Kinect is coming to the PC, not as a hack but as a commercial product with dedicated PC hardware, in early 2012, according to the Kinect for Windows Blog. Some of the changes for the PC version include: a shorter USB cable and new firmware for ‘close up’ applications. You can download the SDK now.

Kinect offers PC users (and developers) some unique capabilities that change the way people interact with their computers, including:

• Skeletal tracking
• Motion sensing
• Voice recognition
• Facial recognition

For example, Calum Cawley, a fourth-year engineering student at IT Sligo and part of the Microsoft Imagine Cup winning team, is using Kinect in his final year project. He’s tracking the movement of actors on the stage and projecting virtual costumes onto them. See different ways people are using Kinect.

There’s also the BizSpark Kinect Accelerator incubation programme, which will give 10 tech-oriented companies using Kinect (on either Windows or Xbox360) an investment of $20,000 each and other benefits. Applications are being accepted now through January 25th, 2012. (Applicants must be prepared to relocate to Seattle, Washington for the duration of the program. It rains just as much there as it does here in the UK so you’ll be fine!)

• Download the Kinect for Windows SDK

Foursquare announced last week that they’re up to 5 million users, growing 25,000 users per day. For a startup that started only three years ago, this is quite impressive, with a lot of people drawing parallels to Twitter’s humble beginnings.

At today’s sessions, Le Web founder Loic sat down with Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare, to ask him about the rise and the future of Foursquare. However, the impromptu Q&A session provided some interesting insights into startups from Dennis. We’ve pulled together some of the ones that we thought were quite interesting…

1. Do it with passion in mind, not money.

Dennis kept stating that Foursquare, or his former company Dodgeball, was never about making loads of money. Instead, it was born out of something that was broken with something that he loved doing… socialising with friends. He saw that there was something that was broken with the way we connect in the real world.

The way he sees it, services like Facebook and Twitter have shown people how to share things online. The next step he wanted to make was teaching people how to share and experience things in the real world, and then have an easy way of telling other people about it by making it fun.

This was his passion, so he built a service that does this. When the opportunity to expand was presented, they chose to focus on this core passion, instead of looking at other markets, which ties into the next point…

2. Don’t get distracted by the competition.

At least three people asked Dennis whether he saw new services like Facebook Places as competition. His response never changed. In his eyes, Foursquare’s strength is that it is unique in it’s style and exactly what it does. Instead of looking at what the competitors are doing and trumping them, Foursquare are focussed on putting their heads down and working on what they think is cool.

While keeping an eye on competitors is an important part of business, it’s also important to not get caught up with trying to beat your competitors. It comes down to what Evan Goldman from Twitter said earlier today… keep it simple.

3. Do deals that are mutually advantageous, and not just big bucks

And interesting question that was posed was to do with how much a company has to spend to have deep Foursquare integration (like Gap and Starbucks in the US, with badges and mass deals). The commonly held belief is a minimum spend of US$50,000 needs to happen before this is possible. However, Dennis denied this and mentioned that it’s more about who the company is, what kind of exposure they can offer Foursquare, and what they will offer the users. Instead of focusing on budget, it seems they are actually focusing on user experience and brand exposure, which is an interesting way to play the game.

For more updates and continued coverage from Le Web click here or for information on how Microsoft can help startups, head over to BizSpark.com.

OK, its confession time – we are all gaming geeks who have spent too much time life playing video games. The good news is we decided to put all that experience to good use, so Pete McGann, Richard Costall and Paul Kelly decided to start a company called IronSun Studios working on games for the Windows Phone 7 launch. Why? Well let us tell you…

Pete McGann, Richard Costall and Paul Kelly

The Dawn of IronSun

Everything really kicked off for us at the Microsoft Mix10 Conference. As a pet project, Pete and Richard had re-written the ZX Spectrum classic, Manic Miner, in Silverlight. When the tools for WP7 were announced at Mix, we pretty much had it working on WP7 within an hour.

View the video from MIX here

We were really pleased at how well the emulator performed, and as we’re used to working with .NET it was a testament to how common the tools and language features are across the 2 platforms.

Silverlight Manic Miner – A tribute to a classic ZX Spectrum game

If you’ve never worked with Microsoft stuff before, it doesn’t matter because there’s an incredible amount of resources out there, and one thing Microsoft does exceptionally well is its tools for developers. Visual Studio for Windows Phone is a free download.

A Spark of Imagination

With development under way, we took advantage of an open WP7 event organized by the Microsoft Bizspark programme, which Pete nearly didn’t make – he arrived late, all hot and flustered after getting off at the wrong underground station, and having to walk about five miles in the sweltering sun, carrying a 5kg laptop.

“We’d started to hit issues with inconsistent versions of software between the team, so the timing of the BizSpark event was ideal. BizSpark offers startups Microsoft software for free, so we signed up on the spot. It was also a great networking opportunity, and we were able to talk to other people in the same position as us which was really useful.”

The next step for us was to get enough funding to make Pete a full-time employee and hire an artist. We were lucky enough to get funding from our existing contacts, but this is another great feature offered by the BizSpark programme; connecting you with potential investors. Pete then took a big leap of faith – “It was quite a big step in some ways to quit my secure job in order to write games for a startup but I love it,” said Pete. “It’s also the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life but also extremely rewarding.”

Test Flight

Shortly afterwards we were invited to attend a WP7 lab led by Paul Foster, Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, to try out our first title ‘IonBall’ on a test device. It was quite a nerve-racking day for us. We’d been solely relying on the emulator to provide us with feedback, but IonBall looked stunning and performed really well on the device. Paul Foster and his team were a great help in ironing out any kinks and providing feedback on the playability of the game.

IonBall

We ended up being invited to join a managed programme, which included full access to a test device (thankfully!), which allowed us to focus on the launch of WP7 and use a real device for testing the games.

Testing Times

With Pete McGann as lead developer, both Richard and Paul were kept extremely busy at evenings and weekends with level design and playtesting. We were really early in development and Pete provided us with a level editor for both launch titles. You can’t underestimate the importance of playability and level design in a game. We had a lot of fun creating levels, and giving feedback to Pete on new functionality we’d like, until Pete drew a line and said ‘no more’!

Home Straight

At the moment we’ve got our heads down working towards launch, we’ll have 2 titles ready for the release of WP7, and they’ll be available on the WP7 Marketplace. IonBall is a Breakout style game, with XP based progression, power-ups, 35 levels of play and 7 boss battles. Visually this game is stunning, and you can even choose to use the accelerometers to control the bat.
ChronoX is a traditional platformer containing 30 levels, set across 5 different time zones, including Ocean, Egypt, Western, Cyber and Horror. You have to retrieve all the collectibles and exit the levels before the time runs out, whilst avoiding the hazards and enemies. Both titles are written in XNA – we had a choice with ChronoX of Silverlight or XNA, the engine actually supports both, but the power of XNA for pure game development won through.

We had a whale of a time designing levels for ChronoX

IonBall is also running on Xbox, and is due to be released as an Indie title before the end of the year. ChronoX is next in line to be ported.

Future Plans

We’ve got more ideas than we have resources. We hope to have another title ready not long after launch, but we’ll all have to wait and see! If you want to find out what we’re up to next, follow us @IronSunStudios.

It’s Tuesday 22nd June, it’s 4.30 and it’s time for the BizSparkCamp for Windows Phone 7 pitches to commence. Eight companies were ready and waiting to pitch their mobile phone application idea to a panel of ‘dragons’.

Helen Keegan              Oded Ran                      Carlos Espinal             Joe N

MoMoLo                         Microsoft                        Doughty Hanson          M8 Capital

Company: 21apps

Application: 21scrum

This two man SharePoint consultancy has become a micro-ISV and are ‘putting the scrum in SharePoint’. It’s an application that allows the user to easily manage scrum cycles and sprints using SharePoint 2010 and is accessible via browser, phone and of course on the PC.

21apps are talking about taking the application to the user – taking it out into large plasma / touch-screens and also to the phone so that developers can check what they need to do that day, wherever they are. The application will cover more than just the specific Scrum Development scenario and enable organisations to manage different types of task lists and projects.

Pitch Number 2

Company: Cortexica

Application: WINEfindr

Cortexica are an Imperial College London spin-out founded in 2009 and now generating revenues. They’re looking at the evolution of visual search from bar codes / tag codes through to taking a picture and understanding what you’re looking at.

WINEfindr on the iPhone was the no.1 lifestyle application on launch, displacing Jamie Oliver.  The application works by taking a picture of a wine label and uploads it to the Cortexica vision system. This returns a wine, or a list of candidates, and enables you to compare prices. It’s hosted on Azure to scale and respond quickly.

WINEfindr differs from Google Goggles in that the user gets a 1 for 1 match rather than loads of data you then have to sift through. With Google you simply get back a picture of the world that Google has already built, whereas with this app many wine producers and retailers have been involved to create the library and metadata. This requires business partnerships – there is much scope for crowd-sourcing in this.

Pitch Number 3

Company: Intelligent Touch Solutions Ltd

Application: Mobile client for Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint.

Founded in October 2009, Intelligent Touch is a Microsoft Solutions Provider specialising in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft Surface and SharePoint 2010.

Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint enables you to connect to multiple systems and allows a user to render the data within the portal, as well as taking it off-line.  This includes ERP Data, e.g. modifying HR records off-line.

There is no mobile client for this and Intelligent Touch have built mobile integration to enable the reading and management of the information on Windows Phone 7.  It can actually run on any platform running Silverlight.

Pitch Number 4

Company: ParcelGenie

Application: Instant gift messaging service (iGMS)

Parcel Genie enables anyone with a Facebook, Twitter or Linked In account to send a real gift instantly without knowing where the recipient lives – you just need an email address/social network ID/mobile number and the recipient adds their address in to get the gift – which means the giver never sees the recipient’s address.

ParcelGenie is also on iPhone which allows instant sending from within the application without needing extra credit card information.

You can select a person from Linked in, Facebook or Twitter, select a person from that account, choose a gift and place your order. No subscription/credit card necessary. Gifts include fun retro style sweets like Fizz Whizz, Wham bars or candy necklaces to coasters, key rings and badges and you can get them wrapped in a picture of you from your social network data. ParcelGenie monitors the sales of gifts and regularly asks for customer feedback to ensure the gift list is appropriate.

It’s not only aimed at consumers but also businesses for B to E (business to employee) rewards, e.g. rewarding staff with real gifts rather than a gold star.

Pitch Number 5

Company: Realtimerace

Application: An immersive 3D driveable experience

Realtimerace is a privately owned company. The application takes the Streetside View from Bing and creates an immersive 3D driveable experience, allowing the user to do anything from racing a car around the M25 to ski jumping/downhill skiing or joining a Formula 1 race. It’s delivered through video stream and is very quick.

Using a 360 degree camera on top of a car (yeah it looks like scaffolding) and laser units at each side, the result enables the user to ‘drive’ the vehicle left and right and also find out what happens when they drive it into the side of the track, for example. The BBC covered the application on BBC Click last year – you can watch it here.

The company want to take the application to Windows Phone 7, ideally giving it to the user for free.

Pitch Number 6

Company: Replify

Application: Optimiser and SyncStor, to make networks faster and synch more easily between remote and local applications.

The company aims to help people by reducing the time wasted waiting for their computer or network. By learning patterns, protocol manipulation and caching, the applications can improve network speed by 10 times.

Replify see the applications being used mainly for businesses rather than consumers, with companies cutting down the time it takes to manage caseloads by starting the process as soon as they’re with the customer.

Pitch Number 7

Company: Richmond IP Ltd

Application: Auditing products for multiple platforms.

The auditing products created by Richmond IP help auditors (small companies/freelancers etc) to quickly and easily scope the audit, for example with inspection, evidence gathering and compliance checking.

For example:

• Client management – including company details, audit calendars, reference methodology library, audit dashboard
• Audit fieldwork – the auditor would take a picture which will have a date/time stamp and also has note style audio recording to tie in the image with the inspection. They can upload the data directly from the field.
• Glanceable reference data.

The application includes a desktop offering and a cloud-based offering which would be used for the application on Windows Phone 7.

Pitch Number 8

Company: Touchnote

Application: Takes your digital photos and post them anywhere in the world as postcards.

Why? Because you can’t stick an MMS on your fridge

The application is currently live on Symbian phones (Nokia and Sony Erickson), Android, iPhone and Blackberry and Touchnote want to bring it to Windows Phone 7, so are looking for developers to help them do that!

The applications uses a WYSIWYG front end and hooks into the native address book so you only see people who you have a physical address for and therefore can send the postcard to. The postcard is sent same or next day and is printed and sent locally so your postcard will actually get delivered before you get home for a change! It costs £1.49.

And the winner was…

Cortexica!

Congratulations guys! And thanks to Bindi at BizSpark for a great day.

Earlier this week I talked about Bizspark Camp UK and GigJunkie in the start-up highlight interview.  Today, I am happy to introduce you to Koodibook’s Richard Godfrey.  Richard was kind enough to not only talk about the company but also offer an in-depth demo of his photo album publishing service.

For those of you too young to know what a REAL photo album is, I’m talking about the physical, “holding in your hand,” wedding style albums.  Koodibook allows anyone to create hardcover photo books from pictures.  Now, this concept isn’t new in the computing world.  People like Shutterfly, Kodak, iPhoto, and many street vendors have been offering services like this for years.  However, unlike those days, most photos that people want to share end up on social networks today.  This is where Koodibook really stands out.  Essentially imagine being able to easily pull photos from any social network, photo site, or online storage system.  Koodibook allows for unmatched flexibility when it comes to what complementary services you use.  Their modular design allows for the inclusion of unlimited number of services.

If integrating with web services isn’t impressive to you, consider this.  Most photos that people possess today don’t actually live on the internet.  Whether you are a photographer, hobbyist, or a casual snapper, a lot of what gets shot stays on local storage.  One of Richard’s “secret sauces,” is the availability of a Windows rich-client based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (sample demo application).  Think of this as authoring software that allows you to customize exactly how the book will look and feel.  Now, you may say, “Viral, it’s 2010, it’s all about the web, I don’t want to download software.”  Normally, I would agree with you, but referring to my earlier point about photos being stored locally, which would you rather do, download and install a super fast piece of software that can manipulate photos locally, or upload hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution imagery over a slow broadband link to Flickr?

Of course, now being a WPF application, the authoring software is PC only, but the service does fallback on a great cross-platform Silverlight environment as well as a basic Flash environment, although the latter is pretty basic.  All in all, once an individual is done designing a great photo album, he can share it and view in online as well as on an iPhone via their app.

To close, Koodibook is not only a great service, its shows exactly what businesses can create in terms of software experiences in in a relatively short amount of time when they use flexible frameworks like .NET and Silverlight!