Archive for Technology
July 3, 2008 at 11:02 am ·
Filed under Technology, Live Services
According to the awesome guys of the Live Search team, we recently bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. The exciting part of this rather administrative announcement is that Powerset adds natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
As they say on the Powerset blog: At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.
Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale.
That famous Wikipedia demo they talk about has been reviewed and tested by Ars Technica and they were pretty impressed with it. Powerset’s potential and passion are more than welcome, and I’m looking forward to seeing their technology melt together with ours to make the entire search experience better. Here’s a demo from their features:
June 12, 2008 at 12:55 pm ·
Filed under Buzz, Technology, Digital Life
Harrah’s Entertainment and Microsoft are unveiling a new interactive entertainment experience with the deployment of six Microsoft Surface units at the iBar in Las Vegas’ Rio Hotel and Casino.
Guests in the iBar will be able to play games, order customized drinks for themselves (or that special someone across the room) and send photos and messages to each other via strategically placed video cameras that can be controlled by the Surface units.
The iBar Microsoft Surface units will feature eight brand new interactive applications:
• Flirt Vegas style by adding a hip ultralounge vibe to the flirting experience. This application allows guests to create an exciting new way to chat and meet people from one Surface to another. Strategically placed video cameras at each Surface add even more energy to the action, allowing guests to interact with old friends, flirt with new acquaintances, and take and send photos across the lounge.
• Mixologists are inspired to create and order their own signature cocktails for themselves or to send to that special someone across the room using Surface and Harrah’s intuitive food and beverage application.
• Hip-notic describes how guests will feel when kicking back to find and view the latest and most popular online videos with their friends on Surface.
• Head Games are taken to a whole new level with Harrah’s creative suite of play-for-fun games. With the unique Surface interface, Harrah’s adds an exciting new take on some old favorites such as High Roller bowling, Dissed multiplayer pickup pinball, and a Last Call musical memory game that encourage the whole group to play together. Leaderboards add excitement as guests compete with one another to see who can climb to the top of the scoreboard. In addition to Harrah’s unique applications and play-for-fun games, the Surface units also feature a photos application and a virtual concierge application developed by Microsoft that Harrah’s customized for its environment.
• See and Be Scene is what guests can do as they tour all of Harrah’s Vegas properties and explore attractions in Vegas without leaving their seat at the iBar.
• Virtual Vegas aptly describes how guests will take a virtual walk down the Las Vegas strip on Surface, letting their fingers be the guide. Guests will be able to get information on the latest events and attractions at all Harrah’s properties throughout Vegas.
Thanks for the heads up, Nic.
May 16, 2008 at 12:54 pm ·
Filed under Video, Technology, Live Services
National Geographic Magazine is partnering with Microsoft to bring Stonehenge to life using the super cool PhotoSynth tool. The idea was to take a series of photographs and jigsaw them together in a 3D environment. Photosynth combines hundreds of high quality digital images and lets you browse them in a smooth way, so you can zoom in on details or zoom out to have a situational overview. The National Geographic Magazine team made a video about their collection and they’ve put it online on their site:
Video link
May 15, 2008 at 10:20 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases
It’s here! All yours to enjoy and totally free. I’ve made a demo about it, but it’s taking aaaages to upload and so after 3 attempts, I’ve decided to use Keith’s wonderful demo instead. It’s even better than mine, so turns out even better for you readers as well :) Keith points out most of the goodies in the little app, and the most coolest part of it is indeed the fact that the planets keep revolving, true to their behavior in real life. Check it out:
Go download WorldWide Telescope
May 9, 2008 at 8:56 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases
As announced on November 13th last year, the guys from the Microsoft Office team released a plug to help people with a handicap ‘read’ Word documents. It’s a simple software add-in for MS Office that converts text documents from Word into audio files, so people with a reading disability (or blind people) can still ‘know’ what’s in the document.
The add-in appears in the menu and shows as “Save As DAISY” (image below), just like when you’d save for an older version of MS Office, or in a different format. The plugin has been created together with Sonata Software and DAISY (which is an abbreviation for Digital Accessible Information System). The software allows you to save Open XML-based text documents as DAISY XML, which can then be converted to the DAISY Talking Book format (DTB). However, this last bit does require an extra bit of software called Pipeline, and is not included in the plug. As shown below, the plug is compatible with Microsoft Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP. I’ve experienced that during the install, the loader bar does not make progress very fast, and then jumps almost straight to the end. Might be because my demo laptop is pretty full already, but it’s just so you know. :)
The cool part about a DTB book is that the audio file encloses part of, or the entire source text plus a joint file that makes sure the text lights up as it is being read. Nice job!
Links:
Announcement Press Release
Download the plug
DAISY Pipeline (updated on May 7th)
MS Presspass: DAISY Virtual Pressroom
April 25, 2008 at 9:16 am ·
Filed under Video, Technology, Releases
On April 21st, Microsoft unveiled RoboChamps (www.robochamps.com), a simulated robotics league that is open to academics, hobbyists and developers from around the world, that demonstrates the power of the Microsoft platform to enable a broad range of developers to explore new ways to use .NET for robotics programming.
RoboChamps is built on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio(MSRDS) 2008 CTP, and uses that product’s robust, physics enabled simulation environment to remove the barriers of entry that exist for many today. This simulated league provides individuals with immersive 3-d environments, simulated versions of robots, and compelling scenario-specific challenges where they can win real robots.
The site also generates its own API keys so developers can compete and have their code tie into the site’s services, provides community with ‘robocards- rich SilverLight cards that are exposed to be readily consumable on blogs, websites or third-party networks like Facebook. Advertising also plays a big role with sponsorship, ‘in world’ ads with Massive, and Silverlight Streaming for the video podcast.
Check out Tina’s cool video:
April 14, 2008 at 11:01 am ·
Filed under Games, Technology, Fun, Gadgets
I have a few friends who own a Wii. As much as I love XBox360 and the experience it gives me, I’ve got to admit that this Wii has something special about it. I love playing with that too. I’m planning a Wii Weekend together with my friends to have 4 of them bring their Wii to a location, probably the garden of ‘friend number 1′, and have a giant screen with a beamer there, so we can game in group. I think that’s going to be a super great and fun evening. Other than that, the reason why I write here about Wii, is the clip that’s been released from the TED talks. Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. Lee is a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Enjoy this trip :)
April 11, 2008 at 12:27 pm ·
Filed under PR, Technology, Releases, Mobile
We just launched a viral video featuring the new shopping experience at AT&T, transformed by Microsoft Surface. This is exactly how Surface technology can be used in a store environment. It’s a new way your world connects with the digital world. Beginning April 17th in NYC, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco. I can’t wait to see the follow-up on this and take a closer look at what the other partners are cooking up right now for their products and services. Imagine how it will be for banking, in bars or lobbies… Innovation has a new front door, come on in!
Link: AT&T / Surface
Link: YouTube clip
April 11, 2008 at 11:24 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Live Services
Some significant improvements have been made to the maps.live.com service, and they’ve been pushed out just a few hours ago. If you’ve been heads-down and haven’t had the opportunity to poke around the product a bit and check out some of the great new work that’s been done, I think you’ll be impressed, and I can’t wait to see this rolled out on an even bigger scale. Here are just a few examples:
- 3D : Improved world realism by ‘densifying’ city data with much richer textures and 3D trees.
try: Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Dallas
- App: Supporting Safari 3 and IE 8 (try using Google Maps in IE 8 native mode).
- Collections: Use MSR’s MapCruncher technology to take your own personal map and overlay it anywhere on earth, then upload it to the collections database to share with the world through search.
try: Crunch sample including Seattle Transit
- Directions: Traffic based routing now uses MSR’s ClearFlow technology to predict side street traffic based on what is happening in the live feed we get from traffic.comtry: SeaTac to UW.
- Geocoding: With reverse geocoding support it is now easy to get an address from anywhere on the map, Just right-click on a building in the map and choose 1-click directions or drive to… and you’ll see a real address as the end point.
- Platform: JavaScript API support for all our new features, including Safari 3 and IE 8 compatibility.
- Search: Now including new review data from Zagat and Yelp, two of the best sources for restaurant review information, directly in our reviews listing.
try: Reviews of Papa John’s in Redmond
I love where this is going :) really! It’s things like this that bring the fun back to online demos. By the way, if you haven’t installed Virtual Earth yet, now is the time to do so (the map will prompt you as soon as you hit the 3D button). Tip: hold down the control key as you move the mouse, it’ll allow you to pan around.
If you want to know more about this update, the API update or the full list of released features, head over to the VE Platform Blog.
February 29, 2008 at 3:38 am ·
Filed under PR, Technology, Releases
I’ve done a few demos about the product already on a Circle of Media last year in October, and a few times as a speaker on some seminars and events in the weeks after that - when I was still carrying around the first samples available in Europe. The Belgian crowd has been waiting for it for a few months already, but as of now RoundTable has been made available in the local market! It’s still earlier as expected, since it was scheduled to be released in Q4, which is late Spring/early Summer, but they managed to squeeze off a few months and threw it into the wild.
From the release notes:
RoundTable can be used with Office Communications Server 2007 or Office Live Meeting 2007. The estimated retail price is $3,000 (US) and they can be purchased through a direct Microsoft order process and, shortly, via authorized resellers. Of course RoundTable is not only a great addition to existing customers, but can also help generate excitement, differentiation and demand for the overall Microsoft conferencing solution.
Belgium and Portugal were the last two countries to be added to the list of the Western European region, so now the device is available anywhere overhere, even though prices might differ from country to country (although the advized rate is the equivalent of $3K in the local value)
On February 1st, the RoundTable had already been released in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
Related: Product Specs
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