With the developer momentum building behind Windows Phone 7, there’s a lot of work-in-progress applications flying around. Although many of them show a lot of potential, it’s easy to get distracted by the rough edges that is not representatives of the final polished experiences.

For those reasons now, this “USGA Shot Tracker” social golf scoring demo app built internally at Microsoft makes a great example of third-party WP7 applications we should expect (if not demand) from developers.

These screencaps comes from one of the dozen Windows Phone Design Day recordings posted today by Jaime Rodriguez which are an awesome resource for any WP7 developers, designers or enthusiasts. (The discoloration is due to the video compression)

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As cloud services have become increasingly popular in the last couple of years, one has to wonder what will happen to all our data a generation from now. Of course we all have excuses for not backing up which only makes the “Technology Heirlooms” project from Microsoft Research UK that much more relevant.

Richard Banks, an interaction designer from the Socio-Digital Systems research group, has just posted these videos of “The Backup Box” and “Digital Slide Viewer” concepts which were presented at Microsoft Research’s TechFest 2010 earlier in the year. The prototypes aims to help people backup and later reminisce memories from Twitter and Flickr respectively.

Even though there’s no sound, the videos pretty much speak for themselves.

However impractical these concepts may be, it’s refreshing to see real physical metaphors applied to digital backups. The Digital Slide Viewer takes the idea even further by making the retrieval process as much of an experience in itself than the information it backed up.

You can read more about these particular projects at Richard’s blog here.

The Internet Explorer 9 “Beauty of the Web” event invitations went out today and the first thing that struck me was how the style of the featured text looks exactly like those from the Zune website. A coincidence, or something more? After all, the consensus of the Zune experience is that it’s beautiful.

Conference internet connectivity can be a bit of a hit or miss but Microsoft Australia’s event gurus has always put in their best effort to make it better.

This year at TechEd Australia 2010, they’re stepping it up a notch (or two) by offering native IPv6 connectivity for all conference delegates.

A first for a Microsoft TechEd anywhere and possibly first for a Microsoft event, every wireless and wired user (with an IPv6-supported OS like Windows 7) at TechEd Australia will have a public and globally routable IPv6 address.

In contrast to a traditional IPv4 network, this means the router will no longer have to allocate internal IPs that can only be reached either through the packet maze that is Network Address Translation (NAT).

Although the benefits of IPv6 won’t be as obvious until it has greater adoption, at least TechEd attendees will be able to brag about their newly assigned 128-bit addresses on Facebook accessed through their special IPv6 URL (www.v6.facebook.com).

For an event the scale of TechEd where thousands of unmanaged and differently configured systems are expected to be connected throughout the day, I tip my hat to the team for even attempting such a bold deployment. Should something blow up, you’ll be able to read about it on their TechEd Backstage blog.

I can’t wait to ride the IPv6 wave in a couple weeks.

Those who still enjoy their fair share of television entertainment through one of dozens Mediaroom-powered IPTV services around the world will be glad to know Microsoft already has a Mediaroom Client ready for Windows Phone 7.

A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) document published on Microsoft’s accessibility website reveals a software unambiguously named “Microsoft Mediaroom Client for Windows Phone 7 v 1.0“.

Although the document itself reveals no features of the software, one can guess by looking at the Mediaroom client for Windows Mobile Microsoft showed off earlier this year at CES, you would be at least able to stream content from the service provider or content you’ve recorded on your own DVR.

The Mediaroom website also suggests you’ll be able to view the programming schedule and even remotely manage recordings from the mobile client. If you think about it, your phone suddenly takes on some of the roles of the remote. I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually replaces it entirely.

Like other components of Mediaroom, it’s likely this client would be the responsibility of each individual service operator to customize and distribute, but at least it shows off some other forms of entertainment integration in WP7 besides the Zune.

Over the past several days, Microsoft Hardware’s Twitter account has been teasing us with cropped thumbnails of an upcoming product leaving many to wonder what it might be, unless of course you’ve been reading my blog in which you know exactly what it is – the “Arc Touch Mouse”.

If you think you might be keen on a touch-enabled mouse from Microsoft, then prepare to shell out $69.95 green ones as a reseller price list from today has revealled.

Those numbers of course are not just any random digits. It’s no surprise they’ve matched the price of the Apple Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad which are its closest competitors, even if they’re not fully supported on Windows.

Keep an eye on www.arctouchmouse.com where I’m sure it’ll make its official unveiling soon.

Update: The entry for the “Arc Touch Mouse” has been removed from the price list.