2cultures.net(.au) » Microsoft

Episode 84 – The One Where We Didn’t Say G****e

feedback@digitalcampus.tv (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:19:58 +0000

This week we consider the question of whether Apple and five major publishers colluded to fix e-book prices and the prospect of a Department of Justice Anti-trust suit against them. We also argue the question of whether buy-in from Blackboard will be good or bad for open source learning management projects Moodle and Sakai and join the chorus of praise lauding the online release of the 1940 U.S. Census. On the lighter side, we check in on the ongoing saga of @FakeElsevier. Finally, we celebrate our unintentional, but surely very welcome, neglect of a certain not-evil web search and services company.

Late update: Since we recorded this episode on April 4, 2012, the DOJ showed its hand and officially filed suit against Apple and its partners in the publishing industry, announcing terms of a possible settlement with at least three publishers.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Bigger Than Agency, Bigger Than E-Books: The Case Against Apple and Publishers
Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle
Fake Elsevier’s complaints about academic publishing leads to fake takedown notice
Big Day for Family History Hunters: 1940 U.S. Census Is Online

Running time: 45:38
Download the .mp3

Tracking Microsoft Buzz with Blogs, Twitter, Bitly and Videos

Matthew Hurst — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:30:41 +0000

Microsoft is an incredibly diverse company. I've just celebrated 5 years here and still don't have a full appreciation of the breadth and depth of products and innovation that the corporation generates. After BlogPulse was unplugged, I felt something of a hankering to continue to follow the buzz around Microsoft, partly as a way to better follow what the company is doing and how it is perceived in the online world.

I'm a big fan of TechMeme, but it has some challenges when it comes to tracking news and trends around a specific company. Firstly, I don't know the sources that are used and the ranking mechanisms in place, so it is hard to really understand quantitatively what it represents. Secondly, with limited real estate, while a big story may be happening for a company of interest, it can be crowded out by other events. Thirdly, I can't help but think it has a strong valley culture bias. Fourthly, it hasn't evolved much in the years that I've been visiting it.

So I've put together an experimental site called track // microsoft which follows a few blogs, clusters posts that are related and uses Bitly and Twitter data to rank the articles and clusters of stories. In doing this, I observed that many posts in the blogosphere about Microsoft would contain videos (be they of Windows 8 demos or the latest research leveraging the Kinect platform).

The site has three basic columns. The first contains established stories, represented by clusters of articles. The second represents a more timely view of posts. Both of these columns use Bitly and Twitter statistics to rank, with a bias to recency. The third column shows videos which have been embedded in posts multiple times.

Thus far, I find the stories and videos that surface here to be very interesting. This is where I first learned about:

Microsoft's site for the new Hunger Games movie.
The dynamics of Nokia's presence in the UK cell phone market.
The release of the iPlayer on the Xbox (how cool is that!)

The nice thing about track // microsoft is that it should be easy to repurpose it to follow any topic - all you need is a list of feeds. I'm hoping to put together pages for taiko, skiing, Kauai, ...

Please take a look at track // microsoft and let me know what you think.

Visualizing the History of Everything

Nathan Yau — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 07:33:19 +0000

Big History is a field of study that crosses multiple disciplines such as biology, natural history, and economics to form a single timeline that starts at the beginning of time and ends in the present. It's the history of everything, essentially. ChronoZoom, a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research, aims to visualize this seemingly endless timeline.

You can browse years on top, and rectangles in the main view represent different scopes such as the Cosmos and Earth and the Solar System. Click on one those rectangles, and ChronoZoom, as you might guess, zooms in on the corresponding window of time. Circles within the rectangles provide videos and explanations for significant events in history.

To get right into it though, move your mouse to the top right. There's a thing that looks like a bar graph, which is actually navigation for the scopes. Click on Humanity and watch it go.

msnNow Offers Real Time Trending, Recalls BlogPulse

Matthew Hurst — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:54:32 +0000

Microsoft has just pushed out a new product under the MSN brand called msnNow. It is a combination of data mining for trends and topics and editorial content. Surfacing trends has long been a staple for the real time web / social media, but it is an area that I feel has never really been done well. Twitter trends, for example, tend to be less than informative and more of a reflection on the constraints and structure of the twittersphere. msnNow has the potential to take trending seriously, especially if there is commitment behind the product and the contribution of the editorial team.

Parts of the product remind me strongly of the recently decommissioned BlogPulse, for example this module:

Take a look!

Charts with explosions now easier than ever

Nathan Yau — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:49:05 +0000

Score.

Siri? How Do I Fix Academic Publishing?

Digital Campus — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:51:23 +0000

Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

Running time: 58:45
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Microsoft envisions the near future in technology and interaction

Nathan Yau — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:34:47 +0000

In a follow-up to last year's visions of the future, Microsoft imagines interacting with data and information in 2020. It is the land of big displays, linked devices, and projections in the real world. It's mostly from a productivity standpoint, but there's crossover to the everyday.

To be honest though, all I really want are power laces, a self-drying coat, a flying car, and rehydrating pizza. I wouldn't mind a hover board either, but it's not urgent. I don't think that's too much to ask. I can deal with not being able to flick graphs in the air if it means getting the important things sooner.

[Video Link via @juiceanalytics]

Episode 72 – May the Swartz Be With You

Tom Scheinfeldt — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:47:55 +0000

Lisa Spiro and Jeff McClurken join Amanda, Mills, and Tom for a high summer episode of Digital Campus. (Dan Cohen did not join us this time, choosing instead to remain incommunicado in an undisclosed location while he writes some book or something.) There is no avoiding the story of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old Harvard researcher arrested for hacking MIT’s JSTOR subscription, which raised for our panel, among other concerns, ongoing questions about open access and the viability for libraries of “big deal,” multiple-journal subscription packages. We also mourn (or celebrate) the demise of the big box bookseller Borders, share thoughts about the next generation of operating systems (including Mac OS 10.7 “Lion” and Windows 8), and hold our collective breath as we await major cuts to humanities funding from Congress.

Running time: 56:39
Download the .mp3

Weekly Linkfest

rouli — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:27:00 +0000

Oh my, what an interesting week for augmented reality, especially in the business front:

Nokia Beta Labs revealed Live View, a revolutionary mobile augmented reality application. Well, unless you consider Wikitude, Layar, Junaio and many other "AR browsers" that came out in the last three years. Nokia was once a leader in AR research, it's a sad day to see them show off a product like that.
Vuzix and German research institute Fraunhofer announced strategic alliance for development of display technology. Vuzix's CEO is optimistic (as am I) - "We have already seen results that we feel will provide a paradigm shift in the style, performance and cost of wearable displays".
Microsoft licenses GeoVector's tech. Slashgear says the goal of this move is to challenge Google Goggles. Patent war against Google (like the current one against Android) can be another reason.
PrimeSense's (Kinect) competitor, Omek raises $7 million from Intel Capital.
Someone (well, Beck's) augmented the Statue of Liberty.
Is the hype around AR disappeared altogether? That's at least what this article, named "What happened to augmented reality?" claims.

This week's video features a cool street art by SWEZA named QRadio. Graffiti boom-boxes around Berlin start to play music when the QR code drawn on them is scanned. Via Wooster Collective.

Have a great week!

Weekly Sunny Linkfest

rouli — Sun, 29 May 2011 18:55:00 +0000

Before we begin with our weekly pile of links, here's a message from Christine Perey on behalf of "the program committee of the Third International AR Standards meeting":

The committee has decided to extend the deadline for position papers to June 6th (5 PM UK). Please find more information and guidelines for the position papers: http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/third-meeting-position-papers/

Now, back to our regular programming:

The community is still abuzz with the Augmented Reality Event:

Microsoft's ARE Read Write World talk courtesy of @MetaverseOne (who worked hard to edit this video together) - check out his site for more clips from ARE.

ARE2011 roundup

ARE2011 keynote by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. As usual, computer vision wizardry is to be expected
But lest us forget about the European counterparts: Augmented Planet 2011 and the AR Summit (which ironically falls for me on a trip to the United States)

Latest Windows Phone version, Mango, discovers GPS and compass based augmented reality two years too late. We want "strong" photosynth based AR, and we want it now!

Zombie Room is an augmented reality puzzle game that looks kinda interesting http://omy.gd/0ojvF but in what way does AR makes it any better?

Zugara shares data from their usability testing about augmented reality For ecommerce

This week's video goes to you Dr. Who fans - I'll never understand your ways. Sean McCracken apparently does, and thus created this Android app, available on the Android market to display an augmented version of the TARDIS. Everlasting glory to the first fan who will create a video of Daleks shouting "augment! augment!"

Have a nice week, and good luck Noora

Episode 69 – Strange Bedfellows

Tom Scheinfeldt — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:23:19 +0000

Steve Ramsay joins us on the podcast as we scratch our heads over some strange decisions by the big tech companies, namely Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype and Google’s entry into the netbook (or “Chromebook”) market. We also mourn the death of the Flip camera, killed by its similarly unlikely owner, Cisco. To end the show we return to our bread and butter of digital libraries to catch up with the Digital Public Library of America, which announced a summertime “beta sprint.” Perhaps they heard our frequent pleas for “less talk, more grok” and “less yak, more hack”?

Additional links related to the podcast:

Flip Video Vlog: A Tale of Two Formats

Digital Public Library of America: Prelim Plans for “Beta Sprint” Released

Will Chromebooks for Education be a Good Deal for Schools?

Running time: 56:14
Download the .mp3

Weekly Spring-Time Linkfest

rouli — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 19:01:00 +0000

The spring is here (unless you live below the equator, and somehow don't fall off the face of the earth), and it brings some great links (and allergens) :

Librarian’s dream app – researchers from Miami University created an augmented reality meets mobile application to help keep books ordered on libraries' shelves.
Beats me why the need the money, I always assumed they make millions, but Total Immersion gets USD $5,5M in funding led by Intel Capital (which, interestingly, also funded Layar).
Quimo from the University of South Australia, is like play-doh for augmented reality. This "deformable material" supports "freeform modeling in spatial AR environments" by embedding almost invisible AR markers.
"The Witness" is a German half-movie-half alternative reality game that uses AR (or pseudo-AR) to move the plot forward (via @GaryPHayes).
Comedian Ricky Gervais dismisses augmented reality as "a load of bollocks" (via @Layar).

This week's featured video is coming to us from Microsoft, a company that develops stunning technologies just to see them later made into products and sold by the likes of Apple. Here they develop a "Photosynth Lite", enabling users to create 3d models by taking a few pictures with their cellphones. I wonder where this technology can be applied:

You can read more about this on Technology Review.

Have a sunny week!

Countdown to the end of Internet Explorer 6

Nathan Yau — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:33:55 +0000

If you've ever designed for the Web, you know what a pain it is to get your work to look right in Internet Explorer 6. It's outdated, and it's not standards compliant, so a design that looks good in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari might look horrible in IE6 (and subsequent versions for that matter). The good news is that Microsoft has started the countdown to the end with a map that shows IE6 browser share around the world. Twelve percent of the world still uses the browser as of February 2011, with a big chunk of that from China.

[Internet Explorer Countdown | via @mericson]

The importance of critical informaiton studies and the digital enclosure

safiyanoble — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:38:33 +0000

Public, non-profit attempts for universal Wi-Fi have been attempted as a counter proposal to private ownership. Yet, the resources available to build infrastructure (e.g., Googleplexes) is difficult competition. The ability for the public to engage so deeply in these technologies is correlated to its affordances. Alternatives that allow affordances without such sacrifice of privacy, surveillance and loss of data control is what Andrejevic argues should prevail. Digital enclosures are regimes of power and control over users, rather than sources of freedom and autonomy and continue to be contested.

First Day with Windows Phone 7

Matthew Hurst — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 05:45:06 +0000

I've now had a Windows Phone 7 device (Samsung Focus/At&T) for 24 hours and thought I'd share some of my thoughts. Note that this is replacing my iPhone 3G.

I've been looking forward to using the new phone for a while now. Certainly, working in Bing Mobile has brought me pretty close to plenty of the excitement around the new product, but Microsoft's generous offer of a free phone pretty much sealed the deal. The first hurdle was getting the device. The AT&T store was sold out and it had to be ordered and delivered. Once in my hands I was immediately frustrated by AT&T's activation mechanics. I had to take three different paths before finally getting the thing up and running. However, that frustration quickly dissolved as I started setting up and playing with the new phone.

When using a piece of technology that takes a completely new approach to an existing problem, one has to bear in mind that things that seem initially awkward are really just reminders of how one has become trained to use the previous stuff - it is a relative measure of difference, not an absolute measure of design. The biggest difference between the Windows Phone 7 UI and the iPhone is that, from an engineering perspective, it is closer to an object oriented metaphor. The tiles that one can place on the home screen are really references to objects of a variety of types. I can place a location resulting from a local search right on the home surface for easy reference. I can place a person on the home screen for quick calling and email. Each of these differently typed objects is associated with different types of actions (one can ask for directions to a location, or for the contact information for a person). Getting this is key to getting the most out of the Windows Phone 7 experience. Personally, I think this metaphor can go even further, with a more comprehensive exposure to the various types of objects.

The first app that I loaded was OneBusAway - a must for any serious public transport commuter in the Seattle area. Initially, I was disappointed with this version of the application. I think it is going to take some time getting used to, but I'd like to see some improvements. Note that, as I mentioned earlier, this is also a reminder that my first experience with the iPhone version of this app was also confusing and it took time to figure out the sweet spot in its interactions to get what I wanted out of it.

Next up I started playing with the browser. All in all I found it to be pretty snappy and a reasonably rounded implementation. Surprisingly, the dynamics of the mobile version of techmeme didn't work. Hitting the 'more' and 'new' tabs don't appear to load any additional content. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a limitation in the javascript (note that with javascript, optimization for the peculiarities of non-standard browser - i.e. all browsers - can impact the use of other browsers, so this may be an issue that techmeme can fix independently of any issues present in the phone browser).

I've played with most of the functionality offered by the phone and have really learned to enjoy the experience. The calendar is great - I much prefer it to the iPhone version from a design point of view; opening Microsoft Office documents is a very smooth experience; the Facebook integration can clearly drive more use of the social networking sites features, and I really liked the idea of linking profiles across different contexts.

However, the biggest surprise to me was the Zune functionality. This really impressed me. I found the experience of playing music on the device quite delightful and the desktop Zune product is also a very well designed and engaging system. I was also very happy with the way in which the phone integrates data with the cloud, including pictures and OneNote documents.

There is one feature that I wish existed - a simple way to transfer my contacts from the iPhone to the Windows Phone. I've read various summaries on how to do this - it is possible - but it should be far easier.