Wednesday night teams transformed AT&T stores in San Antonio, NYC, San Bruno and Atlanta with Surface. Both AT&T and Surface teams rolled up their sleeves and worked through the night to prep the machines, change out the store experience and get everyone trained and ready for Thursday’s public debut. City to city team members were emailing cameraphone pics and hourly updates back and forth highlighting progress and racing to see which store would be the first to complete their transformation (sounds like New York won, though those teams had less units to deploy…so not really fair!).
Checking in with our colleagues across the country at the other AT&T launch stores.
This may be part of the reason the San Antonio wasn't the first store ready.
Larger than life on the AT&T pylon the night before and after the store opened for business.
Yesterday was a blast. After years of development, Surface had a brilliant coming out party. It was fun to stand in the San Antonio store and see customers coming in just to touch Surface or amazed salespeople, excited about how this will enhance their ability to sell products and communicate rich information. From what I heard from the other stores it was a similar experience, coast to coast.
The San Antonio Surface team after a successful launch day (Left to right: Kyle, Eric, Tom, Maxim and Greg)
From a press perspective, media interest was highest in New York, with journalists and bloggers from outlets including USA Today, Bloomberg (print and radio), The Wall Street Journal, CNET, Popular Mechanics and Switched/Engadget visiting the Madison Ave store to be among the first people to interact with Surface in a retail location. Stores in San Bruno, Atlanta and San Antonio all had local print and broadcast interest as well.
Here’s a look at some of the top stories…
· The Wall Street Journal | Amol Sharma: Microsoft Surface Arrives at AT&T Stores: After visiting the New York store and speaking to Mark Bolger, Surface, and Andy Austin, AT&T, as well as customers in the store, Amol posted a video piece to the Wall Street Journal Web site.
· USA Today | Ed Baig: Microsoft Surface Makes Its Real-World Debut – Ed visited the New York store and posted a story to his USA Today blog outlining the Surface and AT&T partnership and capabilities.
· CNET TV.com | Natali Del Conte: Microsoft Surface Hits Stores: Natali posted a video to CNET’s video site, CNET TV, which included interviews with Mark Bolger, Surface, and Scott Hodges, AT&T. The video showcased Surface’s role in AT&T Experience retail locations.
· Gizmodo | Benny Goldman: Multi-Grope: Interacting with Microsoft Surface at the AT&T Store – After visiting the New York store, Gizmodo posted a story which followed their announcement coverage.
We all celebrated the success last night at various watering holes in our respective towns, exhausted team members toasting to a most excellent effort group effort. This was likely followed by much needed rest. Most of the teams are heading back home today though a few tech leads are still onsite to ensure Surface operations continue to go smoothly and local personnel are trained to handle any updates or troubleshooting as necessary.
Eating out at Dicks on the San Antonio Riverwalk. Good times.
Post-launch remedy, Texas style.
This is San Antonio, signing out! (Left to right: Greg, Kyle, Tom, Maxim and Eric)
Now onto our next deployment (shh…it’s a secret).
As a follow-on to the AT&T/Microsoft Surface announcement we made yesterday, this afternoon AT&T showcased the actual customer experience before a crowd of a 100 wireless media and analysts at their 5th Annual AT&T Press Luncheon during CTIA.
After Ralph de la Vega, AT&T Mobility president and CEO, shared their annual "state of the industry" outlook for the company, Ralph invited Robbie Bach, Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices president, to the stage to talk about Microsoft Surface and share a little about surface computing, Microsoft's on-going commitment to AT&T and his excitement for the new relationship.
Following Robbie's remarks, Ralph took the stage again and along with Andy Austin, AT&T's director of retail sales operations, the two demoed the new AT&T customer experience that Microsoft Surface will deliver in stores.
This customized application will provide AT&T customers with a totally unique experience shopping for mobile phones and applications. Customers in AT&T stores will be able to instantly access information about a mobile device by simply placing it on the display.
Users will even be able to place two devices on Surface at once, comparing features and benefits. Even looking at coverage maps becomes an interactive experience when users navigate them by moving their hands across the display. This will give them a unique experience of using cutting-edge surface technology to help make purchasing decisions easier.
Following the demo, media were invited to ask questions to a panel of AT&T executives as well as Robbie, who answered several Surface-related questions. In fact, I think this pic below is of Ralph joking that if Robbie gives him a good price break on a large unit sale then he'll have no problems deploying Surface in AT&T's 2,200+ retail locations. ;-)
It's a been a great couple of days sharing the news of this exciting partnership. Can't wait for what's ahead. Remember the deployments begin on April 17th in NYC, San Antonio (I'll be at that store), Atlanta and San Francisco.
Check back for more AT&T/Microsoft Surface updates...we're working on some videos that capture the true in-store experience.
Cheers from Las Vegas,
K
This evening AT&T and Microsoft announced a collaborative alliance to transform the way that consumers shop for mobile devices. AT&T will become the first company in the world to deploy Microsoft Surface! In fact, on April 17th if you're in NYC, Atlanta, San Antonio, or San Francisco area you'll be able to get hands on with Surface at select AT&T retail locations (I'll post the locations and details soon).
I'm with about a dozen of the Surface team in Vegas right now at the CTIA tradeshow supporting the announcement. It's been a busy day doing media interviews, getting ready for tomorrow's press luncheon and of course celebrating the exciting news!!!
I'll post more tomorrow...off to bed.
Cheers,
K
I was lucky to be part of the team that went to the Venetian in Las Vegas to demo Surface at MIX 08. Demoing Surface is fun, interesting, and exhausting. There were always attendees at the booth. Between sessions it would get pretty crowded. Also, this wasn’t a trade show with 100’s of booths. It was just us and Mobile Devices for the 2000+ people to interact with during breaks. I think 90% of the people I demoed to were already aware of Surface and had seen videos. They still enjoyed the experience when they saw it in person.
The attendees had a lot of questions around developing for Surface. Most were satisfied when they found out you can use WPF to develop Surface apps. I pointed many to this blog. Welcome! I'll do a future blog post on how WPF ended up as the primary dev platform for Surface apps.
On the WPF front, the news that WPF 3.5 SP1 will include support for custom hardware shaders really made my day! I'm anxiously awaiting the beta to play with this.
Since I'm better at taking pictures than writing (which isn't saying much about my photography skills), the rest of this post is mostly pictures.
On the flight out, I had a great view of Mt. Rainier:
Getting setup:
(those daylight balanced fluorescents combined with the incandescent lights everywhere else ensured that the colors would never come out on my photos J)
The Ali V show:
Fellow blogger Robert Levy (who was the most energetic of the demoers):
Nicole:
Tony:
Tasneem – future YouTube star:
Dan caught in an old fashioned digicam standoff:
Briand:
Jason (sorry, my only face shot of Jason has other peoples’ body parts throwing off the composition. What can I say, he attracts a crowd. He will have to remain a man of mystery for now.):
Stephen – He is one of our "Table Tech" people. You can find him swooping in to help the demoers in distress:
Show is over. Time to pack up. Surface units are pretty rugged but the demo units have a lot of miles on them and more to come. They get some extra treatment before being shipped to their next destination.
Betsy doing the road warrior thing – how many pieces of tech can you count here:
MIX also had a pretty elaborate Rock Band setup. On Thursday there was a competition with the winners getting XBOX 360s. Wisely, they didn’t let Microsoft people play (gotta keep us from goofing off.) However the King got to play:
Here are the winners giving their winning performance. I don’t know if she found a wing store nearby (for all I know there could even be more than one in Vegas) or this is something she carries with her just in case. Either way, it was a nice touch! Congrats!
Anyway, that was MIX from the Surface demo perspective. Pretty soon the MIX breakout sessions and keynotes will be available online (including a talk on Surface design from our own Dan Makoski.)
Surface and the team jumped across the pond earlier this week for some demo time at The CeBIT (I don't think it is actually called 'The CeBIT' but I find it funny that some people call it that...so I'm sticking with it) in Hannover, Germany. The CeBIT is the world's largest tradeshow. It puts CES to shame. It's immense.
Steve Ballmer kicked off the show using Surface in a "virtual ribbon cutting" ceremony with dignitaries that included European Commission president Barroso, French president Sarkozy and German chancellor Merkel. Check out this video from someone who attended the invite only affair...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWDGh63dAUs
We were part of a VIP section of the Microsoft booth. We've spent the last four days (9 straight hours of demoing each day...whew!!!) showing off Surface to Microsoft partners, German politicians and dignitaries, and media.
Here I am...Herr Warnick getting ready to paint a masterpiece on Der Surface...
Sometimes it was a little crowded. Surface was a huge hit!
Everyone in Germany was soooo nice! Particular the Microsoft Germany team that made us feel very welcome and treated us to cakes and beers before we did anything! Danke schon! We haven't announced international availability just yet but when it does hit Europe, if the past four days were any indication, it's gonna take off there too.
Bis spater,
K Robert Warnick
Our friends over at Sarcastic Gamer posted some new Surface goodness this morning. It's an early "proof of concept" game called Firefly that was developed by the Carbonated Games folks downstairs. While we've done other games during the course of the product this is among the first casual games to test the SDK. In fact that was CG's mission...test out our SDK and do a little bug bashing (and they took the task literally).
Here's Doc and I...just before I beat him royally (several times)!
And here's a close-up of the action. The goal is to take advantage of the multi-touch capability Surface offers and use your fingers to gently guide fireflies into a jar where you trap them. You earn points by collecting sets of fireflies.
It's a simple game, but that was the intent. Doubt it will ever see the light of day for people to play though. The team just wanted to kick the tires on the SDK. We actually have a video we'll post where we meet the team that developed the game and they play around with it.
And for the record...Doc only beat me once!
Cheers,
K
The Surface team's very own Kyle Warnick was filmed by the local NBC affiliate in San Diego this week. Check out Kyle's full video on NBCSanDiego.com.
Looking good on camera Kyle!
Our team was at the Sheraton in San Diego today. They had a great time showing Microsoft Surface to another new audience.
"I've never seen anything like this."
There's a lot of energy when we hold an event and visitors get to experience our cutting edge technology first-hand. There were hundreds who attended the event. If you were there, thank you for coming out!
We've got some vibrant photos for you below and even more on our photo blog.
Did you miss Microsoft Surface at CES this year? If so, there's a chance to check out Microsoft Surface in person this week. If you're in the area, come and see us at the Sheraton in San Diego. You'll get a chance to see Surface up close and chat with members from our team.
Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina
1380 Harbor Island Drive, San Diego, CA
The event is open to the public and you can find Surface in the main lobby area from Noon to 5pm.
Once you've had a chance to touch the coolest technology on the planet, come back up to the blog and tell us what you thought!
A few of us will be at MIX08 in Vegas next month. August and Daniel from the UX team will be participating in some cool sessions in the UX track (you can search for them by name here to find those sessions). Also, Tasneem and I from the SDK team will be hanging out in the "sandbox" area with demo tables - we aren't announcing anything new about the SDK but we're looking forward to talking to developers and designers about what excites them and what challenges they face when using the latest Microsoft tools/frameworks.
I hear that the conference is nearly sold out, but if you're attending please stop by and chat!
-Robert
So if you've been watching NBC's revival of American Gladiators you may have noticed a familiar face...
http://www.nbc.com/American_Gladiators/contestants/monica_carlson.shtml
That same Monica happens to be the model in all of our Surface web videos. Seriously!
And she's tough too...she holds the second best time among women in the competition.
The entire Surface team is pulling for ya Monica as you compete in the finals this Sunday. Make us proud!
Rob and Thomas think one cool use of Surface would a piano app. I agree :) Believe it or not, this concept is actually one of the first tech samples we shipped to partners in early drops of the Surface SDK. We chose this because 1) it's a good example of leveraging multi-input, 2) from an development perspective, it's a good example of the benefits Surface gets from leveraging WPF, and 3) most of the work was already done for us.
It turns out that the Expression Blend team shipped a Grand Piano sample with their tool to highlight the power of having developers & designers work closely together using tools built for their specific needs. In that sample, each key on the Piano is simply a WPF Button control which is given a custom style which makes it look like a 3D piano key. If you don't have Expression Blend installed, there's a Silverlight version of this that you can play with online.
So how did we Surface-enable this? 3 easy steps:
I don't have a video handy to show this in action (it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect), but will create one if people express interest in the comments on this post.
Disclaimer: This was created purely as an SDK tech sample to help show partners how to leverage Blend and WPF with our SDK. It's not something we consider to be a "complete" app (there are tons of ways it could/should be expanded - including ideas Thomas mentioned on his blog) and it's not something our Demo crew uses at events to tell the Surface story (they prefer things that better fit our v1 business model and leverage all the multi-user & object recognition aspects of Surface).
According to the local Las Vegas weather channel, the Surface Booth @ CES reached "unseasonably high temperatures for January." Could the fact that we had oodles of Surface newbies non-stop all three days have had anything to do with that?
I had the pleasure of demoing on Monday and Tuesday, and it was fantastic. Most of our audience had never experienced Surface before, and it was amazing to enjoy all of the feedback.
One of the points that people kept hammering back to me was the power of un-mediated touch. In plain English, literally being able to place our hands on a song, a photo, a customized snow board had a powerful emotional impact.
It struck me as a really key aspect of the boom in natural user interfaces today. That ability to connect directly (not with a mousepad, remote control, etc.) with the content creates "mixed reality". Very powerful stuff!
So we’re in the home stretch at CES. Today is the last day!!! As draining as this show is, as crazy as the planning has been, as stressful as it was to watch BillG demo Surface (fingers crossed so tight that it performed well-IT DID!) in his last keynote…it has been totally worth it. It’s the biggest show for us this year, the most important in terms of broad awareness (and access to so many different media) and a great way to interact with other Surface enthusiasts.
The response to Surface in the booth has just been overwhelming. People continue to be amazed by the technology and so excited by the benefits it brings and the problems it is going to solve.
Yesterday the booth was so packed that onlookers were using ladders to see Surface and snap photos.
Today the booth had a little less people in it (as many have headed home already) that gave us more time to spend 1:1 with individuals and really dedicate time to address their questions.
I close the Microsoft Theater this evening with a final demo of our product customization scenario and then it’s time to break down the booth.
Thanks to everyone that stopped by to say HI and chat us up. We can’t wait to see you at other events in the coming months and we’re even more excited for you to actually use Surface this Spring in our commercial partner venues.
See you all at next year’s CES.
Ta,
K Robert Warnick
Tuesday was another great day for the Surface team n the Microsoft booth at CES. Because of the reworked the flow of the booth overnight to better accomodate the crowds it felt less packed and we seemed to have more room to breath. Nonetheless it was still crazy busy as folks lined up to touch Surface and learn more about what's possible.
Here's Derek Sunday (sorry for the cameraphone quality, it's all I had at the time), one of our PM's, showing off Surface...
We continued to show off our new product customization scenario, the same one Bill demoed in his keynote. It's proving to be quite popular with folks.
We believe that Microsoft Surface will revolutionize the way that consumers shop in a retail environment by letting them put their own unique imprint on their purchases. The product customization demo solves clear pain points in typical shopping experience (or in the case of the demo, purchasing and customizing a new snowboard)…you are likely overwhelmed by choices when customizing/personalizing your board, it’s hard to visualize, tough to share with others, you can’t really take the custom design with you. By taking advantage of some of the unique attributes (object recognition, direct interaction, multi-touch, and gestures) that Surface has to offer I believe we’ll greatly improve the shopping experience.
In the press tent, we met with the good folks at Popular Science and they awarded Surface a "Best of What's New" award. Here's our GM, Pete Thompson, accepting on behalf of the team...
More from the show tomorrow...
Cheers,
K Robert Warnick