cellular telephone

Due to either my role on the marketing team or my brief stint as a wannabe mommy blogger, Brian and Michael invited me to post occasionally. (Ok, so probably only 10 people ever read my blog, they were all related to me, and neither of them were Brian or Michael. But I do work full-time at Microsoft and have two toddlers at home). And recently we’ve seen a lot of interest in our phone from women – especially moms.

On Friday Feb 11th our two companies announced a partnership that we believe will shake up the mobile phone market. Together Nokia and Microsoft are bringing to bear significant and complementary strengths in global smartphone and mobile phone market reach, hardware, software and services. Based on these strengths, we will build a new, global ecosystem that creates a wealth of new opportunities and innovative experiences.

However, we can’t do it alone.

November 8th is fast approaching and to kick off on the celebration Microsoft and AT&T are giving thousands of music fans the chance to see free concerts from Katy Perry in New York City and Maroon 5 in San Francisco. Fans will need to visit select AT&T retail locations in New York and San Francisco for the chance to attend the exclusive concert. Stay tuned for more info and full details by visiting the Windows Phone facebook page.

This weekend, the Windows Phone 7 team will hit the big apple for the 6th annual BlogHer Conference at the Hilton New York. This year is the largest ever, with more than 2,400 female bloggers from around the world in attendance. The conference is the brainchild of the BlogHer Network, the largest community of women who blog, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Here at Hotmail, we’ve been busy getting our latest release out to our customers – upgrading server clusters, building the new indexes for conversation threading, and making tweaks to our site metrics and deployment software.

I’m very excited to share with this blog community, that our Windows Phone engineering team has hit a very meaningful milestone; one that we’re calling technical preview. We are certainly not done yet – but the craftsmen (and women) of our team have signed off that our software is now ready for the hands-on everyday use of a broad set of consumers around the world – and we’re looking forward to their feedback in the coming weeks, so that we can finish the best Windows Phone release ever together.

In just 5 days, over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that launched last week!  This early momentum is fantastic, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from many of you.  We look forward to updating the iPhone app shortly to address a few issues that users have pointed out, and continuing to improve th