Will Speaking

Teams continue to launch....    New Client Side Image Organizer is now on internal Greenhouse.   Check it out at greenhouse.office.aol.com. It's got a great new UI for organizing your photos by face.  Check it out, and give the team feedback.   Journals R9 went to beta .   Check it out at beta.journals.com.   The hamely blue has gone :-)   UnCut Video Beta 6.5 released, with updates to mobile support.   AOL Pictures - with updates to galleries and bug fixes. Keep on rocking!    

The latest AIM 6.0 Beta is rocking...   Now it has a great feature -- Offline Messaging. So if you send an IM to someone who is offline,  the next time they log in, it will be waiting.    Yahoo IM had this for a number of years.   Now it comes to AIM!   The UI has also been updated,  and it is faster to signin -- check it out. AIM 6.0 Beta...

Org Updates Today you saw some great updates on two parts of the organization from Kevin Conroy and Joe Reddling.     It is great for the Mail team to have a strong technical and business driver with Rich Landsman.    This is great for Mail, great for the Mail team and great for Mountain View. Go Rich ! Go Team! All Hands We will have a campus All Hands next Thursday at 12PM.   We will have our normal agenda - including campus awards.   Plus we will discuss the latest organization updates. AJAX gone mad! Delivering my first keynote was quite nervous for me.   I saw a bit of the video afterwards, and did not know I used "um" so much in my sentences. um........   But check this video out below on YouTube of AJAX blast from the past :  AOL showing iAmaze technology from 2000.    

Keren and Sharon have been awarded another patent, in the area of film restoration.  More details soon...

The AJAX experience in Boston has a core developers attending.    Kevin did a great job on Module T and Microformats, and I spoke at lunch on general what we have done with AJAX/DHTML. We showed this video as an ice breaker.    

I just posted on my StumbleUpon blog plans to get to Boston..  I will be speaking at the AJAX experience.      OK, you can stop laughing.  I know it's more than a cleaner :-) Waves just told me the winners of the employee challenge at TopCoder.  Sripal was once on the Topspeed team.. Congrats! Special congratulations to the TopCoder Employee Challenge Winners, you ROCK ! Ø       First Place -- Sean Bastille, System Programmer Ø       Second Place (Tie) -- Tim Paris, Sr. SW Engr & Sripal Togaru, Principal SW Engr

As a Brit, when I heard of " Carphone Warehouse" buying AOL.UK access business,  I did a double take.   That company has been very successful in the UK for mobile phones,  but I did not recall the access business they are in. Turns out they have a free broadband business themselves , and this is a great addition and compliment to that business.     In addition, AOL UK content will be served by AOL moving forward.  Here's an advert from Carphone Warehouse "TalkTalk" (thanks to a user from Youtube)

We completed another round of Product Reviews yesterday, in Mountain View.   It was very well attended.   David Liu ,  Lu Lu ,  Mary Barnes,   Mary Cheney ,  Eric Newman,   Jim Simmons and James Clark were among just a few who attended from our HQ .      We had a packed room, and kept a good pace for presentations.    A lot of great products are being built from this campus.    At dinner, we had special guests - the Biggs brothers stopped by - Dave Biggs and Brian Biggs.    Thanks to everyone who presented.   We had two exciting demos - " Cayman " - the next generation Websuite was impressive.     And "Magnet" is coming along very nicely - with some excellent  demo's showing the progress this  small, focused team is making.      Once again, the teams here did an excellent...

IE 7 is nearly ready for general release -- Oct 17th is the current RTM date, and on Nov 6,  it will be auto updated for users of Windows XP SP2.      Our products seem to be working OK (at least, we don't seem to have blocker bugs or major cosmetic issues) - correct me if I'm wrong.        Please take IE 7 for a test drive, since our products will need to be ready by the time of launch on Oct 17th . Get IE 7 here.

Heresy! / 12pm to 1ish on Wed Oct 4, 2006 / AOL Silicon Valley, Conf: Shasta I saw Ant speak at a conference in June. See here for details.   Be sure not to miss this one.... "Innovation" and "listening to customers" are high on the list of business hot topics. But what do they mean in practice? Can we really give teams a process and expect innovation to pop out reliably? Are customers really the 'experts' when deciding what to do with our products or services? In this presentation, Ant and Chris will challenge some common assumptions with five 'heresies' of innovation derived from Intuit projects, focusing on innovation 'processes' and illustrating how customers can inspire you, but cannot lead you.

This week, we will have our quarterly product reviews .  We try and do these each quarter (I guess that is obvious)  and get all the functions of the team together - Business, PDM, PjM, Dev, QA, Ops, and UI to go through the product plans, discuss issues and resolve some issues.   This Thursday, we will have Product Reviews, starting at 9AM.                These are typically very productive sessions for the teams and the business owners.