Microsoft describe the MVP programme as:

We seek to recognize the best and brightest from technology communities around the world with the Microsoft® Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award.

These exceptional community leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, as well as technologists, who actively share their high-quality, real-world technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.

With the MVP Award, we thank these inspiring individuals for representing the voice of thousands in the community through the powerful and independent feedback they give us, and for helping our customers maximize the potential of their software.

Now I guess I need to start saving rather rapidly for the MVP Summit next month.

By the way, I find it amusing that I am now an MSP and MVP. I wonder if I could achieve MCP too, or any other M*P titles that Microsoft offer.

This image comes from this tweet:

MS flag flying half-mast at Microsoft UK HQ via @rmdrao on FB. Respect, Microsoft. http://goo.gl/UlIGE #stevejobs

RIP Jobs.

You will be missed.

The tweet says:

Bing Translator OData & OAuth, adding higher volume commercial tiers and 4 month free offer on everything! Big enough?

Those sound like pretty big things to me! I’d still like to know about Translating Telephone though.

Update: You can read more about these announcements on a blog post about the new features.

Does anyone have any plans for using Bing Translator with its new capabilities?

Windows 8 (obviously)

Expectations:

- New Metro UI

- New dev platform, new app package

- New hardware announced and shown off

- Windows Store to be announced and demoed

- New social platform/app for Windows similar to that found on Windows Phone

- Xbox Live to be integrated into Windows 8

- NUI will have a strong presence on the OS with

Hopes

- Single sign on via Windows Live ID on any Windows 8 PC

- Project Gustav is an app for Windows 8 touch PCs

- Outline of how the Windows ecosystem will be available across nearly all device types

- Xbox games can be played on Windows 8 PCs

- Kinect integration build in

Windows Live

Expectations

- New Windows Live apps/web apps to be talked about

- SkyDrive to become more prominent within the Windows ecosystem

Hopes

- Windows Live Mesh will become platform for synching all files and app data to the cloud

- Single sign on via Windows Live ID on any Windows 8 PC

Windows Phone

Expectations

- Nokia to announce at least 1 of their Windows Phones

- Mango’s planned roll out announced

Hopes

- Microsoft to talk about its plans to align Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8

- Microsoft announce new phones

Xbox and Zune

Expectations

- Xbox Live to be integrated into Windows 8

Hopes

- Microsoft either fully support Zune with new software, or kill the brand and merge with Xbox

- Xbox games can be played on Windows 8 PCs

Misc.

Expectations

- Microsoft Translator to be integrated into Windows 8 or to announce “Telephone Translator

- Office for Windows 8, making use of Metro UI, shown off

- New Bing web app announced and released

- Internet Explorer 10 is either released to beta or new Platform Preview is released

Hopes

- Bing HTML5 is released

Do you think I have missed anything off of this list? (I probably have as I rushed to write this while keeping up to date on Twitter with all the latest BUILD leaks, rumours and speculation.)

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for all the latest news about BUILD and shall be “live tweeting” the keynotes, I’ve already been busily tweeting away, and check out the BUILD page for more BUILD news. You will be able to watch the BUILD conference live at the BUILD site at 9AM PDT or 5PM BST (GMT +1).

Download the bingo sheets from SkyDrive.

Send me a tweet once you’ve completed a line.

We could also play a drinking game for BUILD with only a few key words involved, let me know in the comments or through Twitter what words you think should be used.

Vikram Dendi has tweeted stating that this week at BUILD will be a big week for Microsoft Translator and that we should stay tuned to find out more. Dendi works at Microsoft Research on the various translation pieces of research. It’s an intriguing tweet and something I have, since reading, spent some time thinking about.

My first idea for what could be so big comes from a rumoured feature of Windows 8 that didn’t gain much exposure when it was first reported. (I can’t find any mention of this rumour now though but I am quite sure I read it somewhere.) That feature is for an OS wide spell checker but I wonder if alongside that there will be a OS wide translator feature too. This could allow users to translate text in apps, documents or web page automatically. That to me would be a pretty big thing and would tie in nicely with all the expected Windows 8 news.

The other idea I have had for this big announcement is that Microsoft will announce a retail/consumer version of its Translating Telephone. This was shown to be working about 18 months ago so I’d expect it to be nearly ready now. It would certainly be a great NUI feature to have on the Microsoft ecosystem and it would make sense for some NUI news to come out of BUILD. The potential for this kind of feature gets better when you think about how this could be integrated into Skype.

Of course the big news for the Microsoft Translator team might not be quite as exciting as real-time voice translation but could be a new API or something similar (although to me that news is not that big). What are you thoughts on this? Got any other ideas? You better be quick for all will be revealed within the next few days at BUILD.

These apps will be made available on Symbian Belle and users can upgrade their Symbian Anna to get the apps. There will be two stages for the Microsoft Apps to appear, by the end of the year the following apps will be available.

• Microsoft® Lync™ 2010 Mobile – for cost efficient IM, presence, audio and web meetings on-the-go.
• Microsoft® PowerPoint® Broadcast – quick broadcast of presentations directly from PC to mobile.
• Microsoft® OneNote™ – rich note taking with images. Syncs with Microsoft® SkyDrive®.
• Microsoft® Document Connection – single view to documents stored on mobile, including email attachments as well as documents on Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 sites

Then in “early” 2012 another update will be released for the Microsoft Apps which will bring:

• Microsoft OneNote sync with SharePoint (in addition to SkyDrive)
• …as well as adding Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint as native applications

The blog post points out that this will be the first time that the Office apps will be native applications outside of the Windows ecosystem.

I find this announcement very interesting what with Symbian not long for this world. However, I guess this only goes to further cement the relationship between Nokia and Microsoft. I’m sure Microsoft are keen to test out Office on more mobile devices even if the platform doesn’t have much of a future beyond 5 years. I do hope though that Lync for Windows Phone comes out before it does on Symbian!

What are your thoughts on this news?

That news came out of the blue but appears to have been correctly predicted by some people only a few weeks ago.

However, perhaps more surprising was the news that broke yesterday in which the world’s biggest PC maker plans to sell off its PC business. I was quite shocked by this news from HP and just as shocked when minutes later it was announced that the company was planning to kill its webOS products (the phones and the tablets). HP is adamant that they are reviewing other way keep webOS alive, this will be achieved through licensing the OS but which hardware company is really going to want to sell webOS devices after two companies have both had a go and both failed.

So how exactly does Microsoft win from these two big pieces of news?

Well from Google’s news Microsoft stands to benefit because it is now the only major tech company with a serious mobile operating system that doesn’t also make hardware. This means that the companies hardware partners are likely to be more inclined to use Windows Phone than they are Android. This comes about because HTC, Samsung et al get Android from Google who they soon also be competing with in hardware sales. It’s also likely that Google will treat its own hardware preferentially to its partners, again making its hardware partners less inclined to use Android.

This all bodes well for Microsoft. Of course there could be troubles for Microsoft because of this news, Google could create some very impressive hardware that works exceptionally well with Android. However, most people think Microsoft stand to gain more from this than they will lose.

Then there’s the news from HP, Microsoft can gain here too. It’s likely there will now be one less mobile operating system to compete with, Microsoft can focus more so on attacking Android and iOS rather than defending market share from webOS. Also webOS is not likely to appear on PCs now so any threat webOS appearing on PCs has pretty much disappeared overnight which Redmond must be very happy about.

Equally HP planning to sell off its PC business could benefit Microsoft. Whoever buys the business will need to work hard at it to make the PC more desirable than it currently is. This might mean some interesting innovation that could perhaps see Windows PCs finally being able to compete the build quality of Apple’s PCs.

And yet there could be some serious negative effects for Microsoft in the recent news. The fact that Microsoft has a wide ranging partnership with Nokia means that some of the companies OEMs might not be that inclined to back Windows Phone as Nokia will be getting preferential treatment (there’s actually no reason why other OEMs couldn’t enter into a strategic partnership with Microsoft for Windows Phone).

This could mean that OEMs investigate other mobile OSs that they could use without having to compete with Google itself of Microsoft preferred partner, Nokia. Samsung have Bada which they could focus more on and webOS could well be licensable now which might be equally available to all hardware companies, surely an interesting proposition for many device makers.

There’s also the possibility that whomever buys HP’s PC business might not be so inclined to sell Windows PCs. In all likelihood the PC business of HP will continue to make Windows PCs whomever acquires it, but it could pose a problem. What if Google was interested in the business unit to make ChromeBooks and ChromeDesktops? What if Google only bought the business for the patents? They clearly aren’t afraid to buy a hardware company nor keep their own hardware partners happy. If Google did buy HP’s PC business they wouldn’t want to sell many Windows PCs.

I have seen a lot of speculation about both these two pieces of news and I doubt the rumours and speculation will die away soon, these pieces of news will have far reaching consequences for the tech world for a long time yet. Some interesting speculation I saw was that Microsoft should buy HTC, an interesting thought but one I think unlikely Microsoft would ever do, it really isn’t a hardware company. But to add to that idea I wondered what would happen if Microsoft also bought HP’s PC business. That would certainly stir up the tech world. After all what exactly is Microsoft going to do with its stockpiles of cash?

What are your thoughts on this week’s news?

I have grabbed a picture from the video of the keynote and modified slightly for it to be used as desktop wallpaper. You’ll probably only want to use on screens smaller than 1920×1200 as I have find it to be slightly blurred. If anyone from Microsoft’s PR would like to send me a hi-res version of the image that’d be great. Download.

My only complaint with the above image is that it would appear that the rectangles on the Xbox aren’t of the same aspect ratio as those found on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7. On Windows Phone 7 they are 2x a square plus the gap between the squares, where as on the Xbox they don’t even look to be double a square. I hope that is changed before the NXE is released, after all Metro is all about the tiny things.