LiveSide - News blog : Live Labs

New from Live Labs: Pivot

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:13:00 GMT

I got called a namedropper on Twitter today for my earlier Day 1 post, but really we think of our readers as being the reason we’re here, and it’s because of you that we’re able to get to do this cool stuff.

We’ll have a bit more later on the PDC in general, but at the risk of being called a namedropper again, today I had a chance to spend 20 minutes with Dr. Gary Flake of Live Labs, and got a personal demo of the project they’ve been working on for the past year, Pivot:

Here at Live Labs we’re all about experiments, and Pivot is our most ambitious to date. Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.

You need an invite code to get into the preview, and thanks to Gary Flake and Microsoft, we’re going to put up some codes on our Twitter account for you. Of course we want to be a bit sneaky about it, so we won’t hashtag the codes or anything, you’ll need to know to look on our Twitter feed to find the codes. Each code is good for 10 installs, so be nice and use one and leave the others for other LiveSide readers, please. I’ll put the first code up shortly (we have 4 codes to give away, 40 installs total), and more as I get time in the next day or so. Remember, the first 10 installs win!

You can learn more about Pivot and watch a video with Gary Flake describing the latest Live Labs project at www.getpivot.com, and we’ll have a review up soon, too. Have fun, and thanks for reading LiveSide (and following us on Twitter)!

Microsoft Live Labs goes through re-org – new projects coming soon

damaster — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:33:52 GMT

Microsoft Live Labs, the teams that brought us many exciting new technologies such as Photosynth, Seadragon (DeepZoom), Deepfish, Listas, Volta, Thumbtack and many more, had recently underwent a major re-organisation. Contrary to recent rumours, Microsoft Live Labs is not shutting down. Here’s what the team have to say on their blog:

We’ve recently made some changes to our organization, and a number of teams from within the lab will be joining product groups around the company. For instance, the Social Streams team will be joining MSN. Some of our engineers will be helping out with the next generation of Windows Mobile. And others are off to Live Search and Microsoft Advertising. The rest of us will continue our work on building new web experiences, as we always have. But moving great people and projects into the the product groups has always been part of our process, so today's news is entirely consistent with what we've always done.

In the coming weeks and months we'll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more. Going forward, we intend to focus on a smaller number of projects relative to what we've done in the past, but invest in them at a much bigger scale. So to be clear, our most ambitious and exciting projects are yet to come. Stay tuned.

The recent release of DeepZoomPix was one of the “new ways to use Seadragon”. Expect much more exciting new projects from the team, and stay tuned at LiveSide for the latest news!

Microsoft’s Live Labs develops SeaDragon app for the iPhone

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:47:13 GMT

Hot on the heels of the Thumbtack Live Labs release, Microsoft’s incubation team down in Pioneer Square just released the first Microsoft app for the iPhone, SeaDragon Mobile. From the AppStore:

Get the goodness of Seadragon on your iPhone!
Browse large quantities of high-resolution imagery smoothly and quickly with a flick or a pinch. Explore massive galaxies, pore over maps, or flip through collections of photographs, all over the air. You can also add your own photos or browse those already available on Photosynth.com.
FEATURES:
- View thousands of images over the air
- Quickly view massive gigapixel images
- Explore Photosynth collections in 2D, including your own
- Add your own PhotoZoom / Deep Zoom Composer content
- Subscribe to Deep Zoom RSS feeds
Released as a tech preview, Seadragon Mobile is designed to show off the 'what if?' of mobile user experiences. Expect more cool stuff from Live Labs in the future at http://livelabs.com.

More on the SeaDragon Mobile release over at TechFlash, where Todd Bishop is working on weekends even without a Yahoo! acquisition rumor to keep him huddled over the keyboard.

Microsoft Live Labs introduces online bookmarking tool: Thumbtack

damaster — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:52:11 GMT

Microsoft Live Labs today introduced a new piece of technology preview: Thumbtack. According to their blog post:

People have always had a need to make sense of the world around them. We want to identify, classify and clarify things. Lately that need has become even greater, since we’re being bombarded with information wherever we look. Now there’s a new tool to help you organize all that information: Thumbtack.

Thumbtack is an easy way to save links, photos, and anything else you find on the Web in a single place. Compare prices, colors, styles or locations at a glance. Grab the stuff you want from lots of different sites, put it into a Thumbtack collection, then get to it from anywhere you can get online.

Thumbtack uses machine learning and natural language techniques to understand the information you give it—it automatically extracts addresses, for instance, and the Address Gadget will then automatically plot that address on a map. Other gadgets help you compare items in your collection, or arrange them the way that’s easiest for you to see them.

Here’s an introductory video from the Thumbtack team explaining how it works:

You can access thumbtack now by visiting http://thumbtack.livelabs.com

Microsoft launches FeedSync for data synchronization via feeds - previously known as SSE

Chris — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 07:33:00 GMT

Today at the Mix'n'Match conference taking place in Redmond, Microsoft announced a new Windows Live service that enables the sharing of data through standard web feeds such as RSS and Atom: FeedSync. The specification is now available to developers from http://www.feedsync.org/ under a Creative Commons License.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions (or SSE), the specification has evolved, from an idea first put forward by Ray Ozzie, through discussions between Microsoft and the SSE online community. What makes the FeedSync specification useful is that it as well as enabling data inputs from multiple devices/locations at the same time, it is designed to resolve any conflicts that may come about as a result.

For example, imagine if Windows Live Calendar beta offered FeedSync capabilities. Users would then be able to subscribe to their own RSS feed, and if they so wished, ammend appointments simply by editing the feed. Of course this would require a FeedSync client, something not yet available, but it would seem like a good use of the technology.

For those wishing to test out SSE, you can do so over at Live Labs. We've got a test feed of our own, though we don't really know what to do with it at the moment - that's early adoption for you. Permission for the feed can be set based on Live IDs for both reading and editing, though at the moment there is no contacts picker, just the manual entry of email address. Other things to note are that it displays your Live ID alias in the feed, and that deleted items don't seem to get removed.

If you're wondering how we got the pictures in our feed, its because we previously played around with Windows Live PhotoZoom Alpha, and so this account has some options our other accounts don't. From this it seems as though there may be the ability to embed Silverlight Streaming applications in the future, but that may be a leap of logic too far for this v1.0 spec & demo. It is worth noting though that both PhotoZoom and FeedSync/SSE are products of the Ray Ozzie Concept Development Team.

Microsoft Live Labs Listas Technology Preview

Darren Straight — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:09:00 GMT

Microsoft Live Labs have recently released their latest technology preview, Microsoft Live Labs Listas, a web-based application tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and other such stuff. Listas provides you with a WYSIWYG which allows you to quickly and easily create/edit lists and share them with others for read or write - in sense a bit like a wiki. Listas reminds a little of cl1p.net - the internet clipboard.

Listas also features a Listas Community Section, in which you can find a number of highlights of the most popular and random items from around the community of public lists such as the most used tags, the hottest lists, and prolific contributors. Within the Listas Community you can also add other users lists or RSS feeds to your own Listas as well as adding users as freinds so you can quickly find them again.

Now the question is where could Listas progress to - could some kind of Windows Live Spaces intergration be the key?

Windows Live PhotoZoom Alpha: Silverlight powers new Microsoft Live Labs project

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 03:45:00 GMT

There's a new project brewing in Microsoft Live Labs, Windows Live PhotoZoom. This alpha project from Ray Ozzie's Concept Development Team is Silverlight based and allows seamless zoom controls on consumer photos in a web based application. PhotoZoom also makes use of the Photosynth / Seadragon technology developed by Live Labs, which most recently has been seen in the Photosynth collections released by the BBC. While you may not yet be able to recreate the BBC's work, PhotoZoom is another step towards this.

According to Matt Augustine of the PhotoZoom team, "PhotoZoom is an experimental site that brings the zooming capabilities first shown during the Silverlight demos in the Mix07 keynote to consumer photography." Note that the currently available alpha/beta builds of Silverlight do not feature the zooming feature that is required for PhotoZoom, so the timeline for this Live Labs project being released is dependent on when this Silverlight update becomes public.

Though not yet released, at a basic level PhotoZoom will allow users to add photos via an upload tool or import from an RSS/Atom feed. These can then be viewed as thumbnails or at their full resolution. Once processing by the server is complete, the zooming functionality is enabled.

We've created a short video of the zooming in action just to give you some idea how smooth and quick it is, apologies for the poor resolution, unfortunately screencapture programs didn't do the transitions justice. We'll see if we can work something better out.

Windows Live PhotoZoom Alpha video demo

As always we'll let you know when PhotoZoom is available. In the meantime, check out the great stuff going on with the BBC and Photosynth.