We’re heading out to MIX09 in Las Vegas tomorrow so I thought I’d post up a bit of an overview off some of the cool stuff we’re going to be promoting while we’re out there.

new storm ideas site

We’ve just released a new Silverlight site today for storm ideas, in preparation for MIX09. You can check it out at:

http://www.stormideas.com

There's a nice activity feed on the homepage that aggregates my blog posts, google reader shared items and tweets (could be any combination of RSS feeds) I love the way that Silverlight can weave together services and data from all round the web and present it well.

Check out the labs section for links to some Silverlight bits and bobs.

More details on this one here.

DeepZoom and colaab

We've had a busy couple of months since we got back up and running after the Christmas break this year. Since then, we’ve added some key features that truly set colaab apart from the rest of the field; and one which I’m really excited to announce to you is the integration of Silverlight DeepZoom into colaab.

What this means is that users can review and collaborate on extremely large images without having to wait for them to download – when working with these images they can comment, annotate, pan and zoom without losing quality and without the wait!

To get an idea of how this works check out this blog post:

http://blog.stormideas.com/archive/2009/03/05/colaab-ndash-view-large-images-instantly-with-deepzoom-integration.aspx

This shows a quick video where I view a 9MB image, a 12MB image and a 160MB image without having to download them first – accessing each one is almost instant. Once open I am able to zoom in with incredible resolution and detail.

This is a key difference that DeepZoom brings to the table and is something that really differentiates colaab – no one else is currently offering this functionality and this is thanks to our choice of Silverlight for the front-end.

We’ve also been hard at work on a range of other improvements too, the main one of which is the “Actions” tab which allows to you jump from comment to comment, making colaab easier and more efficient to use. For a full lowdown on these features check out this blog post:

http://blog.stormideas.com/archive/2009/02/19/new-release-of-colaab-has-gone-live.aspx

Regards the DeepZoom integration, there's lots of ways we could take it from here - I've also been working on integrating the DeepEarth (http://www.codeplex.com/deepearth) project into colaab! Early results are very promising - collaborative mapping feels like an interesting area.

In this area (DeepZoom) I'm also working on integrating the DeepZoom Visual Site Search stuff I made for the Show Off competition (http://blog.stormideas.com/archive/2009/03/10/mix09-show-off-entry-deepzoom-visual-site-search.aspx) into colaab - comments and annotations are being a pain, but I'm getting there. You can see a prototype in action at:

http://app.colaab.com/R/d4cade23-c88f-4d7d-9c7a-9bc100963ed1

BrandWatcher on Azure

I've also been playing with Azure and have pushed a small Silverlight application live:

http://brandwatcher.cloudapp.net/

Which takes a search term and returns results from a few different APIs (Twitter, SocialMention, Google news search, Google blog search). It's really just a toy to get my head into Azure but you might find it interesting to see a little Silverlight application weaving together some data and deployed into Azure. Have a search for some basic terms and check out the results.

If you’re going to be at MIX09 please drop us a line, we’d love to meet up!