Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
Apple Will Be Just Fine, Thanks To Aggressive Jobsian Minimalism
Tech should be approachable, artful, and radically simple
The Jobsian philosophy is so fundamentally different from the ethos of the other tech giants--Microsoft especially, but also Sony, Google, Facebook, and (until last week) HP--that it's surprising that Jobs came from the same place and time. The core Silicon Valley companies all sprung from the tinkerers-in-garages set, a state of mind that's remained essential to techies decades later. Jobs was a key member of that group, and his work with Apple in the company's early years is not really so different from Microsoft's early work, though Jobs was always less of a businessman and perhaps a bit more autocratic (especially as regards licensing).
After he was ousted by Apple's board in 1985, he spent a decade creating another company, NeXT Computing, from scratch. It's tempting to chalk up his later success to some of the life changes that happened during this time (which you can read more about in )--meeting his biological family, getting married, having two children, beginning to identify as Buddhist--but the change in attitude and work habits that enabled his success might be more easily explained with simple math. The guy was barely 30 years old when he was forced out of Apple, and 40 when he came back. And it was when he came back that his vision coagulated into something tangible.
The Jobsian vision is a variation on minimalism, something completely unexpected when dealing with computers, inherently complex devices. To Jobs, computers are for real people. Not businessmen (ahem HP) or corporations (ahem Microsoft), but people. Computers should be beautiful objects. (Jobs at one point said, when resigning from Apple in 1985, "If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I'll feel I have lost Apple.") Computers should be intuitive and simple, but never dull. It is the duty of the computer's maker to discover the best way to do things, and to that makes that path difficult. And when you make something simple, the details become the most important thing.
our guide to Steve Jobs's minimalist ethos.
The easiest comparison, to me, is to a chef. Take the best ingredients, assemble them simply but precisely, and present a finished dish the way it should be consumed. No extra garnishes, nothing superfluous. Too much is worse than too little. No optional sauces, no mix-and-match, no "add this if you want." The chef is the expert here, not the patron.
That mentality has irked or infuriated the tinkerers, as well it should. There's certainly a sense of smugness--the Jobsian philosophy says "I know the way this should be done." And it has led Apple astray, sometimes. But Apple is also backed by undeniably brilliant engineers and designers (chief among them Jon Ives), which is why their products are successes more often than not. A composed dish can be amazing, or awful, but a buffet can only rise to a certain height. That's the Jobsian philosophy, anyway.
That minimalism has had an effect just about everywhere. Apple isn't just a gadget-maker; the products spearheaded under Jobs are in the Museum of Modern Art. They've inspired similar-minded folks in all kinds of disparate industries, consciously or not. Apple was one of the first to fiercely embrace the use of certain typographic ideas (especially the Helvetica font), which is now used in just about every location imaginable, especially all over the web. Every tech company at least tried the start their own content stores, from Microsoft's Zune to Sony's Connect (some were more successful than others). Companies like American Apparel copied Apple's minimalism, while just about every ad strives to hit an "Apple-like" note of innovation and hipness. Apple's success in the future won't rely on whoever's sitting in the boss's seat--it'll come from hiring brilliant folks and adhering to the model already in place.
Apple isn't like Sony, which crumpled in ability and influence after the departure of its two founders. That's because Sony's founders were amazing engineers and designers--but that's it. Without their two stars, Sony had trouble. But Apple has a guiding philosophy to lead it, one that can function with all kinds of different leaders. With any luck, Apple will be just fine.
The Recession’s Toll on the Green Economy
Home energy-monitoring systems have wilted, green job growth is lackluster, and we're left to worry about the state of green tech
Cisco Systems is the latest tech giant to abandon its foray into home energy management systems, on the heels of announcements earlier this summer by Microsoft and Google. Cisco’s networking prowess was supposed to help connect the various software systems used to control heating, cooling, ventilation and other environmental factors in a home or building, but the company is moving away from that project, according to Adam Aston over at .
The news emerged in an investor call last week, GreenBiz reports. Cisco’s own words on the subject require some kind of MBA jargon translator, but the gist is that Cisco is moving away from household energy-monitoring products, and will maintain a mere toehold in the industrial product market.
Previously, Google announced it was service in September, and Microsoft announced its will transition away from households to . Both programs are web-based tools that let individuals monitor their home’s energy consumption, analyzing usage and recommending changes that could save energy. But consumers have been indifferent — in each case, weak consumer demand drove the tech firms’ decisions.
A who attempted to use these products suggests their own abilities may be to blame here. Maybe it's not that consumers don't care about energy efficiency, it's that recommending an 18-cent-per-hour savings is just not that awesome.
Not everyone is getting out of the home-energy business — there are several other companies selling consumer energy monitoring systems, Panasonic, Intel, Apple and GE among them. But still, the departure of the above-mentioned giants is probably not a good sign. Perhaps it’s hard to convince people there's some value in learning about the nitty-gritty details of their own power use. Or maybe it's a symptom of something worse — that green trends suffer when a listless economy sends old-energy prices into a .
This possibility is reflected in the less-than-impressive growth in the “green jobs” sector, which was supposed to lift America out of the recent recession. The New York Times’ Bay Citizen project surveyed the field and found some in job growth, job training programs and even something as simple as weatherization projects.
Without consumer interest, corporations see little profit motive for going green, apparently even with government incentives. Many federal and state efforts, including several funding injections through the 2009 stimulus program, have “largely failed,” the Times says. Take, for example, California, which was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes. Two years later, the state has spent about half that money and created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter.
“Companies and public policy officials really overestimated how much consumers care about energy efficiency,” Sheeraz Haji, chief executive of the market research firm Cleantech Group, .
I'm not sure I buy the argument that consumers don't care about energy efficiency, but it's clear companies see it that way. What can be done about this disconnect? Tell us what you think in the comments.
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Brilliant Teenagers, World-Saving Tech and Dance Parties at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup
Teams from all over the world descend on New York City to launch their innovations: a note-taking system for visually impaired students, an in-car device that monitors driver safety and more.
Click here to launch a gallery of the winners and highlights of the Microsoft Imagine Cup.
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is an annual student technology competition that draws entries from all over the globe. I rolled into town for the worldwide finals, held this year in New York City. This is the competition's ninth year, and the first time the finals have been held in the U.S. Over 350,000 students ages 16 and up in 183 countries registered this year to compete in the Imagine Cup's nine competitions. Six of these are smaller, more specific challenges and didn’t have as large a presence at the finals. The big three, the holy trinity of the Imagine Cup, were game design (split up into mobile, web and Windows/Xbox), embedded development (building a separate, stand-alone device), and software development (a more general category). The top 100 teams (made up of 1 to 4 students each) in those three categories were invited to New York to showcase their projects. The top three teams in each category receive cash prizes, but the "Imagine Cup" itself goes to the winner in software development, last year received by Team Skeek from Thailand for their software that translated English into sign language in real time. Even for those who don't win, the exposure the Imagine Cup brings is proclaimed by several teams to be invaluable.
By the time I arrived, the competition had already been narrowed down to the top 21 teams, but the Times Square Marriott was still overrun with color-coded badge-wearing competitors, judges, Microsoft employees and international press. Banners hung around the hotel said “Make new friends. Gain new skills. Change the world.”
That’s the theme of the Imagine Cup: “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.” In developing their projects, teams were asked to think about the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, international development goals with the deadline of 2015. Many of the teams did address such goals as environmental sustainability, or combating disease. But a lot of the students are more personally attached to their projects. There’s the legally blind student who developed a system for visually impaired students to take notes more easily. A team from China made a hands-free computer control software because a team member’s mother is disabled. “These students are brilliant,” said Suzi Levine, director of communications and education at Microsoft. “They come bringing in their life experiences.”
The projects themselves are amazing. They are all, perhaps unsurprisingly, designed with Microsoft technology. I did see a Wiimote in one of the projects, and Levine assured me that the only Microsoft product teams are required to use is the .Net framework for software design. Regardless, it was always Bing maps, not Google maps; always Windows Phone 7, not the iPhone.
Finalists in the top three categories spent the next-to-last day of competition pitching and demoing their projects in front of a panel of judges who grilled them with questions. Teams were judged on how well they adhered to the theme, how well they communicated that their project could make a viable business, and how good of a project it was.
All the finalists put on remarkably polished presentations, but the software developers were the rock stars of the Imagine Cup. Perhaps it’s because they were whittled down from a larger pool than the other categories, so the competition was steeper. Whatever the reason, people actually interrupted their presentations to applaud. Fellow competitors with yellow badges scattered throughout the packed ballroom stood up and whistled, and judges who earlier in the day were congratulating teams on “making it this far” were now saying things like “that was awesome” and “I can’t think of any questions.” When OneBuzz, a team that developed a malaria prediction software, finished their presentation, they raised their index fingers in the air in unison like a boy band signing out after a concert. Ladies and gentlemen, OneBuzz has left the building.
While not all the presentations had that stadium feel, every team, across categories, has the strangest combination of idealism and pragmatism. Coming in, I expected pie-in-the-sky ideas for projects that could never really be implemented, or maybe just a more grown-up science fair, all whizzes and bangs but no practicality. There was an undeniable “change the world” mentality pervading the event. The leader of a French team whose television system allows seniors to easily send and receive messages actually said “the return investment will be in smiles.”
But what might come across as naïveté is belied by the depth of their knowledge about what it will take to actually get their project on the market. Almost everyone has an impressively detailed business plan involving field testing or clinical trials. They know their target audience and who they need to pitch to for funding. And they have no illusions about the flaws of their product, easily rattling off a list of improvements yet to be made when the judges inevitably ask. Many of the students see the Imagine Cup as their chance to get venture funding, according to Levine. “We try to pour lighter fluid on that,” she says.
All of the lighter fluid, and money, that Microsoft has poured into the Imagine Cup culminated at the awards ceremony. There was an emcee (a Microsoft employee), a celebrity presenter (Eva Longoria, who proclaimed herself a “techie”) and fog machines. Every student was promised a Windows Phone 7.5 when it comes out. Crazy mounted lights zoomed over the kids before the show as they draped themselves in their countries’ flags and danced to situation-appropriate songs like “Empire State of Mind,” “Don’t Stop Believing” and something about it not being about the money.
And it really isn’t. Yes, the event is extravagant and yes, the winners are handed giant five-figure checks. But Levine tells me many of the game designers will go on to release their games for free. The presentations I saw were very concerned with their business models, but not so much with the profit. They wanted to get funding to be able to produce their projects. This competition is not the endgame; it is just a stop along the way.
Video: Three Hacked Kinects and One 3-D Printer Make You Into Your Own Souvenir
Earlier this year, BlablabLAB set up a sort of interactive art installation on La Rambla, Barcelona's iconic pedestrian street. The user stands in the structure, surrounded by three towers with hacked Kinect sensors inside. Those sensors capture a 360-degree video of the user as he or she (or they) poses. That data is then sent to a RepRap, a very low-cost, low-resolution 3-D printer, which prints out a small figurine of the user(s) in some kind of thermoplastic. Instead of a wax lion or a "Yo
Video: MIT’s Quadrocopter Carries a Kinect for Autonomous Flying
MIT worked with the University of Washington on this project, using UW's SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms to construct these pretty models of the environment, using the data picked up by the Kinect's sensors. The SLAM maps are actually kind of a bonus on top of the main function of the project, which is to enable fully autonomous flight in areas without GPS coverage: SLAM maps are processed off site, but they're not necessary to the operation of the quadrocopter.
The project has some pretty obvious military uses, which explains why it was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office (way to mix up the naming conventions, guys). Being able to send a cheap, effective robotic copter that map an area without GPS or remote control is pretty valuable, a nice step forward for unmanned robotics. For us civilians? We'll take a super smart Kinectified Roomba.
You can check out our ongoing coverage of Kinect hacks here, and don't forget to read our guide to setting up the Kinect.
New Mobile App Builds Realistic 3-D Models From Cell Phone Camera Snapshots
Microsoft researchers used PhotoSynth technology to build the app, but it goes beyond that photo-stitching program and also calculates the depth of an object. The model determines the camera’s location in space and determines the depth. You don’t have to worry about capturing perfectly overlapping panoramas — the software can smooth it all out, as Microsoft researcher Johannes Kopf .
The software preserves straight lines and eliminates holes and weird triangular gaps, a common problem in 3-D stitching.
To make a model, you would walk around an object, snapping overlapping pictures from different angles. Upload them to a server for processing, and the app downloads a 3-D model that you can grab and spin on your phone’s touchscreen. It recreates your view as you walked around, allowing you to see the object from every angle. Technology Review explains in .
This could be useful for selling items online, among a myriad other uses. The app uses much less bandwidth than a 3-D video would, because it only needs a few images.
The project was developed at Microsoft's Interactive Visual Media group.
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Microsoft Shows Off Glasses-Free 3-D
The displays do this by using lenses or filters that divide the image between the viewer's eyes creating a 3-D effect without relying on glasses that use active or passive means to only show specific images to each eye.
Microsoft's new display relies on a wedge-shaped lens that doubles as the screen. It uses motion tracking to track up to four viewers and display a 3-D image to each of them. The motion tracking is vital to displaying 3-D without glasses, as this form of 3-D is impossible to achieve without knowing the viewer's head position. As we stated before, this can be done without head tracking but it only works for one viewer and that person must keep their head in a very specific position or the 3-D effect will be lost. With the motion tracking ability the display can focus the 3-D effect in real-time on the viewer by detecting and constantly updating their position. Nintendo is using this tehcnology combined with a parallax filter in their new handheld gaming device they announced at E3, the eagerly awaited 3DS.
The real breakthrough with this Microsoft display is the ability to track and display 3-D to four viewers at once. Currently the technology is limited to a 20 degree viewing angle, though the researchers feel they will be able to get it up to at least 40 degrees. In the case of LCD and LED screens you'll experience picture degradation at angles wider than this anyway, so it's not such a big deal.
3D without glasses is the holy grail of 3D TV so we will be sure to keep an eye on further developments of this technology.
This article originally appeared on 3DTVBuyingGuide.com.