At the keynote this morning at PDC 2008 Rick Rashid talked about Microsoft Research and how an inspired decision 17 years ago has led to the premier research facility in the field of computer science. With my background having graduated with a degree in computer science, it’s fascinating to see the scale...

About a year ago, my pal Steve Clayton (happy birthday buddy) unleashed a genius viral marketing ploy aimed at starting a conversation about Microsoft.  It was really a call to arms challenging the company to reinvent itself. To innovate.  To change the world. Today we really did announce some...

Great news today that the Worldwide Telescope project is now unveiled and you can download the software yourself and explore amazing scenes in space.  It's based on some of the best telescopic imagery on the planet and provides a rich way of navigating around the sky whilst zooming in and out of...

One of the technologies announced at Mix 08 this year was Deep Zoom as part of Silverlight 2.  It allows you to zoom into incredible amounts of detail in high resolution photos and cleverly only brings back the amount of data you need based on your current view and zoom level.  This allows...

I'm off tomorrow to California for a few weeks of holiday and also off to Mix 08 in Vegas next week.  If you're in the Bay area or the valley and want to meet up for a coffee then drop me a note at james@microsoft.com . I'll be checking in with the odd post here and there but I wanted to leave you...

The BBC have been working with the Live Labs team to bring five famous British landmarks into the Photosynth world and to you at home. If the word Photosynth is unfamiliar to you then I would recommend watching it's creator demoing it at the recent TED conference - it's a really stunning view. Once you...

They are finally understanding it! Another excellent name and another cool brand - Microsoft Surface . I can hardly contain myself - someone in marketing actually is changing Microsoft bit by bit. Could this be another trait of Ozziesoft - cool product names that inspire and that are easy to say and...

Configuring a wireless router or modem can sometimes be a little tricky for the average user, so one of the certifications for Vista aimed to take away the pain when setting up your home network and this video from Ben Reed on the Vista Team blog . Ben shows off how you can setup the router just by entering...

A partner I know is currently looking to render XPS and now a very clever chap inside Microsoft ( via Mike Taulty ) has been playing around with doing it in Silverlight . The app is very cool and has nice controls to boot. Bear in mind it's just a proof of concept but you've got to admire the possibilities...

Wow the innovation keeps on happening ( back story to lack of MS Innovation)... today via the Virtual Earth blog I found a rather cool video which shows off the work of the MS Research team that are doing stuff with HD Photos that size up to 4 Gigapixels and more! Looks like there are some cool partners...

Shall I file that under innovation ( back story )? Yes I think I will. Technorati tags: Microsoft Innovation , Silverlight , Popfly

WinHec - the event where hardware meets software - has recently been live and there have been some interesting announcements come out of the conference, in particular about Windows Vista SideShow. If you're not familiar with SideShow then take a look here . I mentioned recently about the SideShow Fridge...

Yes you read it right... one of the things that emerged at WinHec was a Wireless Fridge Magnet which leverages the Windows Vista SideShow platform (back story about Vista After Hours) that can stream content from your Vista PC to the device. Cool (no pun intended). The company behind it is http://www...