Life with mobile

Well, we’ve been a wee bit busy since our last update. We went from summer to fall working away on new features we’re pretty excited about. Along with stellar platform work, we’ve also updated the look and feel to a few of our favorite features like FOX Sports and we’ve added a few new ones.

Today we launched “MovieTickets” so you can look-up a movie, find a theatre and buy your movie tickets right from your mobile. We’ve also teamed up with Thumbplay for new Ringtones, Wallpapers and Game downloads.  For Astrology fans, we’ve added daily Horoscopes and if you haven’t had a chance to see, we’ve also updated our PC site. Here's a quick peek:

As the year comes to a close, it’s a great feeling to look back and see what a monumental year the mobile industry has had. We’ve seen the expansion of 3G, the launch of iPhone (truly a beautiful device), and the creation of MSN Mobile which we’ve launched in four markets (US, UK, India and Thailand). For me, this has been a remarkable year professionally. I love a great challenge and this team has taken the best talents across a wide range of disciplines to bring together and deliver in that old-fashioned Microsoft way a product we are proud of. Next year I hope we have even greater challenges. Send us your list—we’d like to hear from you.

Seasons Greetings and a Happy New Year!
Michelle MacKenzie
MSN Mobile PM

The newest release of MSN Mobile is now posted on our live site. To get there, just go mobile.msn.com on your phone. Or you can also go to msn.mobi or even m.msn.com. We’ve made significant improvements in two of our most important areas: Sports and Entertainment.

MLB Sports

          Our partnership with FOX Sports is providing data for some great new features for the sports fan on the go. The first of these features is Gametrax for Major League Baseball. We have great data for pre-game, live-game, and post-game viewing. To see it, just go to mobile.msn.com on your phone, then click FOX Sports, then MLB. Scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see a list of games for today. Click [details] on a game that’s in progress to watch the live game!

Hot Gossip

         We’re proud to be able to provide the latest Hot Gossip right to your phone. If you have a few minutes to kill while waiting for your carpool, or you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who can’t wait for the next posting from our gossip columnist, you can now get MSN Hot Gossip whenever and wherever you want. Go to mobile.msn.com on your phone, then click Entertainment.

Some Other New Features

· Search for celebrities by name to see photo galleries and to find out what movies they’ve been in.

· Search for movies by name to read synopsis and reviews. Try this at your local video store to see if the movie is great or a dud.

· See movies in theaters listed by release date, with the Newest Releases right at the top of the list.

We’re working really hard to bring the Gametrax experience to other professional sports, including football, and we’ve got lots of great plans for things to do after that. Let us know if you like what you see.

Michael

Program Manager, MSN Mobile

One of the most surprising aspects about my summer internship was dispensing with the preconceived notions of how working for Microsoft would be. Three months ago, I expected a rigid schedule of long hours, little play, and less flexibility. As it turns out, working on the MSN Mobile team has pleasantly surprised me in many ways. Quickly, I realized that my environment was less about an inflexible work schedule, and more about the quality of your work. Also, I was surprised by the projects. In previous internships there was a clear delineation between the full timers' projects and the interns' projects. At Microsoft, that line is blurred, if not nonexistent. Besides being given real work, I had opportunity to pitch ideas and work on them. As I am prone to brainstorming, I enjoyed being given the ability to work on various passion projects and think my best work is evident in them. Perhaps the best part about being an intern on the MSN Mobile team is not feeling like an intern at all. I was given the opportunity to express my opinions like everyone else, and feel like my thoughts were well received. Being able to discuss ideas with insightful people in a positive environment is very appealing and conducive to accomplishment. For these reasons, the MSN Mobile team has experienced and will continue to experience success.

-Jay

Sometimes my patience for technology advancement is worn thin and just when I think that we’ll never get there in my lifetime, I’m pleasantly surprised and my hope for more is restored. The hype before iPhone hit the shelves was red-carpet marketing at its best and since its release, the device has pretty-much delivered. I’ve had the opportunity to play around with it and the feature that stuck out for me was in web browsing. Browsing on your mobile is a challenge because devices aren’t all that sophisticated, the access speed is still very slow, there’s not a common platform like you’d see for the PC,  and yet the expectations are often just that – for the mobile web experience to be like the PC. So when you see a small format screen with crisp, clear text and images, easy navigation and access to familiar content I felt mobile technology is finally getting somewhere. In the mobile space I know we still have a long way to go, both in terms of device features, information and services. I personally would pay more for a phone service that worked throughout the entire conversation --- where jack-in-the-box was just a fast-food joint rather than a type of phone connection. I’d love to see the information we need accessible regardless of where we are and have it available in a way that doesn’t require a manual and two calls to customer support just to save a bookmark or a ringtone. Others here on the team have also spent time with the iPhone and have some great things to say in terms of its music feature, the graphics, ease of use and overall performance and we all agree for a version 1, the device is very cool. I believe the iPhone has helped raise the bar on what’s to come in mobile. DVDs certainly changed not only how we watched movies but opened the window to a whole new experience, I expect the same leaps of change for mobile in the not too distant future. Anyone want to share their likes/dislikes of using your mobile web feature?

Michelle MacKenzie

MSN Mobile PM

Many of the new features in MSN.Com mobile are driven by scenarios. A scenario is like a story, where a character (which we call a persona) is trying to accomplish a task. To create the Local Movie and Showtimes feature, we created a story about our persona named Eddie.

Eddie and his wife got a babysitter for the night for their two kids. They’ve been looking forward to getting away for a while, and now everything is settled down. They’re sitting in the driveway in front of the house, trying to figure out where to go. His wife suggests a movie, but Eddie’s not sure what’s playing around there, which ones are worth seeing, or even what time the movies start.

Eddie launches the web browser on his phone and goes to the mobile.msn.com  page. He selects Entertainment from the top of the list, and then Movie Times. He puts in his ZIP code, and goes to a single page that answers all of his questions. In a single view, he sees:

· The past weekend’s Top Box Office grossing movies. (The Box Office numbers tell you how much money a movie made in the past reporting period, and the most popular movies are the top grossing).

· For each movie, he sees the MPAA rating (G, PG, R, etc), genre (like Action or Comedy), the movie’s star rating (how much the reviewer liked it or hated it) and the names of the theaters, and the next few showtimes.

Since Eddie doesn’t care about afternoon showings, we don’t show them. We show the next few showtimes so that Eddie and his wife have time to either drive directly to the theater, or maybe get some dinner first.

This screen may be everything that he needs, but if we wants to read the a summary of the plot or read the review or see who’s in it, he can click the name of the movie.

This type of design, based on stories, is a very powerful way of designing web pages. It’s much more efficient than providing pages and pages of links, and we hope that it makes Eddie (and everyone else) feel great.