MVP Award

I was excited this morning to receive an email notifying me that I had been re-awarded as a Kinect for Windows Microsoft MVP.

I love the fact that Microsoft appreciates the work that people like myself do to help others use and understand the technology.

I am looking forward to many more years of relationship building with Microsoft and developers around the world.

Second Gen Kinect for Windows

Fellow Kinect for Windows MVP,  Tom Kerkhove, has written up a really great blog post on the second generation Kinect for Windows device.
While a few of us have had access to this device and the development kit for a few months now, it is still a preproduction solution so things might change.
It is clearly a big step forward for the device and the capabilities of the new device will bring the reality of vision based technology into more peoples lives.

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....

Another First: Surface MVP Award

I like to be the first to work with a new technology and many of the folks at Microsoft know this. Over the years I have worked with the leading edge of Microsoft technologies, COM, Smartphone (now Windows Phone), Tablet PC, Virtual Earth (now Bing maps) and most recently Surface.

I have been delivering training to a number of Surface partners for the last 18 months, written a book on Surface development and formed a Surface development team in Sydney within nsquared .

Microsoft has recognized my contributions to the Microsoft Surface community and I am really pleased to receive the first ever MVP award for Microsoft Surface.

MVP Summit thoughts

This week another MVP summit has started and finished. I spent time with various groups and got the chance to catch up with a number of old friends. For me there was a very different feel to this MVP summit. It is something that I have felt was coming for a while.
Many of the MVPs I spoke to felt that the product groups were not be open with them or telling the MVPs the whole story. Personally I think this is the right thing for the product groups to do. People are now awarded MVP status because they have blogs, twitter too much (more than not at all) and are generally loud mouths in the online world. If I had something secret I wouldn't share it with this group either. During the evenings when MVPs of different technology areas gathered I overheard many conversations between MVPs where they were sharing the things they had learned that day. The point of signing an NDA as an MVP seems most questionable. I would suggest that the MVPs really need to be reminded of the meaning of the NDA.
I have also been doing some _real_ work this week and having meetings with some of the Microsoft product groups. This is the first time that when a Microsoft employee asked if I was here for the MVP summit I cringed as if I felt I didn't want to be associated with the MVP group. MVP status used to be something I was proud of, something that helped differentiate me as a person that adds value. Now I feel that being an MVP associates me with a bunch of Microsoft fan-boys (and some girls) who want to be the first ones to break the news that Microsoft is releasing product XYZ. Of course there are still many MVPs who do the right thing, and understand the business value. Yet I do not get the impression that MVPs overall are perceived to be adding great business value, and in some cases are presenting a hindrance to the progress of Microsoft products.
This is a great challenge going forward and I really hope there are some folks within Microsoft thinking through how to address these issues.