Advocate's Studio

Want to expand your virtual real estate on your mobile phone? If you haven’t already gotten your free Windows Live account, now is the time to do it. Sneaking under my radar during the holiday crazies was this announcement from the fine folks at Windows Live – you can now access SkyDrive’s 25GB of storage via apps on your iPhone or Windows Phone. Pretty darn cool. Dropbox is nice, but it can’t hold a candle to the size of SkyDrive.

Of course, Microsoft has baked SkyDrive fairly deeply into Windows Phone 7.5. With the Windows Phone app, you can store documents, notes, photos, videos and access them from your phone. Share photos stored on SkyDrive by email, text, or IM, use Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with SkyDrive files, and keep your phone’s camera roll up-to-date on SkyDrive automatically. SkyDrive is integrated directly into the apps as well as core phone functions. Of particular use on mobile, you can browse your entire SkyDrive. share files and manage your storage.

The “extra extra” though is an iPhone app! In addition to their OneNote notebooks, iPhone users can access their files in SkyDrive, create folders, delete files, and share links to folders and files directly using the Mail app. Much of the functionality is the same between the Windows Phone and iPhone apps – tailored to the particular phone’s user experience. This is very very cool indeed – kudos to Microsoft for not leaving us iPhone users hanging!

Read more about these apps and SkyDrive and check out some vids over at the Windows Live site. And get an extra 25GB of useful storage on your mobile device. Thanks Microsoft.

Who rightfully should wear the crown of Emperor in the Tech world? It’s always fun to measure tech giants and an Apple / Microsoft duel at 50 paces is hard to resist. Check out the stock values and key events in the history of both companies with this (very) long infographic. And remember back to the good old days when the Apple I was built in a garage and Bill Gates was writing Tic Tac Toe programs in BASIC.

Hat tip to BGR.

I didn’t see THAT one coming! Just glanced over at my reader and caught this awesome bit of news for lovers of iPhones and MS OneNote, a Venn diagram that until recently showed very little area of intersection. I haven’t written about my deep and abiding admiration for OneNote in a while, but I have in fact crowed about it in the Studio before (link). OneNote, originally a powerful desktop note taking and organizational tool with amazing editing, search and collaboration features, made its way to the cloud via Microsoft’s Skydrive about six months ago (link). Now, through God-knows-what-sort-of-unholy-alliance, you can get OneNote on your iPhone free (for a limited time), with automatic sync and backup via the cloud-based SkyDrive. It bears noting that there is no native Mac application for OneNote, making this news all the more surreal.

For those unfamiliar with OneNote, I took the liberty of copying the description provided by Microsoft in the App Store for its shiny new app:

Microsoft OneNote Mobile is the easy-to-use, powerful note-taking application for all of your ideas, brought to you by Microsoft Office. OneNote Mobile lets you create and view notes and lists whenever you need them. Sync your notes with free Windows Live online storage and access them from virtually anywhere using your phone, PC, or almost any web browser.

With OneNote Mobile, you can:
▪ Create flexible notes that can include text, pictures, bullets, and checkboxes ▪ Check To Do items off on the go▪ Save time with quick access to your most recent notes▪ Work with confidence—OneNote Mobile automatically syncs your notes with Windows Live in the background▪ Organize your notes into sections or create new notebooks using OneNote 2010 or OneNote Web App and access them from your iPhone

Although Microsoft has other iPhone apps already, this is the first app I know of that directly relates to a paid Microsoft software product within its venerable Office suite.

From the chatter on the Web, it appears that the auto sync update via SkyDrive may not yet be working and is being addressed by Microsoft. I didn’t let that little glitch bother me – I have my app downloaded and can’t wait to dig in. Any edge Evernote may have had on OneNote based on its portability may now be gone!

I <3 OneNote + iPhone!

UPDATE : the SkyDrive sync is working – simply log in via the app to your Windows Live account.

News aggregators are all the rage. The options out there afford varying degrees of customization, but most take a feed and spit out a more visually appealing version of the links and information contained in the feed.

Microsoft Montage (link here) is a wee bit different. Starting with a search term, you can get your results spit back out you in a magazine-like layout, which in and of itself is easier to digest. But the really cool part is that your “front page” is highly customizable, allowing you to change the layout of each result, tweak animation,  delete or add result blurbs, add Twitter results, etc., until you are satisfied that your paper is a true expression of newsworthy reporting. The result is a page with news items and  relevant media, “picturing”  your subject from many angles. After you are satisfied with your page, you can save and share your “Montages” to your peeps on Facebook or Twitter, and publish it to its own URL.

The Web commentators are almost uniformly comparing Montage to Paper.li, the Twitter-based aggregator that selects tweet from your follows and presents them in a newspaper-like format. I don’t really see the comparison. Paper.li is limited to Twitter and does not involve the depth of editing that Montage does, and Montage does not automatically update – you have to manually keep your Montage’s content fresh via affirmative visit to your list of sites.

Mashable has a nice write up on Montage here. And you can check out this video for a more visual explanation of the service. Thanks to Microsoft’s Fuse Labs for this cool new way to cull and present web information and highlight expertise.

But, I do find Montage to be an interesting, web-based tool for purposes of collecting content and then sharing a very shiny version of it with your social net. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Have you been waiting for Microsoft to finally put its Office applications into the cloud? Have you been waiting for Microsoft to put a “free” tag on those apps? Well, your time has come. Office Web Apps, MS’ free online version of its Office suite, is now live on SkyDrive and available for U.S., U.K., Ireland and Canada-based users.

With the simple creation of a Windows Live account, you can start playing with the new tools. You will find browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even OneNote that mimic much of the look and function of their desktop sibilings. Silverlight improves some of the experience (such as uploading multiple docs at the same time), but is unnecessary. All modern browsers will work with the tools. It’s not the desktop experience, for sure. But it meets Google Docs head on. You can upload (drag and drop!), collaborate with others, create within the web environment, print right from the browser and read docs on your smart phone. And, if you have Office 2010 installed locally (releasing next week), the web counterparts really sparkle with a seamless desktop / web experience. With 25GB of free storage on SkyDrive, this combination of features is nothing to sneeze at.

The Windows team is also promising lots of Office features will be integrated into Hotmail, so stay tuned to that.

Check out The Window Blog (link here) for more information and screenshots. All Hail the Cloud!