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Technology Lab / Information Technology

Silverlight and Photosynth to gain with Obama’s inauguration

Obama's inauguration is tomorrow, and Microsoft has made sure that two of its …

What's the next most-viewed event after the summer Olympics in Beijing? Apparently it's Obama's inauguration, if Microsoft's Silverlight push is anything to go by. After successfully getting its Flash competitor installed on thousands of computers due to the Olympics, the company is hoping for the same success this Tuesday, when Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the US. There are an estimated two to five million witnesses expected to show up at the event, but millions more will be watching it from the comfort of their homes, either from their TV or from their computers.

The official on-demand streaming will be available on If you don't think that having the official Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) choosing Silverlight over Flash is a big deal, the conspiracy theorist in you probably believes that the decision has something to do with donations. The latest version of Silverlight is 2.0.31005.0, though version 3 is expected to be released sometime this year.

In slightly related news, CNN has decided to use Microsoft's Photosynth technology to create a synth of the moment Obama is sworn in. If you don't already know, a synth is essentially a detailed 3D view of an event, created based on photos merged together (you can see examples at Here is the process that CNN hopes attendees will follow in order to make this historical synth possible:

  2. E-mail each photo as soon as possible to (one photo per message, 10MB size limit) and include your name in the message if you'd like to appear in the list of the contributors.
  3. Go to to see all of the photos.

I would not be surprised at all if Microsoft took certain steps to make sure that its web technologies played a part in the event tomorrow, but whether the company does or doesn't isn't really what's interesting here; how well the adoption is and how well the technologies work is what we'll try to figure out sometime after tomorrow.

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