This week MSN teams launched http://liveearth.msn.com, the exclusive online destination for Live Earth: The Concert for a Climate in Crisis. Live Earth will culminate on 7/07/07 with a global concert on seven continents with venues that include the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, China, Australia, and Turkey. Live Earth is much more than a concert – it’s designed to be a catalyst event to coalesce a worldwide community of people who share a single environmental vision and mission: to convert concern to action.

More than 150 of the world’s hottest artists will perform for Live Earth including Madonna, whose new song, “Hey You” is available for free download exclusively for seven days from the MSN Live Earth site.

“Hey You” was produced by Pharrell Williams and Madonna and recorded in London. Madonna will perform “Hey You” as one of the headliners for Live Earth U.K., joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, the Beastie Boys and other performers at Wembley Stadium in London on July 7, as part of the 24-hour, seven-continent Live Earth concert series.

As the exclusive online destination for Live Earth, MSN is pleased to offer this song in conjunction with Madonna and is proud to donate 25 cents for each of the first 1 million downloads to the Alliance for Climate Protection, in support of Live Earth.

A few much needed Xbox 360 updates, coming soon!

Major Nelson reports the official updates that will be out in a months time:

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While the actual update is about a month away from being released, today we released official details on some of the new features and enhancements the free update will contain. In addition to MSN Messenger integration that you may have heard about, we also announced a new text input device coming this summer. Other features coming next month include:

• The redesigned Achievement notification pop-up (toast) will show the name of the unlocked Achievement and the gamerscore value. You’ll see this information the moment you earn an achievement. No more popping open the guide and interrupting your gameplay. (screenshot)
• Enhanced family settings features for Xbox LIVE communications enable different defaults for video chat and voice chat.
• A new Xbox LIVE Marketplace blade lets Xbox LIVE members access the content they seek - whether it is game content or TV shows and movies (available in the United States) - from one place.
• Updates to Xbox LIVE Arcade allow owners to see which Xbox LIVE Arcade games their friends are playing and join in the fun. Xbox LIVE members can also compare progress of leaderboard scores and Achievements directly with all friends on their friends list. The Tell a Friend capabilities have been expanded as well.
• A new option in Auto Downloads provides faster access to the entire collection of free, trial-version Xbox LIVE Arcade games.
• New progressive download controls provide easy access to optimal viewing options by letting people fast-forward, rewind, pause and resume as their video is downloaded from Xbox LIVE Marketplace.
• Extension of the background download functionality will allow owners to set their Xbox 360 console to turn off automatically after downloads are complete.

I know you probably have a bunch of questions about these features, so I’ll work on getting a few guests on some of my upcoming shows to answer ‘em.

One more thing, the update will also add the ability for the name of the game that is in your tray to show up on the dash. Oh, and it works for Xbox 360 and Original Xbox titles

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More details can be found on Xbox News.

The most interesting update to hardware will be the QWERTY keypad accessory for the 360 controller. Watch out for this accessory this coming summer. It will be very useful for people like myself, who want to use the Live Messenger on the 360 but don’t want to attach a USB Keyboard or use on the on-screen keyboard which is a pain-in-the-ass to use!

Details of it had been leaked ages ago around July 2005 on what seems to be a Spanish .ppt presentation.

The Soapbox on MSN Video TeamThanks for helping us test the Soapbox on MSN Video beta – we’ve really appreciated the feedback we’ve gotten from our user community about the service. In order to grow and implement some important new features , Soapbox temporarily requires you to login using your Windows Live ID before you can watch or upload videos. If you don’t have a Soapbox account, we’ll be opening the doors again very soon with some cool new stuff to try. Thanks for your patience as we continue to build the best place to “make your statement” on the web.The Soapbox on MSN Video Team

The simple answer is, is that because of copyright infringment on MSN Soapbox, it’s cutting off all new users on the service and will only let existing beta testers access the website. Who knows when it’ll be back - could be a few days, a week or two, maybe even months. MSN Soapbox Mobile still works though.