Seattle Times: Microsoft "Hack Day" is creative play at work

On Thursday April 6th, the Ideas Factory team in the Windows Live division at Microsoft hosted a 6 hour (3pm-9pm) Hack Day event. Details from the event were covered by Seattle Times technology reporter Kim Peterson in an article Microsoft "Hack Day" is creative play at work. The story made the headline story on the SeattleTimes.com home page today as well as page 1 in the business section in print and online. Also attending as a guest was Seattle Times photographer Alan Berner. Alan's photo of Tony Bristol and I made it as the cover photo for the article. Alan was intrigued by the fact that every table had a remote controlled monster truck. We wanted to give him one but he was not allowed to accept gifts valued over $10. He spent some time taking photos at the table were I was sitting at while I was preparing my quick demos that I presented Hack Day attendees - one was a cool PartyStart mashup demo (same one I showed at Mix06, video to go online in the near future) and the other was the showing the Mix06 Messenger bot.

Many cool mashups and extensibility components were created during the Hack Day, and demos were shown at the end of the event by the various developers who created them. Many of the APIs used by the developers who participated can be found on the MSDN Windows Live Developer Center, while some APIs developers used are still in internal beta. The Windows Live Platform team will be releasing more APIs, documentation, samples, SDKs, multimedia content, and more later this year with significant improvements for creating gadgets, web sites, and application components using Windows Live services. The Windows Live Developer Center now has an RSS feed to subscribe to for new announcements, APIs, and downloads we release. The https://ideas.live.com site as related information on the various Windows Live services and betas in development.