Browse by Tags

A couple weeks ago I told you about the public preview of GeoFlow a pretty amazing data visualization plug-in for Excel. One of the reasons tools like these are in such high demand is because of the lack of qualified professionals who can make sense of big data. Data visualization has the potential to...

One of the most prominent themes at TechFest this year was the visualization of data. Projects like Sketch Insight and SandDance showcased some pretty cool experiences that give you new ways to slice and dice data – though with the caveat that these are research projects with no definite plans...

Over the last few days Microsoft has provided glimpses of our vision for the future and where technology could take us — first with the opening of the Envisioning Center , and then yesterday with a conversation hosted by Craig Mundie and Eric Rudder regarding Microsoft’s strategic and technical...

This week, the Microsoft News Center is publishing a series on Big Data and where Microsoft plays a role. There’s an interview with the CIO of The Weather Company about how weather impacts businesses, something that's especially timely with last weekend's wintry blast. Apparently there’s...

If you read my CES trip report a couple weeks ago then you might recall my comment about Ford’s work in helping consumers optimize when they use electricity—a program they call MyEnergi Lifestyle . Since returning from Vegas I’ve stumbled across a few articles here and there that really...

This was one of the many provocative statements in a book by Herman Miller I read recently. Always Building is a fascinating look at what buildings could be like if we used digital technology throughout the lifecycle of a structure. It challenges many of today’s building concepts where technology...

One of the goals of user experience design is that the technology fades into the background, so the only thing a person sees or experiences is the content and the message it conveys. I saw a great example of this recently in a browser experience of the AIDS Memorial Quilt – each panel commemorates...

The MinuteSort benchmark is considered the “World Cup” of data sorting and is concerned with measuring how much data can be sorted in sixty seconds. Using a new technique called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS) a team from Microsoft Research (MSR) has just sorted almost three times the amount...

You’ve probably heard the phrase “digital memories” many times and like me, you likely think of this as digital photos and perhaps emails or other personal information that reside on a computer somewhere. Ask most people and I think they’d generally think this meant photos. I...

Towards the end of 2011 and in the first few weeks of 2012, the usual raft of technology predictions started to spread across the web. I’ve enjoyed reading many of them given that I spend my time talking to people across Microsoft about where they think the future lies and what technologies and...

A couple months back I mentioned how I want to expand the focus here on Next at Microsoft to include more about the societal impact of technology. The geek in me loves all of the technology we cover here, but the profound impact that technology can have on the world is something I think deserves more...

Another nice find from @thatrobguy – 1000memories.com does a great job of estimating how many photos have ever been taken, both analog and digital. Their analog estimation is astonishing with 85 billion photos being taken in the year 2000. As we shift in to the digital age, the initial uptake was...

I have something of a man crush on data – ever since I started chatting to our MSR folks who are big on machine learning. This month’s GOOD magazine is a great read to give you a sense of how we’re becoming a data driven world; it’s subtitled “ The Data Issue ” and...

The Microsoft Tag team are cranking out infographics at quite a rate recently and this one showed up on their blog just over a week ago – I thought it was worth sharing here given I’ve spoken about how the world is becoming clickable and Tag will be a part of that. As Holly said in the post...

Excel 2010 introduced “sparklines” - intense, simple, word-sized graphics” , as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence . Think of them as micro charts inside an Excel cell that bring visual meaning to numbers . Well you can now bring sparklines...

Back in March I wrote a post on the Official Microsoft Blog about the collaboration between our products teams and Microsoft Research. The infographic has had a second lease of life this week as it was included in a story on the Microsoft News Center regarding Avatar Kinect and I noticed The Windows...

Video: Bing Maps Global Ortho Project The Bing team has a pretty healthy frequent flyer balance courtesy of the Bing Maps effort. Quentin Hardy at Forbes had a post on Bing today that brought me to this conclusion. He posted a piece about Bing Maps and their Global Ortho Project – an effort...

[image credit: noraomurchu ] Can Brighton, England lay claim to having the world’s biggest infographics? I suspect so. Tidy Street in Brighton is anything but tidy at the moment as a graffiti artist has been at work, daubing the streets with huge letters and numbers. It’s all part of...

Our friends over at Tag have just posted some interesting stats about mobile use , in the form of an infographic. Lots of revealing data there about the present and future of mobile, for example – 86% of mobile Internet users are watching TV while they use their device . If you’ve followed...

[image courtesy of Ariel Stallings ] Say machine learning to most people and they’ll look at you suspiciously – even people in the tech industry have a degree of caution is it conjures up notions of machines taking over the world in some sort of Terminator / singularity way. I think it’s...