MSN's presentation facility in Great Pulteney Street has been done up to resemble the sort of compact swimming pool you tend to find in Docklands apartment blocks, complete with navy and white mosaic around the borders, porthole windows and carpet tiles of shimmering,aqueous turquiose. It was on this surface I found myself sitting last night as part of an unsmartly casual, but nonetheless very select audience invited listen to Phil Holden, Director of Windows Live from Redmond.
Lapsed-limey and veteran infonaut in MS space for some 14 years Phil began by telling us that he felt "surprisingly energised" by the ambient opportunities of 2006 and promised us that his team intended to be more "nimble" around major releases and to engage more systematically in customer dialogue.
The first set of forthcoming enhancements he unveiled to us have been designed to make the platform a good deal smarter about where we are and who we are when we're accessing it. So Livecontacts now distinguishes between business and personal contacts and the the new roaming services allow users to access their favourites on multiple PCs or remotely configure their Windows Media Centre. The new Hotmail includes a spell-checker, dynamically-resized thumbnails and an improved facility for mailbox searching. The spam-filter is also more sophisticated, colour coding suspect messages according to their alleged membership of different categories of unsolicited communications. The user can also click on a link leading to a page explaining why that particular message was impounded.
Fremont is MSN's new (free) classified listings service, currently in a restricted beta with stateside MS employees. It features tug-able bars for setting the geographical radius of searches and will be fully synergised with MSN templates and Messenger contacts: so for example, you can make an item available to your buddies and can view any items they too have made available. It was explained that the aim is to fund it with on-screen advertising but there are some obvious screen real-estate issues to resolve first.
Lastly Phil pulled out an ugly but cheap handset and base-station combo from Philips which will lead MSN's forray into the VOIP marketplace. My going home present was a USB 'Traveling Disk' offering priority access to a range of Microsoft betas which I will report back on later. (Photos)