This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when Silverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops.

More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft’s announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there’s no getting around Microsoft’s aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5’s progress in the video area. Scoble says that’s not Silverlight on the iPhone, but if you combine the video hack with Miguel De Icaza’s Moonlight recompiling hack to iPhone primitives, it adds up to a porting path for Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android. Sounds like another sushi dinner for me. A feast of possibilities to ponder on a happy Thanksgiving Day.

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Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.

One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.

During one demo, Microsoft showed what a Silverlight version of Facebook might look like. Using Facebook’s APIs, Microsoft created a demo app which was completely reskinned, complete with news feed, contacts, and photos. Cycling through photos in the Silverlight Facebook app, for instance, was much faster than doing it in the browser. Although I’m not sure we’re oing to start to see a whole bunch of Facebook desktop apps like we do with Twitter, but the it was a good demo.

Some screenshots below of what Facebook would look like as a Silverlight app. They show a reskinned stream view, a people view, Facebook photos, and a grid view.

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Here’s a bizarre use for Microsoft’s “Flash-killer” Silverlight—a ballistics calculator. Yes, Silverlight is being used to build an application that lets shooting and hunting enthusiasts “customize shooting conditions” while comparing Winchester-made bullets.

Winchester’s Ballistics Calculator lets gun users choose their type of ammunition and then compare up to five different bullet types with charts and graphs. You can enter specific conditions like wind speed and outside temperature, maximum range, direction, speed and height. The application will then display charts and graphs that visually lay out the point of impact, drop and trajectory of each type of bullet.

According to Microsoft, Winchester chose Silverlight because it is a “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in” that allowed the ballistics maker to create an app that doesn’t have to be downloaded (but you have to download Silverlight).

Silverlight 3 launched this past summer, with the hopes of making inroads against its main competitor Adobe Flash. It looks like Microsoft is going after gun enthusiasts first.

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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand keywords. Today at TechCrunch50, Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced a new visual search feature on Bing which returns results as an interactive gallery of images.

For instance, if you type in “dog breeds,” it organizes them for you in a grid of images that you can scroll through using a slider on the right. When you hover over a particular image, it enters the name of that dog breed in the search box. And you can re-order the image results by size, breed, exercise needs, and Bing popularity.

There are more than 100 visual galleries ranging from movies, books, and cars to products, animals, and sports teams. The sorting categories change each time. So for movies, you can filter by release date, title, or rating. Cars can be sorted visually by make, price or mileage.

When you resort, the images fly around the screen to find their new positions. The visual search acts as a showcase for Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which makes the animations and visual rendering possible.

“The whole concept,” says Mehdi, “is that the world of search will change. There will be a more graphic way people will search, and it will pivot how people search.”

The judges were impressed with his demo. Ron Conway noted, “I think the huge winner here will be consumers because competition breeds innovation, and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is fantastic for consumers.”

Video:

Other Coverage:
Microsoft launches Bing ‘Visual Search’ CNET.
Microsoft’s next attack on Google: Bing gets visual search VentureBeat.
Bing Tries More Pictures, Less Text Silicon Alley Insider.
Microsoft’s Bing Introduces Visual Search Feature paidContent.
Making Search Prettier: Bing Launches Visual Search ReadWriteWeb.
Microsoft Updates Bing with ‘Visual Search’ FeaturePC World.
Microsoft Bing Adds Visual Search Option Bits NYTimes.
Bing: Now With Visual Search Digital Daily.
Meet an Awesome Search Engine for iPhone Apps – Bing Digital Inspiration.
Bing Search Gets Visual Technologizer.
Hands on: Bing gains Silverlight-only Visual Search feature Ars Technica.
Microsoft Bing Adds Picture Searches for Some Queries Bloomberg.
Microsoft Bing gets visual search; full 2.0 update later this fall All About Microsoft.
Microsoft Adds Visual Search to Bing PC Magazine.
Bing’s new visual search tools are both stupid and cool Daily Finance.
Bing 2.0 “Visual Search” Launches, Allows Search By Pictures Search Engine Land.
Is Bing Optimizing for the Short Snout? The Noisy Channel.
Microsoft announces Bing Visual Search MobileTechWorld.
Bing Goes the Visual Internet AppScout.
Visual Search – Why type when you can see it? Bing Blog.
Microsoft Bing Visual Search Option Helps Us Become Lazier Searchers Google Watch.
Bing encourages visual search Computer World.
Google Leads in Search Engine Quality Test, But Bing ImpresseseWeek.
Bing 2? Microsoft Debuts Visual Search Engine internetnews.com

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Montgomery points developers to Microsoft’s Web Platform and Xbox development program as all projects that were created using Popfly will effectively be discontinued completely.

TechCrunch got an early look at the Silverlight-powered application when it debuted in private beta mode over 2 years ago. At the time, mash-up and widget creation tools were all the rage, with Yahoo introducing its Pipes web app just a few months prior. Google got in the game with its Mashup Editor a bit later, but that service never left private beta and the company ultimately announced it would be axing the product last January. Two days ago, the team even reminded developers that it would soon be shutting down.

ProgrammableWeb in its coverage of the discontinuation of Microsoft Popfly points back to a February 2008 article in the NY Times, in which the newspaper talks about Montgomery and Popfly in a positive light, with the product manager being lauded as “an example of how it just might be possible for someone to teach dinosaurs to dance”.

Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.

Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.

Web 2.0 Conference organizer Tim O’Reilly also gets quoted in the article, and he apparently expressed skepticism early on:

“Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”

Seattle-based tech blog TechFlash got a bit more information out of Microsoft regarding Popfly’s sudden death. In an e-mail to editor Todd Bishop, Redmond says Popfly was simply no longer part of its refocused strategy, which was outlined in light of the dismal economic situation.

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in as a tip)

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Microsoft’s “Flash-killer,” Silverlight released the third version of its rich media application platform, Silverlight 3, on the web yesterday. This morning, Microsoft is holding the official launch of Silverlight 3, which is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform. The beta of Silverlight 3 was launched earlier this year.

Now Microsoft is taking the beta off, and rolling out the full-fledged version of Silverlight 3 to the public. We had the opportunity to speak to Director of Microsoft’s Development Platform Group, Brian Goldfarb, about the new features of Silverlight 3 and the strategies behind the development of the new product. We also were able to talk to Scott Guthrie, vice president in the Microsoft’s Developer Division, on camera about his perspective on the significance of Silverlight 3 and its potential to takeover main competitor Adobe’s Flash (see video below). We’ve been able to compile a complete guide to SIlverlight 3 with all of its new features and the customers and developers who are using these features to launch innovative products. And Microsoft will also be demoing some of the real-time capabilities of Silverlight 3 at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp today.

Microsoft says that one of the main strategies that drove the development of Silverlight 3 was the focus on creating a technology and a set of efficient tools that bring design and development together in a rich media experience for the consumer that could be used across different platforms (browser and desktop) and across different browsers. Here are all of the new features of Silverlight 3, Expression Suite (a suite of tools for designers and developers), and the customers which are using the new product to enhance their media experiences.

1. Smooth Streaming: Microsoft says its new streaming feature improves the quality of streaming video on the browser so that it compares to watching video on television. Smooth Streaming on the backend is basically an encoding that lets you break the file up into smaller chunks that are easier to move and stream to an application. As a user, you’ll experience HD video playback of content if your bandwith is high. If a user’s bandwidth is below 3 Mbps, Smooth Streaming’s dynamic capabilities will kick in. Basically Silverlight is evaluating how much CPU and bandwith your computer and network has and makes dynamic calculations on the optimal place where the video should stream and acts accordingly, allowing for limited buffering. This streaming feature was used to stream Michael Jackson’s memorial service on MSN and to stream Wimbledon live on the web.

2. Digital Rights Management: Silverlight 3 comes with increased protection of content for businesses using the platform to stream or publish content. Studio and content owners have greater abilities to monitor and protect content from being distributed.

3. Immersive Experiences: Silverlight 3 comes with a few innovative capabilities for developers to harness, including th ability to have a deep zoom into images and an experience, almost making users feel like they are on a virtual ride. I demoed the deep zoom capability that’s currently being used on the Hard Rock Cafe’s site to portray music memorabilia in it’s different restaurants. Silverlight 3 also has a more powerful 3-D technology.

4. Out Of The Browser: Silverlight has been a browser based technology since its launch in 2007, but this ends with the new release. Microsoft has now given developers the ability to build applications on Silverlight that can be viewed in the browser and on the desktop. One of the potential apps that can be built off of Facebook was debuted by Microsoft at the social network’s technology tasting a few months ago, and we thought it was impressive.

5. Expression Studio 3 and Sketchflow: Expression Studio is Microsoft’s set of tools that lets designers and developers build high quality applications off of Silverlight. Expression Studio 3 is launching with a new tool, called Sketchflow, which will basically enable the creation and implementation of fully functional prototypes. So a napkin sketch can become a reality, and can be animated and used by designers and developers.

6. The Push Towards Enterprise: Goldfarb says that Microsoft is making a a significant effort to show businesses that Silverlight can also be used internally to host and support rich media applications. For example, Continental Airlines is using Silverlight as the foundation for their call center application for employees who are taking reservations and supplying information.

Besides the examples mentioned above, Silverlight has been able to make some big deals in the live streaming space, including the Bejing Olympics, the Presidential Inauguration and for Netflix.Is Silverlight 3 a Flash-killer? Probably not, but Silverlight’s new features, especially its dynamic streaming capabilities (which Adobe has its own version of) and the innovative technologies that are being offered to developers and designers certainly may keep the product neck in neck with Flash.

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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.

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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.

Single-site browsers (SSBs) aim to bring the best of the desktop to web applications. Rather than running programs in normal web browsers like Firefox or Safari, wedged in a tab between New York Times articles and TechCrunch posts, each app is given its own dedicated browser, which is customized to include many of the desktop features that users know and love. Some of the advantages are obvious. Apps like Gmail and Facebook get an icon in the dock (on Mac) or the taskbar (on Windows) for easy access, and in the case of Gmail the icon can be “badged” with the number of new emails, a popular feature of traditional mail clients. Superfluous elements like the back/forward buttons, generic browser menus and the URL bar can be hidden away, reducing user interface clutter. Other benefits are more subtle. Since each app is running in its own operating system process, for example, a crash in one program won’t bring down your whole browser.

Mozilla Prism is one of the oldest examples of a site-specific browser. It grew out of the WebRunner prototype created by Mozilla developer Benjamin Smedberg, which he showed off at the XTech conference in 2006 to demonstrate the capabilities of the Mozilla platform. Another Mozillian, Mark Finkle, recognized its potential and continued to extend and improve the prototype. It was rebranded as Prism and launched as an official Mozilla Labs project in October 2007. Rather than creating a new platform for standalone web applications, Prism aims to leverage existing web apps while integrating them more smoothly into the overall desktop experience.

With the release of Prism 0.9 two weeks ago, the project now comes with a Firefox extension that makes creating a single-site browser for a website a one-click process that can be performed directly inside Firefox 3. Surf to Gmail, for instance, choose “Convert to Application” in the Firefox menu, and a shortcut with the Gmail icon appears on your desktop. Clicking the icon launches Gmail in its own window. Extensive customization options are available to add things like dock badges, system tray icons and popup notifications. Web developers can add special hooks to their code so that these bells and whistles are automatically included whenever someone spins the app off onto their desktop. Prism is still very much a work-in-progress, but it has already met with some early success; recent Yahoo acquisition Zimbra, for example, is using it to deliver a desktop version of their popular web-based mail client.

Adobe announced the first alpha version of Apollo in March 2007. A beta version was released in June, rebranded as Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). AIR is similar to Prism in many ways, although it is based on the open source WebKit rendering engine (also used by Apple’s Safari browser on the Mac and iPhone). The other big difference when compared to Prism is that AIR, in addition to web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, supports Flash and another proprietary Adobe language called Flex. A glance at their application showcase reveals a heavy emphasis on using Flash and Flex to give applications a slick native look and feel. Early adopters include big names like eBay and AOL.

Another noteworthy site-specific browser is Fluid. It has an impressive list of features considering that it is the work of a single developer, Todd Ditchendorf. The main restriction is that it works only on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature is “built-in support for Greasemonkey-compatible userscripting.” For those not familiar with Greasemonkey, this means that a web app can be modified with a simple JavaScript file that runs on the client whenever the app is loaded. There is already a huge number of scripts available to do things like send SMSes from Gmail, download videos from YouTube and strip ads from websites. This type of userscripting is particularly useful in the case of a site-specific browser since changes to the application user interface may make it work more effectively on the desktop. For example, certain features might be moved from hyperlinks inside the application to the window’s menu bar. In the long term, web developers will hopefully make modified SSB-friendly versions of their apps available, but in the meantime userscripting can be used to pimp them out directly on the client.

A final contender is Google Gears, which was originally positioned as a way to take web apps offline so that they can be used without a live internet connection. Currently the only Google application to support Gears is Google Reader; users who install the plugin can sync their news feeds to their local disk and read them offline. It has recently become clear that Google has much bigger plans for Gears; a “Desktop Shortcut API,” for instance, lets Gears users add an icon to their desktop to launch an app directly. Gears developer Dion Almaer provides a laundry list of future APIs, including everything from notifications and cryptography to image manipulation.

As such, Gears represents a strong move on the part of Google into the browsing space, almost certainly to include site-specific browsing. Despite persistent rumors, it is now apparent that Google does not intend to create its own “GBrowser”. Instead, it is using Gears as a vehicle to add new features to existing web browsers (it currently works in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari), for use both by Google and by third-party apps. Google obviously realizes that its applications won’t be able to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office without significantly beefing up the capabilities of the web browser. At the same time, it would be too stiff a challenge to achieve broad market penetration with a completely new browser brand. Gears is its elegant solution to this problem.

Offline functionality is key piece of the site-specific browser puzzle. Internet connectivity may one day be ubiquitous, but in the meantime web apps need to function offline if they are to compete with their desktop brethren. HTML 5 includes a specification for offline web apps that is already supported by Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3. Gears is in many ways a direct competitor, although one of the HTML 5 editors, Ian Hickson, works for Google, and it is quite plausible that Gears will be adapted to support the specification in the future. Offline functionality is not inherently linked to site-specific browsers, but together the two form a powerful combination.

It’s pretty early to call a winner in the site-specific browser space, especially since heavyweights like Apple and Microsoft are probably poised to enter the game as well. But Prism has one big advantage: a killer app in the form of Firefox. By integrating Prism into a future version of Firefox, Mozilla could quickly get its technology into the hands of its 150 million users. AIR, on the other hand, has the advantage of using Flash and Flex to add sizzle to web app user interfaces, at the price of requiring potentially significant adaption on the part of the web app developer. However the space shakes out, the era of running applications in a tab in a traditional web browser may soon be coming to an end.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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