Microsoft India Shows The Kinect Experience For Diwali


Image credit: Gizmodo (They’ve got a good review too.)

It fascinates me how the Xbox team makes all the right decisions while the other divisions falter. I’ve written about Windows 7 missing the Indian holiday season but the Xbox division is looking forward to capitalize on it… unlike the Windows Phone department that won’t be launching Windows Phone 7 devices anytime this year. In a nicely done video the Xbox India team has people playing on the Kinect at a premier mall in Bombay. Kids in traditional clothes, crowd cheering and an senior person playing Kinectimals made me smile. Here’s the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can pre-order your Kinect from the Microsoft India Online store for Rs. 9,999/- Another video uploaded by XKCDont has some people getting an exclusive hands-on in a mall in Gurgaon, last month:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Microsoft India Shows The Kinect Experience For Diwali

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy


Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center. Image credit: Eternal Code

Steve B was at Moscow State University earlier today and he did exclaim his now signature three booms. During his speech at the university, SteveB focused on Microsoft’s cloud push. While talking about how Microsoft sees infrastructure a problem the developer shouldn’t be bothered with, he said that while working on Bing Microsoft realized this:

We need to improve the agility of software developers to be creative and innovative by separating the IT work that goes on in the datacenter from the work that goes on in the development community.

We learned this frankly the hard way as we built our Bing search service. Bing is literally hundreds of thousands of servers. We can’t have people saying, “Oh, I have to configure a new server; oh, I’ve got to manage a sever; oh, what if we’re going to take some workload and move it to a new datacenter, I’ve got to reconfigure the network.” We had to build an infrastructure that was self-managing and self-provisioning and that developers could do things against instantaneously.

A smarter, self adapting infrastructure based on  requirement is what SteveB is talking about. At PDC10, Pixar demonstrated their CGI animation application – RenderMan on Azure and the animators had servers at their disposal.

SteveB also asked students to friend him on Facebook. The complete transcript of the speech can be found here.

PS: No mention of Silverlight or HTML5.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Bing – The Eye Opener For Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy

Apple’s Magic Trackpad + Display = Microsoft’s Latest Patent Application

Just as Apple came out with the Magic Trackpad, there were rumors that Microsoft will be releasing a competitor, that wasn’t the case to be. Microsoft’s Arc Touch is different. But based on a patent application I came across Microsoft is planning to take Apple’s Magic Trackpad and actually make it magical. And how do they plan to do it? By adding a display and some natural effects to motions.

The patent application titled Touchpad Display, explains how Microsoft researchers envision the touchpad and a display working together. An image from the application that explains some of the concepts:

The top two images show the pad being split into a display and a touch pad, the display is adaptive based on what you are doing. The third image shows a trail after a finger motion, this is part of the project where animations are used to make the device more intuitive to human interaction. Quoting possibilities from the application:

In one class of examples, touchpad output module 42 operates in a visual effects output mode. In this mode, the output module drives the touchpad to display visual effects on the operative surface of the touchpad based on the cursor control touch inputs that are applied to the touchpad.

one visual effect is a finger painting effect, in which movement of the user’s finger across the touchpad leaves a persisting trail on the surface of the touchpad.

the touchpad could flash a particular color for the duration of a touch input, or the entire touchpad surface could be held at a particular color, pattern or image for the duration of the touch input.

Technically the Touchpad has two main components, the display subsystem and the pad. This different from the pressure sensitive mouse patent application I spotted earlier and will go well alongside the device charger with a display.

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Apple’s Magic Trackpad + Display = Microsoft’s Latest Patent Application

PDC10 Highlights

Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference 2010 happened last week and I was there. It felt amazing to be attending a conference that two years back I was watching on a broken Internet connection. Meeting Long Zheng, Paul Thurrott, Frank Shaw, Ed Bott, Mary Jo, Abhinaba, Brandon Watson, Kip and a lot of other folks was good fun. The part that wasn’t fun though was that I did not get a Windows Phone 7 device, that totally sucked. Having said that, listening to Steve Ballmer go “Boom baby!” live is something.

Bellevue is a nice city, not as dull as Syracuse nor is it as busy as New York City. Microsoft doesn’t have a campus in Redmond, Redmond is the Microsoft campus. They’ve got buildings all over the place and shuttles driving from corner to the other. I visited the Microsoft Store on campus and spent quite a bit thanks to my ignorance. Anyway, the three big announcements at PDC10 for me were:

  1. RenderMan being ported to Windows Azure.
  2. Server 2008 R2 VHDs can be run on Azure as is.
  3. The Windows Azure Marketplace.

Given that Silverlight is the dev platform I don’t think it is going anywhere, it was never meant to replace HTML but compete with Flash for rich media. The debate is unnecessary.

Here’s my picture set from Bellevue:

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PDC10 Highlights

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who did not get a review unit nor were given a LG Quantum at PDC 10 nor do you live in Europe, then like me, you are waiting for the 8th of November.

You can kill some of the wait time browsing through Bing’s Visual Search for Windows Phone 7 and other phone platforms. If your country preference is set to the US, you should see the 5 phones that will be available.

The use of Pivots makes browsing the phone catalog quite fun. You can fine tune your search preferences based on brands, carriers, form styles, features and of course Operating Systems. I’ve been looking around Visual Search making myself feel good that I shall soon own a Samsung Focus.

Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

Use Bing Visual Search To Find Your Windows Phone 7

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