Although most of you may know my former teammate Sam Chenaur for his role as the acclaimed Policeman #2, he is actually now better known for his role on Nike’s Cloud Computing effort -  the Mosaic 23/25 project- a poster child for social networked media – and a shining example of how a company can take branding to the next level – by building a tribe of fansumers around a powerful brand such as Nike. Windows Azure and Silverlight provides a level of dynamic interactivity between a company and its fans, creating site stickiness - (e.g. how long a user stays on a page, and how often the user comes back to visit).

The Moasic 23/25 project leverages Silverlight’s DeepZoom technology to build a giga-mosaic using photos submitted by fans. Once the photo is uploaded, Azure runs a computation in the cloud to calculate where  to best place the photo as a micro-image to form the mosaic pattern of Michael Jordan catching air.  Fans can then click on the Michael Jordan image and keep zooming, zooming, zooming until they drill deep into their very own uploaded photo.

Is your photo wrapped around Michael Jordan’s waist?

At 713% you can still see the pick out the image of Michael Jordan’s waistband while beginning to make out the individual photos that comprise the colors.

Send a Secret Valentine Using Windows Azure

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Windows Azure is ready to play Cupid! At 6000% we can see a lovely couple in love (naturally they are from France), along with a rating of the photo and their favorite shoe.

With Azure Cloud computations running constantly in the background, the mosaic is ever changing, so the steps to zooming into this picture will change. You can search for this photo using the metadata – for example: type in Aeight to the search box and see that it constantly keeps moving throughout the main image. I like the idea of embedding a secret message into Michael Jordan using your personal photos as Easter Eggs- you can create a scavenger hunt for a loved one! Now imagine if this photo had a little sign that said “Marry me?”  Maybe we will see that demo’ed at Mix10? Gives a whole ‘nother meaning to being on Cloud 9.

Another usage of Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology was showcased 2 years ago on the Hard Rock site, which highlights a memorabilia collection of over 70,000 items – including guitars played by U2 and Jimi Hendrix to the Beatle's tour bus.  At Mix08, the Silverlight demo zoomed into a photograph of a guitar and kept zooming until it showed the fingerprint of Bo Diddley on the guitar casing. Walk through the steps to see the fingerprint yourself

And that was 2 versions ago – stayed tuned to see what Silverlight 4 has to offer – expect amazing demos during Mix10 in Las Vegas March 15-17 2010 - register by Feb 7 to save money on your pass.

Have you ever wondered how people have configured their Instant Messenger settings in Windows Live Messenger to show their tweets and blog posts?   If you ever examined the lower bottom panel of your Messenger, you may have seen the “What’s New” component which constantly refreshes with notifications about social networking activities  your friends and colleagues have taken lately. In this post, we will walk through how you can configure your Messenger to display your online activities, as well.

You can automate the delivery of your tweets and blog updates to all your Windows Live contacts through the What’s New feature in Windows Live Messenger. Setting it up may not that intuitive to everyone, so in this post, we’ll walk through the steps you need to take to make it happen!

At the bottom of your Messenger window you will see the Configure Updates icon which looks like two connected people.

If you click on that icon, you will see more information about how you can also be intertwined with your friends and family using Social Networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Click on the Add Web Activities icon if you are ready to connect Messenger with your social networking activities within Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, PhotoBucket, WordPress, iLike, LiveJournal, Pandora, yelp and many many more (including one in Russian that I cannot translate accurately).

Once you click on the Add Web Activities href, you will be redirected to a web page which will enable you to configure your social networking accounts so that the activities are displayed directly in Messenger.

The instructions for each are obviously unique; however, let’s take a look at how we can configure one popular social networking platform you may have heard of: Twitter.

Type in your user name and your preferences for how and to whom you wish to display your activities:

You can even configure Messenger to show your custom blog posts!  Let’s walk through that, select the Add Web Activity link. From there, the set up is very similar to configuring Twitter, except instead of a user name, you will need to enter your RSS feed URL: