Microsoft

Last night I attended the Crunchies award ceremony, where Facebook took top honors as the best overall start-up (See the full list of Crunchies award winners). The awards are based on a popularity contest via votes cast through the Crunchies Web site and with input from the Crunchies Committee, consisting of co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and advisors.

The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft's Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.

Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it's a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform.

David Treadwell and Ray Ozzie discuss the mesh with GigaOm's Om Malik.

(Credit: Andrew Mager)

Live Mesh is essential glue for synchronizing files with all the devices a user might touch, and as a kind of information bus for identity, notifications, and other Web services. Microsoft, with its huge footprint, is uniquely positioned to provide a universal, operating system- and device-agnostic syncing foundation.

Ozzie and his team are working on a complete transformation of the back end and the front end, moving from PC-centric to multi-screen, he told me during a brief conversation at the Crunchies. Microsoft's Azure cloud service is another key part of the transformation, but is lagging behind Live Mesh. "2009 is still a learning year for Azure, just as 2008 was the Mesh," Ozzie said.

The challenge for Azure is moving the massive scale Microsoft platforms like XBox Live, to the Azure cloud-services architecture. "In 2009 Azure will be more mature, you'll see some large-scale usage," Ozzie said. But it won't be until 2010 that Azure is ready for prime time.

Ozzie is mindful of the profound changes culturally and technologically among its developers that Microsoft must undergo to realize the Live Platform and Azure cloud services vision. "When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth," he said during a Crunchies interview with Om Malik.

For a photo replay of the Crunchies, check out Andrew Mager's post.

Blockbuster and Microsoft are working together on an effort to use Live Mesh as a means to give consumers a way to reach their video content from a variety of devices.

A Microsoft representative said on Monday that Microsoft's Live Services team is working with Blockbuster on "building some demo Mesh apps."

It's the latest tie-up between the companies. Blockbuster is already one of the early customers for Microsoft's Exchange Online hosted e-mail service.

Live Mesh debuted in April, but at the time was largely limited to PC and Web file synchronization. However, Microsoft said at the time it launched Live Mesh that it would be opened to third parties to write their own Web-based and PC-based applications. Microsoft did just that at its Professional Developers Conference.

The Dallas Morning News has more details on the effort, including a line on just how far the company hopes to take things.

"Eventually, we'll give customers instant access to any movie on any device with an Internet connection and a screen," Blockbuster Chief Information Officer Keith Morrow told the paper. "More immediately, we could use this technology to reach into airports. Travelers could quickly download movies from Blockbuster kiosks to their portable media players."

It's been a busy week for Microsoft and I wanted to briefly note some other items that are making headlines elsewhere.

First of all, Microsoft says it is helping the London Stock Exchange investigate what cased a massive trading meltdown on Monday. ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley notes that Microsoft is among a small list of major tech providers to the exchange, a list that also includes HP and Accenture.

Foley and Microsoft blogger Long Zheng also both have items on Live Mesh apps. Foley notes that creating Mesh Apps is some of what Ray Ozzie's Startup Labs team has been up to, while Zheng posts a look at a demo Mesh app Microsoft created for making to-do lists.

We're clearly going to hear more about Mesh apps at the October Professional Developer Conference, where Microsoft is expected to release tools to let outsiders create their own Live Mesh programs. I don't think its any surprise that Microsoft is going to want to have some programs out of the gate that show consumers and developers that it is something worth spending their time on.

Meanwhile the good folks at Liveside.net take note of an update to Photosynth as well as spotting a new Microsoft beta: Microsoft Phone Data Manager, which helps synchronize contacts with certain (particularly Windows Mobile) cell phones.

Microsoft's Live Mesh hasn't officially expanded to include Macs just yet, but the software maker has said that folks in more countries can now take part without having to wait for an invitation.

In a blog posting, Microsoft announced that folks in Canada, India, and Ireland can now join. Microsoft had already opened things up in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Live Mesh is intended to be a service, over time, that allows cloud-based applications to have desktop components and takes desktop applications into the cloud as well as allowing synchronization among many different devices. For now, though, Live Mesh is primarily a means of synchronizing data across multiple computers.

Several times a link has popped up on Microsoft's site for an early Mac version of the Live Mesh client, although Microsoft has promptly taken down the public links.

Although folks in Canada, India, and Ireland don't need an invite, Microsoft said that there is still a cap for each geography, so those interested might not want to dally too long. The company is expected to broaden testing of Live Mesh ahead of its October Professional Developers Conference, with the service expected to expand to include new features at that point.

The Live Mesh team also posted an interesting blog last week on some of the limits in the current service. For example, individual files can be no larger than 2GB, while the size of all contents in a Live Folder can be up to 10GB. (There's still a 5GB limit for how much data can be stored in the cloud-based Live Desktop.)

It just got a little easier to get into Ray Ozzie's cloud.

Microsoft has opened up its Live Mesh service to anyone who has (or signs up for) a Windows Live ID. The service, announced in April, lets people share data among multiple Windows computers, as well as over the Web.

The vision for Live Mesh is broader--envisioning people sharing data among Macs, PCs, and various devices, as well as opening up the possibility for desktop applications to add online components, and Web apps to add offline components. For now, though, it's largely about file sync.

Microsoft is expected to add more features by its Professional Developer Conference in October.

In any case, Microsoft had been limiting Live Mesh sign-ups to those with an invitation, but now it's open to anyone who wants to see it in its early stages.

The change was noted by Microsoft in its Live Mesh forums and spotted by Windows Live enthusiast site Liveside.Net.

"The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID," Microsoft said.

Oddly, it also told international users they could get into the act by spoofing their systems into appearing to be U.S. machines and then gave instructions on how to do so. That seems an odd choice to me. But hey, there you have it.

"Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems," Microsoft cautioned.