The number seven seems to have found a good home at Microsoft; Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and now even a student film festival dedicated to it called SCREENed.

Although I won’t even pretend to know how the video above is in any way related (but it looks fun), Microsoft Australia wants Aussie students to make a short movie about anything “7” in under 7 minutes.

The competition, open to all Australian-enrolled university, college or TAFE students invites anyone remotely interested in film of any style or genre to make a movie, as long as it incorporates the theme and be not over the time restriction.

Like any good Microsoft competition, there’s some good prizes. Among the three possible awards, the best use of theme win an ultimate entertainments and PC pack including two Windows 7 laptops, three XBOX 360 Elites, three copies of Windows 7 and three Windows Phone 7 handsets.

The competition closes 25 October 2010. Look forward to what crazy ideas people come up with.

For nostalgic reasons, I decided to revisit TechCrunch’s article on my Real Live Search experiment more than a year ago. One comment in particular amused me with what is possibly the very definition of irony in retrospect.

In all seriousness, someone today raised a very good question, why didn’t Bing implement this much earlier when it was clearly demonstrated how even their public developer APIs could have quite easily supported the functionality and load. In fact the only missing component was some Javascript which took all of a night for me to implement a prototype.

Unfortunately for Bing, I think this was a missed opportunity that will now only end up with them being labelled “copy cats” when it does eventually ship.

Update: Christo27 in the comments below shared this video of a Bing session at the Apple WWDC 2010 event earlier this year. Apparently they showed off a demo of a prototype HTML5 version of Bing that has some interesting functionality including but limited to a quasi-instant version of the search results page.

It looks pretty sweet and maybe this is why Bing has been holding off any updates. After all, Internet Explorer 9 will ship with HTML5 support.

Although Microsoft is no stranger to banner ads, they appear to have taken quite the bold step to start building publicity for the Internet Explorer 9 beta (emphasis on the beta) launch event next week dubbed “Beauty of the web” as I spotted this ad on TechCrunch today.

The ad begins with a couple of quotes about Internet Explorer 9 from the press and partners (I saw a few variations) and ends with “Beautiful is feeling the love”, “get ready for a more beautiful web” and “9.15.10” – the date of the launch.

It’s also interesting to note some resemblance of the style and colors of all the IE9 marketing material up until now with the trademark purple and swoosh of Visual Studio 2010 and the aesthetics of Zune.

Even though a screenshot of what might be the IE9 UI has leaked (although I have my doubts it is the final look and feel), the fact that the beta launch event is so elaborate makes me wonder if Microsoft has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Disclosure: I will be attending the San Francisco IE9 beta launch event as a guest of Microsoft.

The third and finale concept video in the Microsoft XUI series, “Play”, has now been officially published online by Invivia, the makers of the video. In contrast to the previous “Home” and “Work” videos released over a year ago, it is by far the most bizarre and incoherent of them all.

Although August de los Reyes screened this during his NUI session at TechEd Australia 2010 last week, I thought by looking at it a second time in full fidelity I would have a better understanding of what the hell is going on. That’s not the case.

Fortunately there is an official description that gives some insight into its intended effect.

The XUI series is a poetic exploration of how technology might invisibly integrate into our daily lives.

…

XUI Play, the third video, is a hyper-real portrayal of a dinner party where differing points-of-view create a complex array of conflicting interactions. The physical constraints of dining at a table can hold together conflicting opinions and desires inside of a singular activity. We are using this metaphor of a dinner party as an analog for collaborative computing. This video also investigates the cause and effect of small gestural interactions on an urban scale via the digital cloud. Here, analog devices behave in extraordinary ways with the hidden aid of technology.

Riiiiiight.

Bringing multi-touch technology to the desktop mice might seem trivial but Microsoft Research doesn’t just want to stop at a couple gestures. A group of researchers there have been thinking of new ways to redefine the dated but familiar traditional mice interaction model with new multi-touch-enabled ones.

In their report “Design and Evaluation of Interaction Models for Multi-touch Mice“, they acknowledge that a multi-touch mice has the potential to combine the best of surface computing with the ergonomic benefits of a mice, however existing prototypes and products including the Apple Magic Mouse might not be utilizing the technology to their full potential.

Using the prototype hardware they built, they designed four interaction models around an interesting idea that not only would the cursor be displayed on screen but also multi-touch visualizers that showed the fingers activity on the sensor, including if they were “activated” and how they are positioned. This also allowed the “hand” position of the cursor to be separated from the “finger” interaction controls in a graphical user interface.

Unfortunately their experiments with a dozen participants concluded all of their proposed models were slower than using a multi-touch screen or a three-buttoned mouse, but their findings establishes some groundwork for future research and development in the area.

I’m sure Microsoft Hardware is taking notes.

During my last day at TechEd Australia 2010, I spotted this interesting image flashed briefly on one of the promotional video loops for Windows Phone 7 at the Microsoft booth. On closer inspection, it appears to be a screenshot of the upcoming MyPhone portal on Windows Live for Windows Phone 7.

Although it’s fairly hard to see exactly what type of features are offered by the site, it’s obvious the top blue bar is the Windows Live website header and you’ll be at least able to organize your contacts and photos, much like you can do today with MyPhone for Windows Mobile 6.5 but presented elegantly in the Metro style rather than a generic tabular format.

For a platform which promotes cloud services so heavily, it’s finally good to see light of its own cloud management service. As elegant and lightweight as the Zune software is, not being tied to a computer to manage their phone will be a huge plus over its competitors.