Since I’m on “The Location Team” for Windows Phone 7 I sometimes get feedback on location usage and applications that use location information. The story below came in today and it brought tears to my eyes. I asked Afshan if I could post her story and she graciously allowed me to do so:

From: Afshan A
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 2:49 PM
To: Windows Phone ALL – Users & Enthusiasts
Subject: Epic WP7 feature win

WP7 Team,

Here is a story of my WP7.  It all started 45 miles away from Bellevue in Snoqualmie Pass where I enjoyed the best day of skiing with a bunch of friends in fresh powder. We left the resort in high spirits, talking about the highlights of the day when I decided to reach for my phone. I searched my empty jacket but no luck. I thought, not a problem at all, it is probably in the bag pack but still no luck. Umm, over here? Empty. We were almost half way back to Bellevue. I called my friend who was in a separate car. We were on the slopes together and she borrowed the phone from me; probably she forgot to give it back, but still no luck.

Slowly the realization grew into an empty black hole devouring all happiness – I just lost my new phone. (Ok not that long, but along those lines!). The worst part was I didn’t have a clue where I dropped it. The question was is it alive or dead?  I started cursing myself that things could have been different if I would have not been so over confident about being a responsible person and purchased the phone insurance. But well some things in life happen for a reason. We seem to gain wisdom readily through all failures than through our successes.

While I was blaming myself in the car, one of my friends suggested that I should try using ‘Find My Phone’ feature to detect the phone location. At last! a sign of hope. The other iPhone user friend in the car goes ‘You can’t use that feature unless you have subscription. At least that’s how it works for iPhones’. After hearing this conversation back and forth I didn’t lose hope. After all I’ve had the phone for a short time and I wasn’t ready to give up. This was simply not acceptable.

As soon as I reached the friend’s house who was driving, I immediately logged in to my live account and desperately looked up the option for ‘Find my Phone’.  Within a few seconds I found this life saving feature and clicked on the button to detect my Samsung Focus location co-ordinates on Bing maps. Keeping my fingers crossed for the longest 30 seconds of my life, hoping I don’t require subscription and boom, I see the results. The phone was resting at Snoqualmie Pass 250 yards from interstate 909 road. This was such a  relief. Even if I don’t recover the phone, at least I know what happened  to it.

When my friend saw my crying and helpless face, he offered a ride back to the resort. He was also an owner of WP7. Almost after 1 hour of driving, we got there. Now all we had to track the lost phone was through a memorized picture of Bing maps in our brains… around 9pm on a Sunday night in a closed ski resort, leaving us in the frigid cold and pitch dark slopes. You could see the clouds surrounding the moonlight and even random flurries. We had no option but to search by stumbling around the ice and snow within the area of what Bing map was showing with the help of our flash light. Immediately an idea popped up that why don’t we just detect the friend’s WP7 location co-ordinates and then compare the two pictures of the map and track it from there. My friend called another friend who had access to a PC and asked her to log in to his windows live account to detect his phone’s location co-ordinates. You can think of this friend at home as a control tower. Once the CT had the two pictures in front of her she was able to guide how far we were from the lost phone. How much further we need to move and most importantly in which direction. 50 yards north. 24 feet east. 20 more steps uphill. Every time pausing and hearing nothing but the dark silence. Finally we reached a point where the two pictures looked identical with a minimal difference to CT and we just started to ring the lost phone. Carefully listening to the sound of darkness, looking at 360 degrees and then , wait, is that… THERE, LIGHT!!! I rushed towards it, and yes it was, MY PHONE!!! IT WORKED!!!

As I rescued my dear phone from the bitter ice, it greeted me in character –the pink home screen boxes nonchalantly indicating I missed only 19 calls and 123 messages, I realized there were multiple factors that made this possible such as having a bunch of geeky friends full of ideas (who work for Microsoft), the lost phone not running out of battery or not getting crushed by other skiers on the slope and mother nature didn’t let it rain during the full 3 hours phone was resting on the snow ground. And that it landed right side up!

I think this is a proud and successful story of Windows Phone 7 which has helped me rediscover my vision of technology and how it can make a difference in your day to day life.  So Thank You WP7 !!

Afshan A.
Microsoft OEM Finance | Business Excellence

Via eWeek:

Microsoft is also planning a smartphone software update that will address a separate issue related to Exchange ActiveSync e-mail synchronization. Other updates, reportedly scheduled to arrive in coming weeks, will tweak application-loading speed and introduce a cut-and-paste feature.

I know a lot more and could tell you about cut-and-past and lots of other features but that would be infringing on territory of the marketing guys.

Update: A reader sent me an email saying, “I’m pretty sure it’s just copy and paste. AFAIK ‘cut’ isn’t there.”

I think I would argue that we are both right. But that discussion will have to wait until the update actually hits the streets.

Via Greg Hamilton’s Facebook Wall Photos:

And a quick reminder than my attempts at humor do not in any way represent those of my employer (Microsoft).

Microsoft is being closed mouthed about the sales numbers for Windows Phone 7 but the indications are that it is doing well:

Early reports hint that Windows Phone 7 has been selling strongly in international markets, with DigiTimes reporting in a Nov. 3 article that sales of HTC-build Windows Phone 7 smartphones are better than expected in Europe and Australia. In the U.K., news outlets reported a lack of available phones through carrier Orange.

“Early supporters of the new operating system such as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are also experiencing rising demand from carriers,” suggested the DigiTimes article, which sourced its information as unnamed “Taiwan-based handset makers.”

TheStreet.com, citing an unnamed “market research source,” reported some 40,000 Windows Phone 7 devices sold in the United States on the first day of release. Neither Microsoft nor AT&T offered exact figures when contacted by eWEEK, although an AT&T spokesperson said the carrier was “encouraged by early demand from customers in stores and online.”

Microsoft employees (such as myself) were asked to not purchase new WP7 phones for a few days so the local stores would have phones in stock for the general public.

I haven’t decided which one I will get yet and I don’t really have a strong recommendation at this time. I have three “engineering units” in hand which I have been using for quite some time and will get my personal phone within the next few weeks.

Microsoft has released two of the ads for Windows Phone 7. I saw preliminary versions of them (and others) about a month ago. Most are pretty good. One has a little bit of what is known in our family as “Scott family humor” (my wife’s side of the family). I don’t like it but I included it anyway.

You will be seeing a lot of these ads soon. Microsoft is making a really big deal out of this phone and I think it is justified. I’m more proud of this work than anything I have done professionally for 15 years.

When I have shown the phone the speech function (particularly in conjunction with search on maps) has most impressed people (it’s working much better than when I was demoing it at the NRA convention):

See more Windows Phone 7 videos here.

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft on Windows Phone 7.

According to USA Today Windows Phone 7 is launching on October 11:

It’s about to be put up or shut up time for Microsoft in mobile. On October 11, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega will be conducting a New York City press conference to spill the beans on the widely anticipated Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

I’m looking forward to being able to buy my own Windows Phone 7. The engineering development hardware I’ve been carrying around for the last year always seems to have something wrong with it that “will be fixed before it’s released”. Some had great sound and camera but poor Wi-Fi reception. Others had great Wi-Fi but poor GPS reception. It was good enough for development but now I’m ready for the real thing.

I know some people that need a new phone for Christmas too. It’ll be awesome.

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft on the Windows Phone 7 project.

Yesterday Microsoft announced they have filed a lawsuit against Motorola alleging infringement on nine patents regarding Android smart phones:

REDMOND, Wash. – Oct. 1, 2010 – Microsoft Corp. today filed a patent infringement action against Motorola, Inc. and issued the following statement from Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing:

“Microsoft filed an action today in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola, Inc. for infringement of nine Microsoft patents by Motorola’s Android-based smartphones. The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola’s Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.

We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year in bringing innovative software products and services to market. Motorola needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its Android smartphones.”

More information can be found here. Even though I work for Microsoft on Windows Phone 7 I don’t have any further information on the topic and even if I did I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss it.

I can’t say why I needed to know but lets just say I have been a little distracted recently as I have been working on a problem. It turns out I could map my problem into the German tank problem.

I had actually kind of pulled an equation out of the air and proclaimed (to myself), “this looks and feels right”. But I needed something more than my gut telling me that. It turns out for a uniform distribution (which, for the most part, my problem is) the best estimate of the true population size based on a limited sample of the population numbers is:

N = m + m/k – 1

Where ‘N’ is the population estimate, ‘m’ is the largest serial number of the samples you have and ‘k’ is the number of samples you have.

This could be used, presuming the serial numbers are sequential, to estimate the number of iPhones or Androids sold. This is far, far, from my application but still a fun application of statistics.

In my application I could substitute in an expression for ‘m’ which made my problem identical to the German tank problem. After rearranging the resulting equation I came up with the exact equation I had, essentially, pulled out of the air!

I’m still marveling at the implications of that result. In a few days I have a meeting with people who may or may not be thrilled to know that much of the work they have done for the past couple of years is bogus and that I have the solution to make it all better.