Blu-ray Disc and DVD authoring with Adobe Encore CS5

Adobe ® Encore ® CS5 software is a versatile, interactive authoring tool you can use to deliver projects for DVD, Blu-ray Disc, or web DVD, which is a full-featured SWF file viewable with Adobe Flash ® Player.

What's new

Integrated search capabilities for web DVD titles
Offer viewers a more engaging experience with the ability to search by keyword within the web DVDs you create. Encore builds a search database for your web DVD using metadata from speech analysis, subtitles, and menu and button names. Viewers can search without interrupting current playback.

Multipage menus
Create a smoother experience for viewers when choosing options from across multiple menus. Browsable multipage menus on Blu-ray Disc projects show options across multiple menu pages without interrupting the playback of audio and video background elements.

Sleek new interface for web DVD titles
Create web DVDs that have a sleek new playback interface, offering easy-to-use playback controls plus the option to watch HD video in full-screen mode.

Web DVD enhancements
Deliver web versions of full-featured Blu-ray Disc productions. With new support for pop-up menus and subtitles, viewers of web DVD titles enjoy all the benefits of the Blu-ray experience delivered online.

4K mastering
Take 4K productions directly to high-definition Blu-ray using a workflow that maintains the original 4K content all the way to output. Work with 4K content in the timeline, even using Dynamic Link to incorporate sequences directly from Adobe Premiere® Pro.

24p support
Maintain the 24p look all the way to output with native 24p project support. Encore supports 24p frame rates for Blu-ray, DVD, and web DVD titles with correct display of 24p timecode in the timeline.

AVCHD output to Blu-ray
Publish content from AVCHD cameras to Blu-ray using the high-quality native camera format. By passing AVCHD content directly to disc without transcoding, Encore preserves the original fidelity of the source content.

DDP Master support
Create replicated discs from Encore using direct DDP Master support for DVD discs. The outputted file can then be sent via FTP directly to the mastering facility.

Cross-platform projects
Share Encore CS5 projects without worrying about platform compatibility. Encore projects can be moved between Windows® and Mac platforms freely, without conversion.

Background transcoding with Adobe Media Encoder
Work more efficiently when transcoding files using Encore CS5. Adobe Media Encoder, a separate 64-bit application included with Adobe Premiere Pro, transcodes files in the background, keeping Encore free to focus on authoring tasks. This separation of encoding is particularly important with 4K workflows that can normally tax your operating system.

Third-party encoding integration
Choose the right encoder for the job without sacrificing workflow efficiency. Integrate third-party encoders you already own with the Encore authoring workflow to take advantage of the latest advancements in GPU-accelerated encoding.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

Story for the next generation to bring excellent editing

With revolutionary native 64-bit, GPU accelerated Mercury Playback Engine, Adobe ® Premiere ® Pro CS5 software to provide superior performance for video production, so that you can substantially increase the pace of work. The machine uses the desired video format, from scripting to editing, coding and final delivery, to achieve full production speed.

What's new in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5 software improves every part of the video production process thanks to the revolutionary 64-bit, GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, a highly efficient script-to-screen workflow, and native support for the latest tapeless camera formats that lets you begin editing without delay.

Industry-leading performance with the new Mercury Playback Engine new
Work dramatically faster thanks to the revolutionary native 64-bit, GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine. Open projects faster, scrub through HD and higher-resolution footage more fluidly, and play back complex long-format and effects-heavy projects more reliably.

Expanded native tapeless workflows enhanced
Edit video natively in the latest tapeless formats, including RED, AVCCAM, XDCAM HD 50, DPX, P2, XDCAM, and DSLR cameras, without transcoding or rewrapping. Do more with tapeless workflows.

Open workflows with Final Cut Pro and Avid software enhanced
Bring the creative benefits of Adobe tools to your entire project by importing and exporting projects from these other NLEs. Do more with open workflows.

Script-to-screen workflow new
Collaborate on scripts, automatically extract shot lists, and generate metadata-rich assets that speed up editing. Do more with script-to-screen workflows.

Tapeless camera support in Adobe OnLocation CS5 new
Use the powerful logging options in Adobe OnLocation™ when working with tapeless cameras.

Native support for DSLR cameras new
Edit native video from the latest DSLR cameras without transcoding or rewrapping.

Streamlined encoding with revamped Adobe Media Encoder enhanced
Produce content in virtually any format, including DPX, FLV, F4V, H.264, MPEG-2, QT, WM, and more.

Client reviews made simple new
Gather feedback more efficiently by sharing work in progress with Adobe CS Review, a new Adobe CS Live online service.* CS Live services are complimentary for a limited time. (Integration with CS Review will not be available for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 when the software initially ships. Integration capability is expected to be available for Adobe Premiere Pro users later in 2010.)

Eliminate intermediate rendering

Use Adobe Dynamic Link for tighter-than-ever integration and faster project workflows. Share content between Adobe After Effects®, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Soundbooth®, and see changes made in one component reflected immediately in the other, without rendering.

Do more with Creative Suite® Production Premium

Faster editing with metadata enhanced
Gain greater efficiency with powerful new metadata features. Detect faces and turn spoken dialogue into searchable text faster and more accurately.

Dozens of timesaving improvements new
Boost productivity with workflow features and enhancements suggested by users like you. For example, use automatic scene detection to create separate clips from HDV tapes, import assets from DVDs, use new keyboard shortcuts, control keyframes with even more precision, and clean up sequences quickly with new commands for finding and removing gaps. Boost productivity with workflow features and enhancements suggested by users like you.

Ultra keyer new
Experience breakthrough performance and achieve fast, accurate chroma keying — even on challenging HD footage — with the Ultra® keyer.

Searchable web DVDs with Adobe Encore CS5 new

Deliver interactive DVD experiences over the web, complete with chapter menus and search capabilities.

Adobe Contribute CS5

Simplified site management


Adobe® Contribute® CS5 software is a powerful Web publishing and site management tools, it will create, review and release into a simple to use WYSIWYG based HTML editor. Work together to improve the efficiency of Web publishing, while simplifying the task supervision and approval.



What is Contribute?

Adobe® Contribute® CS5 software is a powerful web publishing and website management tool that integrates authoring, reviewing, and publishing in an easy-to-use WYSIWYG HTML editor. Increase web publishing productivity collaboratively while simplifying oversight and approval tasks.
What's new in Contribute

Predefined content types new
Create content types based on design templates, and review new pages or publish them directly.

XML editing new
Edit site-associated XML files natively, without opening an XML editor.

Cross-browser preview new
Preview drafts in any browser. Windows® users can compare three browser previews side by side.

Apple granted patent on capacitive multitouch displays

It's not the mythical pinch-to-zoom patent, but the USPTO just granted a fairly broad Apple patent on capacitive multitouch displays. US Patent #7,663,607 describes a "transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches" by way of two sandwiched layers of conductive lines hooked up to an appropriate circuit, and also covers a specific type of multitouch display with a similar two-layer capacitive sensor made of glass. Now, there are certainly other types of capacitive sensors out there, so this isn't a total lockdown, but it's certainly one more arrow in Apple's patent quiver, and at the very least it should spur some interesting developments as competitors try to design around it. We'll see how it shakes down.

10/GUI interface looks to redefine the touch-enabled desktop

Redefining the way we interact with computers is a pretty ambitious task as far as things go, but that's just what R. Clayton Miller is looking to do with his so-called 10/GUI project, and he may just be onto something. Miller begins with the notion that the traditional mouse-based interface lacks the "interaction bandwidth" afforded by multitouch interfaces, and that touch-enabled desktops (or laptops) are inherently problematic since they can't be used for prolonged periods of time -- even a flat surface will do a number on your neck if you use it all day. To solve that problem, Miller proposes separating the touch surface from the display and placing it below the keyboard in the form of a large, hybrid capacative / resistive touch panel. That's just the beginning, however, and Miller has also devised a whole new interface that makes use of all your fingers, and a new linear means of displaying windows that strikes a balance ease of use and the ability to manage numerous applications. Of course, there are some drawbacks -- you'd still likely pull out a mouse for Photoshop or a marathon Left 4 Dead session -- but we'd certainly be curious to see how this would play out in practice. Head on past the break for a full video overview.

War With Apple Will Push Google to $300

Google (GOOG) is in trouble. One can forecast that the next 24 months will take this stock back to its first year IPO levels of $300 a share. They’ve ruffled the wrong feathers. When I hear Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs mention that he feels betrayed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and when I see Apple go out and buy their own mobile advertising firm I begin to question Google’s future growth prospects. Apple’s Quattro is coming, it’s going to be revolutionary, and it’s going to be the most important contributor to Google’s demise. But it won’t be the only contributor. With Google it’s a matter of picking their poison:

1- Leadership. This company is running like a chicken with its head cut off. CEO Eric Schmidt is flying solo without the help of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin who are actually selling shares themselves. Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the innovators.

2 - Profitable Innovation. In a rapidly changing landscape of mobile innovation, Google is having difficulty making money on anything other than its core desktop search business. Desktop search advertising was a great business to be in during decade 2000 but its growth now looks limited because of the shift towards mobile computing. Schmidt knows they are vulnerable which explains why we hear about yet another Google experiment on a weekly basis. Last week it was Google broadband. This week it’s Google TV. It’s all a big joke. Even Android is a joke. The recent market share gains from Android are misleading because it suggests Google is making money when all they’ve really done is give it away for free. Investors are ready to see profits beyond desktop advertising. 24 months from now, desktop Internet surfing will be in dramatic decline.

3 - Mobile Search Competition. Mobile versions of Twitter, Facebook, and Bing will give Google a run for their money. And I would not bet against Steve Jobs and Quattro. The problem for Google is that the mobile Internet relies on applications rather than websites. Apple controls more than half of the mobile Web market share and Google is one Steve Jobs decision away from being left out of the Apple ecosystem. This makes Google extremely vulnerable. Sources from BusinessWeek revealed that Steve Jobs hopes to ‘overhaul mobile advertising in the same way they had revolutionized music players and phones.’ Appleinsider reported that


Specifics at the moment are not known, but a number of potential approaches were offered: Apple could rely on user data collected through iTunes and the App Store, along with geo-location technology due to GPS in the iPhone, to create targeted, local advertisements that would be more relevant to consumers. The company could also utilize gimmicks, such as having users shake their iPhone to win a prize. “Some developers have profited by embedding ads in their apps, but the payments tend to be insignificant since the ads are usually smaller, less effective versions of their Web banner forms," the report said. "According to a source familiar with his thinking, Jobs has recognized that 'mobile ads suck' and that improving that situation will make Apple even harder to beat."


4 - Brand Trust. Nexus One was a disaster on so many levels. Google rushed the product to market without customer service. Google rushed the product to market and the trademark application was subsequently denied by the United States Patent and Trademark office. Google rushed the product to market and caught all of their Android partners off guard who never thought Google would come out with their own phone to compete. Now do you understand why I compare this company to a chicken running with its head cut off? While Apple spent years securing patents to protect the intellectual property of the iPhone, Google is late to the game and is running scared. How much money will consumers invest in Android apps when they know Google offers no Tablet and might not continue with the Nexus One? Whereas you go with Apple and you know that your apps and iTunes library will work on your iPod, iPhone, iPad, and next year they’ll probably work on the iTV as well.

5 - China. This China thing has been catastrophic for Google. After struggling to gain any share from Baidu (BIDU), Google is out of a country that has more Internet users than the U.S. has people. Not good. Especially if they had any aspirations of growing their Chinese Android platform.

Desktop search advertising is Google’s bread and butter. Two years from now the landscape will be completely different. Investors will look at Google as a declining search market share story. That’s not a good thing when your stock is priced near $600 a share. Google reminds me of Research in Motion (RIMM) two years ago. Back then everyone assumed RIMM was untouchable as well. The problem is, when you go to war against Apple you better be more than a one trick pony.

Google is scrambling to come up with a family of products similar to Apple but it simply is not in their company DNA. They do search, that’s it. Their software is profitless and their hardware is copycat. I’m not saying that Google is going to disappear but I am saying that their days of high growth are over and that means the stock is doomed over the next 24 months. Investors might make more on Google puts than on Apple calls.

Disclosure: Long aapl, short goog

Firefox faces browser clone war in China

The browser war in China is heating up but not quite in a way that resembles the Western markets, as Mozilla's Beijing chief explains.

While browser makers in overseas markets often tout their products' Web page rendering speeds and ability to run richer apps, China's browser landscape calls for customized browser versions that bring additional features in order to demonstrate value to users.

According to Li Gong, chairman and CEO of Mozilla's Beijing-headquartered subsidiary, Mozilla Online, the proliferation of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) clones and the dominance of pages coded for IE are among some of the barriers Firefox faces in the country.

"China is different from other markets in that there is a very active IE-clone market," said Li, in an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia.

An IE clone is a browser built on IE's core rendering engine, but carries a different skin and has additional features. Citing numbers from iResearch, Li said there are some 30 different clones in use in China.

Some clone browser makers have employed aggressive tactics to get their browsers adopted, he said. Some have been willing to pay fees to be bundled with pirated Windows disks--"the easiest distribution channel", said Li--while others pay members of the media to tout their wares.

"The most outrageous example is the 360 browser," he noted. Its maker distributes free security software, which upon installation, also stealthily installs the 360 IE clone onto systems and removes other browsers without first seeking user permission, said Li.

"[The 360 browser] makes it very hard to reverse [the implementation] once the software is installed," he added.

Mozilla's answer to the competition is its Firefox China Edition, which integrates a number of services popular among Chinese users, said Li. Examples of such services include IPTV (Internet Protocol TV), music and video, he said.

Mozilla's China team, set up two years ago, also conducts community outreach programs in hopes of educating users on Web standards--a bigger bugbear to Firefox, where the proliferation of IE-optimized pages prevent "even devoted Firefox users" from exclusively using the Mozilla browser, Li noted.

"Most, if not all the large Chinese banks, have online banking [sites] that use proprietary Microsoft ActiveX controls," he explained. "This means that anyone wishing to do online banking has to use IE on Windows."

Furthermore, almost all the country's Web developers test only for IE, resulting in pages that are badly formed and inoperable by browsers using non-IE cores, said Li.

China dominated by IE, clones

According to an online chart citing StatCounter numbers, China stands out with one of the lowest adoption numbers for Firefox globally, at less than 10 percent.

Li would not vouch for the accuracy of the figures, but agreed that China has been "relatively behind" in adoption figures compared to North America and Europe.

Pointing to iResearch figures, he said IE has some 60 percent share of the Chinese market, with more than 20 percent going to IE clones.

Firefox itself has an estimated 7 percent market share, he said, adding that this is higher than the non-IE competition, which includes Opera and Safari browsers.

About 24 million unique users in China use Firefox more than once per month, he said. As of June, China's official statistics show upwards of 338 million Internet users per month, said Li.

Google set to promote Chrome extensions

Google is on the verge of launching a Web site to showcase its extensions to customize what its browser can do.

The company's latest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome now has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, https://chrome.google.com/extensions. (Bookmark sync is already available.)

Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the headline features of Chrome 4.0. It's available as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability was expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta was planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due Jan. 12.

A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are available, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Earlier this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes before the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.

Extensions are a key asset of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions permit people to customize the browser and add new features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is getting a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 due in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.

Google to demo Chrome OS; Detail launch plans

Google will give a technical update on its Chrome OS.

The company is holding an event at its Mountain View campus. The event will be “a technical announcement,” but Google will be showing a few demos as well as detailing its launch plans for this year.

The Chrome OS is in its infancy, but there has been a lot of buzz around a potential launch. At the event, Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, and Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS, will be talking up reporters.

Garett Rogers has wondered if launching a bare bones preview of the Chrome OS is a concern. He noted:

The initial release of Chrome OS will likely be very bare-bones, bordering on useless — but depending on what kind of feedback they get, it may grow rapidly. The “release early and often” mantra adopted by many software companies that use agile practices can be extremely dangerous, however.

Jabra Stone

Manufacturer: Jabra
Part number: 100-99300000-60


General
Product Type - Headset - Bluetooth 2.1 EDR

Width - 2 in


Depth - 1 in


Height - 2.3 in


Weight - 0.2 oz


Recommended Use - Cellular phone


Compatible Mobile Devices - Bluetooth devices


Additional Features - Multiuse, Voice dialing, Volume control, Answer/end button, Battery level indication, Noise Blackout Extreme technology


Headphones


Headphones Type - Headphone - Monaural


Headphones Form Factor - Over-the-ear


Connectivity Technology - Wireless - Bluetooth 2.1 EDR


Sound Output Mode - Mono


Microphone


Type - Built-in


Microphone Operation Mode - Omni-directional


Remote Control
Type - None


Wireless Link
Transmission Range - 33 ft


Miscellaneous
Included Accessories - Portable charging unit, Belt cup, AC charger, Earge


Power
Power Device - Headset charging stand - External


Battery - Headset battery - Rechargeable


Run Time (Up To) - 8 hour(s)


Standby Time - 288 hour(s)


Manufacturer Warranty


Service & Support - 1 year warranty


Service & Support Details - Limited warranty - 1 year

CNET Review

The Good: The Jabra Stone has a one-of-a-kind design that combines a headset with a portable charger. The headset fits easily over the ear and is small enough not to be noticed. Features include multipoint technology and A2DP streaming.

The Bad: The Jabra Stone's controls are difficult to use; we wish it had a snugger fit; and the call quality could be improved. It also fits around only the right ear.

The Bottom Line: While we love the style, portability, and feature set of the Jabra Stone, it does suffer from a few design and performance issues.

Source code for Skype eavesdropping trojan in the wild

Earlier this week, Swiss programmer Ruben Unteregger who has been reportedly working for a Swiss company ERA IT Solutions responsible for coding government sponsored spyware, has released the source code of a trojan horse that injects code into the Skype process in order to convert the incoming and outgoing voice data into an encrypted MP3 available at the disposal of the attacker.

Here’s how the trojan, currently detected as Trojan.Peskyspy, works:


“When the Trojan is executed, it injects a thread into the Skype process and hooks a number of API calls, allowing it to intercept all PCM audio data going between the Skype process and underlying audio devices. Note: Since the Trojan listens to the data coming to and from the audio devices, it gathers the audio independently of any application-specific protocols or encryption applied by Skype when it passes voice data at the network level.

Note: The incoming and outgoing audio data are stored in separate .mp3 files. The Trojan also opens a back door on the compromised computer, allowing an attacker to perform the following actions:
- Send the .mp3 to a predetermined location
- Download an updated version
- Delete the Trojan from the compromised computer”

Skype is often dubbed a “national security threat” by governments all across the globe due to their — at least publicly acknowledged — inability to crack the 256-bit encryption VoIP calls.

And while some of these governments are reportedly spending surreal amounts of tax payer’s money (Rental of the Skype-Capture-Unit per month and instance EUR 3.500) in order to achieve their objectives, others are taking the cost-effectiveness path by attacking the weakest link in the process - the end user infected with a targeted DIY government sponsored spyware recording all ongoing and incoming Skype calls, thereby bypassing the need to attack the encryption algorithm.

Thousands of web sites compromised, redirect to scareware

According to eSoft, they’ve been monitoring the campaign since September, with another 720,000 affected sites back then.

There are now over a million affected sites serving scareware, with only a small percentage of them currently marked as harmful. Google has been notified. As always, NoScript and your decent situational awareness are your best friends.

Security researchers have detected a massive blackhat SEO (search engine optimization) campaign consisting of over 200,000 compromised web sites, all redirecting to fake security software (Inst_58s6.exe), commonly referred to as scareware.

More details on the campaign:


The compromised sites are hosting legitimately looking templates, using automatically generated bogus content, with a tiny css.js (Trojan-Downloader.JS.FraudLoad) uploaded on each of them which triggers the scareware campaign only if the visitor is coming a search engine listed as known http referrer by the gang - in this case Google, Yahoo, Live, Altavista, and Baidu :

“Cyveillance has discovered a complex attack vector that uses Google search results to distribute malicious software (malware) to unsuspecting Internet users. Using this attack vector, users click on links within Google search results and are routed to sites that attempt to download malware to their computers. The attack method also relies on inattentive webmasters who do not update the software on their sites and often unknowingly provide the material that appears in the search results.

The common string albums/bsblog/category is found in the URLs for all these blogs. By simply using the Google search parameter allinurl, along, you can see how many other sites contain the same string. As can be seen in the image above, more than 260,000 URLs are presented in Google’s search index leading to blogs similar to the ones illustrated in our example.

As you can see, only a small portion of sites in the search results carry a warning provided by Google. The reason for the small number of warnings is likely because the actual attacks do not take place on the website URLs in the search results, but on the sites you’re redirected to thereby decreasing the chances that Google will designate the destination sites as harmful.”

At first, it would appear that the campaign is an isolated one and is maintained by a cybercrime enterprise yet to be analyzed. However, analyzing it reveals a rather anticipated connection - the massive blackat SEO campaign has been launched by the same people who operate/or manage the campaigns for the Koobface botnet. For instance, the domains mentioned by Cyveillance, as well as the newly introduced ones over the past couple of hours, are the very same domains currently embedded on Koobface infected hosts.

Go through related posts - The ultimate guide to scareware protection; My scareware night and how McAfee lost a customer; Scareware scammers hijack Twitter trending topics; 9/11 related keywords hijacked to serve scareware; Koobface Botnet’s Scareware Business Model - Part One; Koobface Botnet’s Scareware Business Model - Part Two
How did they manage the compromise the sites? Through web application vulnerabilities as the attack vector, with OWASP’s recently updated Top 10 most critical web application security risks, highlighting some of the riskiest ones.

What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?

In the past year, customers and developers testing Windows Azure have been running primarily brand-new (and largely Web 2.0 style) apps on Microsoft’s cloud operating system. But when will Azure be tuned to handle host legacy enterprise apps? And when and how will users be able to take advantage of some of the Azure technologies inside of their own “private clouds”?

Microsoft officials didn’t share dates for its next phases of the Windows Azure platform. But they did talk about some of their plans for their next steps with Microsoft’s cloud platform during meetings and sessions at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on November 17.

Microsoft said the Windows Azure platform — which is the Windows Azure operating system and the SQL Azure database — is feature-complete as of today. (Officials said a few weeks ago that Microsoft wouldn’t begin charging customers to use the platform until February 1, 2010.)

“Our initial focus on the platform was on enabling Web 2.0 customers to develop and run their apps on it,” said Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President in charge of Windows Azure. These kinds of applications are Xcopy-deployable, while older, legacy apps typically are not, Srivastava said.

Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).

To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them. Srivastava wouldn’t provide a timetable or more details as to how or when Microsoft will do this. Apps running in VMs won’t be able to take full advantage of the elasticity, multitenancy, and other cloud functionality, but they still will derive some benefits, such as automatic cloud backup for apps running on the Azure platform. (The name of this VM capability will be “Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure,” Microsoft execs later told me.)

On the private cloud front, Microsoft didn’t have much new to say at the PDC. Microsoft officials have said in the past that Microsoft won’t allow customers to run the Azure operating system in their own datacenters. Microsoft’s main focus here continues to be to provide customers with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc., for them to run in their own datacenters. That said, Microsoft isn’t simply leaving the delivery of a private cloud solution to Amazon and other cloud competitors.

“Lots of the technologies we have in the cloud are things people want to run in their datacenters,” Srivastava
acknowledged.(He cited as an example the ability to run a scalable cloud-storage appliance on premises.)

Microsoft is working on a longer-term solution that would allow the company to offer datacenter containers that can be dedicated to individual customers, Srivastava said. That way, clouds can be customized for individual users and users will be able to manage these containers themselves. Again, Srivastava wasn’t ready to talk about deployment specifics or timetables for this. That said, “Project Sydney” (Microsoft’s newly announced connectivity offering for private datacenters and public clouds) shows the general direction where we are going,” Srivastava said.

Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications.

Not everything about what’s next for Azure is a longer-term direction. In sessions on November 17, Microsoft officials outlined some of the nearer term deliverables for Microsoft’s cloud platform. The recently introduced content-delivery-network (CDN) support for blobs in Windows Azure’s storage system is one of those deliverables. Another is a capability Microsoft is calling “Windows Azure Drive” (also known as Xdrive) which allows Azure developers to create a drive inside their virtual machines, providing them with an automatic back up capability. Microsoft plans to officially “turn on” Xdrive support in January, officials said.