Steve Ellis : Taking the wrappers off a 'Rough Guide to the World': an #IE9 beta launch showcase

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Taking the wrappers off a 'Rough Guide to the World': an #IE9 beta launch showcase

Some time round about now in San Francisco and London, Microsoft is formally taking the wrappers off IE9. Which means our NDA and embargoes time out and we can shout about the Rough Guide to the World.

I suspect the launch will grab a bunch of coverage, because despite a lot more competition being out there these days, Internet Explorer is still the planet's most popular browser. Consequently, a new version gets noticed and talked about, so I'll leave it to other posts to review the features and capabilities of IE9.

Our interest is that we have just completed a project with Rough Guides the travel publisher - the Rough Guide to the World - that uses the best of IE9 and the HTML5 standards within it. In fact, for good measure, it also uses Flickr's API, shares via Facebook and Twitter, and just to complete our tech buzzword bingo, it is hosted in 'the cloud' on Microsoft's Azure platform.

The site has been quietly live on Azure at makethemost.roughguides.com for a couple of days now. But now that the global launch of IE9 is underway, we can talk about our role in building the site. In fact, the Metia and Rough Guides teams will be in the keynotes at both the San Francisco and London launch events.

If you want to take a look the site you'll need to download IE9 (do, it's worth it), or be using another HTML5 capable browser.

If you want a teaser there are some screen grabs below. The more formal press release, which describes the site, will be linked as a post here from 10.00am tomorrow.

If you are a marketer who wants to know how to create experiences like this for your brand, or you need to understand the implications and opportunities of these new technologies, then get in touch.

If you are a developer and interested in the story of how we built the site, well we built it in just six weeks, so there is a satisfied but tired team here. In the next few days and weeks we'll share some insight into the technical story, here and on some developer channels too. Stay tuned.