Archive for MicroLife
May 19, 2008 at 10:17 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Community, Live Services, Photography
This Saturday (the 24th of May), I’m organizing an event for amateur-photographers in downtown Amsterdam. The day starts around 12 noon with a welcome and introduction at ‘De Rode Hoed‘, a pretty classy venue naar the waterside. Around 40 photographers will be divided into 4 groups of 10, and will then board a ship that will be docked right outside the building. Right then, the challenge starts. Every group will take pictures over the course of 2 kilometers, so that in total we’ll span an 8 kilometer route from the boat. All the pictures will be collected and then stitched together using Windows Live Photo Gallery to form the world’s largest panoramic picture. The end result will be put into a DeepZoom viewer so it’ll become scrollable and zoomable and it will be sent to the Guiness Book of World Records.
The day is sponsored by Zoom.nl, Kodak, Canon and Olympus. They’ll be present to show off their latest cool gadgets and cameras, and at the end of the day some really cool prizes will be handed out in a raffle. Govert De Roos will be present during the day to guide the photographers with some tips and tricks, and he’ll host the closing keynote when everyone is back from the boat, around 5 PM. After that, there’ll be a walking dinner and a moment to network or talk to the sponsors.
If you’re an amateur photographer and would like to participate in this project, surf to the dedicated Live Space for more information (in Dutch) or send an email to photo-event@live.nl to enroll.
The event is co-hosted by the OSG and DPE department of Microsoft -The Netherlands.
May 16, 2008 at 10:51 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Community
There’s an initiative here at Microsoft that’s called ‘Give’. I wasn’t really aware of it until recently when disaster struck China and Myanmar. Here’s how it works: Microsoft partners with a variety of international organizations that support relief efforts, including The American Red Cross, CARE, MercyCorps - US, Save the Children, NetHope and World Vision. If you’re based in the US, you can donate to these or any qualifying organization via Give (internal site) and Microsoft will match your donation. If you’re based in China, Microsoft China will match earthquake relief donations made through a specially created site. If you’re based outside the US and China, you can go directly to the organization’s website to make donations.
Microsoft is aiding the various response efforts in China and Myanmar with technical resources, corporate donations and volunteer support. Our disaster response team is working with subsidiary teams in China and Thailand to help where it’s most needed, while Microsoft.com and MSN are highlighting ways the public can help. In addition, employees in many Microsoft subsidiaries have been working non-stop to support relief efforts. The Chinese Microsoft Employees (CHIME) Community has reached out to relief organizations in China and created an internal website with additional information.
A few things then became clear to me. We have our own disaster response team, which is - to say the least - pretty wow. And there’s a lot of social efforts within the company amongst the employees of all countries to contribute in any way they can, which I find really cool too. The Citizenship Program, as it is called, helps a load of organizations take advantage of tools, technology and resources that enable them to respond effectively when disasters occur.
I admit, things like these make me proud to be part of this company.
April 25, 2008 at 12:14 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Community, Mix Event
Ah! A joyful day it was. Steve Ballmer came to Belgium. I got up around 7 this morning and hopped in my car with my camera and flaptops. Drove aaaaall the way to the other side of the language border in my country and joined the local DPE team in helping to deliver a pretty sweet combo of events, hosted by Microsoft. I invited a bunch of bloggers and put them on the list of the Press so they could attend a press conference with SteveB and ask him some questions in a Q&A. As soon as I arrived, I helped out on the Silverlight demo a little by taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr so they could be pulled in live within the demo. I had 15 minutes to take pictures, upload them to Flickr and tag them so the API could fetch them. Sucked some bandwith uploading the 30 pictures (I added more later on), and saw the demo work juuust fine.
A little bit through the demo, I got the message that the press conference was about to start. I pulled some sleeves with the bloggers I saw in the keynote room, and we went to the press mezzanine. During the announcements, one of the bloggers asked Steve about social networks, and that ended up in coverage on valleywag! Talk about the power of blogging :) I bet if Steve would have burped, we’d get coverage on CollegeHumor and trillions of hits on YouTube. But let’s not drift away. Here’s the clip, courtesy of another blogger who recorded it:
In the mean time, another blogger was streaming the entire event, because as promised, there was wi-fi, and so the press conference has been broadcasted and recorded in full at the same time. Live streaming from the press conference of Ballmer, some Belgian politicians and the general manager of MSFT Belux. The news couldn’t have been hotter on a blog. Other bloggers in the room (they move in flocks) sat back and watched the scene.
The rest of the day, everyone could enjoy some sessions from the Remix event, the Beyond Hypertext or Digital Marketing track. Hundreds of attendees ate chunks of code, enjoyed exploring the tracks or sat aside in the lobby to network and discuss. Some even found their way to the sunny outdoors at the border of the lake. I loved it.
Quote SteveB: “Whooosh, and there it is.
Ballmer closed the day with a pretty interesting keynote, followed by a funny Q&A. I’m currently converting and compressing the session, and it’ll be online tomorrow. Then I drove home, got changed and was right on time for my Tai Chi lessons. I’m happy. High-Five ! Yeah!
Quote SteveB: “Bam!”
My impressions of the day: here on Flickr
Picture above: copyright by Bart Claeys
Pictures 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
March 29, 2008 at 12:17 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
I’m unfortunately forced to terminate my other blog, Coolz0r - Marketing Thoughts. With pain in my heart I say goodbye to Coolz, because it was one hell of a ride for 4 years long, since 2004, back when I still used to code everything in plain html instead of using a blog platform. The recent WordPress upgrade gave an error, and when I put back the backup files I took week after week, it became clear I had been backing up malicious or corrupt tables, which means I overwrote the good ones with the bad ones. I simply don’t have the time to go and fetch everything out of a search engine cache to restore it all. It hurts a little to say goodbye so abruptly, but that’s the way it is.
There’s no turning back, and it’s time to move on. No more Coolz0r. I’ll definitely remain blogging here, because my heart lays at Microsoft and I love to work for this company, but perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to focus on the now, and not on what used to be.
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
February 14, 2008 at 9:58 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Fun
Everybody knows that outsourcing is a common reality in a lot of companies. Also in Microsoft, global tech support is located in India (I think). Obviously we still have a local IT department that helps us out, but when the issue outgrows the local helpers, we have to log a ticket at ’support’. When they get back to you, you sometimes have to pay a lot of attention to understand what is being said, because a dialect is very often difficult to understand. Somebody recorded a follow-up call from global support, and it’s really funny :) Check this out:
Video: Microsoft Support Call
Painful, but incredibly funny.
February 13, 2008 at 2:09 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video
Ever wanted to find out how life really is at the campus in Redmond? Tina did. And she filmed it. And it’s funny :) Check it out:
February 5, 2008 at 12:00 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
They say high trees catch a lot of wind. I say: can be, but the view is priceless. And high trees have strong roots. Besides, it’s not windy all the time either.
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