That’s right we want to hear what you think, about all things Ubelly as well as looking at the industry as a whole.  We have prepared a short online questionnaire that probes these questions and would really appreciate you taking ten of your precious minutes to complete it – you can find it here

As a thank you for your time at the end of the questionnaire you will asked to provide your contact details and you will be entered into a prize draw to win one of ten Kinect bundles.

The prize draw is open from today (Wednesday February 6^th 2013) until 23.59 (GMT) on March 1^st 2013.  Full terms and conditions can be found here

Here at Ubelly we care passionately about what our community thinks and we’re always considering ways we can hear more from all of you. Recently we’ve been debating whether it matters where comments and feedback are shared.

Traditionally, blogs and websites have looked to drive engagement towards the comment boxes below articles or to their own forums where they can manage and if necessary edit discussion. But, with the rise of social media, we increasingly see people discussing content off-site. This has caused a lot of head scratching as people across the web have tried to figure out if this is a good thing.

Comments below articles are great for two main reasons – everyone can read them without having to put any extra effort in and it gives readers a sense of how everyone else reacted to the piece they just read.

Traditionally these comment systems required registration – which isn’t great, as it creates an extra barrier between the user and them doing what they want. Lately, we’ve seen more and more blogs implement a system which allows users to sign in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts – but if they’re using these platforms as their main source of conversation why should we expect them to come to us? If you build it they will come is a phrase the web design community should be running away from, not towards.

On one level it’s an ego boost – we all like to see a string of comments below our article.  On another level it’s sheer laziness, if all the comments are on our blog, we don’t need to spend time looking around for them. There’s also some evidence to suggest comments help boost your SEO ranking – though with Google’s recent changes, it’s hard to tell if this is still the case.

But, none of these are compelling enough reasons to prioritise comments on our own sites. Ultimately, if our content is compelling and worthy of discussion users will join that discussion, regardless of the platform it takes place on.

And if we really want to show off how popular our article is on Twitter,  we can always compile the tweets in a Storify so everyone can read them.

As we thought more about this it led us to look at ways to integrate discussion on social media onto the site and that’s why we’ve installed LiveFyre, a comment system which incorporates discussion from Twitter into the comments thread.  Is this something you’d like to see more sites do? And how have you handled the comments challenge for projects you’ve been working on?

Are you a designer or developer struggling to get heard? Are there conference you want to go to but can’t afford? Would you like a soapbox from which to stand on top of and scream your thoughts, ideas and insights? We may have an opportunity for you…

We’ve been running the Ubelly Writers Programme (called n.Ubelly) for just over six months, and it’s been a great success. We’ve had five writers attend a bunch of conferences, get their dancing shoes on at The Critters and chase a few features for Ubelly. Now it’s time to take on another five writers, arm them with some tech and conference tickets and send them off to report for Ubelly.

In case you missed it the first time around, n.Ubelly is an opportunity for up and coming tech and design folks to go along to conferences, get involved in Ubelly events and pitch features to the editorial team. We’re looking for 5 people from any background, and there’s only 5 days left to apply (submissions close on the 21st). This is a great opportunity for people who are relatively new to the industry to gain experience, network and get heard by Ubelly’s hundred thousand strong audience.

Don’t take our word for it though.

Here’s what some of our current team have to say anout their experience with N.uBelly:
“Writing for Ubelly has given me the opportunity to attend conferences I might not have attended before and hang out with some amazing people. I’ve also had the opportunity to be a technical reviewer on yet-to-be published books due to my Ubelly articles,” says Shaun Dunne, Code Geek and Responsive Web Samurai.

“Last year, I was privileged to be offered a place on the writing team for Ubelly” says digital & social strategist Wil Benton, elaborating with “It’s invaluable help for a young digital journalist – or anyone trying to make a name for themselves in the tech industry.” Finally, Will recommends that if you’re an aspiring writer with a passion for technology or anything related, he “can’t recommend applying for this year’s n.Ubelly enough. You’ll be looked after by a brilliant team; you’ll meet and talk to amazing people. I’ll be a part of Ubelly for as long as they’ll have me. That surely says it all!”

What are you waiting for? Head here to apply. Want some tips on how to apply? Read our top 5 tips for applying for n.Ubelly.

Speaking at LeWeb London last week, Microsoft platform evangelist Tim O’Brien described how the company is changing to become more supportive of open-source standards and tools and non-Microsoft technology. That’s a change the developer community will welcome.

So, why the change? Back in the ripped-jeans heyday of grunge (AKA the nineties – but you already know that. I hope) Microsoft was known for its overbearing behaviour. Says Tim, “We’d tell developers to abandon old tools in favour of new tools.” Not cool.

I think Microsoft has realised it needs to be realistic about the world of development. This is a world of multiple platforms and tools. The days of saying ‘I’m [solely] a Windows person’ – or Oracle or Java person – are over. Today’s developer relies on a mixed bag of skills. If the 90s were about grunge, in 21C it’s all about the hip-hop mash-up.

Tim’s message was, rather than dictating the terms, Microsoft is now committed to enabling developers to use their existing skill-sets to develop for the next generation of platforms. That’s exciting news indeed.

Watch Tim’s Q&A session at London LeWeb

Speaking of the next generation…

Bill ‘Frickin’ Buxton (as coined by Josh Clark) spoke at Future of Web Design this year on the social network of devices. In essence his talk focussed on the state of play when it comes to device interaction, and some thoughts, problems and procedures associated with interaction design in the future. In Bill’s eyes, it’s all about making technology transparent and interaction seamless in everyday life. That is, you shouldn’t have to worry about technology in different concepts, and if you can see the machine/computer/motors in what you’re doing, then the design is broken.

However, it wasn’t the talk that inspired this post, but something that Bill said in response to a question after the talk. An audience member asked about the problems that we face with technological hurdles (like processing power, memory and battery) when it comes to creating experiences across devices and contexts.

In response, Bill told a story about a watch he owns. It’s a small Casio watch with a capacitive touch screen that allows direct input onto the face of the watch to access information. For example, if he wanted to know what 1+2 was, he would draw ‘1’, ‘+’, ‘2’, ‘= and the watch would show ’3’. If he wanted to look up a phone number, he’d start to draw the name of the person he was searching for. This is an intuitive and well designed piece of technology that Bill bought in 1984. Earlier in his talk, Bill made the comment that technology takes 20 years to go from invention to commercial visibility. That is, the technology that is heralded as new and cool now is actually 20 years old, and the things that are built today won’t be seen in the mainstream till 2032. In Bill’s words, “the only processing problem we face today is up here in our brain, with our creative process.”

It’s an interesting concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot. We’re currently in an age where almost anything is possible with technology. However, the real challenge is in the ideas and the creativity attached to coming up to what can be done with the technology.

It’s an incredibly inspiring thing to think on, and is something that makes me incredibly excited, especially with all the crazy, cool, wonderful things that come out of hacks and hack days. However, I believe that as developers and designers, we need to start looking outside our own fields. This is where I see hack days focussed around non-tech areas (like Music Hack Day, Culture Hack and Culture Code) as incredibly exciting opportunities where non-tech people and tech people come together, come up with ideas together, and build things together…

Now that technology isn’t standing in the way of the possibilities, it’s time to make something awesome. Get out there and do it.

Spotted a nice surprise earlier this week – the Kinect and its SDK have won the 2012 ‘Digital’ category from the Design Museum’s Design Awards!

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Design Awards before;

“The Design Museum’s Design Awards, ‘the Oscars of the design world’, showcase the most innovative and progressive designs from around the world, spanning seven categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Product and Transport”.

The 2012 ‘Design of the Year’ went to the Olympic Torch, with the London 2012 Velodrome and Nokia’s ‘Pure’ typeface also picking up awards.

I wasn’t hugely surprised when I saw the Kinect had won, the platform and its technology is 110% wicked. It’s got more than a few applications, some of which I’ve discussed in depth (previously) – and look what Luke‘s just discovered:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPcoM7BIDZ4?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

How super-freaking awesome is that?! So yeah, in my opinion the Kinect is hugely deserving of the 2012 Digital Design Award. Congrats to everyone involved in making the platform what it is – and here’s to more awards in the future!

For the full list of winners, head on over to the Design Museum’s website.

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.