TechWag

Microsoft makes a foray into the uploading and sharing of mobile phone images and video by the buyout of WebFives. This is a company here in Seattle that was started by Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Mike Toutonghi. Another Seattle startup has been purchased, and will be incorporated into the bigger Microsoft Suite of goods and services.

While WebFives has pioneered some great technologies, including automatic upload of content from mobile phones and PCs, high-quality video sharing services, and automatic RSS feeds for everyone, our next challenge will be to help Microsoft incorporate the best of those technologies into its already comprehensive suite of products and services. I encourage you to look at MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live services as an alternative to WebFives for serving your video, photo, music sharing, and blogging needs on the Internet. Source: Seattle Times

What will be interesting to see is how Microsoft will incorporate the mobile phone content uploading. We would expect that it will show up as a download for Microsoft CE and other small appliance/phone systems first, and then be expanded into other systems that have a built in web cam. This would be really kind of nice to see on medium sized systems that do have inbuilt web cams and other systems on them.

There is some real potential here, and as WebFives works out how best to incorporate the technology into Microsoft products, it will be interesting to see if Mike will want to go back to Microsoft, or now that he has had some success as an entrepreneur, if he will take the money to see what other ideas he can come up.

Tags: web 2.0, technology, business //