Social Media goes hyper local for emergencies

Posted on April 28, 2009 by lewisshepherd

For the past year, whenever my group has had government visitors to Microsoft labs in Redmond to see advanced technologies, we’ve considered whether or not to show them a demo of a particular “secret project” being developed, now called Microsoft Vine.

vineIf the group was with local or state government, or related to homeland security, or emergency responders and the like, the answer was easier, because that’s the sweet spot it’s designed for.

But I was always tempted to show it even to my federal government friends – and anyone else – just because it’s so impressive!

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Place your bets on research

Posted on April 23, 2009 by lewisshepherd

No reason to sugarcoat the Microsoft quarterly financial report issued this afternoon: it reflected the bad news in the overall economy.  Revenue down, earnings down, profits down. 

What I did find most interesting was the silver lining as Business Week points out in its coverage. Like most of Wall Street apparently (MSFT stock rose in after-hours trading), Business Week was impressed with some of the positive steps taken by the company:

Maybe the most striking news is Microsoft’s crisp cost-cutting. Who knew this Midas of the computer industry knew how to scale back so well? In the quarter, administrative costs fell by more than $1 billion, from $2.3 billion to $913 million. And the company completed its first ever general layoff, of 5,000 people. The company did not cut into its R&D budget, however. Spending there rose from $2 billion to $2.2 billion.”

It’s that last point that I’m focusing on, as it demonstrates that the company is living up to CEO Ballmer’s pledge to increase our annual R&D spending – amid this deep recession – from $8 billion a year to over $9 billion.

At a time when most budgets are hurting, that’s quite an investment.  If you’d like to know what we’re getting for that, check out http://research.microsoft.com, or for the most up-to-date reports, use Twitter to follow @MSFTResearch – this week, the Twitter feed has focused on papers and demonstrations we’re presenting at the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009).

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Three cool new projects in Microsoft Research

Posted on April 1, 2009 by lewisshepherd

[April Fool’s Edition]   I haven’t blogged in a little while – been a little busy – so I’ll make up for it with a burst of three cool new things coming out of the inventive lab work at Microsoft Research – improving Twitter, computer performance, and mobile phones.

MegaNano: New High-End Camera for Cellphones

Many people are dissatisfied with the fuzzy quality of photos taken with their built-in cellphone cameras. So Microsoft will be rolling out this summer the most advanced built-in mobile phone-cam on the market, based on a fantastic prototype now in final user testing at Microsoft Research’s Beijing lab.

MegaNanoDubbed the “MegaNano,” the sylish but diminutive camera boasts 72 megapixel resolution and a shutter-speed setting range from 0.003 seconds all the way up to seven hours.

The itty-bitty MegaNano will be launched simultaneously with the new Microsoft Mobile Apps Store, bundled with a nice selection of jackets and outerware with specially reinforced pouch-pockets and backpacks designed to hold the tiny device. 

I know you’ll want one. One beta-tester says, “It’s so small yet so powerful!  I have to remind myself sometimes that the weight on my shoulders is actually a tiny camera!”

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Year of Data brings together Apple iPhone, Microsoft Surface, Google Android

Posted on January 31, 2009 by lewisshepherd

 

Neat video below (Stimulant’s “XRay” project), but first, why I think it’s neat:

Every year is the year of data, I believe.

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Microsoft gives Intel a ride

Posted on January 31, 2009 by lewisshepherd

For once, Intel shares space on a Microsoft bus, and not the other way around. (For the more typical arrangement, see Wikipedia’s straightforward history of the Wintel platform, still “the dominant desktop and laptop computer architecture”).

I’ve been following some of the output from this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, and noticed this very cute paragraph from the always interesting blog by Intel’s VP for Corporate Social Responsibility, Will Swope:

Earlier today I had just 12 minutes to get from a hotel on the “far end” of Davos back to the conference center. The session I was exiting had been organized by the World Economic Forum, so they organized vans to assure that the participants could get back to the main conference center. I was on the phone when I walked outside (feeble excuse for what I’m about to write), saw the van, and climbed in. At that time, Craig Mundie turned to me and said, “Will, this is the Microsoft shuttle.” He was quite gracious, would not let me leave, made room, and they gave me a ride to the center. Embarrassing…geez, you think?

Will, that’s not embarrassing!  But it does show that Craig Mundie’s a mensch.  Don’t know how to be a mensch? Guy Kawasaki can help you out.

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Way Ahead and Far Behind

Posted on January 22, 2009 by lewisshepherd

Today’s Washington Post has a story on its front page: “Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages.”

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.”

“What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.”  -Washington Post

Some say that whoever has been responsible for information technology in the White House itself should be fired — but then perhaps the change of Administration just took care of that  🙂 

Overall, this situation is familiar to anyone who has worked in what I call “Big-G  IT” or the information technology of a federal government agency. I’ve argued about its challenges and sub-optimality before: see my previous pieces on “Roadmap for Innovation: From the Center to the Edge,” and more specifically “Puncturing Circles of Bureaucracy.”  In that latter piece back in March of 2008, I wrote about the “the defensive perimeters of overwhelming bureaucratic torpor,” and the frustrating reality within much of Big Government: “Federal employees have an entire complex of bizarrely-incented practices and career motivations, which make progress on technology innovation very difficult, not to mention general business-practice transformation as a whole.”

Here’s the truly frustrating, mind-bending part: it isn’t always true!  Other elements of the White House have cutting-edge, world-class technologies operating day in, day out.

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2.0 View of President Obama’s Inaugural Speech

Posted on January 20, 2009 by lewisshepherd

obama-inaugural-word-cloud

A word-cloud produced (quickly) by the Los Angeles Times.  Befiitting the social-media aspect, the paper published it on Twitter immediately; don’t know if it will even be published as a graphic in the day-old “newspaper” printed and distributed tomorrow.  The New York Times, meanwhile, has the same for every previous presidential inaugural address as well – interesting to scroll back and forth to notice trends in presidential intentions.

Which lines was I most struck by? Because of my national-security interests, I was taken by the strong, even muscular statement to terrorist foes: “You cannot outlast us and we will defeat you.”  That followed on his opening with a declarative statement that ““Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”

Information Week has already this afternoon called it the “First Web 2.0 Inauguration,” arguing that “Web 2.0technologies offered plenty of new experiences and communications tools for those witnessing the historic event.”

Some of the best set of mashups using cutting-edge technology, to my mind, are the photographs from media and members of the crowd on the Mall, being synthed into 3D Photosynth virtual models. Really cool!inaugural-photosynth

 

Twitter and other social-media services and channels appeared to hold up well under the crush of traffic. I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of Microsoft’s official streaming of the entire ceremony for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, using Silverlight (same technology was used really nicely for global streaming of the Summer Olympics last year).  In fact, the online streaming was markedly smoother than the ability of the TV networks to speak to reporters reliably down on the Mall – it appeared that network and cellular traffic was constantly cutting out on remote video and microphones.

A moving day, brought to more people than ever before through technology.

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A Semantic-Touch-Flexible-Cloud Future Prototype

Posted on January 8, 2009 by lewisshepherd

One of the more popular posts I wrote in 2008 about Microsoft Research prototypes featured the “Research Desktop” project, bringing together semantic analysis with Web 2.0-style user interfaces. MSR is now supplementing those concepts with more natural interfaces and new display and touch technologies.

ces-future-prototypes

Tonight at the Las Vegas 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, Janet Galore of Microsoft’s Strategic Prototyping unit was onstage with Steve Ballmer, showing a conceptual demo of several technologies of the future which could significantly change the way people find, share and use information. Take a look at the video, which shows among other things new touch capabilities, semantic analysis, “Software + Services” integration of device computation with cloud computing, and flexible active displays.

By the way, that last one – flexible displays – was just highlighted by Bob Gourley in his New Year’s “Look Ahead: Some Technology Developments to Expect in 2009.”  I think this video’s example, about six and a half minutes ino the scene, really makes clear the startling promise of new displays.

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Stretching collaboration with Embodied Social Proxies

Posted on December 24, 2008 by lewisshepherd

My wife and I are spending Christmas this year at home in Montross, and I’m sad that we’re not visiting with family in North Carolina or California.  But I’ve been looking at some new Microsoft research efforts on how to keep in touch with people in more natural ways, particularly valuable for teams working across geographic distances, which is how our Microsoft Institute works.

The question of how distributed teams can work collaboratively is only going to get more challenging, with out-sourcing and crowd-sourcing. Last week the Institute had a great visitor to our Reston digs: Tony Hey, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of External Research.  Tony’s bio on Wikipedia mentions his thirty years as a leading European academic (particle physics was his game), along with the excellent books he’s authored: Einstein’s Mirror, and Feynman and Computation.

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March of progress with human consequences

Posted on December 9, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: Today Cisco announced a new program with “learning solutions partners” to support China’s growing IT infrastructure by “Nurturing Talent in More Than 100 Training Centers Across 31 Cities in China” (Cisco Launches Talent Development Strategy for China“)

Analysis: One day last week an enterprising handyman in my little town of Montross, Virginia spied a large sinkhole in the long driveway leading up to our house. He offered to my wife that he’d fill and level the hole for $20.  Sold! Continue reading →

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