At launch, this free beta of Seesmic Ping will include familiar services to reach your audience:

• Facebook and Facebook Pages
• Multiple Twitter accounts
• Linkedin
• With more to come…

Main features of Seesmic Ping:

• Post via web
• Post via email
• Attach links & images (post pictures on Facebook and Twitter as if you were posting them “natively”)
• Schedule your posts at any time

We’ll look to have more features and services when Seesmic Ping comes out of beta as a paid service.

We’re also happy to announce the launch of our Seesmic Ping mobile apps, available now!

Discover how easy it is to share from your mobile device:

• iPhone & iPad
• Android
• Windows Phone 

We’re looking to build out our mobile applications, so feel free to send us feedback on any of our apps on feedback.seesmic.com.

For Ping.fm users – With the release of Seesmic Ping, we’ll look to maintain Ping.fm for some time. In the meantime, we encourage you to sign up for a Seesmic Profile and give Seesmic Ping a ride through our mobile applications or the web.

Enjoy.  We are just getting started…

The Seesmic Team

With the recent release of the new Windows Phone, we updated Seesmic to take advantage of Mango specific features. Specifically, you’ll find Pin to Start, Live Tiles, Support for Fast App Switching, a revised background, and some new UI enhancements.

• Updated UI for Home and Search: Following Microsoft’s UI Guidelines: We removed buttons from the home panorama and placed them instead in the app bar.

Image via Wikipedia

Last month we launched a contest to send a Salesforce Sales Engineer to Paris and to LeWeb, Europe’s #1 technology conference, founded by Geraldine and Loic LeMeur. Today we are pleased to announce that the lucky winner is Trevor McClaren.

Trevor is eagerly awaiting heading to Paris on December 7,8 and 9 and is already working on his French. Can you blame him? Speakers include Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Kevin Rose, Marissa Mayer and many more. You can find the full list here.

Many thanks to everyone who entered the contest. If you didn’t win, you can still attend. Tickets are still available at LeWeb.

Bon voyage, Trevor, and enjoy your trip to Paris and LeWeb. Psst…don’t forget how to say Seesmic in French. It’s easy: Seeees-mic. 

• The StartupBus is launching in Europe and heading to LeWeb (thenextweb.com)
• Loic Le Meur interviews Marco Kaiser to make sense of the Microsoft news and to understand how a developer sizes up the Windows 8 tablet and OS | Seesmic Blog (seesmic.com)
• IBM at Le Web11 (delphineremyboutang.wordpress.com)

Users will be able to:

• Search, edit, and create Contacts, Tasks, Leads and Events
• Customize your homescreen to move more quickly from one add/edit to another
• See recent activity concerning a Lead,Contact,Account, or Opportunity while on yourway to your next meeting
• Log a call or email in your Salesforce account directly afterwards
• Take advantage of Salesforce Custom Objects on your mobile device

Enjoy the video below to see more about Seesmic CRM for Salesforce on Windows Phone:

Download it now, and let us know what you think.

If you haven’t yet tested out the latest updates, you can get Seesmic Desktop 2 and try them out here:
https://seesmic.com/seesmic-social/desktop/

While the main feature is the synchronization with your Seesmic Profile, we also added or improved several things within the application:

• Synchronization with Seesmic Profile

You can now synchronize your Seesmic Desktop with the accounts that are listed in your Seesmic Profile. Simply go into Settings and log in with your Seesmic Profile credentials. If you don’t have a Profile just yet, you can create one from Seesmic Desktop. This  post will show you exactly how to create a Profile from within Seesmic Desktop.

• Scheduled posts

You can now schedule posts to be delivered on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Salesforce Chatter.

• Conversation View

Click on the “in reply to” in a Twitter message to get the full conversation thread

• Smart Search

Once you get it, you’ll LOVE it. Sometimes you want to investigate more than just the current conversation thread (if available) from a person on Twitter. Simply add keywords to the search term box, and you’ll be able to track what a person says about you or your brand within their profile panel.

The Smart Search feature is ONLY through a user’s timeline. In our example, if a user mentions seesmic OR loic OR iTibz OR yama (as entered below) you will find all mentions in one stream.

Don’t forget that you can search through all of Twitter via the search box in the upper right-hand corner.

• Updated Profile Panel

We’ve added more features when looking up a Twitter user. You’ll find buttons to follow, unfollow, send direct messages and block people, as well as the same full controls that are available in a timeline.

• Hashtags in Replies

When replying to a message with a hashtag, the hashtag will carry over to your message in the composer. This feature can be configured in the Twitter plugin settings.

• Activities Column

This is a favorite feature that allows you to view who is following you, added you to a list, retweeted you, and more. We’ve updated this column to add a full control of actions, just like you would have in a timeline.

• Facebook Picture Preview when Posting URLs

When posting URLs, you can now post a full picture to your Facebook Feed. Simply add your URL, and click on the Facebook “F” icon to get a preview of the URL. Choose a thumbnail and click “Apply” before sending

• Post on a Friend’s Wall

Post directly on a friend’s wall through the Facebook Profile Panel!

• Updated Notification Timeline

If someone comments on your status, simply click on the notification link to go back to the original status update

• Keyboard navigation is available for highlighting items as you scroll through your timelines 

(You can use the arrow keys to move from one item to the next, or you can use J and K for scrolling up and down like on Google+, and H and L for moving across your columns.)

• Spell checking integrated directly into the composer field

• New alert settings

• See.sc url shortening service available when connected to your Seesmic Profile

• The composer will change color when you approach the character limit for your selected services

• Highlighted new feed items (when activated in Settings)

• Timeline items can be marked as read and can also be hidden

• The sidebar can be hidden, as well

• Other bug fixes and performance improvements

For more details and explanation about these new features, head over to the help post for this update!

We are very excited to release this new version. We hope you will enjoy it as well.

If you have any questions or issues, please submit us a ticket on our Help Desk with as much information as possible, so that we may get back to you as quickly as possible.

Best,

The Seesmic Team

 Jobs put life and soul into inanimate objects.

Steve Jobs welcomed creativity into the technology industry.  We spend most of our waking hours building, testing and thinking about technology, but it is not just about the code. There is a life and soul in everything we do. A line of code is far more than a combination of characters. Code is built with intent – to give users features and functions, but also to provide an experience, a feeling and a look that requires a human being to envision it.

As users embraced Jobs approach, the technology industry accepted the value of creativity, and technology now creates products using both the left and right sides of our brains. The influx of creativity in technology also redefined its endusers and reasons for using technology. Gadgets, computers and software are not just for geeks or for performing tasks at the office. With tools to more easily capture, create and share content, including music, film and a variety of mediums, Steve Jobs and Apple taught people without any technical expertise to use technology to express what was previously limited to our imaginations.

Shared on Google Plus by Mike Searle

Steve Jobs reintroduced technology to the world and inspired us not only to “think different”, but also to “do different” We can’t imagine a world without Steve Jobs, because we are living in a world that he has helped us build.

• The Tao of Steve (gigaom.com)

Seesmic‘s CTO, Marco Kaiser, and Director, John Yamasaki, spent last week at Microsoft’s BUILD Conference and were among the first developers to get their hands on the Windows 8 tablet and OS.

During our team meeting, we sized up the device and were slightly confused  - this tablet does not look like an iPad or Android tablet. As Marco pointed out, that is the point.

In the video below, Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO, interviews Marco to make sense of the Microsoft news and to understand how a developer sizes up the Windows 8 tablet and OS:

As Marco points out in the video, the Windows 8 tablet offers developers features that iPad and Android currently do not offer: the ability to code in many different languages, the Metro UI and intra-application capabilities on a single device. It is not really a tablet, but a device with the convenience of a touch screen and mobility coupled with the features of a PC, like the keyboard, mouse, and stylus included with the tablet. As Marco explains, this “multi-purpose device” will make coding or number-crunching on a tablet a different experience. What’s more, the Metro apps for the tablet blur the line between mobile apps and computers apps.

It will take time for developers to explore the device and OS and form their opinions. Unlike consumers, developers have a more systematic approach to evaluating news, and a lot of in-depth analysis is sure to follow.

• Windows 8: Are Metro apps mobile apps or computer apps? (zdnet.com)
• The big Windows 8 tablet challenge (zdnet.com)
• Developers See Bright Future in Windows 8 (pcworld.com)

We launched Seesmic Profiles about three weeks ago and promised we would be adding more Seesmic apps. Today Windows Phone 7 joins the Seesmic Profiles offerings.

Seesmic Profiles: Log into your Seesmic Profile online, add Windows Phone 7, and all of the accounts you added to your profile will appear on your mobile device. Please note: for now, Facebook is not included, but please stay tuned.

What else is new? 

Spaces: Create spaces for individual timelines.

• Twitter spaces include: Home, Replies, Direct Messages. Retweets, and Favorites
• Facebook spaces include: Newsfeed, Inbox, Friends.
• Salesforce Chatter Spaces Include: all Chatter, Groups

Multiple Chatter Account Support: Seesmic Social for WP7 now Supports multiple Chatter accounts

Main Screen UI Upgrades: Launch the Composer directly from the main screen and check out saved searches. We also updated the main screen to accommodate more Spaces without scrolling.

Updated fix for Facebook: We heard you – due to a a recent change in Facebook’s authentication, you were unable to login to your Facebook account. Good news, we resolved the issue in the lastest build.

Related articles

• Seesmic Web Users, Meet Seesmic Profiles (seesmic.com)
• Social Startup Seesmic Follows the Money, Pivots Away From Consumer Play (adweek.com)
• Seesmic Now Offers Two Product Suites: Seesmic Social and Seesmic CRM (seesmic.com)