Author: M3 Sweatt

Courtesy of MSNBC, the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and several private firms have launched a Web site designed to help consumers spot Internet fraud. The “Looks Too Good To Be True” site launched yesterday, providing greater consumer awareness, education and warnings of the latest scams.

“Officials say they are overwhelmed with complaints about Net crime and are trying to enlist consumers’ help to stem the tide. Last year, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received 207,000 complaints, an increase of 66 percent over the previous year. The average consumer lost $220 per complaint.”

When you consider the daily bombardments I get from fraudulent e-commerce phishing mails claiming to be from on-line services and popular financial institutions with which I have no accounts, it’s a safe bet that the 207,000 complaints are only the tip of the iceberg.

• Hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but the absence of it almost certainly guarantees failure.
  
• In the game of life, even the 50-yard-line seats don’t interest me; I came to play.
  
• Focus on the things you can control, and the only thing you can control is you. 

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

From Scoble’s Blog… Is Jason Fried’s brother and sister working at Microsoft? (Hadi Partovi, what are you thinking?)

“Today I found out the truth. You let this thing ship with only two people working on it. With no testers. No document people. No marketing. No PR…. What are you thinking? They are weird animals: they are focused on shipping software that makes users smile.”

I love http://www.start.com/ and have been using it for a couple of months, but just found this public blog entry WRT their development process… (sorry I skipped a couple of Scoble entries this summer… 😉 

Anyway, I knew that Start had been launched by a small team, but of greater interest to me has been the number of times over the last couple of months a large number of people across the company have played the story of Start (and other MSN innovations like paid search) back to me. They look at these efforts as beneficial examples of nimble innovation.

Over the last year I’ve met with people all across the product groups looking at the Microsoft customer experience. I see the incredible challenges and efforts we face each day as a company, using our own products as employees and as customers. I’ve been happy to watch MSN Search become more relevant (particularly in my own searches, where I’ve found what I’m looking for more often, and with links to the info from Encarta), to find examples of how we’re working to make content easier to, well, find and make improvements in the overall product experience for our customers.

In a company the size of Microsoft, there are also incredible opportunities to test our products in real-world environments, ones where very demanding customers (the employees) and partners (the product and business groups, subsidiaries, operations, IT…) are dogfooding our products, and sharing that experience not just with the product teams but with our customers. Case in point: I use our intranet portal (MSWeb) several times a day, which is built on SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Well, there’s a white paper that takes a look at the design, implementation and deployment of MSWeb, targeted at helping those companies interested in implementing or upgrading their current intranet portals.

Great for organizations, large and small, but more than I need in doing my job as an “information worker” at the office, and a “consumer” at home. That’s where I have developed a relationship (one-sided) with the Microsoft Office “Crabby Office Lady.” Do you want plain, easy to understand and yet entertaining answers to common (and not-so-common) Office questions that you didn’t find by going to Help -> Contents and Index? Then go to the Microsoft Office Assistance site and chances are you’ll find some interesting answers from her. (And although I haven’t seen a new video in recent memory, my personal favorite is her response to “Microsoft Doesn’t Care?”) This week, she posted an article on providing useful feedback and referenced where you can go to provide feedback directly to the Office team.

There is so much that the Office team is doing to ensure a positive experience for our customers and so little time until I need to get back to Office in my office.

Tags: Microsoft, Crabby, Office, dogfood.

I noticed that Sean Alexander said that Windows Media Connect 2.0 has been released – very nice for those with MCE PCs or those thinking about purchasing one, especially when it will work with some of the slickest devices out there including Media Center Extenders, the very slick Roku Soundbridge (created by the equally bright Anthony Wood, who founded ReplayTV) and talented and the coming-soon Xbox 360). With Windows Media Connect, you can stream music, photos and video from a Windows XP PC to lite digital media receivers. Coupled with the Windows Media Center 2005 software release, I may soon retire my old analogue Replay TV 3000s.

That is, if I successfully upgrade my current Media Center PC to WMC2005: that may prove to be a challenge.

All well and good, but what’s really fantastic is that the update avoids the isues that sometime affects next releases: loss of speed and agility. Sean notes that version 2 is faster and has a smaller memory footprint. More info on the products that support this architecture is available at windows media connect.

Hopefully, it will also work with another very cool device: the new roku Soundbridge Radio. I now know what I want for Christmas. Note that I just saw this on roku’s site:

Q: Are protected WMA files supported?
A: Protected WMA files purchased from a PlaysForSure music service (http://www.playsforsure.com) are playable when using the Windows Media Connect server.