Anith Gopal

I don’t know if the term “spend a penny” has the same meaning to people outside our little corner of the world as it does here in England – but if you happen to use email it soon might.

By Dan Kasun, Senior Director, US Public Sector Developer Evangelism In October, we launched the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Federal Application contest , encouraging developers, partners and hobbyists to submit Windows Phone applications for federal employees.  It was a high bar, as developers not only had to come up with solutions that solve a specific federal need (i.e., for federal employees, federal agencies, or citizens in a federal scenario), but the application had to be deployed into production on the Windows Phone Marketplace as well.  The response we received was incredible!  36 applications were submitted for review – all very high quality and targeting some very unique solutions.  Of course, there can only be 10 winners, and this week the contest judges announced them – all of which will be featured on Zune Marketplace .   This was a unique opportunity to tap into the incredible talents of our citizen developers, and they delivered, creating a great variety of applications that facilitate citizen engagement, increase transparency and improve access to government services.  All of the applications are available to download from the Windows Marketplace right now – so feel free to check them out personally. We’d like to thank all of the developers who submitted applications – a marketplace rich with useful government-oriented solutions is good for everyone.  For those who are considering writing an app with a “government” slant, make sure to check out the State and Local Windows Phone 7 Apps Contest which just got underway!    Without further ado – here are the winners: Congress 411 – provides easy access to information for every member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Relief Central – includes the World Factbook from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Field Operations Guide from USAID, MEDLINE Journals, and Relief News from the CDC, Red Cross, FEMA, ReliefWeb, and more

If you’re traveling on Southwest Airlines this holiday season, you’re sure to be put on the “Nice List.” Southwest and Windows have partnered to make your holiday travel experience jollier with Holiday Photos on the Fly. Beginning Dec. 2, Southwest and Windows will offer free holiday photos to customers at 26 airports nationwide.

I thought it would be fun to share what it was like my first week making the transition from Redmond to Silicon Valley in my new role. And more importantly, I thought it would be fun to explain publicly to my uncle back in Mississippi that my job isn’t to pray for the developers of the world.

Even though I’m in love with my Zune 120, when I learned that I could be writing multi-touch games in XNA for the Zune HD, it didn’t take much to convince me (the recent price drop plus Bing cash back helped, too).  I probably would have bought one even sooner if the Newark airport had them in their handy little Best Buy vending machines. I picked up a 32gb Zune HD last week when I was in the US, and even I am shocked at how beautiful this device is.  The touch screen is very responsive and the display simply amazing.  Just like my previous two devices, it does great synching with my music, videos, audio books, pictures and podcasts, it has a radio, and it lets me wirelessly beam songs to friends.  And now it also has wireless, marketplace access, internet, apps and a handy 33 hours of battery life.  Downside?

If you attended the last summit, you will probably notice that our main campus layout has changed a little bit and now there are a couple of additions that you may want to visit.

Yesterday I flew to Minneapolis to speak at PASS MN on disk partition alignment .  I left for the airport immediately afterward to get home to Indianapolis in order to speak at Perpetual Technologies, Inc. ( PTI ) 2nd Annual Back to School with Microsoft & Oracle Event .

For me, the Home Sharing feature introduced in iTunes 9 has been a long time coming. I’ve always run at least two Macs, one desktop and one notebook, and over the years I’ve tried various solutions for sharing media between multiple machines

Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline , an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses . It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users , it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE

How Twitter works in theory , by Kevin Marks. “Phatic” gestures are important to understand if you’re building on the web.

I have been meaning to blog about this for a long time now, and since I seem to be writing a number of insufferably long blog posts lately, I figured there was no better time than the present.  Most of you know me as someone who has been working on Microsoft virtualization software for as long as there has been Microsoft virtualization software – but how did I end up in this role?

Cash for Broadband instead of Clunkers .