Microsoft is again partnering with NBC Universal to deliver live Olympics coverage. On the NBCOlympics.com website, over 400 hours of live competition will be made available for all 15 of the Winter Olympics sports. In addition, you’ll have access to 1000 hours of full-event replays, recaps, montages, commentator analysis, and athlete-specific clips.

As with the previous Olympics games, the video will be streamed in HD via Microsoft Silverlight technology and will feature DVR-like controls for pausing and rewinding the live coverage.

Other new features include Silverlight Enhanced HD photo galleries on NBCOlympics.com where you can zoom in and out of your favorite images and a social “Olympic Pulse” page that will feature athlete and expert tweets and blog posts.

This year, however, Bing is getting in on the action too. You can visually explore Vancouver through Bing’s interactive StreetSide Maps, the Bing homepage will feature Olympic-related images, Bing Visual Search will add an “Olympic Athletes” category, and new Instant Answers will be added daily on popular athletes, sporting events and medal counts. In addition, Bing has exclusive rights to index all the Winter Games videos.

Although the games haven’t started yet, you can visit NBCOlympics.com for related news, images, and videos.

Did you know you can Zune wireless remote to control your Windows Media Center PC? Although not designed for this purpose, a simple registry hack is all the stands in the way of turning your Zune remote into one that controls Media Center, too.

Recently posted to LifeHacker, this tip is worth sharing:

1. Open the registry. Scroll down toComputer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da
2. Find the REG_DWORD named CodeSetNum0 and change the value to Zero.
3. Reboot the PC and enjoy.

By default, Windows listens to channel 1 and the Zune remote is channel 8. This hack works by setting the ID to 0 which allows Windows to listen to all the IR ID’s. It’s been tested in Windows 7 and not in other versions, but there’s no reason to believe that it wouldn’t work in those, too. Let us know if you try it!

Sony Ericsson has just announced their brand new “Aspen” phone, the first Windows Mobile device running the new Windows Mobile 6.5.3 mobile operating system. The phone is the latest in the company’s eco-friendly “GreenHeart” line, which means it’s made from recycled materials, features energy-efficient chargers, offers a power-saving mode, and uses wateborne paint.

Designed for enterprise users and heavy texters, the phone has a full QWERTY keypad and includes Microsoft Office Mobile, Outlook Mobile, and a PDF reader.

As for what’s new with WiMo 6.5.3? The OS now offers improved support for capacitive-touch screens and multi-touch support, better navigation, horizontal scroll, and better touch controls so you can use the device without a stylus. You also drag and drop applications on the homescreen. There are other bug fixes and general improvements in the OS, too – ZDNet has a full feature list here.

I just came across an interesting Microsoft Research Project called Merlion which lets you run desktop applications on a mobile phone. The way the system works is that it allows a mobile phone user (on any mobile OS) access to a remote server running some sort of remote desktop software like VNC. Then, without any modifications to the desktop app itself, the user can interact with the original application from their mobile phone using a specially created mobile interface.

End users can create their own Merlion-enabled apps themselves, too, using the Merlion Designer. With this tool, you select the visual portion of the original app you want available on your mobile device and then create an alternative layout designed with your phone’s dimensions in mind. Once the new interface has been created, the Merlion runtime is used to access the desktop app on the server via the new mobile GUI.

In addition, Merlion can increase productivity by automating repetitive actions like logging in or tasks that require multiple interactions. It also can make applications available across different mobile form factors and can allow applications that work on different OS platforms to operate in concert.

Merlion’s ability to create alternative interfaces to applications works for web-based applications, too. Also, it’s not limited to smartphones alone. It could be used to create apps that run on platforms that weren’t originally intended to run apps. For example, Merlion works on basic “feature phones” and handheld gaming devices like the Nintendo DS which supports Wi-Fi.

Pictured is an example of a modified version of the Windows Calculator app, redesigned using Merlin for use on Windows Mobile phone. More screenshots and other details about this project are available in the whitepaper here. 

I’ve been using FileZilla for my FTP needs in the past, but the features built into this new FTP program have me interested in taking a deeper look. The (uncreatively named) “Windows 7 FTP Application” was recently featured on the Life Rocks 2.0 blog where a couple of its specialized Windows 7 features were mentioned. Intrigued, I went directly to the program’s page over on the CodeProject site, where it states that the goal of the new software is to create a fully functional FTP program that uses “the new functions found in Windows 7.”

Specifically, the software implemented the Windows 7 libraries feature within the program for easy access to your most common file stores. It also provides a login form, download form, and upload form created using Aero technology. And as you upload and download files to and from a remote site, the progress of those file transfers is shown using the thumbnail previews in the new Windows 7 taskbar. Instead of seeing a small thumbnail of the open window, for example, this FTP program actually displays a dialog box complete with informational text including file name, save path, and status as well as a progress bar.

The new FTP program is available for download along with its source code from here.

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Seven Microsoft BizSpark companies were invited to Microsoft’s campus recently to spend time with SharePoint team members in order to better learn how they could integrate their particular service with the Microsoft business software. SharePoint, which provides companies with intranet sites, hosted file stores, online collaboration tools, process management functions, intranet search, and more, is often incorrectly positioned against these “software-as-a-service” type companies in an either/or scenario, as if you would have to pick one model or the other when looking for business collaboration technologies. In reality, there are plenty of companies that allow their software to layer on top of SharePoint to provide more advanced features or specialized functionality.

Among the companies who visited Microsoft at this “SocialFest” event, as it was called, were Cortex Intelligence, a data mining and sentiment analysis company, Calinda Software, an email message mapping tool, Confer, a communications platform for microblogging, status updates, and chat, Leverage Software, an email organization technology, Liaise, an email data extraction tool, and Loqu8, a data lookup tool.

However, the winner of the top prize was Huddle, a collaboration platform for file sharing and online meetings. Their creative entry into the competition was a technology that allows separate SharePoints from different companies to integrate with each other and collaborate even though each SharePoint site was behind a separate firewall. The content between both sites are synchronized while maintaining auditing, compliance, and identity management functions. Genius!

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