Last Friday (27th January) I was lucky enough to be invited to a Microsoft event based around SkyDrive. The days was put together by Microsoft and 3MonkeysPR. It was all based around the application and the features of Skydrive, so not only were we going to have a demonstration and tour of the product, we also would set a series of challenges around using the application. To celebrate the fact the application was launched on Windows Phone and iPhone there was a chance to win some prizes. It would be based around two challenges that we would have to face throughout the day, going head to head with the other tech gurus that had been invited.
When we arrived at the Marriott hotel on the south bank, we all met the gang for the day and we were giving some time to setup our kit and there was an envelope which contained our challenges, we were not allowed to open them yet, it was all very Mission Impossible.
After a short time Ian Moulster kicked off the talk/demonstration of the Skydrive Product. He showed us many features of skydrive and easy it is to use and how we will have to use the application to complete our challenges.
London Eye taken with iPhone 3GSOur first challenge involved taking a trip on the London Eye. While we were going round, we would have to get a picture of 4 famous London Landmarks:
- Battersea Power Station
- St Paul's Cathedral
- The Shard
- BT Tower
Once we had taken the photos we then had to upload them up to our Skydrive Account ( all you need to access skydrive is a hotmail address or Windows live account).
Once we had them uploaded them to Skydrive we then had to use our machines to share the pictures out publicly, we then had to tweet the link and get our twitter followers to identify the London landmarks and where they were pictured from.
All the replies had to have the hashtag #SkyDriveLondon, the first person to receive three correct answers with the hashtag would win 2 Nokia Lumia 800 phones, one of the winner and one to give away to your followers. I have to say a big thanks to @stephenwing from the @Ukgadgeteer who was responding as soon I could upload the pictures (wifi connection issues), and frankly I was shocked we lost the speed he was replying, it was a fantastic effort but congratulations to @aedney who won the phones.
Our second challenge was to create a PowerPoint presentation using the webapps, that described our day's events as well as displaying the pictures that we had taken. When you are logged into Skydrive, you have access to the Web versions of applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. You have the ability to download your document into the desktop applications to make further enhancements to the documents. The webapps are cut down versions so there are some functions within PowerPoint this example that you won't be able to do. Most of the bloggers there had full PowerPoint on their machines so they could create much better presentations than I managed to. Here is a link to my presentation that I created in a few minutes using only the webapp.
Unfortunately as great as my presentation was (now be nice), I was not the winner of the competition, the winner of the this part of the day was Melinda http://twitter.com/missgeeky). Her prize for her efforts was a new Acer Ultrabook.
I was going to include my pictures of the day, but I thought it would be better to share them out using Skydrive, you can see my shared folder here.
I would like to thank Ian Moulster from Microsoft and 3MonkeysPR for inviting me to the day. My review of Skydrive will be up shortly.
I am always interested in your thoughts so if you have any comments or feedback then please feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me here.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 11:34AM 
Microsoft SkydriveFrom now on if you sign up to Microsoft's Skydrive, you will be getting 7Gb of storage instead of the 25Gb they used to offer you once you sign up. If you are an existing customer then you are being given a free upgrade to 25Gb of storage but you have to visit the skydrive site to claim your free upgrade, you need to do so using this following link. 