Ten winners were selected this week, whose stunning photos of clouds from all over the world now feature in a Windows 7 Theme Pack that has just been released. Cooler still, the overall winning entry, an awe-inspiring shot of a snow-capped Mount Ranier, was featured on the Bing homepage this week.

Congratulations to Somana Konganda and the other nine talented winners. You can find the new desktop theme, Windows Live Clouds, over at the Windows Personalization Gallery. 

Piloting in Seattle, San Francisco and New York, when you check-in at selected locations you’ll receive tips from professional photographers on where to shoot the coolest photos and how to go about taking them.

For example, check-in at Fort Point, San Francisco and you’ll receive the following tip, “From the right side of the parking lot there is a great vantage of the Golden Gate Bridge. Get low and try to capture one of the rusty chains in the chains in the foreground with the bridge in the background”

Over on the Windows Experience Blog, Harrison Hoffman tells the story of how the tips were generated. He travelled across each of the cities with leading local photographers scouting a wide variety of spots in each of the three cities, including famous tourist landmarks as well as other locations off the beaten track.

Sounds like a very cool way to explore some of America’s great cities – even if you’re a local, the tips may well help you see your environs in a brand new light. Fingers crossed more cities are included over time.

Download for free at this link: http://download.live.com

The 2011 suite includes a tonne of new features including

• Facebook Chat integration within Messenger
• Bing Maps integration and improved geo-tagging support in Photo Gallery
• Upload video direct to Flickr
• Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU
• Higher bit-rate movies in Movie Maker
• Better spell-checking and Office integration with Writer
• Improved Gmail support

In this video Bryan Saftler gives us a quick tour of the Essentials 2011 suite.

If you have any questions or requests for follow up interviews/demos related to Windows Live please leave them in the comments.

More: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/09/30/windows-live-essentials-2011-available-for-download-now.aspx

From this menu, you can select one of the following: “clip art,” “videos,” “webpages,” and “Maps and Places.” Using any of these options lets you automatically insert content pulled from Bing, but probably the most useful will be the option to insert content from Bing Maps.

When you select this option, a task pane opens on the right-hand side of your screen, allowing you to search for a location or pull up a location you’ve previously saved. You can optionally edit the details of the item or just click “insert” to add it to your email.

That’s definitely a handy feature to have when trying to share directions via email – you don’t even have to go to another web page, you can do it all from your inbox.

According to news from Chris Jones, the beta has proved quite popular so far, with 3 million unique users in Messenger alone, 3.5 million updates to display pictures, 6.2 million video calls, and 7.6 million updates to status messages, just to give you a taste of some of the beta-related stats.

So what’s new this go-round? A lot, actually. Here’s the list of service improvements:

• A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
• More efficient video chat - Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
• Better facial recognition - Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
• Larger movie uploads - Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480x640 vs. the previous 320x480).
• Higher bit-rate movies - Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
• Better spell-checking - Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
• Better integration with Office - Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
• Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
• Faster web filtering - Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

There are also new features being introduced as well, like “quick previews” and an improved tree view in Photo Gallery, Flickr video publishing and “Snapshot” in Movie Maker, Bing Maps integration in Photo Gallery & Movie Maker, 640x480 video upload resolution to SkyDrive, Jump List integration in WLW plus some other improvements to formatting features and spellcheck, better alerts and reporting in Family Safety, support for Russian and German languages in addition to English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, and even more minor upgrades too numerous to list here.

But perhaps the feature I’m most excited about is Facebook chat via Live Messenger. I may hang out in “invisible mode” a lot on IM, but it’s nice to know that when I want to chat over my preferred communication service – that’s Facebook, actually, sorry GChat, AOL, & Messenger – I can. And I can do it without having to go to Facebook.com itself, which, quite frankly, can be a huge time suck I don’t always need.

To try out the new beta yourself, just head over to its homepage here and hit the “download now” button. 

Included in the list are Google, AOL Mail, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Hyves, Hi5 and Tagged. You can, of course, also import your Outlook contacts for safe-keeping online and you can even import the contacts associated with a different Windows Live account you have access to.

The end result is one online contacts list available at a single URL which houses all  your contacts from around the Internet.

What’s even better is that the Windows Live Service continues to sync data from the other networks into the service, so you’ll always have the latest info available.

And if you want to go one step further, you can add your Windows Live account to your smartphone in order to access your entire contact list from anywhere you go – just add the associated Hotmail account to your device.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington already reviewed the suite positively in early June, calling the enhancements “impressive” and “crowd pleasers.” He’s especially taken with (and who can blame him?) the new “Photo Fuse” feature, which he said just yesterday “makes the suite worth trying out.”

For those that don’t know, Photo Fuse is the Photoshop-esque feature in the new Windows Live Photo Gallery app that lets you take the best parts from a group of photos and merge them into one single great-looking picture. It’s perfect for group photo scenarios where you want just the one image where everyone is smiling.

We’ve looked at some of the Windows Live improvements here already, including the new Windows Live Photo Gallery, Live Sync, Live Movie Maker, and Live Messenger. But if you really want a comprehensive listing of everything that has changed (and there is a lot!), you should check out the Windows Live Essentails preview site instead.

To hit the highlights though, you can look forward to the above-mentioned Photo Fuse editing function in Photo Gallery which joins Retouch and Panoramic Stitch features, facial recognition in Photo Gallery, batch auto adjust features in Photo Gallery, tons more social sharing and mobile sharing options in Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, an Auto Movie mode in Movie Maker which includes themes, export to HD (720p or 1080p) in Movie Maker, “Photo Mail” slideshows in the Mail app, offline access and shared calendars in Mail, integrated calendaring and messaging in Mail, remote desktop and file syncing via Live Sync, and so much more.

When the beta goes live it will be available from here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Feel free to keep hitting F5 until that page changes!

Live Essentials requires Vista or Windows 7 and is available in English, French, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.

In his new post “10 Secrets of Windows Live Wave 4,” Jamie delves into details about the newly refreshed suite, offering news that includes things like the above-mentioned status dashboard (status.live.com, when launched, which will show issues and outages), Office signature sync (you’ll be able to sync signatures, styles and templates between computers), in-line YouTube video viewing and Photo Viewing in Messenger, and several other “secret” tidbits.

The 10 items he lists in the post aren’t the headline-makers over at WindowsLivePreview.com, but rather those small details that show off some of the new service’s “featurettes,” as he calls him. The whole post is worth a read for anyone anxiously anticipating the brand-new Windows Live.

The technology that was developed for Live Mesh will form the basis of the new service, which will provide 2 GB of free storage in the cloud for your most vital files and folders in addition to synchronizing your files (like those in your Documents, Pictures, Music, etc. folders) between PCs...or even your Macs. When you update one file, that change is made available on all your connected computers.

Files uploaded to the cloud are then available on any computer with an internet connection. 

Also like Live Mesh, the new service will offer remote desktop management for free from any computer on the web. Once live, you’ll head over to devices.live.com to see a list of all your connected PCs and from there, you can click “connect” to begin remotely controlling them.

Those who were already using Live Mesh will have it removed upon upgrading to the new Windows Live Essentials. Afterwards, you can set up your folders for syncing again via Live Sync.

Live Sync and all the new releases that are a part of the Live Essentials suite will be available soon. In the meantime, you can head to http://www.windowslivepreview.com to learn more about the new programs and services.

In the updated Movie Maker application, there will be new themes built in and when you use the “Automovie” mode, those will be added for you. In a minute, you can create a movie using your own pictures and/or videos which has transitions, a title, captions and a soundtrack, all with very little effort on your part. This is great for those of us who are always pressed for time but also for those who are intimidated by editing video, even as easy as it is to do in Movie Maker.

Also coming to the new Movie Maker are improvements to video and audio editing with an updated editor and the ability to export to high-def 720p and 1080p video, Windows Phone format or Zune HD format.

As with Photo Gallery, social sharing is built in too, allowing you the ability to instantly upload your creations to SkyDrive, YouTube and flickr.

These changes and more will arrive soon when the new Windows Live Essentials suite rolls out to all.

In the new Messenger, when your friends are offline, you can leave them a video message, just as you did before on the standalone service. You can see this new feature in action on a video found here on the WindowsLivePreview.com website

That said, if you have messages you need to retrieve from the Video Messages service before it’s closed, you need to do the following before July 21st rolls around:

1. Go to the Video Messages Beta website and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Open a video message and then click the Save button.(You can only save video messages if the sender has given you permissions to save or forward their video message.)
3. Choose a location on your computer, enter a name for the file, and then click Save.

When you login via the new URL, you’re presented with a message about the change: “Live.com is now Windows Live Home,” it reads. “Windows Live provides one convenient place online to send e-mail, share photos and files you create, and see what's new with your favorite people,” notes the rest of the message.

Nothing much has changed at the portal itself as of yet – though there has been plenty of speculation about what the upcoming revision to Windows Live services will soon offer. The unofficial leaks, screenshots and news stories about “Windows Live Wave 4” are everywhere on the net already, but nothing has been officially confirmed.

However, we’ve already started to see small changes like this and the new sign in page for Windows Live which hint that even larger changes may be on the horizon.

The font size for the words “sign in” and the service itself (e.g. “Hotmail”) has been increased as have the icons for the user accounts you’ve signed in with before on that computer.

Also, when you hover your mouse over one of the accounts, an “X” appears at the top-right corner, allowing you to remove it from your page. That’s a handy feature for the times when you let someone else borrow your computer for a quick email check and don’t want their account sticking around afterwards.

In Photo Gallery, the upload option appears under Publish –> More Services while in Movie Maker a new button called “Publish on Web” offers the option from its menu.

If you’ve been a fan of the YouTube plugin in the past, you’ll now need to download this critical update in order to continue to use it. Due to a change in YouTube’s hashing algorithm, you’ll no longer be able to authenticate and login to YouTube with the older plugin. Instead, you’ll need to download the updated release (1.1) from the CodePlex site here. There are no other features or updates in this new version besides the one bug fix.

As of this week, you now have access to 19 more web activities partners, including, most notably, YouTube, CNET, and Break.com. The other sites being added are more country specific as you can see here in the list below:

• 4Travel (Japan)
• Azbuz (Turkey)
• Baby Kingdom (Hong Kong)
• Biip.no (Norway)
• BuscaPe (Brazil)
• L’internaute Copains (France)
• Doctissimo Community (France)
• IRC-Galleria (Finland)
• Libimseti.cz (Czech Republic)
• lokalisten.de(Germany)
• Multiply (US)
• MyVIP (Hungary)
• Neogen (Romania)
• PIXNET (Taiwan)
• Qype (Germany)
• Wat.tv (France)

Although many of those sites are only popular in their home countries, you don’t have to live in that country to add them to your network feed.

If you prefer to use MSN as your homepage, you can also add your Windows Live Network feed to that site now too, thanks to the new redesign of MSN.com available here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx.

The updated version includes a lot of new features, such as the Windows Live Home page, a page where you can view your “What’s New” feed from the Windows Live service to see what your friends are doing, view Windows Live photos and comment on them, view Windows Live People, update your status, and more. You can also upload photos right from your phone to Windows Live Photos and other 3rd party sites thanks to the new integration with the My Phone client.

Other improvements to the mobile service include a new launcher screen, Bing search integration, touch improvements, abuse reporting, automatic uninstall of older versions, virtual memory improvement, and reduced installation file sizes.

To get started using the new Windows Live for Windows Phones you can visit http://wl.windowsmobile.com using your phone’s browser.

The most prominent of the feed partners include big names like Hulu, Goodreads, Newsvine, Qik, and SlideShare. The new contacts partners are AOL, Google, Hyves, and Tagged which join previous contact partners Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and hi5. (You can view the complete list of Windows Live partners here.)

To add any of the new services to your profile, simply log into Windows Live and click “Add Web Activities” from your Windows Live Profile page. Then select the services you want to add. (Detailed instructions can be found here).

To call attention to the birthday, you can use a “Calendar Charm,” which is a little colorful icon that appears next to the even on your calendar. The birthday cake charm is an obvious choice here. And so you don’t forget, you can configure an email reminder when you’re adding a birthday, too. Actually, you can configure two reminders, if you want, so you really don’t forget.

Also new is a “refresh now” button which will force a sync between the birthdays stored in Windows Live Contacts and those stored in Windows Live Calendar. Previously, people complained that they didn’t know when the syncing (which occurred at specific intervals) was taking place. Now you can know for sure that it’s being done.

You can check out the new features now at Windows Live Calendar:  http://calendar.live.com.

With the new Windows Live implementation, Windows Live as well as Windows Live services including Live Messenger and Hotmail, will start broadcasting MySpace activity streams data via MySpaceID. That means Windows Live users will be able to see MySpace activities like status updates, blog entries, photo uploads, and music across numerous Windows Live properties.

The integration is made possible by using MySpace’s ActivityStrea.ms API, again built on open standards.

To enable this integration in your Windows Live profile, just do the following:

1. Sign into your Windows Live account here.
2. Click “Add Web Activities”
3. Choose “MySpace” from the Options listed
4. Add MySpace to your Windows Live account.

When you’re done, you’ll be able to see all your MySpace activities from your Windows Live homepage and share them with your extended Windows Live network.