Two earlier blogs and now this: Microsoft is serious about your home

The Wall street Journal reports that Microsoft quietly bought id8 Group R2 Studios to boost its Xbox business.

I already wrote about Domotica before and I mentioned Microsofts work in this area already in my blog about the HomeMaestro project.

If they pull this off I would love it. Beats DLNA imho (which is crap really…unless somebody can explain to me how to get it working properly) and the Apple proprietary stuff (full disclosure: I bought a Sonos P3 recently).

Much more information can be found at CNet.

 

The Power of Moving Pictures

When I came home from holiday, I connected my HD video-camera to my computer and was able to publish my recordings to YouTube in just 1 click (publishing on YouTube was actually even easier than putting it to a DVD).

Last month when I wanted to replace the hard disk in my MacBook, I found more than one detailed video on the internet with perfect instructions how to do that.

The Khan Academy has library of over 3,400 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice academic lessons available for anybody connected to the internet.

I can set up a video conference with anybody in my company who is online, in less than a minute.

Is it any wonder that video is high on the list of technologies that are important for organizations to communicate, train, support and sell their products and services?

(Increased) revenues are hidden in better communications and in targeted communication on different channels; Television, Internet and in-company broadcasting.

The Atos Scientific Community has researched the importance of video, the major technical and business challenges that industries face, and describes the opportunities opening up for system integrators. The result will be published in an upcoming whitepaper. (here)

Video will become so omnipresent and embedded that it will be the normal medium of communication


According to the research, we will see video technology appear in every part of our communication, supported by increasingly capable mobile devices and better connectivity.

It is even expected that the importance will take over from photography and written text.

Interactive capabilities and integration with social networks provide a large potential market that has not yet been completely monetized

This newly found importance of video is certainly not yet understood by everybody and still some time will pass before the right revenue models are available – most models now are based on counting the amount of views or the potential amount of people that are reached.

Increasingly we will see the value of data (including video) to be calculated against the impact of that data in social networks, the speed of distribution and the amount of response generated.

Last but not least I believe video will grow because it will just simply increase the quality of our communications – people talking with each other on the phone or in instant-messaging (I dare not mention email here…), especially across different continents, are just missing a big element of the part where communication leads to understanding.

True understanding in any conversation only comes from actually seeing you smile.

 



This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/09/18/watch-this-space-the-power-of-moving-pictures/

 


  

3 screens and a cloud – it means you are at the center

Image representing Ray Ozzie as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

Most of my regular visitors know I am a fan of the Microsoft (or Ray Ozzie for that matter) vision to merge cloud computing with 3 household devices; TV, Computer and Smartphone.That is why I have put this ‘mantra’ as a byline to my blog since its beginning.

Now a very good article was published in Wired Magazine by Tim Carmody, explaining how this will work out in a Microsoft world and beyond that.

A quote from the article:

Three screens and a cloud” was Ray Ozzie’s mantra when he was chief software architect at Microsoft. The idea is that desktop, mobile, and entertainment/living room experiences each require their own form factors, tied together by backend services that pull those devices together — and furthermore, that all of them in unison serve the function formerly known as “personal computing.”

The article continues to explain this is not just a Microsoft way of positioning their products, and at the end it comes to a very important conclusion. A conclusion I have always believed to be a essential aspect of the future of computing:

The central hub, the location/entity that combines all of these devices and clouds, is not a product, it is not a company, it is you.

All digital services in the cloud, all devices and all software agents can work together because you bind them together. It is your identity that allows them to know about each other and it is your personality that fills them with content.

I believe that to be a fundamental point and I am very glad to see that companies like Microsoft and other are recognizing that.

There is still hope.

 

(now if I only could get my Windows Phone to communicate with my very new MoBridge Car Kit, life would be wonderful – got any tips?)

threescreens

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Guess that quote (3)

Star Trek TOS logo

Image via Wikipedia

Nobody guessed our previous entry # 2. The quote was from Star Trek, episode “Q who” and was delivered by Q, the omnipotent being.

Our next quote is:

This is the way society functions. Aren’t you a part of society?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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