One of the cool things that Bing has is the Cashback ability when shopping. If you like to shop online whether to find cheaper deals or just for the convenience, Bing Shopping allows you to compare prices from all the different sites as well as get Cashback on a lot of items. All you need to do is register and then start shopping by clicking the Cashback link that you see.

In the end you will get an email that looks like this and you know that you saved some money :).

So it has been a year since I last updated and I guess I was just too busy but there is important news today and might as well make an update. The new Zune Launched today, the Zune HD. It is amazing and along with the software, get ready for a new experience.

The Zune Software comes with many new features such as Smart DJ and Quickplay as well as an updated MixView Mode (it is pretty cool and you will want to play your music up on a screen). The new Zune HD, however comes with a lot more features and all new design. Touchscreen, HD Radio, Wi-Fi, all new interface and other pretty cool features.

Also with the ability to buy from Zune Originals so that you can get different colors and an engraving makes it pretty cool. Here is what I ordered today (woohoo).

The text on the back says “This is the way Life should be. Welcome to the Social. Now in HD ~RunsWithSizzors~” (Thanks to Derek and Ed for their help with this one). This is one extremely cool launch of the Social and there are so many updates for Zune fans. If you have never given it a chance check it out and see what you can get if you subscribe as well. Enjoy the Social, I know I am.

I’m a PC. Short and simple. Microsoft is continuing their advertising campaign with “Life Without Walls”, and part of that campaign is understanding that being a PC is not a stereotype. Check out the new campaign commercials that people will be able to see online, on TV as well as on the streets:

I really like the commercials and it really speaks to me, especially because “I’m a PC, just like BillG”. It’s nice to know that I’m a PC and can connect with so many others as well as do so many things, but I am different than other people who are PC’s as well. One of my favorite quotes is:

I'm a PC and a Human Being, not a Human Doing, not a Human Thinking, a Human Being...

As the next steps in marketing are about to start, I am getting all excited and just getting ready for what we can expect. Be prepared for a new commercial tonight to continue what Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, already started. Did I ever say how much I love this company…

So last time I had blogged about the first commercial that had come out as part of the campaign, and now the second commercial is out and has been aired.

Now I was a little skeptical when the first commercial aired, but like everybody I was looking for a commercial that hit all the points immediately. But what these commercials do is break the ice. It allows people from all over, whether they use a Mac or a PC or even Linux to just talk about this commercial. It is not product specific, but just allows people to sit back and laugh and enjoy it.

According to the Windows Blog, the commercial is doing exactly what it should be, and that is generating interest and making people talk about it, which is great, because talking about the commercial, leads to talking about Microsoft, which is what they want.

There are some really good lines in this commercial and they seem to be from Jerry Seinfeld,

I love a condiment with booze in it…

I can’t help wondering what’s next. Frog with an email, goldfish with a website, amoeba with a blog…

I don’t know why but those just make me laugh. Bill Gates, does do the robot at the end, which is funny as well. I know that I am really excited to see what comes next. So let us see what happens.

Some people like to blog and sure you can use things like the occasional twitter, to share your thoughts, but what if you wanted to be able to get all the benefits of using your Spaces site on the go (such as your friends being notified that you made an update, as well as RSS feeds). So how do you do this?

Go to your Spaces Site, and chose the Options Tab and go to Email Publishing. What you need to do is turn it on, and follow the steps to set it up (one time).

Before you start you will need a phone that can send email and thus you are going to have to have a data plan as well. There are a few options you need to configure:

• Your from email address - These are addresses that you authorize to email into your space so that you can update pictures and blogs.
• Enter a secret word - Just a security feature and select something that is known to you only, and you will see why it is used.
• Select a photo album – If you want to upload photos then it is a good idea to create a new blank album, or use an existing one and select it here and give it a keyword (something short and simple to remember).
• Publish or save the entry – This is a chance to select whether you want to publish immediately what you send in, or leave it up there as a draft so when you are at a PC you can make changes and then finalize.
• List of email addresses for you to remember – You can write these down or save them to your phone or if you have a Windows Mobile phone and use Hotmail create a contact and use Live Hotmail on you phone, so that you can start an email message and just choose this contact to send it too.

Essentially, you now have set up Live Blogging. So for example I have it set so that it publishes immediately and hence I can send an email to the email address that is given to me, in step 5, and my entry will get published. For blog entries, subject line is the title of the post, and the body is the text for the blog. For pictures, subject line is the caption, and just remember to attach the picture to the email, for it to be included in your photo album.

And there you have it. If you have it to publish immediately then your posts will show up immediately. This works and I have tried it out before, with pictures too. Enjoy and hope it makes people think about sharing and blogging on the go .

Part of what Microsoft, is trying to do is change its image and appeal and thus has an ad campaign out there to try and accomplish just that. The first commercial (shown below) is trying to do just that and there are more to come shortly.

What do you think of the commercial? As the PressPass link above said this about the first commercial.

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing.

Thus one is supposed to see and realize that this just set the stage for more commercials as they come out and understand that Microsoft is doing other things as part of this campaign. You will soon see Microsoft Gurus who will assist PC buyers and help share the Windows story.

Anyway's after a couple of days of discussing this one at work, it came down to the fact that this commercial means to me that it is about you, the user having choices which is important. There are other things as well but I will leave it up to you to come up with your own thinking around this. All I can say is that it should come out to be one “Delicious” campaign .

I figured I should mention that part of the Windows Live family, is FrameIt, which allows users to set up a RSS Feed of pictures, from something like their Spaces site, and thus allowing them to enter that into a Digital Picture Frame that supports these type of feeds and thus as you upload pictures you could allow family members to share these memories without having to even get on a computer. Say you are on vacation and if you set it up right, you should be able to just upload the pictures to a folder and family and friends can view this feed or use a Digital Picture Frame to view the pictures and share the memories .

So, we have just released Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 to the web and wanted to share some of the features around it. There are a lot of new features added to the browser and it just takes usability to the next level.

Some of the new features are things like Web Accelerators, so that users can highlight a piece of text right click and choose things like map or translate. Web Slices is another new feature that allows users to add a section of a website to IE so that you can reference it quickly.

Search and Privacy are also major improvements and with the ability to search multiple engines and even Wikipedia from one location is pretty impressive. Security has improved and things like developer tools have been added as well. There are a ton of other features as well when it comes to tabbed browsing, and rendering and the look and feel. Try it out now.

Microsoft finally release Photosynth and it is now live for people to use. This was previewed a while back and now it is finally available as something that is free to use. Users can go to the site, and register with a Live ID, and then start creating Synths.

It is pretty neat and some of them are pretty amazing. With the ability to take anywhere from 30 pictures to 300 and being able to fly from one to the other, as well as being able to see a mesh frame like below it is pretty neat. Hope people enjoy and try it out. The way that it works is that it sees what is common between sets of pictures and groups them up to give you a 3D feel to your pictures. I have used it a couple of times and its just amazing.

It has been a while since I last made an update, and hoping that I can keep it up again, I wanted to give a quick update about a new website that went live earlier this month.

It is a new community portal which brings all the Live Technologies together so that users understand and learn about the product as well as see tips and tricks from community members on how they work and what you can do with them to give you that ultimate experience.

Check it out, as I know that I have learned a lot more from reading some of the posts up there. Enjoy.

Today was a very tough day for a number of people. Today was Bill Gates last day at Microsoft. It was a very, very sad day, because it involved a lot of mixed emotions where by people were sad about him leaving Microsoft and not continuing in his full time role, but also happy that he is spending and devoting more time with his foundation.

There is so much news about this over the last couple years that the day is finally here. The parody video is below and it is pretty funny.

I have always wanted to be here at Microsoft and to work for Bill Gates. I am happy that I had 2 years to do that, and look forward to continue working at a company that he created and started. It is amazing what was done to found the company. From the stories you read, to the movies you watch, there is a lot to learn about how it all happened.

In the end, it started with a dream. A dream that there would be a computer on every desk, and in every home. It is with that dream that the company was built. I read about this dream, and I knew I wanted to somehow be a part of it. Hopefully one day I get to make an impact in peoples lives using software.

Bill Gates, thank you for everything that you have done. Thank you for making this possible. You shall be missed, and wish you best of luck with the work you are going to do with the foundation.

So been really busy lately to try and keep up with the latest news, however will return to that soon. However I did want to share a quick video. Was reading this article on Gizmodo the other day, and this is by far the greatest Nerf war ever.

These guys must have spent a really long time to get this one right. Wish we could do that in the office.

I thought I would take a moment to highlight Windows Live Favorites which is something I could have definitely used when I was back in college. Friends always used to send me links to games and pictures and all sorts of stuff that I would have to bookmark them, otherwise I would never find them again.

Enter Windows Live Favorites. One of the neat things about Live Favorites, is that it allows you to store your favorites in the cloud, or in other words, allow you to access them whenever you have access to the Internet. This means if you went to your live page, or went directly to your favorites site, and just logged in with your Live ID, you could access all your favorites.

Another neat thing is that if you install the Windows Live Toolbar, you can choose to sync your favorites with your PC, so that all your favorites on your computer automatically become available wherever you go as long as you can log on to the site.

A little while back, my demo partner (Eric Kamont) and myself took part in a World Cup Demo Competition where by we wanted to showcase how we could use multiple technologies efficiently and effectively to solve a problem that we saw in the real world.

In our Scenario, Eric has sponsored a little boy named Italo (this is actually true in real life) and is pondering, as to what is the best way to interact with him as working through the traditional mail system is too slow and would allow maybe only 4 interactions a year. As can be seen in the video below, we utilize a number of technologies that are available to us and we use everyday to tackle this problem.

As you can see, there are quite a few technologies we showcased, but as mentioned in the video, we wanted to make sure people understood that it doesn’t matter if you are at home or at work, or even on the go, you can still make an impact as the technologies are designed to be available from anywhere. Here are a few links so that you can go directly to the site:

• Windows Live Spaces – A blogging platform that allows people to share and connect with others. We used this as the basis so that Italo had a one stop location to go and get updates from our side as well as a place we could visit to see updates from him. This also allowed us to take advantage of Web Gadgets and added things like the Web Messenger gadget onto the site, so that Italo could essentially IM with us without installing any client side messenger tool.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery – This application allows you to edit and manage your photos and then upload them to Windows Live Spaces with a couple clicks. Also with different themes when viewing pictures as slideshows, and allowing you to tag and organize pictures, it is definitely a one stop show for organizing your digital memories on your computer.
• Windows Live Writer – A bloggers dream as it allows you to manage multiple blogs as well as make and manage posts like this one.
• Windows Live Mail – An application that allows you to store and manage all your email accounts from one easy to use program.
• Windows Live Translator – Windows Live Translator has two unique features, where by it allows you to translate text, such as emails or small pieces of text, as well as it allows you to enter website links or pages and translate those for you to read.
• Windows Live Family Safety Settings – With Family Safety Settings you can define child accounts and manage their accounts and keep them safe on the internet.

Other Technologies, that were used included Windows Mobile Phone, Vista, Microsoft Word, Popfly as well as the Xbox 360. Hopefully we have been able to demonstrate how we can use these technologies, that we already use in our daily lives to make an impact in someone else’s life, as well as communicate with others and not have to worry about geographical or language barriers.

Well it is finally here. The WorldWide Telescope by Microsoft Research is available for download. It is absolutely amazing. Using a couple of technologies it allows your computer to act as a Virtual Telescope, bringing together images from many different locations (including the Hubble Telescope) to give you an experience like none other. I think its pretty awesome and definitely if you have sometime, check it out and play with it. It could be a big hit especially if you have a class you can show and share this with.

So a couple days ago the Zune Team made an update as outlined in this Press Release. There have been updates to both the client software and the actual Zune, but part of the updates has been the push for the Zune Pass.

It is all about the fact that for the Price of 1 CD a month, you can have access to a full music collection. Technically you don't even need a Zune and can use the application for everything and have access to the large library.

One of the updates also recently made allows you to access TV shows for the Zune through the application. All in all a good release and took care of a few technical things and added some new features. Essentially it's right here and it ain't going nowhere .

So last year, Microsoft started the initiative, where by a portion of the advertising revenue would donated to the organizations that users of the messaging program choose.

So for example out of the 10 organizations that are listed here, when I use Live Messenger, a portion of the ad revenue is donated to Stop Global Warming. So, within a year of this initiative being launched, US $1.3 Million has been donated as a whole to the different organizations. This is amazing and all it takes to join is to follow the steps here, to make a small change as to how you display your name in Live Messenger. Go ahead and make a difference, all with an IM .

So, hopefully by now, everyone has heard of Surface, a huge interactive table that allows users to interact with digital content using natural motions, hand gestures and actual physical objects.

Well after many months of talk and speculation, the first Surface units are out and in select AT&T stores. Although the functionality is limited to providing information to shoppers at the moment, they are hoping for advanced interactivity in the future so that people can do more with these units. Check the video out for details.

Hopefully we see them soon in other locations. Can’t wait .

No One Wants to Look Dumb is a new ad campaign that is going around for MSN. Some of the videos they have are pretty funny, such that they highlight the fact that MSN has the content you might need to prepare yourself for daily conversations.

Going on a First Date

They even have a Facebook Page that you can view as part of the campaign. Anyway if you head over to the site, you can send a quick dose of awesome using the phone or through email to a friend and remind them on how MSN can help them with their daily life conversations.