Ok I’m now back from the Second Windows Live Session to be held in London in the UK this year, and I must say I’m pretty impressed on how the whole session went, it was much better than the previous one.

In the last Session we were shown products and services that we already knew about and there wasn’t much new except Fremont now called Windows Live Expo but the problem with that is that it’s only available in the US and wont be available in Europe for some time, also there wasn’t much technical details being revealed.

But everything changed in this Second Windows Live Session and it turned out to be pretty damn good, I even got to interview Phil Holden the Windows Live Director, shame I wasn’t too good though, I really do need to improve my speech when being filmed.

But hey it’s the first ever interview I think I’ve ever done on somebody especially while being on camera, so I hope that when you see it later once published that you will forgive me for messing up on some stuff.

Anyway like I was saying it was a great session, you could definitely tell that Heaven and Microsoft had listened to our feedback from the last session because they gave us a great session with stuff we wanted to see or hear about!

We had various people there from Microsoft including Koji Kato a Group Program Manager for live.com his main role is building up a devopler community for Windows Live, he showed us some pretty cool stuff that you could do if you knew coding, I especially liked the idea of using a Tablet PC or PDA Stlyus to write on the screen handwriting which will be converted to text to to search the web on the fly!

We also had Phil who gave a talk about some various Windows Live Products and Services including Live Local where he told us that we can hope to see UK Aerial Imagery some time in the summer, and then soon after that more parts of Europe.

He also showed us an early preview of Windows Live QnA which is looking pretty good at the moment but still needs some work done do it before it is rolled out as a beta to beta testers, hopefully by the next session we will be on the Live QnA Beta and will be able to report back to Phil and the rest of the team on what we personally think about it.

The last thing Phil showed us was a new Windows Live Mobile Messenger Application in which users could submit images and voice clips (not video) from their mobile phones on Mobile 5.0 to a Windows Live Messenger contact who currently appears online in their contact lists, I think to actually see this working was pretty impressive even if the process of sending data from a phone was a bit slow, it was also interesting too see that if you sent a nudge from the pc to the mobile phone the phone would vibrate, shame you couldn’t send a nudge from the mobile phone though!

At the end of the session we were shown Heavens RSS HUB for Windows Live, which is a central RSS Hub which gathers RSS Feeds from unofficial community Windows Live Blogs and displays them as links, with the most updated up the top, it’s similar to Heavens xbox360daily site, I could show you some screenshots of what Heavens new Windows Live RSS Hub looks like but I would rather wait until it’s a bit more final!

Ok and that was about it, well except for the fact that I was one of the 5 lucky ones to win a Philips 433VOIP Phone, the other 4 people to win were Robert Gale, Zack Whittaker, Ben and D3v.

Now to say a big thank you to everybody at Microsoft and Heaven for organizing this event, supplying food and drinks, giving out us each a Wi-Fi finder (thanks robert for the link) and for doing a surprise draw for a VOIP Phone and best of thank you for making my night and enjoyable one, also thanks to Rob for inviting me to drinks when I should of been inviting him, you wont get away next time!

And hey nice talking to all of you at the session, make sure we all stay in touch! 😀

Related Posts, updated as more become available: Robert Gale | Miel Van Opstal (a.k.a. Coolz0r) | Zack Whittaker | Simon Andrews | d3v | andyman from msgstuff | Pieter Dom from Mess.be |  Seb Skuse | Kris Hoet | Jeroen | Messenger Blog