When it comes to casual games online, they tend to be built in Adobe’s Flash (see Kongregate). But Microsoft wants people to start creating Web video games in its competing Silverlight.

Today, it is taking a step to make that easier by introducing the Popfly Game Creator. Microsoft launched Popfly last year as an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight. With Popfly Game Creator, it is adding a simple Web-based authoring environment for creating casual arcade-style games.

The tool is built for non-programmers so that anyone can create a game, and is particularly aimed at kids and teenagers. It is entirely browser-based. You create a game using predefined templates that can be modified, and when you are satisfied, you hit play to run the code. The games run in Silverlight and will be hosted at Popfly, but are embeddable anywhere on the Web. Here’s a game Microsoft created for us with Michael as the main character.

The Game Creator starts off with templates for about 20 different types of games—from space invaders and breakout to racing games and shooters. Game makers can populate their games with hundreds of characters, background scenes, sound effects and objects, or create their own from scratch. More details can be found on the Popfly wiki.

New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.

Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism.

Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears).

Read Matthew’s blog, Just Browsing, here.

Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet.

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NBC announced today that they are working with Microsoft and MSN to build NBCOlympics.com. That announcement alone is a snoozer. What’s interesting is that they’ll be using the Microsoft Silverlight platform to “deliver deeply immersive user experiences.”

The partnership was announced by Bill Gates at the CES keynote this evening in Las Vegas. The new site will host 2,200 hours of live event video coverage, with more than 20 simultaneous live video streams at peak times. An additional 3,000 hours of on-demand video will be available, including full event replays and highlights.

Silverlight will be used for an “enhanced playback mode” and will allow full screen viewing “that is as good or better than anything on the Internet today.” There will also be metadata overlays that enable viewers to additional content like results, statistics, bios, rules and expert analysis.

This is good news for Microsoft and their nascent Silverlight platform. What I want to know is how much Microsoft paid NBC to use this. It’s highly unlikely they chose it without an additional nudge. Testing a new platform at the Olympics carries significant risk. And since no one really uses Silverlight yet, this will require millions of people to download the Silverlight framework before they can use the advanced features of the site.

Microsoft PR sent out a link to this slick new Windows Home Server Demo this afternoon. Nothing really notable about it (although I do want one)…except the demo is in Flash.

Microsoft has been pushing their alternative framework to Flash called Silverlight since announcing it earlier this year, even going so far as to have a new search user interface created that shows off some of the Silverlight features. Did the memo never get to the Windows Home Server team? Eat your own dogfood, or else no one else will.

Of course, everyone has Flash on their computer, and few have Silverlight installed. So what does Microsoft want more – Silverlight installations or sales of Windows Home Servers? I guess the answer is – servers.

LiveStation, the Microsoft Research/Skinkers P2P IPTV solution we reported on last night, has sent out beta invites to a number of users. I’ve tested it and have included screen shots below. Frankly, there isn’t much to report.

This is a Silverlight application and currently works only on Windows machines. If Silverlight is not installed on your machine it will be during the setup process.

Once installed, a window opens on your desktop and BBC World News is shown. It is exactly like turning on a one-station television (only BBC works with the application currently). You can watch the station live, turn the volume up or down, see information on the show and what’s up next, and close the application.

You can’t fast forward or reverse the program or pause it. There is no time shifting feature at all. It’s fun, but I won’t be opening it again until it includes time shifting capabilities and a lot more content.

The company left a comment on our original post asking us and others not to compare it to Joost or Slingbox. In the demo video they distributed yesterday, however, the presenter brought up both of those products and made his own favorable comparisons to those startups.

Screen shots below.

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The video above shows a demo of a new product called Livestation, a peer-to-peer live television broadcasting application built on the Microsoft Silverlight platform. This is a Microsoft Research initiative, built in partnership with a London company called Skinkers.

In the demo, the presenter calls this a “Slingbox without the box,” and it is an apt comparison. However, the solution will require the broadcaster to work with Livestation, whereas the Slingbox allows users to broadcast their normal TV to IP connected devices.

In its current form, this is not a competitor to Joost, Babelgum and the other time-shifted TVIP startups we’ve covered. The service shows live television only, although presumably it could also be used to stream time-shifted content as well. And while it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video.

If you’re looking for a deployed “Slingbox without the box” check out Orb, which we’ve covered here and on MobileCrunch. Or go buy a Slingbox.

Microsoft will announce the private beta launch of Popfly this morning, a new Silverlight application that allows users to create mashups, widgets and other applications using a very cool and easy to use web-based graphical interface. We previously covered the launch of Yahoo Pipes and compared five different applications that let you mix data and build applications online. At the time we mentioned how this space was really heating up – and how Pipes from Yahoo simplified the creation of mashups and mini-applications by providing a drag+drop interface. Microsoft are the latest entrants in this market, and they have completely leapfrogged every other application we have seen so far.

Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors above because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen. With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services.

See additional screen shots and a link to a screencast on the Popfly overview page here.

Seeing applications like Popfly coming out of Microsoft is something that I couldn’t have imagined all too long ago – and together with the recent Silverlight announcements (which we were also very excited about) the new Microsoft is really starting to come out through their product releases. Popfly so far seems to be another potential big hit from the new Microsoft under Ray Ozzie (Ozziesoft).

Invites: While the private beta is very limited (even within Microsoft), we do have TEN invitations to send out. Leave a comment about how you would use Popfly and the best (or funniest) ten will be sent an invitation to the application.

The announcements around Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform yesterday were important to anyone who is thinking about where the web will evolve. For those of us watching the demos at the Mix conference the immediate importance of it was apparent – Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications. It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy. After the keynote, the main topic of conversation in the hallways centered on just how effectively Microsoft carried out its execution of Adobe.

We didn’t cover the news as it broke – I was on stage at Mix and Nik Cubrilovic was denied a press pass due to a mixup and got in very late. There was a lot of early coverage but mostly from journalists who hadn’t been properly briefed on it or who rushed to post quickly.

In preparation for the Mix Q&A, Nik and I had well over 10 hours of briefing on Silverlight, with very senior Microsoft employees (Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, Charles Fitzgerlad) as well as members of the product team that actually build Silverlight (Keith Smith and Brian Goldfarb).

Nik wrote a very long post yesterday afternoon on Silverlight, long after the initial news broke. From a pageview standpoint, the post was a loser for us. We would have been far better off doing a one-paragraph post at 10 am announcing the news, and by the time we wrote in the late afternoon the buzz had worn off somewhat.

I’m glad we waited to write. Nik (a long-time developer) was most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) and how fast it is (it blows away native Javascript routines – without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight).

The news today about Silverlight is significantly more thoughtful. Microsoft-hater Steve Gillmor gives it a thumbs up and says “the engineering behind this is stunning.” Robert Scoble, who’s angry at Microsoft for not giving him a free pass to the Mix event, says “Microsoft “rebooted the Web” yesterday.” The list goes on.

If you are a developer or an entrepreneur, take a look at Silverlight, download some of the sample applications, and take the time to understand how it can affect your product. Our overview post is here, and our podcast interview with the product manager who built it is here.

Some of the most interesting new web applications will be built on this platform.

Update: Listen to our podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb at TalkCrunch.

Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complementing it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform.

During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio.

When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web – in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.

The CLR
The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.

The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB – which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.

Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it – it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.

Multimedia
A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia – particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen). The demonstrations shown today were simply gorgeous, and we are finally seeing a web-based video distribution model that can compete with both desktop-based downloads as well as DVD and other offline content.

As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB (it will be a bit bigger for Mac OSX as it is a universal binary). The install happens automatically, and doesn’t require a restart in IE which will probably result in video content sites being the first major distributors of the Silverlight 1.0 client across browsers. I expect that over time we will see a host of sites, especially those currently serving WMV of other formats into media player embeds, migrate their video serving to Silverlight.

Services
The same video sites that will be switching to Silverlight for content delivery will also want to consider one of the new web services announced by Microsoft today. The service is called Silverlight Streaming and it allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. Best of all, this service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality. Starting right now, you can build a total video content site using Silverlight at no cost. The future for this service looks good as they will incorporate Silverlight Streaming with the MSN Video ad network to allow you to easily monetize your video streams and participate in a revenue sharing opportunity with Microsoft while removing your distribution costs. There will also be a premium level of content delivery where you will be able to pay for higher levels of usage – the cost for this service is as yet unknown but expect it to be very low.

Mobile
Silverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone – so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well – thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do.

What is next..
In all we should expect to see more services provided by Microsoft as part of the ecosystem. Ray Ozzie today spoke about a vision of services complimenting software – and announcing Silverlight Streaming at the same time as the new Silverlight client is an excellent example of that. Microsoft are clearly determined to position themselves as the premier provider of tools, software and services for the web.

Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident – so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.

My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched – but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).

To find out more about Silverlight, and to download toolkits and samples and particpiate in discussions check out the new Silverlight website at www.silverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 will go gold sometime this summer.

Nik Cubrilovic has been a contributor to Techcrunch since early 2006. He writes a blog at www.nik.com.au and he is the CEO of Omnidrive