the unimaginatively named: lewis’ blog

…for the medium business downwards, quite likely, here’s the current feeling:

Mary J Foley: With Wave, did Google jump the (Microsoft) shark?
Paul Thurrott: First Look - Google Wave 
Twitter: SharePoint and Google Wave

Features
For the SharePoint features I see most small and medium size companies using… (as a SharePoint consultant), Google Wave may well hit the spot. So how does it match up against SharePoint? Here are a few things I can’t confirm are in the “Google wave product”, but features that may be deal breakers for potential switchers:

1. Workflow (could be provided by extensions)
2. Metadata on Waves/Posts (to emulate content types)
3. Security – this is the big one, how to make someone a commenter but not a contributor to a wave? how to have the granularity of permissions levels?
4. Microsoft office integration – well if Google docs/spreadsheet etc are enough, then this will be an awesome addition.
5. Skinning/Branding – could be provided by a third party that wraps the Wave engine into a CMS/Wiki/Blogging platform.

Read on for some more devil’s advocate……

Eye-tracking on a tablet. Why? because no one wants to hunch over the table when writing their shamefully dull memoirs, and neither do they want to sit back and squint to read the screen…Just a little idea from the sketchbook:

more images after the break…  

So, nearly 2 years after starting this blog, it seemed like a good idea to write some posts. Over the next few weeks i will be updating the theme and putting together some decent posts. In the spirit of “fail culture” i will make live changes to scripts and design whenever I find time.

new tools for blogging on the new mac:

• Ecto
• Coda
• jQuery

Ok, a little bit of futurology for you..Every now and then I will put a few company’s products together and come up with some predictions about the near future, in terms of what products, services and technology will be needed or might emerge.

Today’s Equation:

Secondlife + PS3 Home + (VirtualEarth * Crytek engine) + Cardspace =

Lets start with video-conferencing. At a high level, video conferencing simply provides a window into another place in the world through the internet. High-quality video and audio then provide a fairly emersive environment for people to talk, collaborate and socialise without needing to be physically next to one another.Video calls today are almost always ‘active’ experiences, where the call is initiated much like a phone call, with a specific purpose and requiring the immediate attention of the other callee(s).

So imagine if video conferencing could become a ‘passive’ experience in some way, where the video/audio connection to that other place in the world is constantly open, and so it now becomes your choice whether to passivley watch it, or actively interact with people on the otherside….

Lets explore an example; imagine if two coffee shops could have displays spanning a whole wall, each set up as digital window into the other, with sound and video mirrored both ways (similar to UNC’s inevitable “office of the future” concept above). Would this simply be another marketting gimmick to help Starbucks force more mocha-lattes into you, or could it actually have a use?

The Mouse (1972-2008)

So, all of the major players (incl MS) are now looking toward making touch devices that interact more like physical objects than computers; i.e. the traditional pen + paper, blackboard or fridge scenario.

Why is this happening? I think the quick answer is that hardware and software have come to the point where touch/pen/voice interactions are possible at the speed that consumers expect. But perhaps a more subjective answer would be that consumers have growing expectations of simplicity and speed when it comes to computers, and perhaps the market has started to show this, and maybe this is why we see hardware and software companies now clammering to react.  

Everyone is moaning about Digg not having a Picture section, so I thought I’d weigh-in on the feature request posts. Why Digg should do a debates section?

Ok, a little bit of futurology for you…Every now and then I will put a few company’s products together and come up with some predictions about the near future, in terms of what products, services and technology will be needed or might emerge.

Today’s Equation:

SharpCast + Microsoft HomeServer + Orb Networks =

Imagine everything you have on your computer is backed up, automatically. You set it up once, and your files are backed up to your home server in your closet, and then onto remote storage supplied by a company selling raw storage in a storage facility. This is something that MS Home server will allow you to do when it ships this year.  

Ok, a little bit of futurology for you..
Every now and then I will put a few company’s products together and come up with some predictions about the near future, in terms of what products, services and technology will be needed or might emerge.

Today’s Equation:

Microsoft VirtualEarth + Photosynth + Vexel Inc + Seadragon =

Errrr……equals Microsoft?! The first two are Microsoft, the last two were acquired by them.

Seadragon were acquired by MS for their technology which allows for incremental streaming of images. So when you are zoomed out of an image, you have only streamed the low res parts, and as you zoom in, more and more detail of the section you can see is streamed to you.

thoughts on voice recognition for computers

Why Voice? Voice doesn’t make sense in so many areas, particularly in the office cube or even the home office. Key to a company’s success in this area will be understanding where this is best used, but more importantly, where people are most comfortable with using it.

So i am checking out blogging software, wordpress came up trumps purely because i can mess with the css for a reasonably small amount of cash. This foray into the blogging world was primarily spurned by watching a hideous amount of channel9 and podtech recently. If i continue with this, i will likely post an awkward mix of techie stuff, utopian politics rants and on odd occassion music reviews.

I have also been playing with Vista’s media center with democracy player and tvrss to download video for free in a sky-like fashion. Democracy player beats iTunes because it downloads feed based shows/podcasts via torrent as well as traditional http downloads that you do from websites. Anyways, i’ve subscribed to a whole bunch of shows this way including “the oc” and “heroes”. It’s kinda nice just turning on media centre and seeing what’s been downloaded for me…

random links
me.dium - an interesting attempt at making browsing a social experience.