Lately, Microsoft has improved its online storage product by increasing the size of the storage. Windows Live SkyDrive, formerly known as Windows Live Folders, is now offering 5G online storage for the users. However, as the team of SkyDrive announced in their blog, they only offer this 5G of online storage to as many as 38 countries, but excluding China, Hong Kong and some SouthEast Asia countries, such as Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and Singapore. I stay and frequently travel in between Singapore and Malaysia (due to my work reason), trying to login to this Windows Live SkyDrive will come across the “Not available in your region.”

Despite the fact that Microsoft’s product and services is popular in SouthEast Asian countries, Windows Live SkyDrive will not be available generally to the people here. As of present, if you’re looking for the alternatives for SkyDrive, you can try myotherDrive (offers 5G), Xdrive (5G), mydatabus (10G), UploadingIT (10G) and MediaMax (25G).

Hot on the heel comes another Microsoft’s new venture, the releases of HealthVault platform. Health information related platform currently is the new darling of the Web community, AOL has launched its own one, i.e. Revolution Health launched in April, Google Health, codenamed as Weaver is also on the way.

HealthVault is launched with the jointly effort of nationally recognized medical providers, health-management device manufacturers and patient advocacy organizations. It is aimed at helping people better manage and access their health information in an online environment, and the first priority would be to bring the health and technology industries together to create new applications, services and connected devices. In the same spirit, HealthVault allowed users to control their own health information, and rather acted as a platform provider with responsibility for technology development. This contrast to the normal practices of clinics and hospitals where medical records were channeled to the medical doctors. Meanwhile, HealthVault was also supplemented by a pool of most relevant online health content that offered by HealthVault Search, a search service tightly integrated with Windows Live. The search queries entered by its users generally will lead them to HealthVault compatible solutions.

HealthVault was established with a simple focus, i.e. to empower people to lead healthy lives. There are several alternatives for HealthVault’s growth, one good example is the availability of HealthVault software development kit (SDK). Software developers interested in developing the third-party applications can visit the developer center where they can download the SDK, view documentation and share information among each other.

Microsoft has released a better Live search engine today, as shown in the image above, with the sexy and simple interface. It is known as a move that attempts to bring the closer gap between the market share of Google and Live.com. According to Microsoft’s press release, this revamped search engine trying to make its existing users fascinating about the search experience that Microsoft did not offered in the first hand; and trying to make these group of users make more search queries on it. However, the main focus of the overhauled Live.com seems to be focused on vertical search, with the substantial research and improvement done on the areas such as entertainment, shopping, local and health. One of the great things that this search engine offered was the increase of the size of its search index by four times, to more than 20 billion in total.

Apparently, Live.com still far lagged behind Google and Yahoo!, but it seems that they’re going to become a “narrow focus search club” in order to get more advantage over the fierce competition in the U.S. market.

I wonder that Microsoft like to rename their software programs. While I access to Microsoft’s online file storage software, they’ve just renamed it to Windows Live SkyDrive. Does Windows Live SkyDrive provide a clearer and more effective brand identity than its former name, i.e. Windows Live Folders. Perhaps Microsoft is sending a clear message to everyone that they’re building an e-drive instead of a folder-like program for the users.

I just came across that Microsoft has improved their images search technologies whereby users can now filtering the search through keywords such as filter:face, filter:portrait, and filter:bw. Note that face mean the search results will show faces of the objects, and bw mean black and white images. As stated in official blog of Microsoft’s Live Search Team, several examples are provided as links so that users can well differentiate how the filtering system works. However, when I tested the Windows Live images search engine through the input of keyword filter:color, it works but the black and white images also appeared on the result page. I think it will be cool to see Microsoft further improves their images search by better filtering the images in not only portrait, but also the landscape format.

Search engines supposed to be acted in a more user-friendly manner. I believe people are more favor of a single click button instead of typing the keyword, i.e. filter:XXX, if Microsoft can develop that, more people will come to Windows Live to search the images that they want.

Microsoft’s U.S. search share rose from 10.3% to 13.2%, compete said a good portion of it are coming from the users of Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in April. A good sign is Microsoft has finally closing its gap with Google. However, the bad sign was the rising of Microsoft’s search statistics may be attributed to the use of macro or bots in playing the Live Search Club games.

One of Microsoft’s projects, Window Live Folders is now goes limited beta. It is a product that based on the security foundation by means of password-protected. As I read their official blog entry, I’m aware of that it is still in limited beta and they said they will expanding the beta within the next two months. This Windows Live Folders is an online file folder that users are required to sign-up with their Windows Live ID, and 500MB file size is the maximum limit of each folder.

In fact, there were plenty of similar applications launched in the past few years and I failed to recall the names of those. Satirically, sometimes a particular product or service may be sound but too many similar players in the marketplace may also well destroy the chances of its success.

I came across this TWERQ, a search engine for quite some time. It has released the newest version, i.e. beta RC3 last week. TWERQ is an AJAX-powered, tabbed search engine, with RSS reader and its office is located in Alberta, Canada since its first inception in March 2006. When an user enter the query on the TWERQ search engine, the results showed are in tab format and thus, I believed the biggest selling point for this search engine to attract users is their search capabilities in tabbed results. But I think the users nowadays are not favor to the tabbed results that a search engine could perform, somehow. I think people are hoping to experience a totally different search engine, that’s why a lot of IT geeks are talking about the “Natural Language Search” that going to be offered by Powerset in this year.

Today, TWERQ has announced that it achieved a 10,000 searches in a single day. “Words can’t describe how excited we are,” TWERQ founder Wesley Long said. “We have all worked extremely hard on this release and I think it shows.” According to this press release.

However, I still not sure what’s TWERQ real product strategy in the next two to three years. They have their beta RC1 that built on the Google search engine, but now the search results showed by them is powered by Windows Live search engine. Thus, I feel it is still very early to comment what’s going to be the next step this search engine likely to take when it officially moved out of beta in the near future. But overall, I think TWERQ is progressing quite well for the past few months.