Archive for Demo
March 25, 2008 at 7:19 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Demo, LSE, Digital Life
It’s been a hell of a busy month. So busy that I didn’t even have time to log all the things I attended and participated in, let alone to cover everything that has been launched. So the next couple of posts will be more for the archive, to document what’s been going on and what has been launched in the meanwhile.
The first of March, there was the B-wards, the ‘un-awards’ of the Belgian blogosphere. I co-sponsored the event and dropped by to socialize with all the bloggers that showed up. Obivously, Maarten Schenk was live-streaming the entire festivities, and so those who couldn’t make it still had the chance to tune in over the innerweb. Pretty cool location too, Love Lucy. A lounge concept on the top floor of a high building, with a view over the South side of Antwerp like I haven’t seen one much. I loved it. The funny thing is that two of the five awards were given to blogs of whom neither I, nor the other ‘regular bloggers’ were very aware of. Then again, with fair voting, it just comes to show that as long as you have a trusted flock of followers, you can easily score good points. Pictures of the event can be found on Flickr. The guys from Enchante, the dedicated blogger advertising network Adhese, hired Ine to take really cool pictures of the bloggers who wanted to be shot. Here’s mine :-)
Next on the list was de TechDays in Ghent (11th, 12th and 13th of March), where I had to present the ‘Digital Living Room’ for three days in a row. I had great fun, and so did the 5000 attendees. With over 60 demos given, I had a great opportunity to get in touch with people right at the heart of their interest: technology. These three days have given me more than I expected in terms of connections with all sorts of people. From technology lovers to IT Pros. I learned quite a lot as well from listening to my audience. It’s really amazing what some geeks cook up at home to fully enjoy their products. The demo-talks I’ve been giving were about the setup of Windows Home Server, Media Center to display pictures and videos that were stored on that server and XBox 360 as a media extender to the Media Center PC, to demonstrate you no longer need a PC in you living room to consult data stored on another location in the network. The XBox360, when used as an extender, uses the Media Center interface, which makes browsing through your pictures and videos a really pleasant experience.
Then on March 19th was the PLUGG conference in Brussels. Plugg is a one day conference focused on raising global awareness for European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field. In combination with an impressive list of speakers - one by one visionaries and/or field experts from a variety of industries and all with ties to Europe -, there will be a place for 20 hot start-ups to showcase their business ideas and realizations. I sponsored the event with the kind help of Microsoft’s LSE (Local Software Economy) initiative and had a booth there where I handed out brochures and gadgets while showcasing some cool videos from Microsoft’s Research department about ‘visions of the future’. In between the sessions, it was pretty busy but I got a lot of time left to interact with start-ups from all over Europe who enrolled in the competition. This was a really cool event, hopefully the first of a yearly tradition since it’s really important for young startups to get a chance to come into the spotlight. The next garage startup might very well be slumbering somewhere in your very neighborhood. Obviously, more pictures of the event are on Flickr.
The rest of the days were filled with planning the calendar of the next fiscal year (as good as possible) and preparing the super cool event I’m planning in Amsterdam, together with Serge Van Schie from DPE NL. I’ll write more on that soon.
I realize it’s been a while since I posted, but I moved houses this month as well, and I had to wait a few weeks for the cable company to come hook me up. The time I spent in the office was rarely enough to sit down at ease and blog, since there was so much to be taken care of. But, since I’m now back online, I can finally get back to relaxing evenings of online fun. Stay tuned :-)
February 25, 2008 at 9:42 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Demo
One of the cool things I have to do for my job, is to give demos about the latest products Microsoft releases. It’s definitely über-sweet to get to play around with all the cool toys just before or shortly after they’ve been thrown ‘out’ for the world to play with. The DPE group (Developer Platform Evangelism) I’m in has made it a key point to ‘bring back the art of demo’ this fiscal year, which means that you’re being challenged to make things happen on stage, to try and put a little bit of magic in every move you make.
Taking this by heart, I enrolled in the World Cup Demo Competition, an internal initiative to motivate employees to show off their knowledge of the products and a ‘dare’ towards their fellow employees to demo cool features. Very often, not everyone has the time to play around with all the tools we’ve released and not everyone has realized the full potential of our toys. That’s where demo people step in. We show you the goodies. Internally and externally. Me and my fellow Microsoftee Jurgen Van Duvel won the nationals, and we’re about to leave to Madrid for the Western European Division Finals. We’ll ‘fight’ the other teams, hoping we come out as the best.
The 3 judges are Alex Dale, OSG Marketing Director for EMEA, Roger Fontana, Windows EPG Lead for WE and Fernando Calvo Velilla, Windows Consumer Lead for WE. Pretty impressive people already. IF we win in Madrid, the next stop is the finals in Redmond :) Fingers crossed!
Agenda for the day:
8:45-9:00 am- Judges briefing
9:00-9:15 am- Welcome breakfast
9:15-9:30 am- Introductions
9:30-1:00 pm- 7 demos
1:00-1:15 pm- Winner announcement
1:15 pm- Interview & shooting session.
I’ll be caught up in meetings all day today, and tomorrow as well, with a small exception for the table-soccer tournament I’ve signed up for and for which I have to play the semi-finals :) Chances I’ll blog before Wednesday night are very small.
February 20, 2008 at 7:08 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, Demo
We’ve had another cool Circle of Media where we announced the DreamSpark program and a new partnership for Media Center with RTBF, a French spoken national broadcasting company. The full DreamSpark announcement can be found in an earlier post on this blog, if you want to know more about that. The partnership with RTBF includes an exclusive content delivery with podcasts and digital radio (and tv programs) for the Media Center platform through the very well-known interface. This content can be consulted if you set the Media Center settings to Belgium/French, and will extend pretty fast as new content will be made available on a swift pace.
I’ve also done a 10 minute demo of InkSeine, a brilliant application for tablet PCs (I also reported on that earlier). Luc Van Braekel and Maarten Schenk, two of the invited and present bloggers, both recorded the session and I’m posting Luc’s clip below, since Maarten’s cam wasn’t able to get the screen capped clearly.
Under normal conditions, the web search would go faster and I’d show off a little more features, but since there was no wifi available, I had to uplink my phone to 3G and connect to the internet over USB. That caused a small delay in the demo-flow but still, it went pretty well. Enjoy the demo. Thanks againfor the USB cable, Maarten :)
Video: Miel Van Opstal presents Microsoft InkSeine
December 8, 2007 at 4:40 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Technology, Demo
These are some images of my demo booth at the Innovation Playground of the Inspiration Week. What you see is a mini pc that serves as a MediaCenter (it runs Vista Home Premium). That’s the small i-pro device next to the keyboard on the left. Right next to the MediaCenter pc is a prototype Home Server, also from i-pro. Then there is an XBox 360 with wireless controller. Other things in the picture are an UMPC that serves as interface for the MediaCenter, a VGA switch and a router and a bunch of cables. So the setup is as follows: the XBox 360 is an extender of the MediaCenter, so I can browse the cool interface with the wireless controller. The MediaCenter then collects data on the Home Server and displays it in the interface so it is ready to be explored. The XBox360 is initiated as a remote user on the Home Server, so it can gain access to all assigned folders that belong to its user profile. It’s a pretty fun demo to give, and I gave it about 15 times that day. I like to play around with things like this, because it’s just so cool to have an integrated solution. The router is necessary to hand out IP addresses to all devices in the network, and the VGA switch comes in very handy to switch from one device to another as you set it up. I’ll do a decent recorded demo of this soon to put it online, but most of the time when I’m at an event, I lack the time to record my own stuff :)
The two little award cards were given to me by a fellow booth keeper who attended my demo. I gave mine to the Delfly team (of whom I posted a short interview/demo earlier). I was pretty pleased with these cards, even though I didn’t win the prize of best demo or best application (you had to collect as many of these cards as possible). Thanks, Steven :) Very much appreciated!
You can see more impressions of the Innovation Playground at The Hague in my Flickr feed.
October 19, 2007 at 2:58 pm ·
Filed under Uncategorized, MicroLife, Video, Live Services, Demo
So… On October 10th at the Innovation Day in Utrecht, The Netherlands, I had the opportunity to demo all day long to all the people that stopped by at the Microsoft booth at the fair. Besides demos of SeaDragon, Photosynth, HD View, Home Server or Windows Mobile 6, I got another chance to play with the Roundtable a little. I did a little more than a dozen of short demos that day, but I had the most fun with Windows Live Services for Nokia devices. Yes indeederydoo! Fun on a Nokia, with Windows Live. Here’s how that goes:
There’s 4 services that are integrated in the Nokia OS, after you download the install files in the downloads folder. Watch the demo below to see how that works.
1. Live Contacts
Once you sign in for the first time your Live Contacts is auto-magically synchronized within the address book of the Nokia device. As well as names, addresses, email and the other usual stuff. Pretty unique is that the online presence and status of your contacts show up within the phone list. So now from within the device address book you can find whoever you want to communicate with and leverage the presence/status to determine the best way to reach them.
2. Windows Live Messenger
At sign-in you can change your online picture and your status. Once online you obviously can browse your messenger contacts and take part in multiple conversations as you would expect. The services integrate features from within the phone, so when you are within a conversation you can send a voice clip, file or picture - either from the gallery or snap one with the camera
3. Windows Live Hotmail
Your Hotmail gets loaded into a separate folder within the client. Because the emails are downloaded they are available when you are offline. Right now your email isn’t synchronized auto-magically, but its a simple process to goto options, select sync etc. When you are composing an email, just like messenger the phone features are integrated so that you can insert a picture, voice clip, video or other phone right into the email message.
4. Windows Live Spaces
Not surprisingly there is good Spaces support. On Nokia devices there is an application called ‘online share’ which comes with plugins for Flickr and Vox and now there is Spaces support too. There is a simple process to activate the service by adding your Live ID and once that is done the Gallery is now Live enabled. It’s super easy, select the photo you want, goto options, open online service and it will promote you to add a title and text and the the image is load up to your blog.
For screenshots of these thingies, please visit Phil Holden’s blog [you’ll see I stole borrowed most of the words above from there too. He just said it so well :-) Thanks Phil !]
And as for the demo of how this thing goes, I had the chance to meet up with Kris Hoet, whose device I borrowed to demo in Utrecht last week. I geared up the cam and let Kris have is way to show off the goodies.
Video: Windows Live Services For Nokia
Devices that are supported:
- Nokia N73, N80i, N95, N76 and the N93i (full integration)
- E90, E65 and E61i (without Spaces due to ‘No Nokia Online Share Client’)
Countries to date (more to be announced, so watch Phil’s blog):
- Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands,
Norway, Spain, U.K., Sweden, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates,
Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia
October 19, 2007 at 2:06 pm ·
Filed under PR, MicroLife, Video, Demo
At the Circle Of Media, I did a small demo for Luc Van Braekel about Microsoft’s Roundtable, the video-conferencing device. Just posting it here to keep track of it, because I’ve already needed it a few times. Thanks for taping it Luc.
Microsoft RoundTable is an advanced collaboration and conferencing device that provides meeting participants with an engaging, immersive conferencing experience. Combined with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007, RoundTable provides a 360-degree view of the conference room, wideband audio, and video that tracks the flow of conversation between multiple speakers.
Roundtable info and specs can be found here [pdf, 234 Kb]
Video: Roundtable demo by Miel Van Opstal
The Circle of Media event itself went pretty well, apart from a minor issue at the beginning where there was a small problem with the sound. Luckily [or so it seemed] the live demos pretty much made up for it. I had a lot of fun, and from what I’ve heard the attendees did too. Yey. On to the next one.
