The Winter Olympics, this year held in Vancouver, B.C., are just a few days away, and promise to be the most internet friendly Olympics, so far (especially if you’re in the US, we’re checking on the non-US story).  NBC Universal will again carry Silverlight-driven live coverage of many of the events, although the restrictions on what you can watch will be based on your cable or satellite package.  Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times explains the restrictions:

In some ways, online broadcasts of the Vancouver Olympics preview what's coming from media companies, as they explore ways to charge for online content that used to be free.

This will be apparent when you try to watch a Vancouver event live online at NBCOlympics.com, the Games' official, exclusive broadcaster in the U.S.

For the first time, viewers will have to prove that they subscribe to premium-cable service to access "live and full-event replay video."

MSN.com, through NBCOlympics.com, will be providing the coverage, including:

• More than 400 hours of live event competition video and more than 1,000 hours of on-demand access to full-event replays from broadcast and host-feed coverage of all 15 sports on program.
• Fast, comprehensive results for all 86 Winter Olympics events, providing live results, statistical summaries, elimination brackets and more.
• An interactive online player, powered by Microsoft Silverlight, presents video in HD quality and has DVR-style controls, enhancing navigation and allowing people to pause and rewind live and on-demand video.
• Mobile access to the Winter Games via MSN Mobile, powered by NBC Olympics.
• Olympics Facebook application, MSN Vancouver FanPicks, via MSN’s Facebook Fan Page. FanPicks pairs fans with athletes depending on their lifestyle
• information (hometown, zodiac sign, favorite books, etc.), and incorporates Bing, NBCOlympics.com and Twitter feeds.

More on the MSN blog.

And not to be outdone, Bing is offering up new instant answers, and two new Visual Searches for the Winter Olympics, for Events and Athletes:

More on the Bing Blog.

PPC Geeks published the latest in a slew of rumors on what to expect at Mobile World Congress (MWC), now just more than a week away.  In their post, the PPC Geeks expect to see at least the user interface, but not in depth functionality for Windows Mobile 7, which they call “Very Clean”, “Soulful” and “Alive”.  In addition, PPC Geeks says that according to their sources:

• the UI, code named Metro, will be very similar to the Zune UI
• No Flash, not enough time (umm, how long do they need?)
• App installation through Marketplace only
• No multi-tasking, but apps can be paused when in the background
• No NETCF backwards compatibility, at least not yet
• Full Zune integration
• Full Xbox gaming integration
• Full support for Social Networking
• No Windows Mobile Device Center, will use Zune software instead
• No OEM interfaces
• Ready by September 2010

Sounds like quite a juicy list, but there is enough missing here to at least question the authenticity.  What about the Danger phones?  What about Silverlight Mobile?

Luckily, although amazingly no one offered to fly us to Barcelona for MWC, our friends Long Zheng from IStartedSomething.com and Tom Warren from Neowin.net will be liveblogging the Microsoft Press Conference at MWC, starting at 3 pm local Barcelona time on Monday February 15th (which is 6am Seattle time, eh WHAT?), and we’ll finally begin to get past the rumor stage and find out what all the fuss is about.

Kind of a sad note on the “Your mail is here, come and get it” blog, the official blog of Hotmail, as they are shutting down the blog and concentrating their efforts on Inside Windows Live.  We don’t necessarily disagree with the concept, but the Mail blog and LiveSide go way back, so it’s kind of like saying goodbye to an old friend.

February 05

This blog is no longer active

For a deeper exploration of the engineering behind Windows Live check out Inside Windows Live. And, for help with Windows Live try the Windows Live Solution Center.

We said this back in 2007, just as Windows Live Hotmail was launching, back in the days of managed beta testing, and hopefully at least some of that spirit will live on:

Our thanks to the Kahuna/Windows Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail beta team for putting on a beta the way they're meant to be: open, inclusive, fun, and flexible.  No other beta has been as responsive to user requests, as open to feedback, or as willing to expose a work in progress in order to get the best out of beta testers, and out of Windows Live Hotmail. Congratulations!

But things do change, as we are well aware.  We’ve been working through a number of back end changes here at LiveSide, too (in order to keep on blogging along!).  After an experimental run with managed servers and WebHost4Life, we’ve gone back to a dedicated server and our old friends The Planet.  To make a long story short, we simply missed the level of control that having a dedicated server allows, even if it does cost a bit more, and so we’re back. 

We’re Microsoft fans here at LiveSide, and we try to use Microsoft products whenever we can, which is why we’re on Community Server (an ASP.net solution), Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server Express 2008.  In setting up our new box, we were able to try out Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, and were very impressed.  It made our job so much easier.  If you’re setting up a web server, we highly recommend it, and the Web PI will help you set up a number of free or open source tools and solutions, too, even WordPress!  Check it out!

Oh and one more note, we just got all signed up with Bitly.Pro, and (hopefully) should be using our new URL shortener in our Twitter feed: http://LiveSi.de.  Yes we know it’s not the shortest URL around, but hey it’s kind of fun!  We don’t have any plans to open up access, at least for now, so if you see a LiveSi.de address, it comes from us.  Special thanks to Mynetx for helping us out with obtaining the URL, and for helping us test out the shortener while we waited for Bitly.Pro to come online.

Update: yay, it works!:

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!