Microsoft Lightspace

• Interesting video demonstrating a 3D interactive system, whereby presenters can move light objects around a table, from table to screen, or person-to-person utilising infrared sensors Aka an interactive surface. I think we may have borrowed some ideas from external folk, because I have seen something similar using a reverse engineered Wii remote and a wearable interactive projection system. Cool tech though. Look’s like you need a steady hand to not drop the ball

Popplet

• Interesting application for sharing ideas via a kind of white-boarding flowchart like app. Also available on the iPad

• Here’s a video done with Popplet for a Work Smart from FastCompany

Gmail–priority inbox

• Well now that Microsoft have Mail Sweep, GMail now improve there already good web mail product
• Nicely done video

SharePoint 2010–Productivity hub

• Just installed SP2010 Enterprise and installed the free productivity hub from Microsoft. The hub includes Office 2010/SharePoint 2010/Win7/IE8 etc. content packs including videos, documents and links to blogs, coaches (tutors) and is nicely skinned in Silverlight just for good measure
• So that means a company who is hosting SharePoint 2010 can avail of a free training portal by way of a this site collection add-on. Very impressive set of documentation

Download here
Demo site here – you’ll need to login as corp\demouser with pass@word1 to see the content. You may also need to install Silverlight via the plug-in

Pivot and other stuff

• I’ve been off air for the last few months mostly coming up to speed on Office 2010 whilst developing some rather cool Excel training materials in PowerPoint 2010 as a potted set of training materials with hands-on demos, combined with videos and narration
• In between work and play I’ve also been developing a new company selling e-bikes over at http://cyclotronic.eu. A 2 year incubator company selling LEV (Light Electric vehicles) whereby I intend to have my own branded models and technology at a some stage. Grin factor 10 when you ride an e-bike into town, especially when you power up the hills – it’s like being a bionic man! Muscle power + electricity – a powerful cocktail for you adrenaline junkies and not to healthy types as well..
• Out of the Office 2010 apps, Excel 2010 impresses; mostly due to the outstanding speed it loads and performs calculations on Pivot table data. With Power Pivot it can handle a million rows of data on the 32-bit version and 100’s of millions of rows in the 64-bit version of Excel 2010 allied with Windows x-64 bit + oodles of RAM
• How does Power Pivot work? Clever compression algorithms that compress data both on disk and in memory .. more
• Gary Flake of Live Labs demos Microsoft Live Power Pivot. He shows off rather impressive PhotoSynth (Silverlight?) like application that can be used to Pivot web data. You can download it here. There will also be a Silverlight application you can embed in your own site, with your own content later this summer 2010

MS PP site
MS PP Gallery site – password is Pass@word1

Office 2010 documents shared on FaceBook

• Interesting collaboration project with FUSE at Microsoft Cambridge Research, Docs.com and Facebook whereby you can edit and share Office 2010 docs in the cloud with your friends and colleagues. Currently invitation only
• One of several incubation projects under Ray Ozzie’s tutelage to further Social cohesion

Ribbon Hero

• Now that we’re well passed the beta stage of this add-in I thought I’d give it another go
• What does it do? It’s role play tool that sets you challenges and measures your performance using Microsoft Office applications… and.. let’s you score points against you buddies and colleagues via Facebook. Kind of Mr. Clippy, but this time you win balloons!
• In Office 2010 there will be social connectors made available at a later stage, which in theory let you connect to Facebook, twitter etc and presumably share your skills via data mining emails or.. via metrics gathered via role play tools like Ribbon Hero
• I suspect this will end up forming part of a training platform via role play possibly with metrics linked to your job; maybe even linked to a remuneration scheme. Hard to tell how this will be routed. But there is plenty of scope for diversification
• I’d prefer a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)application training guide hooked into the ribbon to smart-sense what it is I’m trying to do, then present me with a number of options and let an WPF avatar trainer walk me through the process – hell, why not do the work for me, so I can take the day off and go flying ;-) Man that’s what I call being productive, arf