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After Cloud, Cloud, CLOUD yesterday (ok, ok we believe you), today we got the consumer angle.
The connectedness of the Microsoft 'Personal Cloud' story worked for me. In the office, IT make sure everything works, but at home I'm my own support desk and my community of end users is growing (the two year old isn't there yet, but the other three and my wife definitely are), their devices are proliferating, their use of different services is unfettered and their understanding of where data resides and how they access or protect it, is limited to non-existent.
The connectedness of the Microsoft three screens plus the Cloud proposition makes a lot of sense in terms of offering a great experience and fixing those practical painpoints. If Microsoft can make sure it all simply 'just works', and they trade on the strengths of their big platforms like IM and Hotmail, then it is a good story to take to market.
But the scene stealer today was the Kinect for Xbox 360 demo. It wasn't so much the technology on display but the engagement of Molly and her young assistant in the game. Aside from being a great demo - watch it on the Digital WPC site - every Microsoft marketer must be drooling at the prospect.
Microsoft doesn't have a great track record in connecting with the consumer but Kinect definitely hits that sweet spot. And it connects to the consumer through the compelling nature of the product itself, rather than trying to buy an emotional connection with an ad campaign.
I'm not sure that Microsoft's revenues have ever benefited significantly from the impact of 'pester power' (not with Barney, surely??) but as a parent, I for one can easily see Kinect sweeping through suburbia like the Wii and iPod before it.
I know I'll need to order one for my family.
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Not everything goes to plan. My World Cup journey ended in a bar in Washington DC, rather than Johannesburg.
While neither England or the USA exactly set the competition alight. Metia came away with more than a few extra fans.
- Metia's Mobile Keepy Uppy game has now been downloaded over 25,000 times and continues to get over 1,500 downloads each day.
- The Youtube video has been viewed over 7,500 times.
- The World Cup Pivot has had over 15,000 people use the site to interactively interrogate the player stats.
Football fever aside, each of these projects was conducted as a Proof of Concept (PoC), designed to explore aspects of mobility, social, and data analytics respectively. Aside from the obvious output, each PoC generated learnings about the different technologies, channels and social outreach techniques employed. All of which will now get fed back into our client's projects.
If any of this stuff interests you, or you are curious about how it can be applied to real campaigns and projects, get in touch and we'll share the inside track.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia
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The development team in Metia Seattle has been exploring uses for Pivot, a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that let's users interact with large volumes of data.
To bring Pivot to life, the team tipped in all the player stats for all the teams in the World Cup to create World Cup Pivot.
Filter the different criteria through the lefthand column options. Change the view with the top line nav bar. Pivot is made to be simple to shuffle through large volumes of data, trying out different permutations and options to sift for meaning, so have a play here.
We are already building Pivot into a number of external web sites and services for clients who want to give users the ability to get interactive with data. Bearing in mind the way Infographics seem to have taken a grip on the web, it'll be interesting to see Pivot's progress.
My World Cup Pivot insight: Lionel Messi, 30 shots, 0 goals. He might as well be English.
Tags: Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia   
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This week we have had a team over at the Beach Break Live student festival in Wales. Our role was to build and sustain a virtual experience that gave a flavour for the live events happening at the festival.
Live streaming wasn't an option, so instead we created a site that used Microsoft Silverlight 4 to mash Photosynth images and Spotify playlists related to what's on around the different festival stages.
Aside from a few local bandwidth issues caused by thousands of students simultaneously nudging, poking and checking-in with each other, everything worked just great.
Take a look below or check out the site to get the full Photosynth experience.
  
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As England switches off from work and switches on the telly for tonight's match, here's a latest score from World Cup Keepy Uppy.
In just one week the 'patently silly football juggling game for mobile phone users' aka Mobile Keepy Uppy has been downloaded an astounding 6,330 times (that's 5,201 times from our site and 1,129 times from Freeware PocketPC).
Which is one download every 90 seconds since it went live. Don't you wish that was Emile Heskey's goals to seconds on the pitch ratio?
And the dodgy video has been viewed 2,200 times on YouTube.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
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 Quick update on our Mobile Keepy Uppy game.
Seems there are a few people out there with time on their hands.
The game is featured here on the Freeware Pocket PC site, and elsewhere on Mobile TopSoft amongst others.
On the Freeware site it has over 800 downloads so far, gets four stars out of five in reviews and has some great feedback.
A few people comment it doesn't work on their phone - which is a shame all round, we agree, but we were pretty upfront about the limited number of phones, HTC mostly, which can run the game.
Here are our favourite comments so far:
"excellent game...good graphics and sound effects...great response to g sensor"
"Nice little app for killing time. My kids will love it. I like how you can see the shadow of the ball as it's coming down. Good job"
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
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It all seemed plausible enough at the time.
The chaps in Metia Labs said: "We really want to explore the uses for accelerometers in mobile phones, maybe look at the use of physics engines too. Perhaps some kind of a game would be a good vehicle to see how we could use different physical senses to shape a mobile experience."
A week later and this noble intent morphed into a virtual version of football's Keepy Uppy played on mobile phones.
Pretty soon after that and we are having the Mobile Keepy Uppy World Cup in our London office. It is all explained here and you can download the game too.
For the record, however improbable it sounds, England won.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
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Yesterday I got a piece of personally targetted direct mail with a proposition specific to my business. Nothing unusual there. But it was sent to me at my home address. In fact the whole creative angle was trading on how clever the sender was to connect the two pieces of data in a piece of personalised DM - a colour photo of our office, with my name on it, sent to me at home.
After a spooky moment, the first thing that popped into my head was, Stalker!
Probably not the effect the DM agency had in mind. Needless to say I'm not buying.
The convergence (confusion?) of social/personal and business worlds has created opportunities for companies to make errors of judgement in how they make use of the data they can gain access to.
Technology is always opening up lots of new possibilities. But just because you can now do something, it doesn't always mean that you should.
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Good post here by Gartner's Richard Fouts on using customer references across the breadth of an organization.
It comes complete with this nifty little quote from Richard:
"Case in point: now that Metia has supercharged Microsoft’s customer reference solution, the sales process moves faster, site traffic has increased and more prospects and customers download Microsoft case studies."
Couldn't agree more with Richard's general sentiment: "when customers migrate to evangelist territory, they are worth 10 great sales people".
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Last week we met up with Charlie Kindel - @ckindel - one of the Microsoft execs driving the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7) program.
Our interest in WP7 is to use our Silverlight and .Net skills to build mobile experiences and apps for brands. A lot of the detail on WP7 we'd already heard before at MIX10 but a few interesting points emerged.
Charlie was realistic about where Microsoft starting in this race: "We have Last Mover Advantage." Which is a triumph for positive thinking. And, if you can accept you are late, then you can at least start to consider how that might be turned to an advantage.
He was also upfront about cutting features from the first version if they couldn't confidently be delivered in time: "Shipping is an important feature too."
Interestingly, he confirmed all the highly polished WP7 apps demoed at MIX10 were started just three weeks before the show. Which highlights the agility necessary - and possible - for agencies or software companies developing for WP7.
Microsoft's version of the AppStore - the Windows Phone Marketplace - will split app revenue 30% to the network operator & Microsoft, 70% to the app developer. So pretty much the same as Apple, although Microsoft appeared to be trying to be more transparent and more developer friendly about the process of getting apps into the Windows Phone Marketplace.
With a number of small but nonetheless limiting features left out of the first version, it'll be important that the proposed model of smaller and more frequent software update cycles is adhered to.
The first WP7 phones are due for the Christmas 2010 market, but developers will have to sit tight for another few weeks before finding out when they can get their hands on a shiny new device for development purposes. Until then, it is back to the emulator.
Tags: Microsoft, Windows Phone Series 7
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Metia has a flourishing SharePoint practice. They focus upon making SharePoint implementations more successful by improving end user experiences (designing better UIs); building bespoke tools and applications to improve the efficiency of collaboration; and, generally, just making SharePoint a nicer place to be.
Although we focus more upon the user experience and collaboration end of things, the topics of migration and infrastructure are always somewhere in the conversation and with SharePoint 2010 looming, the question of migration is a live topic in many corporate IT departments.
Consequently, we have created a partnership with US based Metalogix to provide their tools for SharePoint migration into the UK. Like us Metalogix is a longterm Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and like us they also do a lot of work on Microsoft's own internal SharePoint deployments.
For the next few days, some of our SharePoint team are with the Metalogix chaps at the SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference in London. Say hello if you want to know more, or drop me a mail and I'll connect you.
Here's a link to Metalogix' press release.
Tags: Metalogix, SharePoint, Metia
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 Having just returned from SXSW and MIX10, where geo-location, social technologies and user experience were all big topics of conversation, I arrived back in London to find Metia Labs has just finished the Near.me project.
Near.me uses the Foursquare and Bing Maps APIs, and presents them within any Silverlight enabled browser - if you are a Foursquare user take a look at the Near.me site to sign in, experience the service and give us your feedback.
Near.me shows Foursquare users where your friends are, places nearby and your recent history. It also allows you to search Foursquare, or visually scan through your friends, with the results mapped onto Bing Maps using their Silverlight control. It can also be viewed on your desktop using the Out of Browser features of Silverlight, to try this right click and choose: install Near.me onto this computer. Or, if you don't use Foursquare, take a look at the demo video.
An obvious next step would be to create a slinky little mobile client but until Silverlight is available on a mobile device - in a few months or so - we'll just have to wait.
To measure the usage of Near.me, we jumped onto Microsoft's Silverlight Analytics Framework, announced just a few days ago at MIX10. This allows us to analyse the effectiveness of the site and particularly the elements of the service that measure depth of engagement within this sort of rich user experience. The Labs team said this took ten minutes to set up, more or less straight out of the box. When we have some data to share, we'll report back.
Near.me is a great example of a Metia Labs project.
It was motivated by the desire to explore the possibilities around geo-location and available data services. Projects like this help us to guide and inform our clients' digital experience strategies based upon firsthand knowledge of API handling and referencing a body of analytical data.
From our perspective, Near.me immediately crystalizes the opportunities geo-location offers to many types of businesses, and it has helped advance conversations with a number of organizations looking at deploying such services.
We are genuinely keen for feedback, so please do take a look at Near.me and contribute any feedback or ideas for other APIs that would enrich the service, via the comments on this post.
Tags: Foursquare, Bing, Near.me, Metia
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Today I lucked out. Every session has been great.
I sat in on:
The Web of Things workshop explained one scenario for building the web of things using internet protocols and standards, and featured seven demos connecting and controlling 'things' of various sorts all live over the web. Surprisingly where demos are concerned, they all worked. Sparked lots of ideas, especially that the topic of sensors will become much more mainstream. The team report on their talk and share their deck at the Web of Things site.
Clay Shirky discussed the impact of abundance as a factor behind radical change because, as he explained, abundance is far harder for us to manage than scarcity. When something is scarce familiar pricing models get applied, when something becomes abundantly available everything changes. He also touched upon sharing and that there are three different notions of sharing - sharing goods, sharing services and sharing information - and how our behaviours are different around each type of sharing.
Dan Ariely spoke engagingly about the irrationality of our decision making processes using a variety of anecdotal stories and illustrative examples of experiments. He touched upon herding, reward substitution, the entrenched nature of our intuitive assumptions, and our need for developing smarter self control mechanisms.
Unfortunately, that means a premature departure from SXSW 2010. We are heading to the airport and MIX 2010 in Vegas. Good to end on a high note.
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