Ra Puke Moana

http://www.markermetro.com/

https://www.cengagebrain.co.nz/shop/index.html

http://www.polleverywhere.com/

http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-shows-off-metro-style-windows-8-business-apps/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cdndevs/p/d3-ep401.aspx?WT.mc_id=otc-n-ca-loc-devs3direct-40725

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KA3Wdvl37ns/

“Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple, the company behind Base—a simple CRM for small businesses.

Welcome to 1889. The field of photography was just changed forever. Up until recently, the process of taking and developing photos was expensive and cumbersome. As a result photography was available only to professional photographers or rich people.

Then, a guy named George Eastman comes up with a new way to take photos. He develops a special flexible, unbreakable, rolled film that allows people to take photos and then send the film to a factory where the photos can be developed and sent back to the customer’s house. Suddenly, photography becomes available to everyone. Kodak is born.

However, Mr. Eastman had one other innovation. In 1892 he came up with an advertising slogan for Kodak: “You press the button, we do the rest”. More than an advertising slogan, it was really the first time in history that a company captured the user experience of its product in a single clear and crisp sentence.

Eastman understood that the key pain for the amateur photographer was the long and complicated process of taking photos. As a result, he came up with the idea that photographers should just focus on taking a great photo and that Kodak can handle the printing. He captured that in this single pithy sentence that described the unique compelling vision of the company. Let’s call this the User Experience Vision (UXV if you will) of the product.

From Paul Graham’s “Do one thing and do it well” to Steve Jobs’ “Focusing is about saying no”, the idea of focus is one that is often mentioned, and frequently ignored. After working with many startups, I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing more important for a startup than the ability to clearly understand what it builds and then relentlessly focus on it.

How can you achieve such focus though? Let’s look at two examples that will help explain the concept of a User Experience Vision.

Evernote is a note-taking tool. Every computer ships today with at least two or three free, pre installed, note-taking applications. How come Evernote is so successful? One reason for that is Phil Libin’s grand vision for the product. He wants it to replace your brain. Seriously. This is beautifully captured by Evernote’s perfectly crafted tagline — “Remember Everything”. So simple. So powerful. The beauty of this tagline is that it touches a real pain (you forget stuff), offers a compelling vision (you will now remember everything), and even more importantly – gives the Evernote team a beautiful User Experience Vision to optimize for.

When Dropbox was founded, there were probably more than 100 companies that were offering some sort of cloud storage or backup. How did Dropbox grow so fast? Phenomenal virality aside, the key to Dropbox’s success was a fantastic product. But what did Dropbox build? When they started their message was: “Your files everywhere”. Simple. Powerful. Clear. Now, as they move beyond that, it changed to “Simplify your life”. It relates to the Dropbox’s plan for the future.

The Ingredients of a Great User Experience Vision

It’s very hard to capture the UXV of your product in such a meaningful and concise manner. To make it easier, consider the four critical elements that make a great User

Experience Vision:

It addresses a real need – If you don’t know what is the need you are solving for, I suggest that you take time and think through it. Now. It will also give you a good starting point for defining the UXV and help you focus on what is meaningful for the user.

It is simple — keeping the UXV simple is critical so you can communicate it effectively to your customers, team, partners or any other stakeholder. If it is not simple, you probably didn’t figure out the right UXV yet.

It serves as a guiding light — a successful UXV provides guidance to your team as for what to build next. It can help you think through your roadmap and identify whether the next feature you are building will be useful or not.

It is unique — it does not apply to every other startup on earth. Don’t have as your UXV something like “Great User Experience”. The more unique it is, the more meaningful it will be.

It is not easy to come up with a UXV. It takes time. You have to intimately understand the needs of your users. It might take weeks to come up with a good one and either way you will keep developing and refining it. The time to start is now.

Excerpt image from Smashing Magazine”

-Sent from Weave for Windows Phone 7

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/18/the-next-next-thing/

“Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Kwindla Hultman Kramer, who is the CEO of Oblong Industries — the company known for developing the gestural interfaces in the film Minority Report. The company’s current customers and partners include Boeing, SAP, GE, and others.

Computers have been getting steadily “better” — faster, smaller, cheaper — for sixty years. But they get “smarter” — more capable and more broadly useful — in discrete leaps, the biggest of which don’t happen very often. We’re overdue for our next big leap.

Working with computers is intoxicating. The price/performance curve is always moving to the right. Every year one can do more: Design new user experiences, write new kinds of programs, and develop new hardware. In this context of constant change, it’s easy to focus on the trees rather than the forest. Good engineering is often about incremental improvement. Good business is often about finding product/market fit, while good design is often about giving users an interface that is easy to understand.

This is what’s involved when building the “next thing.” And it’s great, fulfilling, and indispensable work. But, of course, it’s also possible to build the “next next thing.” And we should be doing that, too.

The fundamental driver of progress in computers is that the number of transistors that can be packed into a given-sized integrated circuit keeps rising. So the cost of computing power keeps dropping. This trend is so important everybody knows the name for it: Moore’s Law. Since about 1960, Moore’s Law has resulted in the increase in raw computing power at a steady, yet incremental rate. But, viewed more generally, what we can do with computers could change that not only incrementally, but also in big, saltational leaps.

Progress isn’t just a megaflops numbers game. There are other drivers and constraints in addition to Moore’s Law. Some of these are technical, some economic, and some social. It takes time for us to figure out how to use, and to adopt, additional computing horsepower.

There have been three saltational leaps — next, next things — that stand out in the history of modern computing: Interactive, general purpose, personal computers; graphical user interfaces; and the Web. In the 1970s, computers evolved from batch machines designed for experts to interactive machines that a much broader population could learn and use; the desktop era had begun.

By 1980, VisiCalc was turning bookkeepers into computer users. By 1983 WordStar, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word were fighting for dominance in the exploding word processing market. In 1984, Commodore sold more than a million C64 home computers. By the time the desktop era was in full swing, though, the next next thing was already starting.

Apple released the Macintosh in 1984, a desktop computer designed from the ground up around graphics rather than text. The Mac was influential right away, but it took ten years for the Graphical User Interface to take over the desktop market completely. And by that time the next next thing was starting again.

Netscape brought the web to the computer-using masses, went public in 1995, and pushed Microsoft and Apple to take the internet seriously as a technology and commercial opportunity. Again, it took about a decade for this new mode of computer use to become ubiquitous and fully capable as a platform. By 2005, internet adoption had reached a tipping point at well over 10 million regular users, the term “Web 2.0″ was in common use, and powerful web services with APIs (like Google Maps) were beginning to appear.

This time, though, the next next thing has taken a little longer to come into focus. Or maybe it seems like that only because we’re living through it now, rather than looking back on it. Either way, though, it’s worth thinking about what’s coming, not just incrementally but disruptively, transformationally, mind-expandingly.

Phones and tablets are part of this, but we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be done on mobile devices. And mobile devices themselves are just part of the equation. So applications like Foursquare and Instagram are terrific (and important) but they’re only the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

What we need is a new set of approaches that knits together the entire user experience across all our computers and screens. The GUI unified our desktop experience. The web browser standardized client-server application development for the computing environment of the early internet age. The next next thing will give us the platform for the multi-device era.

We don’t have a name for this, yet. “Post-PC” gets it partly right, in that we’re expanding beyond the ideas that shaped the “personal computing” environment, in a number of ways. But post-pc is usually thought of as a move simply to new form factors. That doesn’t begin to capture the potential of what we can already build with the raw technology available to us today. And it definitely doesn’t capture the qualitative shift to a whole new way of thinking about the computing experience.

The transitions to the desktop era and then the graphical user interface were driven largely by Moore’s Law. But the arrival of the ubiquitous internet was a little different. “Web 2.0″ and all the subsequent advances in content delivery, mobile experiences, and embedded applications were enabled by vastly cheaper bandwidth, which is partly driven by Moore’s Law but is, conceptually and architecturally, a new ingredient.

In a similar way, the transition to more-than-post-pc will be driven by cheaper pixels. The fall in pixel cost has snuck up on us. We don’t talk about it very much. But the fact that a forty-two inch, two megapixel LCD screen costs less than $300 means that there are television-sized displays everywhere now. And a smartphone in a billion pockets is only possible because three-inch, half-megapixel displays cost $20.

One way of thinking about the next next thing is that we have a new resource available, all these pixels. Now we have to figure out how to make the best use of them. Pixels getting cheaper means that lots of them are in public spaces of various kinds. We don’t have interactivity just on our desktops or in our hands. We have it in our living rooms at home, in hallways and meeting spaces at work, on retail end-caps and every wall of trade-show booths, and plastered throughout airports and train stations.

We have to build some new top-level interaction techniques. These pixels that are suddenly everywhere aren’t like the scarce, fixed pixels of yesterday. For me, the Minority Report interfaces are still the gold standard here.

I want to be able to walk up to any screen in the world and point at it. And I want, in pointing, to actually reach through that screen into the network to get at all the content, all the programs, and all the communications channels I care about. And I want all the screens in my world — mobile or fixed, small or big, owned by me or just something I’m near — to be part of this networked ecosystem.

So that dream is about the interface, but also a lot more. We’re going to have to change some fundamental assumptions about what we’re doing when we write applications (and “apps”).

Making the most of the GUI required that we learn how to build new user experiences. We couldn’t just re-skin text-mode programs. Similarly, both web and mobile applications are most interesting when they leverage the “N squared” strengths of the internet — social, crowd-sourced, service-backed, able to provide both centralized and de-centralized building blocks.

Our next next applications have to make similar leaps. We have to make a transition from a mindset that applications are built around one person, one screen and one task, to a new world view that’s multi-user, multi-screen, and multi-device. We’re starting to see little glimmers of this.

More and more applications are using the combined infrastructure of the network, the cloud and the device to synchronize interactive state and content automatically. Users are taking the “two screen” experience into their own hands, mashing up broadcast consumption and social interaction in ways that are forcing big media companies to adjust. I can push the display from (some of my) mobile devices across to (some of my) big screens. And my phone can selectively tell other people and computational agents where I am and what information I might like to see pushed from their devices and their screens.

But, again, we’re just starting down this road. We’re going to need a lot of new stuff to get to really interesting new capabilities. We’ll need new platforms and tools, new standards, new hardware, new partnerships and business models, new coopetition and new evangelism. We’re going to have to try a lot of things that aren’t quite right to figure out what is right.

In other words, the next next thing is the perfect thing for startups to work on.

—- —- —-

The interfaces in the film Minority Report were designed by John Underkoffler, based on ten years of work he’d done at the MIT Media Lab. In 2006, John and I founded a company, Oblong Industries, to turn John’s vision of seamlessly interactive, integrated computing into commercial reality. So I’m a true believer. Oblong’s customers and partners include Boeing, GE, SAP, and other early adopters of game-changing technology.

Also, a big tip-o-the-hat to Michael Lewis’ “The New New Thing,” which is both a great book and a great phrase. I’m humbly borrowing and repurposing his title. Go read the book.”

-Sent from Weave for Windows Phone 7

Hi, I thought you might like this article: ‘Making Things See’ can teach you how to hack the Kinect

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WinRumors/~3/iOUmiIw9ga4/kinect-hacking-book-greg-borgstein

“With the Kinect, Microsoft is providing today’s hackers with a powerful off-the-shelf system for accessing motion controls and 3D imaging; letting people build things that would have been out of reach for anyone but experts and researchers just a few years ago. Unfortunately, as is often the case in the hobbyist world, the quantity and decentralized nature of online documentation can be daunting for first-timers, discouraging people that might otherwise be interested in joining the scene. Luckily, that may no longer be the case with the release of Greg Borstein’s new book Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino and MakerBot.

With Making Things See — the newest in the Make: Books series from O’Reilly — Borstein…

Continue reading…”

-Sent from Weave for Windows Phone 7

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/memorylens.aspx

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WinRumors/~3/BfDtyWpbtoU/microsoft-research-lifebrowser-eric-horvitz-private-data-mining

“Your computer contains a lot of personal information, from photos and email to calendar appointments and browsing history. And Microsoft Research is trying to make sifting through that content easier with a program called Lifebrowser. The software is able to learn what information is related to significant events in your life, and then lets you browse that content in a timeline. For example, Lifebrowser can look at how many photos were taken at an event as a way of determining how important it might be, or even analyze the photo itself to see how many people are in it. Once its importance is determined, the content is placed in the timeline relative to specific events. So, for instance, all of the photos and emails from your vacation…

Continue reading…”

-Sent from Weave for Windows Phone 7