Driving Interactive Mobility with Microsoft Tag

brentphillips — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:13:00 GMT

If you work with documents, images, blogs, or other digital information, you are probably familiar with tagging. Keywords, or meta data, can be used to describe the information in question (a file, unstructured data, etc) which later helps indexing and searching. The following is a slightly different take on tagging that promises to foster new experiences in interactive mobility. By using coded images (think barcodes) and a small app in a camera-equipped smartphone, users can interact directly with their environment, in real-time, to receive new information, or find new experiences, through their device.

As the FAQ states, anything from billboards, to product packages, to business cards, can be equipped with such an image. As a simple use case, imagine reading a tag on someone's business card, then being shown - on your device - a small videocast describing that person's business. Or perhaps someone who is visually impaired can tag a product to 'hear' a description rather than having to read a small font on a box. The scenario's are endless...I see tremendous potential from a marketing, usability, and even transaction processing perspective. As it concerns interoperability, I see great value in the fact that we are simplifying the transaction between the device and surrounding infrastructure through a discrete and 'simple-to-deploy' component pair. The software is available for most devices today and the tags will be deployed in various media by anyone who wants to use them. The tags won't care what 'reads them' and the devices won't care what produces the tag (screen, paper, etc).

The Tag service is in beta today. For more information, check out the website here: http://www.microsoft.com/tag. If you want to try it out, by the way, visit the site to grab the app. I've created a test tag here that loads my personal blog into your mobile web browser...

The connected experience and a bit on how we got here...

brentphillips — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:46:00 GMT

I hate that I missed Bill's keynote at CES, but this article provides a solid recap of some interesting philosophy on the future of technology and how we use it to drive the connected experience. Coming from the wireless space, I am very comfortable with the idea of a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that we (as consumers) navigate with a flexible, sophisticated hand-held device (think 'lifestyle' remote control). Specifically, a PDA, Cell phone, MP3 player (whatever) combines all features required to communicate, self-locate, recieve - manage - create content, and tender transactions. Imagine, now, a seamless computing environment that you simply tap into from wherever you are to access whatever information you need - regardless of the access point, and regardless of the device.

Closing the loop - we're in an age where such possibilities are now being realized and, with the convergence of mobile and fixed infrastructure, the evolution of intelligent devices, and the advancement of storage and processing technologies, the onset of new gadgetry, applications, tools, and "ways to use them" will be limitless. As a colleague of mine likes to say, we talk on computers, we drive in computers, we fly in computers, and we live in computers. The age of ubiquitous computing, suggested to have started almost 16 years ago, is now advancing at a seemingly exponential rate.

And I ask myself [a la David Byrne]...how did we get here? I mean really get here. After all, companies like ours didn't have a master plan to role this stuff out. Nor did all of this innovation happen by just a handful of companies...(Now, to interject for a moment on my own point. I bring this up because there seems to be a great deal of discussion these days about how to accelerate innovation through openness, community, and a removal of IP (think patents) from software...Open source combined with a bit of copylefting, some might argue, is the panacea for society's innovation and technical complexity woes...) It seems to me, however, that innovation has taken care of itself quite well over the years - re: how we got here, and today it is accelerating and maturing just as the market requires. The market, after all, is the community that matters. And the dialogue in that community - broadly through industry associations or standards setting organizations, or more focused through customer engagements - is sufficiently open in my opinion to drive progress and to address integration woes created by rapid innovation cycles. And intellectual property protection gives incentive to everybody in the market to keep on developing...(even the open source guys patent some things)

How do we sustain an ecosystem of heterogeneity and complexity? Keep working. Keep talking and working together. And when we make new islands of technology, simply 1) standardize enough to connect, 2) build technical bridges, 3) seed new markets or 4) all of the above.

I'm going to noodle on this a bit more. Thoughts and feedback welcome!

Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog : innovation

Driving Interactive Mobility with Microsoft Tag

The connected experience and a bit on how we got here...