Geek In Disguise

A very cool little project from the folks at LiveSide.net has turned the Microsoft executive roster in a a Pivot project. If you have Pivot installed, check it out by opening jkipk.com from within Pivot. If you don’t have Pivot, go grab it and explore a completely new way to navigate data. You’ll need an install code and Liveside has 50 of them on offer in their post. 

I was checking out some Windows 7 case studies this morning and noticed Bugaboo International has chosen to go with Windows 7. As a happy Bugaboo customer I’m pleased to hear they’re equally happy with our products :)

“We’re a fairly young company, and our users are very computer savvy,” notes Siereveld. “Windows 7 appeals to them because it keeps them on the technological edge, and it fits our needs as an innovative company.”

Hmmm…now do I go buy some of their Project RED gear for Christmas.

Another classic

"You can't control the  wind, but you can adjust your sails." - Yiddish proverb

courtesy of John Caswell

words (ordered by most used)

microsoft windows london bing love liverpool live azure cloud thanks week blog apple google video nice office check cool time people store free read look stickers wired dell world goes cloud

via http://tweetcloud.icodeforlove.com/stevecla/43625

I’ll start my Christmas Wish List posts this year with something a little unusual – salt.

"Soso is a brand of high quality salts, which come from a salt mine located in a natural reserve in the south of Spain. The client was looking for a distinguishing container that could be used both to store salts and as a salt cellar. An egg is the perfect container, as its own shell is the packaging, so it was decided that an egg shape would be reproduced. The project and the brand were named Soso, which means 'lacking salt' or 'short of salt' in Spanish."

via thedieline

This doesn’t really need an introduction. it starts with some good humour in the intro from BillG and then quickly on to extremely important, moving content from Bill and his wife, Melinda. It’s an hour of education on the impact of vaccines, the eradication of Polio and the power of smart investment.

Inspirational stuff and visually such a departure from Bill’s Microsoft presentations. There are also some great infographics accompanying The Living Proof Project

Boosting Nutrition, One Bite at a Time

Progress Against Polio

Benefits of Breastfeeding

The excellent Matthew Stibbe has published an excellent FREE eBook titled 30 Days to Better Business Writing. A number of years back I attended a course by Matthew on business writing and it was great – very practical and easy to consume stuff – his eBook is much the same.

You can read it online or download a PDF from his blog.

Brilliant. Falls in to the category of “too much time on their hands” but frankly, if more people with time on their hands did work this good, the phrase would have a better name :)

via @jackschofield

Diana demanded a laptop with faster wake-up. Windows and Toshiba told Diana, “We’ll build it. You come to Tokyo to approve it.” She did.

there are two others in the “seal of approval” series so far

• Sophie and the Sony touchscreen L series
• Tyrone and the Dell Studio XPS 16 entertainment powerhouse

Postman Pat is heading to the cloud! Okay I’m sure the Royal Mail is tired of the cartoon references….great news to hear they’re heading to the cloud though with Microsoft Online. CSC will deliver our Business Productivity Online Suite in the company.

PR newswire quotes Royal Mail Group's Head of Technology Service Delivery, Carol Olney, said: "This deal forms part of Royal Mail's drive to invest in new technology to improve efficiency and customer service. The Microsoft suite will give people across Royal Mail Group the tools they need to do their jobs more effectively, enabling our business units to collaborate with each other, partners and other external organisations more freely, easily and securely while securing cost savings."

InformationWeek also has some details.

Kudos to CSC and the UK team. A big win!

Wow….2 years in a row!! I was very pleased to collect the winners award and bottle of champagne last night as my blog won the Individual IT professional male category at the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2009

thank you to everyone who voted for me and for continuing to read my blog. I’m working hard to keep up the standard and sincerely appreciate you visiting here. It’s not really my day job so to be recognised with this award makes all the late hours of blogging worthwhile. thank you very much.

This is one of my favourite slides from the PDC last week – it comes from the session titled Windows Azure Platform Business Model
“Transforming to a services business“ by my friend Dianne O’Brien.

When talking to customers, colleagues and journalists I often talk about these models and Dianne’s slide will help me leave people with a visual representation. It’s even more powerful if we add example customer scenarios to each of these. Allow me to do that with a few fictional scenarios (i.e. these are not customers using Azure but they could be)

1. On and Off: a good example here would be a pharmaceuticals company like GlaxoSmithKline with drug trials data. Before a new drug is put in market it undergoes rigorous testing that generates masses of data. At a point, it may be necessary to apply brute force analysis of the data with a lot of computing power required. Once the results are produced though you want to turn that computing power off until the next time you need it. Why pay for servers in your own datacenter when you can spin up thousands on demand and only pay for what you use?
   
   
2. Growing Fast: this is the Web 2.0 overnight success story scenario. You and two pals leave your jobs, build a killer Web 2.0 site (think Facebook or Twitter) and you have demand that you could never have expected within days. In the past, this was a nightmare scenario of having to overbuy capacity (even in the days of traditional hosting) just in case you were successful. If you were, you then had to scramble to add more servers, build the load balancing and keep monitoring as you scaled up and up (hopefully not down). The cloud, and Azure more specifically allows you to scale as you need with minimal overhead. Note this is different that the EC2 approach from Amazon where you need to do quite a bit more administration as your capacity grows – though companies like RightScale do a fine job of helping with this. The key is Azure is designed to scale out using our Fabric Controller capability which is subtly but crucially different than having lots of VM’s or scaling up. As it happens we have a great on ramp here for Web 2.0 companies looking to lower their barriers to entry by providing free access to not our developer tools but also Azure.
   
   
3. Unpredictable Bursting: this could be applied to a number of sites but lets take something like a site that tracks news and may respond to huge bursts in demand when a global news story breaks – lets say Twitter (or Google :) ) when news of Michael Jackson’s death broke. Totally unexpected massive demand for the service which can sometimes be interpreted as a denial of service attack (as happened to Google that day). With a cloud platform that can dynamically scale you get around this issue.
   
   
4. Predictable Bursting: this is probably my favourite as it’s a bit of a hobby horse. Why do sites like Ticketmaster drive us insane when our favourite band (U2 in my case) fall over when tickets are announced?  My guess is because they’re designed to support the middle of the curve – not the peaks. It’s expensive to buy hardware for the peaks when they maybe only happen a few times a year and the rest of the time your kit is idle. The scenario is similar to #1 but could be architecturally different in that you may use something like Azure just for it’s worker role capability to handle massive web requests but still have your core data within your own data center. This is where services like Project Sydney that we announced this week at the PDC come in handy – allowing you to have a secure, dedicated connection from the cloud back to your own data center.

So there you have it….the reasons to think about cloud as a new model for computing. thanks Dianne!

This whole Black Friday thing is a curiosity for us international folks but over in the US of A, the Microsoft Store has a number of special offers some of which are really quite impressive. See below

• Free three-month subscription to Xbox LIVE when you buy an Xbox Elite Console—or get 30% off selected Xbox accessories.
• Save $50 when you buy an Xbox Premium Console and Beatles Rock Band together—yeah, yeah, yeah!
• Save 30% off most headsets for that gamer on your list.
• Get an amazing deal on Office Home and Student—just $79.99. That’s a savings of almost $70! Or save almost $80 on Office Small Business Edition.
• Free Lenovo S10 netbook when you buy a Lenovo T400 or X301 notebook, or A600 all-in-one desktop (first 50 customers).
• Get $50 off an HP PhotoSmart printer.
• Save $50 on any monitor when you buy any desktop or laptop in the store (netbooks not included).
• Get 20% off selected laptop bags or sleeves when you buy selected laptops or netbooks.
• Buy a Sony laptop (VGN-NW250F/S or VGN-FW520F/B) and get a 16 GB Zune HD at no additional cost (first 50 customers).
• Buy an Xbox Elite Modern Warfare bundle console and get two games free: Assassins Creed 2 plus Dragon Age Origins.