward to address this opportunity.

Microsoft has long been ridiculed for painfully long product names, and had to retreat from a less than well thought out Windows Live branding strategy, if indeed there was any strategy at all in the beginning.  Miraculously, that seems to be changing.  When I pointed out the problems in Live Search headers and logos in a post last week, it was in part because we’ve been told about new branding strategies before, first with Windows Live itself, and then with “the flair”, as Harrison likes to call it.  Then we had a couple of iterations of new design, and while everyone seemed to have new ideas, no one bothered to clean up the old ones.  Hopefully, with a nudge or two from Kevin Johnson, that will begin to change.

I’m sitting here at Advance08, at Microsoft in Redmond, where Senior Vice President for Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Brian McAndrews made a couple of announcements today.  In addition to announcing the rebranding of Microsoft’s various advertising services to “Microsoft Advertising”, McAndrews announced the availability for marketers to be able to place banner advertising on Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail for Mobile properties.  Available in France, Spain, the US, and the UK, ads on Hotmail and Messenger in the US for example, would reach some 25 million mobile users of Hotmail and Messenger.  Plans are also being readied for keyword ad placement in Live Search for Mobile.

Tomorrow we’ll be listening to Satya Nadella and Bill Gates talk about Live Search, and we’re expecting some significant announcements.

After a couple of months of beta testing, the MSN Toolbar is ready for release.  We first told you about it in March, and while yes, it’s another toolbar, the new MSN Toolbar is different in a couple of significant ways.  First, it’s powered by Silverlight, and as it is written in XAML, there are plans to do some cool stuff with it coming up, according to MSN Director Stefan Weitz, who I had a chance to talk to a bit about the new toolbar.

Later this year an SDK will be released and 3rd party developers will be able to write to the toolbar.  Weite said that plans have not been finalized, a check-in process, similar to how apps are checked into the Windows Live Gallery, may be used.  Extending the toolbar may give it more of a reason to become a keeper in what is already a crowded browser toolbar market.

The toolbar also includes a “breaking news” feature, which alerts readers to important news stories without having to check MSNBC etc.

One complaint we heard about the MSN Toolbar available in beta was a lack of customization, users were stuck with basic black.  That has changed with color customizations:

The new toolbar is not without some not-so-subtle attempts to feature Live Search.  Whenever a search page is encountered (either this MSN page, or a search page from a competitor), the Toolbar “flips” to reveal a Live Search bar and all of the “scope” tabs:

All in all, however, it IS just another toolbar, albeit a Silverlight one, in an already crowded market.  I wonder if this guy can add it to his collection:

You can download and try the new MSN Toolbar now at http://toolbar.msn.com/ (if it's not available in your area now, it will be soon Update note: the toolbar is rolling out in the US today, and will be available in more markets "this summer")