[Update] Microsoft India Testing Azure Based Webcasting Platform – Zeollar

Update: The team has now changed the name from Zollar to Zeollar

Seems like the devs at Microsoft India are keeping themselves busy, after releasing a transliteration tool to type in 6 Indian regional languages, the DPE division is now testing a Webcasting platform called Zollar Zeollar. Weird name[1. UPDATE: The name Zeollar stands for Zero-dollar]. Zeollar is on Azure and is intended to become Microsoft’s on-demand technology channel on the web.

Here’s what Zeollar is according to Microsoft:

What is Zeollar?

Zollar Zeollar is a new initiative that attempts to get you latest technical content on a daily basis in different channels. Think of it like a personal television that switches on every day at a specified hour allowing you to switch channels and view the channel of your interest. Zeollar is currently in a public BETA and upcoming sessions are advertised by invite only. If you would like to be part of the invite, please email us at [email protected]

You can associate your Facebook & Twitter accounts and send messages to the two platforms and read what others are saying. They’ve even deployed some sort of filter that will only show messages being shared by the folks who are watching the channel. Here’s a screen shot of what the platform looks like:

Sounds interesting! Maybe I’ll take a session or two if they’ll allow me to. :)

Some technical details on the backend by Pandurang (an engineer who worked on it) –

The entire site and its backend was developed in about 4 days. So please bear with bugs :) We have the stuff running off Windows Azure and SQL Azure. We use Silverlight, jQuery, ADO.Net Entity Framework, etc.