The odd ramblings of a geek pretending to not be "all grown up" : MSP

Imagine Cup Local Finals – Register your attendance today!

AndrewParsons — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:49:47 GMT

COOL! We’re on the final approach for Imagine Cup 2009 and I’m happy to announce that we’ll be holding the local finals for Australia on the evening of the May 27th.

The top teams who have entered the Software Design category go head to head with some incredibly creative and innovative ideas on how to make our world, and our country, a better place.

This year, the finals are open to the public although seats are limited. Come and see the competitors present their solutions to a panel of judges from the industry, media, academia and Microsoft and find out who will be going to Cairo, Egypt to represent Australia at the worldwide finals.

This is a great opportunity for students, teachers and faculty to see why we are so keen about Imagine Cup and how it can help make a difference through technology.

The details:

Date: 27 May 2009
Time: 6:00pm start, finishing approximately 9:00pm
Where: Microsoft Australia office
1 Epping Road
North Ryde, NSW 2113
Cost: Free to attend

To ensure you’ve got a place, send an email to Australian Imagine Cup with your name, contact phone number in case of emergencies and how many people you’re registering for, if you’re bringing more than just yourself. Note that if you do not register, you may not be admitted to the event if we’re oversubscribed, so don’t miss out.

Hey, I almost forgot, for those who register, you might even get a chance to win some cool lucky door prizes.

Student Daze Day One

AndrewParsons — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:10:39 GMT

Well, here we are in the middle of day two and I’ve finally got more than a few seconds to write up yesterday’s experience. It was an absolutely full-on day – 6.30am start and a 11pm finish (originally scheduled to go to midnight but the students got an early mark).

The day started with a series of shuttles picking us up from the hotel and taking us over to one of the dozens and dozens of buildings that make up the Microsoft Redmond campus. After weaving our way to building 122 we spent the first little while having breakfast and doing initial introductions. At 9.15 we got the proper stuff underway.

Disclaimer: Unfortunately a lot of the stuff we saw/talked about was under NDA and so I can’t give much detail here (which is also why my twitterfeed went quiet from time to time).

The first session was Popfly with an introduction how general mashups and Popfly games can work. A lot of the MSPs had used Popfly before so it wasn’t too long before we dove down a little deeper and looked at code behind and how to create your own block.

Next up was the blogging panel run by Frank Arrigo. Frank pulled together a bunch of great guys to talk to the MSPs about the importance and pitfalls of blogging, including Major Nelson from Xbox, Jeff Sandquist, Lawrence Liu and Warren Sukernek.

Following on from here we heard from the open source team talking about all the things Microsoft does for the open source community. This was pretty cool because Microsoft are actually involved in a heap of open source projects and initiatives, and have a dedicated team to do it.

The highlight for many of the students was the next session – all about Mesh. The Mesh team showed off a few different scenarios including meshing between Windows PC, Mobile device, Mac and the online client. There was plenty of talk about Mesh futures but obviously I can’t talk about that. The real time demo included taking a photo on the mobile and then letting it sync with both Mac and desktop right there in front of everyone. Then we went to the web version and could view the pic there too (interestingly the pic review is done in Silverlight – woo).

The last formal session of the day was all about XNA Game Studio and Creator Community. While the news for Australia wasn’t good – we’re definitely not in the first phase to allow homebrew games to be bought and sold on Xbox Live Arcade – there’s still hope that we’ll be included in one of the next phases. Mostly the session talked about the program itself, including the Dream Build Play competition (which IS open worldwide) and what’s involved in the Creator Club which was pretty cool. Even so, we still had time to preview the new experience for Xbox - it’s gonna rock, can’t wait to get it on my Xbox 360.

Now it was time for some fun stuff. The MSPs all scored temporary access to the Company Store and each received a gift certificate to spend in-store. Many a mouse, game, shirt and souvenir was purchased and lots of smiling faces were seen leaving the store on their way to their next destination.

Which turned out to be a tour of the House of the Future. I can’t talk about this one much – we weren’t allowed to take cameras in – but I’ll say that I’d like to see a number of the technologies sooner rather than later. :)

Oh, alright – a couple of highlights. First up is RFID tagging everywhere. You’re in the kitchen and you get the blender out and throw it on the bench, followed by a bag of flower. Seconds later, you see a message broadcast onto the bench suggesting possible recipes based on those two items along with the other ingredients the house knows you’ve got.

Or when you receive a pizza fridge magnet, the message board displays weekly specials alongside the magnet. Or you bring a souvenir home and put it in the display cabinet and the system recognises it and highlights related bits and pieces. This was particularly cool; there was a display cabinet with nine panels – the middle one being a shelf inset. The other eight were digital frames cycling through photo streams. When something RFID enabled is thrown into the shelf, however, it bursts into life, searching through the entire family’s photo history looking for photos of the object or location (for instance, the RFID tag may have identified that the thing was bought in Paris, and so any photos of that city would be included). Just a subtle way of how technology enhances your experience and keeping your environment fresh.

The second thing that I liked was also connected to this display cabinet, that they refer to as a sharing box. It is the interconnectedness with close family that it brings. In the future, they envisage connecting each panel of the cabinet up to a different family or family member. For example, the top left corner in the demo house was connected to their grandmother’s house. Any photos they upload to that particular box’s stream are automatically shared with grandmother, and vice versa. It also has indicators telling them when she’s around, etc…

(Thinking about it – this would be quite easy to realise – have a Mesh folder of photos you share with your extended family, and have wireless digital photo frames pointing to the Mesh folder, and voila, everyone gets a copy of any photo added to the folder… I think I’m going to implement this when I get home!)

Finally, time for a major relaxation effort with a pizza and Xbox night. This was hosted on the top floor of Lincoln Square with 270 degree views of the city, loads of pizza, beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages for the underage MSPs (remember, drinking age here is 21). There was a lot of good conversation, lots of Halo, Soul Calibur and Burnout Paradise, and the highlight for me – Rock Band 2… w00t… can’t wait for this to hit Oz.

And that was it – but it was a very long day. Day two is just as full on in terms of schedule, but so far seems to be more manageable. More later.

Student Daze – a little taste of the world

AndrewParsons — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:08:13 GMT

As I mentioned in a previous post, Student Daze is a Summit for MSPs from around the world. This morning we caught a shuttle (with very dark tinted windows) over to the Redmond campus for a day of amazing sessions. In just this one shuttle of 8 or so guys, we ended up having a tour of the world – just check out all the countries where these boys are from:

Student Daze Twitter

AndrewParsons — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:18:00 GMT

Just to make it easy on myself, I've been twittering through the sessions little tidbits of info. You can follow me on www.twitter.com/mrandypuppy. Alternatively, search for the #studentdaze tag (here's a direct link: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23studentdaze).

Check out Frank's blog post on the blogging panel here: http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2008/09/25/back-from-the-blogging-panel-for-the-microsoft-student-partners-summit.aspx

Student Daze Day Zero

AndrewParsons — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:47:31 GMT

The cool guys at Microsoft HQ decided it would be a good idea to celebrate the MSP (Microsoft Student Partner) program by inviting a small number from all over the world to come together for the first Student Daze MSP Summit. This two day conference is jam-packed full of sessions for the MSPs as well as a bunch of entertaining activities as well to really have fun with.

I was fortunate enough to get scope to invite two Aussie MSPs to the event, and now the three of us are sitting happily in our hotel in Bellevue, waiting eagerly like little boys who can’t wait for Christmas morning.

It was a tough ask to select two from the more than two dozen MSPs in Australia – there are a bunch of guys who could have easily made it, but unfortunately I couldn’t get to invite more, so had to make the difficult decision (to help highlight how blessed we were to get two – the whole of the APAC region had an allocation of four – and I finagled 50% of them to come from Oz).

Anyhow – the two that ended up being invited and who accepted before I even got the words out of my mouth are Luke Kim from over in Perth and Edmund Tse in Sydney. These two guys are very much representative of the great individuals we have in the MSP program in Australia and I’m really looking forward to getting to know them better and helping them upload as much information as they can so they can bring it back to the rest of the MSPs.

So, as I said – here we are in our hotel, waiting for the morning. We’re told we have to be down in the foyer at 6.30 and even that didn’t elicit a groan (well, not a big one anyhow). Tonight we went looking for a reasonably priced restaurant and found a southwestern grill across the road called Z’Tejas. Turns out that Edmund is underage as far as Washington state is concerned so we couldn’t even go in one place!

Luke and Edmund at Z’Tejas

Gonna try to hit the sack now – the next two days are going to be a wild ride!