Geek In Disguise

Trek Bike by Damien Hirst

2009-07-09T16:11:00Z

Regular readers will know I’ve been following the Trek bike designs of Lance Armstrong and have been awaiting first sight of the Damien Hirst designed model. If I’m honest I’m slightly disappointed as I was expecting an more of an LSD design. I much prefer the Marc Newson model

All part of Lance’s STAGES exhibition

Microsoft’s interoperable cloud

2009-07-09T14:59:30Z

A busy week for Azure and more to come next week at Worldwide Partner Conference. Meantime, Mary-Jo Foley provides a good update today on the interop status of Windows Azure. The team there is heads down cranking out code and this week and this week released a whole bunch of stuff

If you want to play in Microsoft’s cloud, it’s not a Microsoft only world….that has to be a good thing.

Field Notes Goodness

2009-07-09T10:36:08Z

Whilst National Express gets customer service woefully wrong, Field Notes gets it just right. Not only did my pack of 3 Field Notes notebooks show up in good time last week, they pack in a few treats to keep you smiling and knowing that they actually care about your custom. My pack included a pencil, pen, elastic band a sticker. All of them probably cost a dollar when added in bulk to a pack like this….but it’s a dollar well spent as I’ll go back and buy more of their products and recommend them to my friends.

It’s actually pretty easy to get customer service right and not much harder to do customer delight.

National Express #fail

2009-07-09T10:30:16Z

National Express seem perfectly capable of sending me email about their problems but not replying to my email about my problems with them. Over 2 weeks ago I sent email to their customer complaints department about their service at Newcastle. I’ve not even had an acknowledgement of that….sigh.

For a picosecond I wondered if Susan or one of her staff my use Twitter to hear customer feedback.

SQL Services is now SQL Azure

2009-07-09T07:57:32Z

Renaming SQL Services to SQL Azure makes total sense to me – it starts to make it very obvious what our on premises products are vs. our cloud services and helps build the Azure brand.

The really good news is we got this out first before it leaked :)

Find out more over at the data platform insider blog

New Laptop Hunters Ad from Microsoft

2009-07-08T16:01:32Z

Everyone has been concentrating on the IE and Bing ads but I’ve been keeping a beady eye on the Windows campaign and today sees a new Laptop Hunters ad. This time Matt and Olivia are looking for a laptop under $700…which of course rules out a Mac :)

Windows Photo Galley gets a high five in this ad and eventually they walk out with a HP dv7

Tweetmeme Plugin Updated

2009-07-08T13:55:05Z

My buddy Scott Lovegrove has updated his excellent Tweetmeme plugin for Windows Live Writer. You can download it from Windows Live Gallery and the screenshot above shows some of the additions to the options tab.

Twitter Infoporn

2009-07-07T21:15:08Z

An interesting view of the impact of Twitter on the creation and circulation of news. From the blog of Burson-Marsteller in Paris. Nothing we didn’t already know of course but cool to see it laid out this way and I expect we’ll see this used frequently in presentations from here on.

Get the English translation of the post

TREK Art Bike

2009-07-07T20:04:00Z

Marc Newson + Lance Armstrong + Trek = cool

via SLAMXHYPE

IE8 Accelerators and Tesco by Microsoft UK

2009-07-07T15:53:07Z

My evangelist chums here in the UK have been busy for a little while producing some great content. They’re the guys behind the How Red Dog (Azure) Werks video and have their own channel on YouTube and their recent IE8 Accelerators and Tesco is above. I love the deadpan narrative from Marc and the cameo from Nick Lansley.

Anyway….if you wanna learn about accelerators in IE8, how they work and how to build them on Windows Azure, check out the vid.

Under the (Microsoft) Surface

2009-07-07T10:55:12Z

A new cartoon from Hugh…I’m sure the folks in the Microsoft Surface team will like this

Microsoft’s Subscription Enrollment for Schools

2009-07-06T22:11:00Z

Microsoft’s education offerings are not something I spend that much time thinking about – largely as a smart guy in our group called Aaron does that :)

I follow the blog of @richfrombechtle though and enjoy his posts about Microsoft Online. Today he added a great post titled Microsoft Licensing: Subscription Enrollment for Schools.

Why great? Well it was an interesting topic for me but mainly because in this case he explained Microsoft Licensing in a way that was simple and easy to understand. Not something you see too often….especially not from people outside of Microsoft. When folks outside do offer licensing explanations that are simple that usually means they contain four letter words :)

I digress….what we seem to have done here is change our licensing to make it both sensible and easy for the customer to license our products.

Bravo.

New, Large Format iPod

2009-07-06T21:24:02Z

Modelled by Sir Paul Smith – a birthday present to him from Jonathan Ive.

Remixing Hardware = Radiohead

2009-07-06T12:00:30Z

Big Ideas (don't get any)

This may not appeal to everyone and to be honest I’m still not a HUGE fan of Radiohead but…respect. This is a brilliant piece of work by James Houston. It was a (too late) entry to a competition set by Radiohead to remix "Nude" from their album - "In Rainbows”. To quote James

This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that's played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It's pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.

He decided to build a symphony composed of

Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX

hat tip to Richard Moross

If you can dream it and if you can imagine it, you can build it..

2009-07-05T14:14:13Z

Ray Ozzie recently posted a blog entry ay the Microsoft On The Issues site as he kicked off the Imagine Cup Finals in Cairo.

I’ve promised myself one day I’ll make it to the Imagine Cup to see the amazing work students are doing with software. Ray gives 3 examples himself which all sound terrific

The all-female Egyptian team is developing a low-cost solution for addressing air pollution in developing countries;
A team from India has developed a solution called Pearl to address that country’s high percentage of child and neonatal deaths among rural populations; and
A team from Uganda has created an innovative phone application that could help small farmers get better prices for their harvests in a country where more than 70% of the population earns less than $8 per day.

I can’t help but mention the team from Kings College here in London who are working on smart traffic routing. This year for the first time, we are asking people to vote online for their favourite entry in the Software Design category so if you like their project, please give them your vote – they’re TKCL with project Pioneer.