January 26, 2006
@ 06:54 PM

From the press release Microsoft Expands Internet Research Efforts With Founding of Live Labs we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Jan. 25, 2006 —Microsoft Corp. today announced the formation of Microsoft® Live Labs, a research partnership between MSN® and Microsoft Research. Under the leadership of Dr. Gary William Flake, noted industry technologist and Microsoft technical fellow, Live Labs will consist of a dedicated group of researchers from MSN and Microsoft Research that will work with researchers across Microsoft and the academic research community. Live Labs will provide consistency in vision, leadership and infrastructure as well as a nimble applied research environment that fosters rapid innovations.

"Live Labs is a fantastic alliance between some of the best engineering and scientific talent in the world. It will be the pre-eminent applied research laboratory for Internet technologies," Flake said. “This is a very exciting opportunity for researchers and technologists to have an immediate impact on the next evolution of Microsoft's Internet products and services and will help unify our customers' digital world so they can easily find information, pursue their interests and enrich their lives."

The Live Labs — a confederation of dedicated technologists and affiliated researchers in pre-existing projects from around Microsoft — will focus on Internet-centric applied research programs including rapidly prototyping and launching of emerging technologies, incubating entirely new inventions, and improving and accelerating Windows Live™ offerings. This complements the company’s continuing deep investment in basic research at Microsoft Research and product development at MSN.

Ray Ozzie, Craig Mundie and David Vaskevitch, Microsoft’s chief technical officers, will serve as the Live Labs Advisory Board. Ozzie sees Live Labs as an agile environment for fast-tracking research from the lab into people’s hands. "Live Labs is taking an exciting approach that is both organic and consumer-driven," Ozzie said. "Within the context of a broad range of rich usage scenarios for Windows Live, the labs will explore new ways of bringing content, commerce and community to the Internet."

You can check out the site at http://labs.live.com/. It's unclear to me why we felt we had to apply the "Live" brand to what seems to be a subsection of http://research.microsoft.com/. I guess "Live" is going to be the new ".NET" and before the end of the year everything at Microsoft will have a "Live" version.

*sigh*