August 12, 2008 at 11:33 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Fun
I have stickers like this too :) maybe I should put them on my laptop to evangelize a little more. :)
Truth be told, too few people at Microsoft use live.com as their search engine of choice. I mean, I know we’re a little behind, but we’re only gonna catch up at a face pace and take the lead even sooner when everyone sends in their feedback to help make our products better. Eat your own dogfood. No better way to state it. I often tell people to switch when I see them using google, just because I think that if you work somewhere, you gotta stick to the products. And more and more, I find relevant results listed on top. It took some tweaking and twisting, but I’m pretty convinced the guys of the team are getting it. Especially since the Findory guy, who ran one of my favorite search engines, Greg Linden joined the Live Labs. I have great hope for the near future. :)
thx, Maarten
August 11, 2008 at 3:55 pm ·
Filed under Projects, Technology, Releases
… and thinking you might want to check out the quality of the water first before you book your ticket? Then check out this project called Water Watch. You can check out the EEA water quality rating (guidelines of the European Commission) on the Eye On Earth map. Apart from the official ratings, visitors of the beaches can also express their ratings, which makes this an interactive map where you can recommend nice places to go to other visitors.
To view and rate the quality of bathing water at a bathing site:
- Zoom in to your selected site on the map or type the beach into the search bar
- If the “cluster” symbol is displayed, zoom in further until the individual location is represented
- Left click on the icon for your location to display historical data, and open the basic rating system in the pop-up
- To view detail on other bathing sites, simply left click on other icons
- Zoom out to go to the original view
Visit Eye On Earth to leave your ratings or explore the beaches
August 11, 2008 at 3:27 pm ·
Filed under Fun
Kicking off a new topic, the GotW. There’s too much cubicle humor out there to ignore it all, so I’ll line up the best one of the week, every week again :) What better way to kick off a Monday than with a comical graph made in Microsoft Office Excel?
Source: GraphJam - Pop Culture for People in Cubicles
August 11, 2008 at 3:06 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
Yeah, It’s been a while, I know. Stuff kept coming up and I was either way too busy or tired to write things. One of the rules of blogging I evangelized at podcamp in Seattle was that you should not blog just to blog, but only if you felt like it and you had something to share or say. Well, there’s been a ton of things I wanted to share, but I couldn’t because of non-disclosure agreements. And the things I could talk about were mostly discussed already by a number of other colleagues so I felt like chasing the train instead of riding it. Quite a lot of things have changed at Microsoft too, but I’ll tell you more about it as soon as everything’s locked into place.
Aaaanyway, a bunch of really cool stuff is coming up, and be sure I’ll be ahead of the curve again, as soon as I can talk about it :)
Below are a bunch of pictures from my recent trip to Seattle. If all goes well, I’ll be heading back there in the first week of October. Between that time and now, I’ll enjoy my holidays in the Dominican Republic and chill a bit to charge the batteries.
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:
July 3, 2008 at 10:43 am ·
Filed under Games, Fun
One of the funniest time-wasters I’ve seen in the latest year is the quite popular LineRider app. A very simple thing, but still oh so fun to try out. It’s been turned into a real art form by some, who’ve taken the design of their own game to the extreme (as shown in the clip below):
And to top it off, LineRider even got it’s own moment of glory as it was fully integrated in a MacDonalds commercial:
A few days ago, an email got sent around in the company that said the LineRider.com website was now running on Silverlight technology, which is an even better reason to try it out and promote it. And so, here we are :)
June 12, 2008 at 2:07 pm ·
Filed under Releases, Digital Life
The Release Candidate of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 for public testing is now available at this location. This is the time to install and upgrade, and to send feedback to the team so they can still tune the final version. Power Pack 1 provides a range of new enhancements, including support for home computers running Windows Vista x64 editions, backup of home server Shared Folders, improvements to remote access, more efficient power consumption, improved performance and support for the Chinese and Japanese languages. Power Pack 1 also resolves the data corruption issue experienced by a very small set of customers.
- With Power Pack 1, the Windows Home Server Connector software for home computers is compatible with 64-bit editions of Windows Vista.
- Customers can now backup and restore their pictures, music, and documents that they have in their home server’s Shared Folders.
- Uploading and downloading batches of photos or other files, at home or away, is now easier with the option of ZIP or self extracting .exe files.
- Photos are now presented as thumbnails on the built-in Home Server web page, making it easier for customers, friends and family to see photo collections.
- There is now more granular control of the access various users have to data on a home server. This is particularly useful for home based-businesses who want to give their clients controlled access to certain files.
- Windows Home Server can automatically decrease and increase its power consumption on some processors, meaning making it more energy efficient.
- Windows Home Server now supports and streams Windows Media playlists.
More info in the press release
June 12, 2008 at 1:16 pm ·
Filed under Community
I’ve been nagging before about Facebook and the utter overload on ‘apps’ which are in fact total time-wasters, but today when I logged in… I was kind of surprized to see how much activity there’s been in my network the last couple of days. Quite ridiculous in fact, and here’s why:
Pretty neat heh :)
I’m still not cancelling my account, but I really don’t want it to go any further than this. I’ll probably just go check the boxes to make myself no longer available for these toys. Hooray for Social Networking.
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 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.
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