Microsoft and Nielsen are teaming up to track the ratings from the online Xbox LIVE game show “1 vs. 100.” This is the first time ever that a video game console network will be measured by an analytics firm such as Nielsen. The goal of the new ratings system is to measure how many people were playing the game at a particular time and, therefore, how many saw the included advertisements.

This data will be of great benefit to Xbox advertisers who want to know if their ads are reaching the right people at the right time. And it’s only the beginning, notes the Microsoft Advertising blog. The game show only runs for 14 weeks, but Microsoft will continue collaborating with Nielsen to measure other Xbox LIVE media in the future including TV, video, and social media.

If you didn’t attend PDC 2009, you missed a chance to see Windows Azure up close and personal. How close? How about being able to actually walk inside an Azure data center container? That’s right – one of the cooler displays at PDC was a modular container that was just sitting there on PDC’s floor.  Attendees got to peek inside this container which is just like the ones that power the new cloud platform, Windows Azure, from a number of datacenters worldwide.

The containers are self-regulated thanks to sensors that monitor temperature, air control, and humidity. Based on the sensor’s readings, various mechanisms adjust the amount of air flow through the container. For example, if a container gets too cold, dampers in the upper part open up to allow air to circulate back though, explains a post on Bill Evjen's blog. He has posted a number of photos and accompanying explanations as to how the new data centers work, if you’re interested.

The Data Center Knowledge blog also has a photo tour of Microsoft’s Chicago facility available, one of the largest ever built. Microsoft has a behind-the-scenes video of this center, too.

Even if you’re not a data center guru, it’s pretty cool to see what “the cloud” looks like.

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Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit recently announced a new special for students with Mac computers looking to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office software. As of now, U.S. college and graduate students can save more than 70% off the retail price for the Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition. This more extensive collection of office tools includes Web Services Edition, Document Connection for Mac with SharePoint support, and exclusive themes and graphics in addition to the standard Office programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage.

Given Microsoft’s plans to include SharePoint in the Live@edu program as of next year, the Business Edition’s SharePoint support is sure to come in handy. Colleges participating in Live@edu will let students create, host, and edit their documents “in the cloud” using Office Web Applications or they can be saved and worked on offline using Office desktop software. When files are ready to be shared with classmates or teachers, they can then be added to the appropriate Sharepoint sites.

Students who are non-Mac users aren’t out of luck for getting a bargain, too - they can find discounts from Microsoft and other retailers on the Microsoft Students page.

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Today’s the big day for Xbox users. In case you haven’t heard (where have you been?), a new update for Xbox 360 owners is arriving today to bring social networking and Zune integration from Facebook, Zune Video, Twitter and Last.FM.

The Facebook integration lets you update your status to share details about what movie you’re watching or game you’re playing. It also acts as a Facebook application, letting you see your friends’ status updates, the News Feed, and new photos your friends have posted. And best of all, you can now see which of your Facebook friends are on Xbox LIVE so you can friend them there, too.

With Twitter, you can post and reply to tweets, view profiles, watch trends, and do Twitter searches. Both Facebook and Twitter will appear in the new “My Community” channel on your Xbox dashboard.

Last.fm, which will be under the Music channel, lets you love, ban, or skip tracks. There’s also a “gamer stations” section which offer game-related music for the U.S. and U.K. gamer communities.

Zune video on Xbox LIVE provides access to HD videos you can rent or buy through the Xbox. The videos offer 1080p HD and 5.1 surround sound.  When you download a video from this section under the Video Channel, you can watch it on your Xbox and then watch it again later on your PC or on your Zune HD device.

To get the update, just turn on your console and log into Xbox LIVE with your Gold membership. If you only have a Silver membership, you can demo the new features for free from November 20th until the 23rd.

Note: The update is only available to members over the age of 18 for now. Here's why.

Wednesday, the second day of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, was jam-packed with news about upcoming products, beta releases and more. If you didn’t tune into the live stream, here’s what you missed:

Internet Explorer 9

Arguably one of the bigger announcements from PDC, Steven Sinofsky gave attendees a first look at what’s coming in IE9 with a demo of an early build. The updated browser will support new web standards including HTML5 and CSS3 and will also have a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky admitted that JavaScript performance in IE8 was much slower than other browsers and it’s clear that addressing this problem was a key goal for the IE9 team. A post on the IE blog shows a chart comparing the script performance on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Although still a test build, IE9 has narrowed the gap considerably when it comes to speed:

The new browser will also include “hardware accelerated rendering” which means it will now render graphics and text using the graphics card instead of the CPU. For the end user, this means that online images, videos, animations, and web fonts will be displayed faster, more clearly, and will use less CPU in the process of doing so. This is one of the better features of IE9 as it takes advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite technologies to do something that today’s other browsers don’t – and it’s more useful than both Google's Native Client and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, said Dean Hachamovitch, IE’s GM.

Office 2010

At PDC, Office 2010 launched into beta along with SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps. Office has been given a new look with updated logos and icons, but the most exciting development is the Outlook Social Connector. With this tool, you can track conversations and stay up-to-date with everyone you communicate with via email without having to switch over to another program or website.

Likely inspired by the demands for more social inbox experiences provided by plugins like Xobni as well as third-party services like Gist, the Social Connector will also focus on social network and email integration. As with Xobni, the connector tracks your communication history with your email contacts, your upcoming meetings, and it helps you easily find attachments they may have sent. It also offers activity feeds for each person based on their actions on both business and consumer social networks, including SharePoint 2010’s new social features and Windows Live. 

The first consumer network to support the new feature is LinkedIn, the professional business networking site. With the LinkedIn integration, you’ll be able to track your connections, email them, send invites, and more.

The Social Connector is available now in the Office 2010 beta and the LinkedIn integration will go live early next year.

Silverlight 4

Another major announcement was the developer release of the Silverlight 4 public beta. The updated platform includes a number of new features like webcam and microphone support for sharing audio and video in Silverlight apps, performance improvements that allow it to run 200% faster than Silverlight 3, support for Google Chrome, Deep Zoom enhancements, multi-touch support, and the ability to bring data into the app via copy/paste or drag-and-drop. For example, you could now drag an Office document into a Silverlight application, if desired.

To show off the new capabilities, a Silverlight Facebook app was demonstrated (TechCrunch has the screenshots).  In the app, cycling through the photos was a much faster experience that what it would be in the browser.

Silverlight 4 is a developer release only so no end-user runtime is being provided at this time.

Pivot

Pivot is a new Microsoft Live Labs experience that lets you interact with “massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.” Essentially, it’s a visualization tool for organizing datasets to discover new patterns and insights. The tool, built in SeaDragon and powered by Silverlight, does the visualization over the web. In other words, it’s streaming the data, not caching it locally to your hard drive.

In Pivot, datasets are organized as collections which are displayed using thumbnail images. The collections consist of objects that share some common attributes. In Pivot, you can analyze all these objects in a broader context. For example, as the video explains on Pivot’s homepage, they used Pivot to look at all of social lending organization Kiva’s loans and sort them by loan type.

Another example of Pivot in action is Brandon Watson’s Crunchbase Viewer which allows you to sort through the massive amounts of data stored in the online database about internet startups.

In order to use Pivot, you need an invite. You can request one here.

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The Associated Press has just launched a new application designed for Windows Mobile devices called AP Mobile. Soon to be made available in the Windows Phone Marketplace, the new application offers news from 1100+ local providers across 50 categories including top news, business, politics, world, sports, celebrity, travel, and more. 

The topics appear across the top of the application and you can swipe through them using your finger. You can configure the app to just display the categories you care about, too, if you don’t want to see them all.  News items feature an image and headline which you can tap to read full story.

Also included are social networking features that let you share the news on Twitter or Facebook or save the link to your Delicious bookmarking account. You can email stories, too, if you would rather share privately.

Some users are already seeing the app listed under the “News and Weather” section of the marketplace while others (like myself) haven’t seen it show up yet. I imagine that it’s simply a case of the app being rolled out in stages, so it should be there for you soon if it isn’t just yet.

The popular Twitter application from Seesmic is moving away from the Adobe AIR platform and over to Windows where it will use .NET and WPF technologies. The company also announced a Silverlight version is in the works for some sometime next year which will re-introduce the cross-platform capabilities previously offered via Adobe AIR.

Considering that some of the top Twitter applications currently use AIR (TweetDeck immediately comes to mind, for example), you may wonder why the company decided to make the switch. According to Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO, the app’s users have been asking for a native Windows client for some time. He also said that the new client will be faster and will use less memory than the AIR version.

Le Meur notes on his blog that the new app will also offer some great Windows-only features, including location-based updates and access to several languages in spell checker.

If you’re interested in trying the new version of Seesmic for Windows, you can sign up now to join Team Seesmic, the company’s exclusive band of beta testers. Team Seesmic members get early access to all the company’s releases and are kept up-to-date with emails about the new products and upgrades.

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Thanks to a grant from Microsoft Research, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has launched a new website called Be a Martian. On the site, visitors can virtually “explore” Mars, zooming around the planet, looking at images from various Mars landers, explorers, and satellites from the 1960’s to present-day. But Be a Martian isn’t just an educational experience – it’s a crowd-sourced experiment that may end up helping NASA accomplish something important: process the massive volumes of image data they have collected about the red planet.

To encourage visitors to pitch in with data analysis, Be a Martian makes work a game. Multiple games, in fact. In one game, players line up images from the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter with a larger image from the Mars Global Surveyor, a process which could help NASA create more accurate 3D models of the planet. Another game has users counting craters. And everyone participating earns points and badges for playing, making the process even more fun.

The site uses Silverlight so it works in any major browser while still offering a visually impressive experience. On the backend, the NASA data is stored in “Dallas,” Microsoft’s newly launched project for serving up massive data stores which web developers can use to create information-rich sites. The Be a Martian website runs on Windows Azure, allowing the site to scale as needed. “The system dedicates an appropriate amount of processors to the application, whether it’s being used by 250, 250,000 or 2,500,000 people at the same time,” says Marc Mercuri, Microsoft’s director of business innovation for Developer Platform Evangelism (DPE).

Coinciding with the site’s launch are two Martian-themed contests, one for developers and one for non-programmers. Developers can enter the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge which asks them to use the NASA data, its media API and other components to build new applications for solving a set of problems defined by NASA scientists and engineers. Non-programmers have the Martian Film Fest which lets them build on their digital movie-making skills. More details about both contests is available on NASA’s website here. 

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On Tuesday, Microsoft kicked off the 2009 Professional Developer Conference (PDC) with some big news about Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform announced a year ago at PDC 2008.

The biggest news to come out of the keynote was the announcement that Azure will launch into production on January 1st, but customers will get the first month of service free. However, prior to its public launch, a few companies are already using Azure now. During the keynote, some of them came on stage to discuss how. This group included some big names like WordPress, Domino’s Pizza, and the Cheezburger Network (yes, the blog empire built from LOLcats).

Matt Mullenwag of Automattic, the company behind the open-source blogging platform WordPress, showed off how Azure powers their service, taking away the stress related to massive traffic spikes. And yes, that was a downright geek-tastic way of demonstrating how Azure works with open source technologies. The recent release of the SDK’s for PHP, Ruby, Java and Eclipse further highlights how Windows Azure extends beyond Windows technologies.  

Similarly, the ICanHazCheezburger network is launching a new site on Azure called www.oddlyspecific.com. The site, devoted to funny signs, will also use Azure to help balance the massive traffic spikes common with its virally shared properties.

Another big name from outside the web world moving to Azure is Domino's Pizza who uses the platform to manage their ordering system. The company says it will be especially helpful on Super Bowl Sunday when ordering peaks.

Kelly Blue Book (KBB), will also be moving to Azure, allowing them to close a second data center kept online mainly for failover reasons. With Azure’s ability to provide extra computing power when necessary, the company says the extra data center will no longer be needed.

Even Vivek Kundra, the U.S. government’s CIO made an appearance to discuss open-development efforts, specifically a project code-named “Dallas” which is powered by Windows Azure and SQL Azure. This “data as a service” offering is an open marketplace for data. The data will be available for purchase at a site called “Pinpoint” and includes data from NASA, the AP, National Geographic, data.gov, and more. Kundra also said that he was looking forward to the “thousands of applications that are going to be created,” and after everything we heard about Azure’s power, we are too.

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If you’re a Twilight fan, then you’re likely anxiously awaiting this week’s opening of New Moon, the latest movie to detail the events taking place in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-themed saga about a human/vampire romance. In the meantime, you can gear up for the big event with a exclusive online tour, courtesy of Bing, of all the locations mentioned in the book from the Cullen house to the high school to the hospital where Bella seems to spend a lot of time.

At The Virtual Twilight Tour website, you can pull up the various locations on the map then watch related videos that show the actual locations used in the filming. (For example, did you know that Bella Italia is a real restaurant?)

You can also watch exclusive videos like the featured video called “Land of Legends” which talks about the vampires of Forks, Washington or a clip from a “Stephanie Meyer Day” event. There are also links to online photo galleries from the new movie, actor photos, and Twilight rumors on MSN’s celebrity-themed Wonderwall site.

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