Microsoft launch Windows Mobile 7 Series, below are two hands on videos on the interface. It looks really impressive. Gizmodo said;
I’m sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.
Unfortunately it will probably be like most of these great technology ideas. It will be US only, at least at the start, and more importantly only really is of value if all your friend are using the same platform. The Facebook integration is an nice idea if all your friend are heavy Facebook users. It isn’t clear how well other 3rd party services can be integrated into the interface, but if they can be done as well as Facebook has it could be a huge plus for the platform.
Finished the setup for my bit.ly pro account. I’m using lu.is as the short url. Basically lu.is is a cname for bit.ly. The advantage is I get a Pro dashboard and better stats on short URLs I generate and I can monitor bit.ly click throughs to scaryideas.com even when they are generated by other bit.ly users.
The Budget webcast on Wednesday the 9th of December wasn’t has big as the emergency budget in April but still very busy. We had about 9100 concurrent streams at peak using 4.49 Gbit/s of bandwidth. The format ratio was 8:1 to Flash over Windows Media.
Some more stats from the webcast;
Average viewing time: 5 minutes, 1 second
79% of viewers were in Ireland.
76% of Irish viewers were viewing in Dublin.
The technology behind it;
We use 6 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers with Windows Server 2003 and Flash Media Server 3.5, each connected with two gigabit connections to the HEAnet network. The Windows Media servers (soon to include the FMS servers) are Dell PowerEdge R905 servers with 10 Gbit/s connections running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. The servers currently host four virtual machines serving Windows Media using network load balancing across the VMs. They will soon host FMS VM also.
