"The Disney gadget is aimed at an emerging Chinese middle class that does not have the history with the Disney brand that Americans do, said Edward Kummer, a Disney executive in charge of online promotions of the company's parks and resorts.

The gadget is constantly being updated via RSS feeds with news about the theme park and also includes long-format video, itinerary planning tools and other interactive content.

"This is effectively having a Disney application on the PC," Bach said.

No details were provided about the size of the application, the computing resources it uses or whether consumers could remove these branded gadgets."

There is a video of the Disney talk during Bach's presentation, up on the Visit MIX07 site. I've taken a few (rough) screenshots of the Disney gadget from the video, because I think its interactivity and rich real-time data (including video) is a great example of how widgets/gadgets will evolve over the next couple of years. I also expect this kind of interactivity and multimedia in widgets that run in the browser (e.g. Microsoft's own live.com widget platform).

Note that I haven't yet seen the Disney gadget on the Web, so if anyone has a link to it -- please note in the comments.

"You can build desktop applications with Windows Presentation Foundation, build web-only applications with ASP.NET AJAX and now the hybrid Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight."

The enhancements announced today for Silverlight include integration with .NET and support for dynamic languages - including Python and Ruby. Microsoft also announced new tool support for building Silverlight applications, with Expression Studio and the next edition of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas".

Tell us what you think of the new-look Silverlight in this week's poll, below.

Ray's answer was that Microsoft is creating a platform for developers to build componentized things like widgets and other web services, but he wasn't able to elaborate on IE's future role in this growing ecosystem - because IE's development plans in that respect are still under wraps. He acknowledged that Firefox is becoming an information broker, saying that this is part of a continued trend in browsers where they are becoming more interactive and writeable. He noted that initially browsers were read-only, but browsers nowadays are able to be written to as well. He also discussed the general trend of componentization, which is basically what is happening with widgets and web services. He said that IE4 was a componentized browser, so this has been a trend for a while in browsers.

Just before the lunch, Ray and Scott were on the main stage being interviewed by Michael Arrington. Dan Farber has a great write-up of that discussion, which discusses Web OS and office software amongst other things.

Scott, Ray, Mike; pic by pxn8

So how is Microsoft's Web Strategy panning out?

From Mike's Q&A and my own lunch with Ray and Scott, I have gotten a better sense of Ray Ozzie's style as Chief Software Architect - the role he took over from Bill Gates last June. Ray Ozzie obviously has a superb handle on technology trends and his 'services vision' has become nicely refined over the past year or so. So I'm impressed by that, although I wish he'd told me specific details about IE's future today at lunch ;-)

Also what we're seeing at MIX this year is that the end products are beginning to show evidence of Ozzie's strategic leadership - e.g. we saw today that Silverlight is a comprehensive web development platform covering the browser and desktop. I haven't mentioned Scott Guthrie much in this post (mainly because his job is to talk specifically to developers, in their language, so a lot of what he says goes over my head!). But the demos of Silverlight-produced apps this morning, which Guthrie compered, were impressive and show that the services strategy coming from Ozzie is starting to show through now in Microsoft's products.

There's a lot to wrap my head around at this conference, but I'll be back later with more coverage.

Update: Ryan Stewart was at the lunch too and his write-up is up now.

Next Ray Ozzie outlined two types of web apps - what he calls "Universal Web" apps, meaning ajax, html, browser based apps. Then he discussed "Experience First" apps - xbox, mobile, pc desktop apps. He pointed out that "the most sucessful solutions have an element each of universal web and experience first".

Ray said that a common design pattern has emerged for this new era of desktop/web/mobile apps - desktop for richness, browser for tagging and other collaboration/community features, mobile for location-specific information.

Ray said that this "brings together the best of the web, best of the desktop and best of the device - using the service as a hub". He also noted that to build these apps, developers and designers can use all kinds of platforms - some of them not Microsoft's. He may've been referring to Adobe Apollo, for example. (Incidentally, I visited Adobe's HQ last week and there is a post on that coming soon).

Silverlight Extended

Next up, Ray Ozzie announced some major upgrades to the Silverlight product, which was first announced a couple of weeks ago. There are 3 main parts to Silverlight now, said Ozzie.

Silverlight is targeted purely at the universal web - it's a cross platform runtime for video delivery. This was the part that was announced two weeks ago.

2) .NET

The big news today is that Microsoft is bringing Silverlight into the .NET environment, making it a full-fledged RIA deployment platform. Ray referred to Silverlight as a "first class .net runtime environment" and noted that "Silverlight brings .net to the universal web".

Also, Microsoft is officially shipping Expression Studio today.

In other news, there are new APIs and html-based controls being released - for Live contacts, virtual earth, photos within Spaces, search.

Ray then showed Photosynth, a new photo app that has an excellent zooming feature - which has also been added to Silverlight.

3) Silverlight Streaming

The third part of the story is streaming, which allows developers to post Silverlight apps to Microsoft's storage service in the cloud. This essentially enables things like video streaming, via the browser.

Overall, Ray referred to Silverlight as a "foundational technology" which is now a key part of Microsoft's web development platform.

More from MIX soon....

Photo from pxn8 (I was sitting next to him)

Update: Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Beta and Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha is immediately available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight.