As Surface develops who are active with many industry events, we've worked with integrating Surface and Surface tags in these environments. One of the downsides though is having to create each tag, assign it to a person, print each one on a Microsoft recommended printer and manually sticking the tag to each event badge. We worked with a printing partner of ours to develop a dry-erase material, full color bleed badge with pre-printed Surface tags that makes Surface an integral and less hassle part of events. Our CEO Joe Olsen explains more on Phenomblue.tv.

Sean Erickson from our .NET development team headed west to L.A. for PDC last week. Since not all of us could go, we asked him to fill us in on the highlights. Here's what we missed: This year’s PDC didn’t have the didn’t have the same wow factor as last year’s, which was sprinkled with major announcements (the Surface SDK, Windows 7 beta and Azure services). The only major announcement this year was the beta release of Silverlight 4 and the roadmap to its official release. But what was lacking in major announcements was made up for with an overriding theme of how to use all the recent releases. It was like they were saying "Here’s what we showed you last year. Here’s what we’ve done to it since then. Here’s how to use it. Now start using it." And that's a good thing. A lot of the ideas and concepts from last year are now actually implemented and are available to start using. Here's some of the coolest. Silverlight 4 This is what will put Silverlight on a more level playing field with Flash. They've added printing support, Webcam and audio integration, the and the ability to host HTML and Flash content inside the Siliverlight plug-in. There's a new user option to allow out of browser apps to run outside the sandbox (think Air, except you can run the same app on the Web and locally with no recompile). An application can run with access to local file system, launch applications and access drives and sensors. It's got a 30 percent faster load time and increased performance (it was said to be twice as fast). You can share reference DLLs between .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 with no need to recompile. And this release has full binding and command structure. SQL Azure With the changes made since last year, SQL Azure will look and act almost exactly like a local instance of SQL Server. There are still some limitations, but the vast majority of SQL Server users could move to SQL Azure pretty seamlessly. Windows 7 Sensors and Location Windows 7 comes with a full API that gives us abstracted access to any sensors on the local machine (GPS, Ambient Light, Accelerometer). A good example of where this would be useful is a map application that defaults to search near your current location. Also, when Windows 7 Embedded comes out for Windows phones, you could add the lat/long to the metadata for any picture taken and have an exact location for every picture. For even more PDC action, check out these session videos: Day 2 Keynote by Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and Kurt DelBene Silverlight 4 Overview User Experience

If you’re a web veteran or even a new but frequent user, you’ve more than likely run across a few sad excuses for video players. If you’re a Flash developer, you’ve probably struggled with many of the problems at the root of said video players. Either way, it’s unlikely you were happy about being on either end. Many of these video player inconsistencies can be attributed to one thing – the lack of a standards based approach to web video development. Fortunately, there’s hope. The Open Video Player Initiative aims to make these user and developer time-wasters a thing of the past by developing a standard approach to web video development.

Our interactive developer Brandon Bone dove into this open-source project and its resources for developing against the initiative’s standards. The official initiative is the brainchild of the folks over at Akamai, with development partners like Microsoft and Adobe (itself a collaboration of industry giants unlikely to be seen again). Unfortunately, this collaboration has failed to provide any real solid ongoing community support at OVP’s main site.

From what Brandon could gather, immediately after the initiative’s conception, the site featured videos and tutorials rich with code examples on how to build a player from the ground up using the OVP framework. This is no longer the case. The site’s video section is peppered with high level talks about the initiative that provide little, if any, development examples. The site goes down pretty regularly, and sadly, it seems to serve as more of a repository for news releases and links than as a hub for information about the initiative. To top it all off, the initiative shares all of its code through the web dinosaur that is Sourceforge.net

It’s not all doom and gloom though. While examples may be sparse, it’s safe to say the code being delivered by the initiative provides a great base for more reliable development of web video players. In fact, the OVP framework is currently being used as the based for Adobe’s own Open Source Media Framework project (previously known as Strobe).

Still, what we find most interesting about the project is the collaboration between Microsoft and Adobe. It’s not an exaggeration to say these two companies have been sworn enemies of rich interactive web development  — a battle that has become more apparent with Microsoft’s rapid development of Silverlight. So why would Microsoft partner on a project with Adobe that obviously benefits the latter’s current domination of online video delivery? There’s no way to be absolutely sure.

The simplest explanation could be that Microsoft would like to get in good with Akamai and their expectations for content streaming while their product is still in its early stages of development. After all, even with Silverlight 3’s long list of new features, it’s still no Flash. This would minimize the number of poorly developed, shoddy looking video players built on their platform. That’s one answer, but it doesn’t account for Adobe’s continued participation.

Consider this alternative explanation. If you’re like us, you’ve more than likely heard of W3C’s plans to deliver HTML 5 as the new web standard. With it comes a fancy new video element aimed at freeing web video from the narrow, proprietary world of plugins — something neither Microsoft nor Adobe can be too happy about. With the both of these companies allotting resources for this project, the two stand a much better chance of denying HTML 5 the chance to decouple web video from plugins by creating a more promising and reliable standard outside of HTML 5.

Either way, we’re pretty excited to see where this rare collaboration goes and what it brings to the realm of online video. Want to know more? Brandon handpicked some resources for you below:

• Open Video Player Initiative
• OVP API documentation
• Open Source Media Framework
• Adobe unveils “Strobe”
• ActionScript 3.0 overview