For those who didn’t hear the news, we’ve just launched n.Ubelly, the Ubelly Writers Programme, which gives people a chance to get their voice heard and gain some great experience amongst the Ubelly team attending conferences and events across the country. However, some might be wondering about the kind of thing we look for in n.Ubelly writers. I’ve been writing for Ubelly for just over a year, and have helped drive n.Ubelly with Sara, so I thought I’d share a few tips for those wanting to write for Ubelly…

1. Be yourself

If you’ve had a look around the site, you’ll notice that Ubelly isn’t filled with marketing jargon and product pitches. You’ll also see that each of the authors have their own writing style and areas of expertise. No one wants to read an article that feels like it’s been pumped out by a machine, or been co-authored by 5 different marketing departments. If you have a passion for memes, then write about memes. If you want to get your hands dirty with responsive design, then do it! We’re all people at Ubelly, so make sure you be yourself. As long as you’re not being offensive or discriminatory, you’ll be golden.

2. Have an opinion

It’s all well and good to right a post reporting on something, but the most interesting articles are always the ones where the author has an opinion. If you’re writing about a talk, it might be highlighting the relevant bits, and noting the bits you don’t agree with. If you’re reporting on a piece of news, don’t just list out what’s in the press release. Think first, then write. We love people who are passionate about the things they do!

3. Don’t be afraid to tread new ground

Don’t be confined to the areas that everyone else covers. If you can find a digital spin on any story, then pitch it. If you have passions outside of tech and you see cool things that have a tech angle (say theatre, for example), then that’s the kind of thing we love. If you have a crazy idea of where design should be going, but no one else is talking about it, then pitch it to us. Also, just because we’re a Microsoft blog, doesn’t mean we only write about Microsoft stuff. If something is cool, and related to what we do, we’re interested in it.

4. Social much?

Social media is a fairly integral part of Ubelly. We’re all up in the Twitters and the Facebook. We were on Plurk back in 1982*. The point is, you might want to take a look at your social media profiles around the web and tidy them up (or hide them). Hopefully, being involved in Ubelly will drive followers to you as well, so be prepared to be harassed in the street (Invest in big sunglasses. They help).

*blatant lie.

5. Have fun

For anyone who has been to one of our pub quizzes, pub crawls, award nights, or just said hello at our stand, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that we like to have fun. I hope this is also reflected in the things we write online (Bill jumping over a chair, anyone?). Remember, this is the web, not brain surgery. Make sure you’re having fun with what you do, otherwise there’s no point!

So, head on over to the site and apply to become a n.Ubelly writer! If you have any questions, then post them here or contact us on Twitter.

One of the biggest threats to major airlines isn’t a low-cost competitor, but video conferencing. Why spend the time and money on business travel when the video feed coming through is as good as being there? Then imagine throwing one of the most advanced sensors on the planet into the mix. We’ve spent plenty of time pondering some use cases for Kinect that go above and beyond gaming.  With Avatar Kinect now being released to the public, is it time to start seriously thinking about building apps that make use of 3D input and the depth of ability to recognise minute movements, for communication purposes?

Avatar Kinect

Imagine having a virtual meeting space for up to 8 people where you don’t just hear audio, or have multiple video feeds going on at once that requires a massive screen to make sense of; but rather one you can set up from your lounge for free (with an Xbox Live Gold subscription), with multiple backgrounds to suit the conversation – and harness the facial recognition abilities of Kinect to understand when your friend is frowning, lifting an eyebrow, or gesturing wildly. That’s the premise behind Avatar Kinect:

There are 24 different themed 3D stages and users can record their chats to refer back to later – ideal for lounge debates about the scores over the weekend, but could you really imagine running a business meeting with your avatar in Xbox Live attire?

improvements required (and made)

The age-old mantra that human communication consists of 93% body language and paralinguistic clues means the ability to see really in-depth physical responses are key to the difference between video and audio conferencing. So the Xbox team did some work to improve both facial recognition and hand gestures.

Says Craig Mundie, Chief Research Officer at Microsoft:  “Another thing we’re working on, and we did some work in Avatar Kinect, is tracking the hands. In the major games, we stopped at the wrist, because at that distance, there’s not enough sensor resolution to do the individual digits of your hand. But, when you get a little up close, and you’re not moving so fast, we can basically even get down to the hands and finger movements. So, I think all of these things will prove, obviously, the silicon environment will improve the sensor technology, and we’ll keep moving that along, too.”

Check out this Singapore research project for an overview of the technical complexities that need to be overcome to make hand gestures really stand out.

why choose an avatar over video?

Standard protocol involves sitting in front of a PC webcam with your headset on, doing either a 1:1 video chat, or having multiple small windows open with each participant. You can only see their faces. Or a business could invest in a telepresence room that takes these feeds and assigns them to massive screens, but the cost is enormous and implementation requires a decent amount of space. By using a device that’s familiar and has an install base of over 10 million homes around the world, it makes mobile working more of a reality. Then think about meetings as they exist today – where gestures get across points, people get up and draw things on the whiteboard, and the priceless sense of actually being in the same place and it becomes a very different proposition to managing video feeds of peoples faces.

Craig Mundie outlined the broader goals for NUI technology: “There’s a number of things you can do with the Avatar Kinect. One of them is, it has a Kinect videoconference facility. And what’s interesting about it is that, while it’s just more traditional videoconferencing, the camera tracks you as you move around. So, you’re now sitting some significant distance away from the screen. So, many of the problems that you have with traditional sort of PC-based videoconferencing, where when you’re so close the angular displacement of the camera from where your gaze is gives you that very weird sensation. When you’re far back, that angle becomes just a couple of degrees, and the gaze problem is sort of automatically corrected.”

Mundie did an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Maria Bartiromo sharing his thoughts around some non-gaming uses of Kinect and yes, some of the interview was conducted using Kinect Avatar. It’s well worth a look here.

Get the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta here

An interesting week… For those who were able to drag themselves away from the casino there was some tech-y stuff going on in Vegas. Here’s our favourite Web Apps stuff from the event, beginning with some of our CMS friends:

Dotnetnuke

DotNetNuke and Azure: Taking Your Business to the Cloud: Watch Shaun Walker talk about the what the cloud really means to enterprises, in a practical sense including the top 10 reasons why businesses of any size should consider moving there. Shaun also covers off how you can use the open source ASP.NET CMS DotNetNuke to design and deploy feature-rich business websites on Windows Azure.

Walking the Razor’s Edge with DotNetNuke: Charles Nurse talks about WebMatrix and how it makes it that much easier to develop websites – focussing mainly on the Razor syntax (a new scripting engine that ships as part of WebMatrix which is designed to minimize the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing code) and like Shaun, delves into how this works in a real-world scenario for DotNetNuke.

What’s just been announced?

Plenty. Top headlines are:

• DNN migrates its codebase from Visual Basic to C#
• DNN has acquired social collaboration solutions provider, Active Modules
• DNN announces CTP early version of DNN 6.0

kentico

Building Your Web Sites with Kentico CMS on Windows Azure: Today, Kentico is in use by almost 6000 websites in 84 countries as an on-premise or hosted solution. Delivered as a Visual Studio solution, Kentico CMS includes 34 out of the box modules all on top of a SQL Server backend. Watch Thom Robbins run through how to build a scalable solution with Kentico on Windows Azure.

What’s new with kentico

• Kentico announces its competency program for Azure

umbraco

Sharpen Your Web Development Skills with Razor and Umbraco CMS: Razor again, but this time with an Umbraco flavour – watch Niels wear a crazy t-shirt whilst walking through how to create dynamic sites with clean markup and managed content, using the vast array of Razor functionality. Umbraco powers over 85,000 sites and is one of the quickest growing open source CMSes out there – definitely worth watching.

Life in the Fast Lane: Rapidly Deploy Umbraco CMS on Windows Azure:   Cloud, cloud, cloud… common theme appearing here?  Using the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco Paul demonstrates how simple it is to deploy the pre-configured cloud-drive image along with local SQL Server (and SQL Express) database schema and data to SQL Azure. Also, using Full IIS in Windows Azure to host multiple Umbraco instances on a single Windows Azure instance – thereby reducing the costs to run Umbraco sites in a scalable and highly available cloud environment. Case studies too…

what’s new with umbraco

• First-class support for Azure with Umbraco 4.7 and upcoming v5

General web stuff

Kinect demos with the Channel 9 team: Might seem a funny one to include but imagine using a Kinect to navigate through web sites… Take a look and imagine some of the possibilities.

Hacking with the F12 Developer Tools:Our very own Martin Beeby talking through some of the functionality in IE9 to fix compatibility issues, increase site performance and general issue resolutions. A ton of demos, exploring the inner guts of the browser and plenty of code. Get the hell in.

what’s new with webpi and webmatrix?

• Support for targeting IIS vs. IIS Express via contextual installs
• Support for a &referrer-tag on <trackingURL>
• SQM support
• WebMatrix upgrade that notifies users when an update is available
• Click here for more info

Special offer

Talking of CMSes and the cloud, we’ve got limited 30 day passes for all-things Azure – no credit card details required! Hurry up and get yours here for FREE.

I used to work in the UK MSN Messenger team way back in the day so I have an interest to claim here, but I am loving Windows Live Messenger at the moment – specifically its Facebook chat functionality. Prompted by this post outlining how Messenger powers over 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chat, it brought back some IM loving.

About 15 years ago it was all ICQ, then it was MSN or Yahoo!, now it’s a combination of Facebook, chatting from your inbox in Hotmail or Gmail, or just texting from phone to phone. In a corporate environment the enterprise IM solution is more a way of seeing who’s online or in a meeting – or acting as the bridge for VoIP/video calls. But if you think about user behaviour of staying logged into an IM client throughout the day, it makes sense to use that screentime as a snapshot of “what’s going on with my friends or family – regardless of whether it’s on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace or other…”

Personally I’m not a fan of IMing from a web service: it’s slow, cumbersome and far too feature-restrained. But what I do love is being able to see when my Facebook friends are online – and chatting with them from my Messenger UI.

For websites, you can make it more social by plugging in Messenger Connect and letting people chat or share your content with their buddies – or use Windows Live ID as authentication. Sound complex? Not really – it’s a pretty simple implementation using REST APIs, Controls and JavaScript library.

Get more info on the Windows Live & Facebook partnership here or download the latest Messenger here. Or add me to Windows Live andyrobbwork@hotmail.com.

We were pretty excited about the Drupal 7 launch event earlier this month; auditorium meeting room booked in our London office? Check. Cupcakes ready? Check. Thinking caps on for some of the upcoming brilliance that Drupal 7 allows? Check. Now that we’ve finally put the bin bags full of pizza boxes and empty beer bottles away, let’s take a close look at what we find awesome about Drupal including its step into the cloud and some of the new modules that make sites and apps more social.

Killer database

I sometimes get asked what the hell I, a Microsoft employee, am doing at an open source event. After doing my little product pitch and whipping out my WP7 I get down to the real stuff – I’m really there to a) learn about the product (I use CMSes on a daily basis) and b) help answer questions about how folks can get their stuff to work with Microsoft technology when the time arises. A question that comes up commonly is from agencies or dev shops who get asked by customers and clients how their web site/app can play nicely with their existing Microsoft infrastructure. As announced at last year’s DrupalCon, there is now support for SQL Server 2005 and later. The SQL Server driver for PHP 2.0 lets Drupal 7 use the PDO ‘PHP style’ that incorporates smoothly with the SQL Server database. For Drupal developers, this means taking advantage of Business Intelligence and reporting as well as SQL Azure features like exposing OData feeds.

Bryan House – Sr. Director, Marketing, from Acquia commented: “The Drupal 7 release with enhancements for the Microsoft platform is a tremendous milestone giving Drupal developers the freedom to use their existing Microsoft resources to build extraordinary web experiences with Drupal. It expands the set of options Drupal developers have to choose from when building the best solutions for their customers and end-users. We’re also pleased to see Microsoft really participating in the community, providing valuable assistance, and taking a long term approach to supporting Drupal.”

Install crazy simply with WebMatrix

If you use a Windows PC the easiest way of running Drupal is through WebMatrix. Honestly – if you know of a quicker or easier way – answers on a postcard please @androidrobb.  Want to run Acquia Drupal 6 or Drupal 7? Well you can – check it out. If you’re planning on attending the February Drupal drop-in Robert Castelo has kindly allowed me a few minutes to demo this.

(To continue my PR quotations in italics):

In response to the WebMatrix announcement, Damien TOURNOUD, CTO of Commerce Guys, said that ”Microsoft has become a citizen of the Drupal world, and the integration of Drupal 7 in WebMatrix is great news for the Drupal community.” Damien is a key contributor to Drupal 7 and the main developer of Drupal 7/SQL Server integration.

Get it in the cloud

Windows Azure is an easy way of building and deploying apps without having to manage the infrastructure or operations that just make it work. Handle your growth, determine whether you need on/off workloads or just having sudden spikes in traffic to absorb with Windows Azure.

Check out the Drupal & Windows Azure Companion tutorial

New modules that build on top of Drupal with some cool Microsoft technologies

Bing Maps – Embed maps into Drupal content easily

Watch the demo: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Interoperability/Bing-Maps-Module-for-Drupal

Get the module / source code: https://github.com/mindtree/BingMapsDrupal

Silverlight Pivot Viewer - Embed Silverlight Pivot into Drupal content using preconfigured data sources

Get the module / source code: https://github.com/mindtree/PivotViewerDrupal

Windows Live ID – Associate your Windows Live ID (Hotmail address or Messenger sign-in) with your Drupal account for easier sign-in

Watch the demo: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Interoperability/Windows-Live-ID-Module-for-Drupal

Get the module / source code: https://github.com/schakra/WindowsLiveID-Drupal-Module

OData Module – Allow data sources based on OData to be included in Drupal content

Watch the demo: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Interoperability/oData-Module-for-Drupal

Get the module / source code: https://github.com/mindtree/ODataDrupal

(Thanks to Craig Kitterman for the images above).

So what does this all really let you do?

I’d bucket the benefits into three main areas: First off, you can get Drupal up and running easily on your PC using WebMatrix (especially great for beginners) on Windows, in addition to providing Drupal solutions to customers or clients who already run Microsoft technologies. Second, take advantage of some products or features such as Bing, Windows Live, Silverlight and more that people are using across the web and embedding it into your site. Finally, take advantage of the cloud movement by managing scalability and reliability with Windows Azure.

If you’re at the Drupal event stop by and and say hey – would love to chat about this, and other Drupal goodness!

Alex ball (@ alex_ball) just pointed out that if you take my name: Martin Beeby, and auto correct it in Microsoft Office then it suggests it should be Martin Beefy. I write my blogs using Windows Live writer and whilst writing this blog I’ve discovered it suffers from the same problem (see Below).

I was wondering if others amongst you suffer from this affliction? Were you also blessed with an odd surname that gets misspelt by humans or computers. Have you ever had letters delivered with odd surnames, or perhaps you are constantly having to correct text messages because your phone thinks it knows how to spell your name “correctly”.

Let me know in the comments

Martin Beefy

Have you thrown the Christmas wrapping paper away yet? With Christmas 2010 wishlists including a world of slate devices vs. 2009’s netbook-heavy bonanza, does this signal the death of the netbook? Are slates here to rule or will they be the netbook of 2010? We take a closer look at the devices and predict what we’ll be seeing a year from now.

Where they came from

Netbooks

Small personal computers have been around in various shapes and sizes really since the mid-nineties. Apple’s eMate 300, a cross between the Newton PDA and a standard notebook was released in 1997 but quickly fell under the guillotine with the re-arrival of Steve Jobs as CEO. It wasn’t until Asus released their Eee PC in 2007 that the mass-market felt the force of a small, low-cost PC that could do the things most people did most of the time. and relatively cheap due to the Linux install – the device originally designed for emerging markets quickly found its feet as a companion device in larger countries. The PC was for productivity and other weighty tasks, the netbook was the portable device for content consumption. Hitting the coffee shop with netbook under arm, Facebook with your latte became the chic image.

Hardware was initially based around a 7-inch display, 85% sized keyboard, and weighing around 1kg. Solid-state drives were commonplace as they were faster, lighter and prone to handling more movement than traditional hard-drives, at the expense of disk size (with a median around the 40GB mark). Wireless connectivity was omnipresent, with some also including ethernet ports. Processors hovered around the 1.6 GHz mark, running x86 architecture.

With software it quickly became apparent that Linux wasn’t to the mass-market’s taste, however, and PC manufacturers quickly turned to Windows XP, and subsequently Windows 7, to stem the tide of consumer returns. With the heavy dependency on web usage, companies such as Google have attempted to bypass the OS altogether – running a flavour of Ubuntu that requires just enough to power up the hardware and relies on the browser to do the rest. So far however, the Chrome OS project (especially through the own-brand CR-48) has so far suffered significant delays and user-experience headaches.

Slates

The slate’s big brother was really the Tablet PC, introduced to the world in 2001 by Bill Gates, who, still riding the wave of Windows XP, felt the PC, mouse, keyboard input model was to be outstripped by a more natural form factor – a standard PC became a digital ink input device when the screen was slipped round. Despite a relatively palatable price point, poor battery life and lack of ‘killer apps’ meant its main success was in enterprise spaces such as healthcare, where ink input such as signing prescriptions and patient checks was combined to great effect with line of business applications – rather than the consumer space such as students.

Slates in their current form where announced to the masses by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at 2010’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), such as this HP device.

What really captured the imagination of the consumer audience was of course the iPad. While initial reports dismissed it as “just a big iPhone” the slick device, great battery life and simplicity of use sent sales through the roof. In the final quarter of 2010 alone, sales were estimated at over 6 million.

The forerunner slates

Let’s take a look at the flagship devices per OS, and look ahead to a year from now:

iOS: iPad

The Good: Uber-slick hardware, approx. 300,000 apps, faster than it seems.

The Bad: No webcam/USB, rigid rules for app development, no Flash compatibility.

Where it’ll be a year from now: With a v2 heavily rumoured to be released in Q1 2011, we’d expect the lack of webcam/USB to be fixed, improved battery life and a slightly thinner casing. Anyone remember the iPhone 4…?

The contender: iPad 2 (release TBA)

Android: Samsung Galaxy Tab

The Good: Small 7” screen makes it suitable for pockets, runs Flash, huge number of Android apps, decent 3.2MP rear camera for photos plus 1.3MP camera for video calls.

The Bad: Difficult to type on (in-between the ‘two thumbs’ approach for phone, and two hands for a PC), claims to also be a phone – but feels too oversized to use properly.

Where it’ll be a year from now: To successfully take on the iPad, the Galaxy Tab will need to either look at lowering its price (it’s only about 30 pounds cheaper) or develop more applications designed specifically for the 7” screen – rather than upscaling phone apps. The hardware’s currently a bit plastic-y, which we’d expect to change.

The Contender: Motorola Xoom (running Android Honeycomb).

Windows 7: Asus Eee EP121

The Good: The most powerful slate at CES: Intel Core i5 processor (an ultra-low voltage variant) and can be configured with up to 4GB of memory, 12” screen is among the biggest for tablets, with great 1,280-by-800 resolution. As full Windows 7 OS, can handle all the heavy apps. Wacom digitised layer + pen takes advantage of handwriting recognition. Click here to see a demo of it in action.

The Bad: At 2.5lbs, it’s over 1lb heavier than the iPad. No rear-facing webcam or 3G options. Solid-state drive models only.

Where it’ll be a year from now: Expect a lighter version with longer battery life – but the real magic will come in handwriting-optimised apps that light up the device.

The Contender: HP Slate 500

So which is better?

It became clear from CES 2011 that most of the PC manufacturer innovation is in the slate space – dropping the keyboard and peripherals, and investing in screen technology is a smart move for many PC OEMs who also make TVs (ie Samsung, Sony, LG) but it also stops PCs becoming a commodity where the lowest price wins.

But the real sticking point is this: If you’re going to spend 400 quid or so on a new device do you really want to limit yourself? Slates are great, slick and definitely built for content consumption – but for those little moments where you just have to finish off writing the document, spreadsheet, presentation or edit that photo will an onscreen, will a virtual keyboard really suffice? Netbooks certainly aren’t the quickest devices on earth but at least they do let you type properly – and after forking our your money, when you’re really in need – that could be the difference.

Expect to see a merger of the two moving forward in the form of a new tablet: Dual-screen slate devices that don’t carry an old-school keyboard but rather let you use the 2nd screen as a virtual keyboard when standing it up right. Have a look at my favourite bit of hardware from CES, the Acer Iconia:

Are you a netbook fan or a slate guru? Let us know what you think of the devices. Plus, check out our round-up of CES here.

Google’s decision to drop H.264 video support from it ‘s chrome browser has caused a whirlwind amongst the web development community. Today the chromium blog went into more detail regarding it’s position and reasons for dropping H.264 support. The discussion from the community seems to fall into two camps.

Firstly, there are the pragmatists who point out that, software, hardware and workflows are geared up to support H.264 and that moving to WebM will involve an effort so herculean that the video market will fragment and HTML5 Video will not become widely adopted.

Secondly, we have the idealists. They believe, however painful the transition to WebM is, it will be better for the future of the Open web  and will ensure that future innovation is not stifled by licence fees.

On the web, as in life we need idealists and pragmatists… but on this issue which category do you fit into?

Some rather interesting stuff announced yesterday at CES in Vegas by Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft.

What was announced was a two fold expansion of types of hardware that can run Windows to support something called SoC or Software on Chip and it will do that on both ARM and the x86 (x64) platforms.  Windows 7 is already amazingly successful and is still selling more than 7 copies a second and this expansion means it’ll be available on more devices and critically it’ll be available on devices that require less power.

Lower powered devices with chipsets from the likes of Nvidia (the dudes that make awesome graphics cards and the chipsets for mobile phones) and Qualcomm (who also make mobile phone chipsets) and Texas instruments (who make chipsets and awesome calculators) mean we’ll see more devices doing things like instant on in more interesting form factors, like slates and stuff that hasn’t even been thought of yet.  That’s an amazing opportunity for developers.

Essentially devices running Windows can all run the same software so when you develop your killer app for Windows your market is even more massive than it currently is, which is pretty massive.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT

We also announced 2.0 of Surface, the hugely cool and huge touch and other sensing display come table device that costs about $12k.  I do actually know someone who has one in their home though, although she’s using it to help autistic children

This is the dead sexy video of the new version of Microsoft’s biggest Natural User Interface.  Note the metro styling!

Every now and again you can get lost in technology for technology’s sake. Despite it only launching within the past couple of weeks the hours of gametime already spent makes it easy to think of Kinect as the next level of home gaming. But when you take a step back and look at the technology behind things like Kinect and touch devices such as phones and Microsoft Surface it’s exciting to imagine what else it could be used for other than games, making phone calls and looking at maps in a different way. Time to remove some of the limitations of the old mouse n’ keyboard.

Kinect

I stumbled upon this article from Gaming Nexus where the author outlines the desire his son has to play games with him, but the difficulties in doing so due to his autism – particularly around controlling the characters on the screen with hand-held input devices.While Xbox controllers may not seem ‘intricate’ to those who have spent hours playing Halo or Fifa, when you think about the two mini-joysticks, four coloured buttons and four shoulder tabs the connection between the combination of inputs and what happens on screen is quite a cerebral concept. So when the author’s child simply stood in front of the screen and saw his character replicating his actions, getting involved in the game became a million times simpler.

Surface

Our in-house tech ninja Andrew (@deepfat) met a woman named Freena at an event recently, who told her story of using Microsoft Surface amongst other multi-touch devices to aid children with autism around the world. That the device was large and solid, had a clear flat-screen and had a simple I/O process (the logic on computers – pressing ‘Enter’ has a clear function of ‘Enter”) was the hygiene for this to be helpful; the real value came in the attraction of a flashy computer and a new way of interaction by using your hands on a big screen. Building apps that can detect, test and help assist those with disabilities in an entertaining way has been a breakthrough for people who previously found it difficult to do so. Watch Andrew’s chat with Freena here.

It’s incredible to hear anecdotal cases of Microsoft technologies being used in this way: Pensioners using Windows Live Messenger to video chat with family members who are unable to visit in person on a regular basis, touch-screen phones enabling communications for people who found keys too small to operate properly or voice recognition software for the partially sighted.

Do you have examples of where this new wave of technology has helped those who previously weren’t able to take advantage?