App Development Success

Last night I made a guest appearance on the AppBizDev podcast to talk about some of the work I have been doing to help developers around the world build better software.
It has been a while since I have talked about the work I am doing and it was a lot of fun.
We discussed the way developers can do improve the applications they are delivering as well as improve their business model around the apps they have already delivered.
We also discussed some of the other work I am doing and the great work that nsquared has been shipping in the last few years.
Of course we talked about digitables and shared screen experiences.

Listen to the podcast here 

Talk on Seamless computing

This video was taken recently at a talk I gave, at a WiseTech Forum, on how we can build futuristic technologies today.

Seamless Computing, bring the future to life.

I am heading back to Sydney in a few days and some friends at WiseTech have asked me to come and spend an hour at UTS talking about Seamless Computing scenarios.
the details can be found here http://www.wisetechglobal.com/events.html
Hope to see you there.

In this session Dr. Neil Roodyn (http://www.roodyn.com) will discuss how scenarios, that a few years ago would have been science fiction, are now becoming achievable with the technology we use every day. Taking some small leaps and pulling together technology from different platforms, enables us and our clients to now achieve tasks that would have seemed to be magical a mere 5 years ago.

In this session you will learn how some key technologies are likely to become the core components of experiences that seamlessly connect devices, people and software together.

Enriched Customer Engagement at the Table

The February issue of Cutter IT Journal published an article I wrote on the experiences nsquared had building a table top solution for Telstra.

Telstra bought Microsoft Surface units to run the nsquared business pack and some custom software that the nsquared team built specifically to engage the Telstra small business customers.

The Hotel Room of the Future

This week I have been at the Hotel Hospitality and Design Expo in Sydney. The nsquared team released the nsquared hospitality pack for Microsoft Surface. This includes three applications designed specifically for the hospitality industry, nsquared concierge, nsquared room service and nsquared tourist table. Each of these applications helps the hotel up-sell services that they offer directly or through affiliations.

News.com.au included an interview with me in their video about the hotel room of the future

ntask, another win for the nsquared team

Over the weekend a new iPad app became available in the Apple App store; ntask.



It is a gorgeous task management application that synchronizes with Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Sharepoint tasks lists. I have been using it while it has been developed and I am so pleased to see it has been selling like hotcakes now it is available in the App Store.
Earlier today when I checked it was the 32nd best selling business application in the app store! Congratulations to the nsquared team for another wonderful application.

What is a table for?

Let me ask you a question, what is a table for?
It may seem like a strange question yet it is not something we typically think about.
Furniture is taken for granted, in fact sometimes the word furniture is employed to mean the adornments in or on an object. You could say someone with lots of facial jewelry has 'furniture on their face' or, as I have heard it said, they have 'face furniture'
In our everyday lives we utilize furniture to enhance comfort and to perform functions, it is these functions that are worth exploring.
Think of all the things you do at a table. Eat food, work on your computer, layout a puzzle game, hold a meeting, and many more 'events' occur at a meeting. Consider which of those events take great advantage of the horizontal surface that is presented by the table. Playing puzzle game with friends, or holding a meeting at a table is something that clearly requires a horizontal platform. The horizontal nature of a table with multiple sides open and available for people to sit, presents the ideal place for holding a meeting. It enables eye to eye contact, allowing all participants to engage in a much fuller conversation. Such a large portion of communication between people is non-verbal and by facing the other parties around a table we can pick up on these subtleties. We can understand from proximity and quick glances of the eyes the nature of personal relationships between people.
Many technical solutions ignore the human interactions that are crucial for us to work together and create far shallower modes of engagement. Instant messenger, for example, provides a mode of communication between multiple parties, each siting at their own workstation. The nuances of passion, humor and disgust during the conversation can be hinted at with the use of emoticons. These provide a limited set of clues to hint towards the users feeling as they make a statement. The vocabulary of these is not just limiting but also deceptive. A person may want you to feel they are being jovial while really they are sad. You would only ever pick this up if you actually with the person. The telephone can provide a better medium for judging the mood of someone, through the tone of their voice and through other audio clues.
Yet nothing bis better than sitting at the table with someone for truly understanding their feelings and position on a topic. Most digital content is still presented using vertically oriented displays, yet these displays act as barriers to the optimum personal communication.
When working with the Tablet PC team at Microsoft in 2003- 2005 one thing became very clear, the slate form factor could radically change the dynamics of a meeting room. In a typical meeting at Microsoft people will bring their laptops and sit around a table, each staring into their own screen. This is incredibly anti social and detrimental to the level of engagement of the people in the room. In a meeting where each participant had a slate device the device did not act a barrier between the individuals at the table. Tabletop computing now has the opportunity to take this to the next level. By sharing the content directly on the tabletop the number of barriers is further reduced. A personal screen can present personal distractions during a meeting (email, IM, etc...), on a shared screen the focus can be on just the content desired.
Today I presented these concepts to a potential client showing the nsquared business pack for Microsoft Surface. It is clear that these applications can really change the dynamics of a meeting. Even as we were discussing the requirements of the project we were sketching out the ideas on nsquared thoughts. Tabletop computing should start to bring new ways of human engagement to our meeting rooms in the coming years and this will help us to work better together than many earlier technologies.

Measuring the success of your tabletop application

Over the last 2 years I have been heavily involved in working with tabletop software, specifically software for Microsoft Surface. Having content displayed directly on the table top can radically change the interaction that occurs between the users sitting around the table. How we present the information on the table top will greatly impact on this interaction.

A number of researchers have spent considerable time and effort working on this challenge and recently at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010 (http://www.its2010.org/) some of this research was presented. One of the more interesting (and arguably problematic) papers was presented by Tang, Pahud, Carpendale and Buxton; entitled VisTACO: Visualizing Tabletop Collaboration. The paper presents a way that researchers can scientifically understand the interactions of the users at a table. One of goals being to validate the design of a multi-user tabletop computer.

I say this can be problematic because while it is easy to track the user interaction on the table top, with software, this project (as described in the paper) attempts to solve a couple of other challenges; 1. does the interaction change if the people are not all physically sitting at the same table, 2. does the spatial position (configuration) of the users impact on the interaction models. The results are certainly useful but do they tell the whole story about the success of an interaction model?

From the work we have been doing in the real world with tabletop multi user deployments at nsquared there are other factors at play that are less easy to measure. The emotional connections that are made between people at a table during an interaction is often (maybe always?) more important than the actual physical interactions that have occurred. Creating an environment that encourages a rich and deep social engagement has been one of our goals at nsquared.

Our other goal at nsquared, which might be even harder to evaluate, is to enhance the intelligence of the people using the technology. More on this topic another day.

A quick glance back

Today I was writing an email to a customer and I was explaining what the nsquared team has achieved in it's short lifetime, I thought I would share this with you because it is something to be proud of.

The nsquared team is a small and high specialized group of developers and designers based in Sydney. We do have people in the Uk, USA and Hong Kong, but most of the development happens out of our studio in Sydney. Our main mission is to make the world a better place through the intelligent application of technology. For this reason one of our core areas of focus has been education, where we believe so many of the world issues can be solved. A number of our team are ex-teachers and have a passion for teaching and helping people reach their potential.

We often see technology as something that hinders social engagement and this was one of the key attractions of Microsoft Surface. The table is a place of social engagement and adding digital content to the table should be used to enhance the conversation. The nsquared education pack has been the outcome of this work and you can find out more about this here http://nsquarededucationpack.com/

We also realized from the work we were doing that business meetings could be improved around a table, and drawing people's attention away from their personal computing devices to a shared screen would help increase the value of business interactions, this lead us to build the nsquared business pack, more information is here http://nsquaredbusinesspack.com/

We also have been busy exploring other touch and gesture based technologies, the most dominant being the Apple iOS set of devices, iPod, iPhone and iPad. We have been building apps for ourselves and third parties now for close to 2 years for these devices.You can explore all of our products on this page http://nsquaredsolutions.com/products/

As leaders in the field of Surface and NUI (natural user interface) development we wrote the first book on Surface development, http://nsquaredsolutions.com/surfacebook/

We are also the only company in the world with more than one application certified for Surface, in fact we have more applications certified for Surface than Microsoft does! http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/Pages/Product/Applications.aspx

Through the work we have been doing we were awarded the contract, by Microsoft, to deliver all the Surface development training to new partners in Europe in 2009 and 2010.

Earlier this year I was awarded by Microsoft the first Microsoft Surface Most Valuable Professional award. https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=BD4DC19A-A1B7-49B4-90B2-EB41C67F980F

It is so great to achieved all of this and yet I feel we have only just started. We have so many great ideas and big goals for the technology we are working on. I am sure that his time next year we will have added some more fantastic achievements to this list.

Watch this space....

Certification For Microsoft Surface Applications

Over that last 2 years the nsquared development team has been building Microsoft Surface applications. We are one of the most accomplished teams in the world at developing tabletop computing experiences. We wrote the book Developing for Microsoft Surface and have delivered all the global training to Microsoft Partners for Surface development. The certification of 10 of our applications now puts another achievement on our list to validate we are masters of our craft.

It is important that customers can differentiate between validated experts and those that claim to know what they are doing. Building software for table top interfaces such as Microsoft Surface is not a skill that can easily be adapted from desktop programming skills. This is not about the technology, this is about creating simple, easy to use, and engaging experiences. At nsquared we are bringing our expertise in this space to produce applications that owners of Microsoft Surface can purchase, download, and start using today. Having our applications certified for Microsoft Surface provides a level of assurance to our customers that we are delivering high quality software that will deliver a rich Surface experience.

My belief is that within 5 years we will see a proliferation of table top computing devices and at nsquared we plan to be at the forefront of this revolution.

Windows 7 Touch or Microsoft Surface

I have received a number of questions around the topic of touch on Microsoft Surface and Windows 7.

I have seen a variety of feedback from client and developers along these lines:

• Surface doesn't have a web browser, I must have a web browser
• Surface is just Windows with touch

While the work I have done with After-Mouse and nsquared has led to a web browser control being built for Surface, typically a user trying to browse the internet is not looking for a multi-user, social, computing experience and Windows 7 is much more suited to provide a single user experience. Browsing the internet (the way we do today with modern browsers) is a single user experience, you cannot have two users clicking in the same browser at the same time and expect to get meaningful results. At best a browser can provide an experience for multiple users with a driver-passenger model of engagement. One person is the driver and is the only user interacting directly with the browser, the other participants are passengers, observing the interactions and potentially providing verbal guidance to the driver.

The questions to ask are:

What is the client trying to achieve?
What is their vision? A good place to start is to understand the usage scenarios they are hoping for.

If the objective is really to get multiple people engaged then Microsoft Surface provides a far superior solution. For a single user touch experience go for Windows 7.

You should also note that while the touch is getting better in Windows 7, the shell in Windows 7 is not designed to be 100% driven by touch, whereas the Microsoft Surface Shell is designed for touch from the ground up. With Windows 7, touch enhances the mouse and keyboard interactions. With Surface touch replaces the mouse and keyboard interactions.

Interviewed by Tse:

I was interviewed recently by Corwin Tse of TseDrive.com and the interview has now gone online.

Corwin asked some interesting questions about nsquared, Microsoft Surface and software development.

I hope you enjoy it.

Do you speak my language?

I am on my way now to Las Vegas for Mix. I will presenting a session on the new features of Microsoft Translator that will be announced on Monday PST.

The nsquared team in Sydney has been working long hours with the Microsoft Research team in Redmond on getting things ready for this launch.

There are so many great things about this new release, I look forward to telling you more shortly.

The session Do You Speak My Language? is at 2pm in the Lagoon H room. I hope to see you there.

Do you speak my language?

If you have followed my activities over the last year you may have noticed that I am doing a fair bit of work with the Microsoft Translator team. I presented at Mix '09 on Exposing Web Content to a Global Audience.

For Mix '09 the nsquared technology studio in Sydney worked hard on producing getting started guides and documentation to help developers begin using the APIs.

then at TechEd in Berlin last year I worked with the Translator team to announce that the wdiget and APIs were moving from CTP to Beta.

Today the translator team announced that seven new languages have been added to the supported list, creating a grand total of 30 languages!

I will be at Mix again this year and talking about Microsoft Translator. If you are at Mix be sure to come along to find out about some new additions to the Translator and how you can build translation into your software using the same technology behind Bing Translator.

Welcome back the Neil and Hugo show

Hugo Ortega from Tegatech has agreed to join me in a new series of videos in the nsquared studio on touch and mobile computing. I really enjoyed making this first video and look forward to plenty more to come.

Are you looking for a challenge?

IF

You want:
1. to work on some amazing new technologies,
2. the rare opportunity to really improve the world with the software you build
3. to engage with some of the smartest brains on the planet (our customers)
4. the challenge (every day) to do something better than anyone else

AND

You are prepared to commit to:
1. bringing your best to every project every day
2. demanding that your team mates bring their best to every project every day
3. producing outstanding software experiences that deliver more than our demanding customers expect
4. learning and improving every day

THEN

You will have the opportunity to :
1. engage with Microsoft Research, Microsoft Surface Product Group and the Microsoft Education Product Group
2. work with our leading global partners including Tricky Business and After-Mouse
3. develop with us
4. deliver greatness

NOTE:
You will be working with me. I am passionate about building great software. No ifs or buts: I am demanding. I want to be associated with excellence and will always ask for more. I believe in zero defect software that betters the lives of it users. I believe in crafting extraordinary software experiences. I believe in growing and learning. I bring my best to the team every day and expect you to do the same. If you’re still reading, chances are that you’re inspired and you should contact us to discuss the possibility of joining our team.

Send an email to jobs_at_ nsquaredsolutions.com

Another video in the learning and technology series

Today another video in the nsquared series on Education and technology went live. I talked to Maridee about how cross-disciplinary education benefits students. We discussed how technologies such as Surface, Semblio, and MultiPoint can help create great learning experiences.

Less is More with nsquared

Yesterday we had some fun in the nsquared office recording this video about how less is more...



Today we decided to release the 'more' version of this video, enjoy!

Microsoft Surface Shell

Time for another nsquared Surface discussion. This time we talk about the Microsoft Surface Shell.
We explain the components of the shell and how Microsoft Surface applications can integrate with the shell.

Surface Video Series

This month I have started working on a series of videos with the team at nsquared on Microsoft Surface. We are discussing a number of the topics I cover in my Surface development training courses. You can see the whole series on YouTube.