The World of Interactivity by Vikas Joshi
Microsoft is making the news again, first with Windows 7 crossing 150 million license sales and very recently due to the leaked presentation slides from the Windows 8 OS Strategy. The content lists new features like face recognition, touch screens, Windows store etc, which will best suit the future market needs.
I am personally excited about the Windows Store idea, which will be similar to the immensely popular Apple AppStore. The leaked presentation has not been officially endorsed by Microsoft, but it absolutely makes sense for Microsoft to jump on the app store bandwagon. Moreover, although Windows 8 is slated to hit the market in 2012, Microsoft could very likely bring the store idea in Windows 7 itself.
The proposed store will certainly have all the goodies of an in-OS, in-context market place for buyers. And importantly it will help application and hardware manufacturers sell their products to a broader set of buyers; something which was not possible in the conventional and isolated sales cycles.
So, with this Windows Store success story firmly set in my mind, I thought about how Microsoft would qualify such 3rd party products for their store. They have a ready turf for this with their Windows Logo Programs. The programs are targeted towards hardware devices/systems and applications for client/server operating systems. Through the program, Microsoft ensures product reliability and compatibility with Windows operating systems. As logo certified products are trusted by Microsoft, they will quite naturally be the favorites to easily qualify for publishing on Windows Store.
Till now Windows Logo testing was considered as a “good to have”, but the Windows Store assumption could become a reality much sooner than 2012. Product manufacturers would need to aggressively think about getting logo certified and push it up in their priority list.
Read my earlier post, 6 hurdles to Windows Logo Certification, to see what hurdles managers face in their thought process and roadmap to certification.
Most of us are closely following the standoff between Apple and Adobe over Flash. It is now clear that Flash won’t be available on Apple devices anytime soon. Folks like me hoping to use Flash as a cross-platform tool for different mobile devices and web browsers have to look for alternatives. There are clear signs that mobile industry is going to be a fragmented one. So, writing code for each individual platform is not really optimal. What we need to achieve very quickly are the following:
Although Unity is known as a game development tool, it can provide a good alternative to satisfy the above needs. A close look at Unity’s features reveals that Unity can go beyond games. It offers excellent features for 2D and 3D graphics, audio, video, animation, networking and deployment. It has an embedded game engine, a fully integrated IDE and uses JavaScript and C# as programming languages. It supports importing assets from all popular graphics tools. In short, everything a highly interactive application or content will need, and that a developer looks for, is available.
Unity also doesn’t seem to be harmed by the Apple OS 4.0 license change (clause 3.3.1) that closed the doors on Flash. Unity’s CEO David Helgason anticipates no problems so far. Even if it impacts, the fact that Unity compiles into an XCode project may help them realign quickly. Same may not be true with Flash, as the reasons there go beyond just technology (remember, Flash bypasses the native platform unlike Unity).
Unity has a proven track record on iPhone and iPod Touch (it now also supports iPad). It supports Mac, PC, Wii, XBox 360 and all popular browsers (check out this sample). The upcoming version, Unity 3, will also add support for Android and PlayStation 3. Looking at the growth of Unity both in terms of the number of registered users (130k+ so far) and the addition of platforms supported, Unity surely seems promising for the development of highly interactive content to face the proliferation of devices out there. It will be very interesting to see how well it works out in the interest of developers and end users!
We all test our products and have high quality standards. But is the end user aware of our standards? Does he trust our claim of delivering flawless products? I am sure that in majority cases, the answer is going to be a NO. Unfortunately, end users just don’t trust the manufacturer’s word on quality. However, there is one way to increase users’ confidence.. and that is through compliance testing. Windows Logo Test is one such compliance program that is designed for ensuring strict compliance with Windows OS design and standards. From my personal observations, the buyer’s anxiety level is drastically reduced when they see a Microsoft Logo artwork on the product. It gives them the confidence that the product will be of great quality, as Microsoft themselves have certified it.
So, Windows Logo testing is a critical stage in the life cycle of product development. However, on many products, such testing is considered as “optional” or “good to have”. Based on Harbinger Systems’ experience working with product vendors, we see that the Windows Logo Testing thought process goes through the following stages. Some vendors drop out midway through the process, while others do walk the entire distance and come out on the other side.
I am quite sure that many of you can visualize yourself at one of these stages when it comes to Windows Logo Testing. Hopefully, some of the pointers shared above will help you proceed to the next level.
Are you a product developer thinking about Logo Testing? Which stage of the above thought process do you find yourself in? Do let us know or contact us here if you have questions for us.
This is a new world for searches. More and more techniques are evolving to index, manage and present the tremendous amount of data available on the net, and make it fit for users’ need. Both old and new search players are trying to shape searches and refine results. More than ever before, relevancy and context are key to “organizing the world’s information” today.
Google has introduced many new initiatives to advance relevancy in its search results. Let’s take a look at few of the most critical ones of these:
As shown in the above example from the Google blog, the search for “pictures developed with coffee” will have all the search results with synonyms for pictures, and all the synonyms along with the search terms will be displayed in bold.
The concept behind this is quite simple. There are people associated with documents, pictures, companies, addresses – almost everything. Similarly, there are events associated again with a place, an address, a company, a play etc.
So now with the help of Rich Snippets, it is possible to tag profiles, events as well as reviews for a particular search string. An example outlined again in the Google blog shows three links to three events on Jan 23rd, Jan 25th and Jan 29th when a user searches for Irving Plaza on Google (see image below). Needless to say, this provides a fast and convenient way for a user to determine if Live Nation has any events lined up that he or she might be interested in.
Of course, relevancy in search results has been a determining factor of the success of a search engine for decades. Google is a key player in the search world, and will definitely be an important contributor in defining the semantic web. With all the above as well as other semantic analysis techniques like context servers and usage of explicit user actions when indexing content, the search scenario for 2010 and beyond looks very interesting… And Google seems to be taking small but sure steps towards the intelligent web of tomorrow.
Towards the later half of the twentieth century, a big revolution gripped humanity. After having tackled mass production and creating machines, people looked to using a single machine to do multiple things. I am happy to report that software was born, and with it, a period of information revolution was unleashed. The whole digital world is an automated mass production factory that can’t help being any other way. A piece of software is mass-produced the instant it is written (it is soft-ware after all!). In fact, people go to great lengths to limit this inherent mass production feature by encrypting information, using DRM etc. etc.
Industrial revolution took the pockets of automation already happening and put it on steroids. Similarly, information revolution takes the pockets of innovation and puts them on steroids. The result is for everyone to see. Just the internet itself doesn’t cease from being an immense source of innovative entrepreneurs and even more innovative users generating “user generated content”. However, just like automation couldn’t be an end unto itself, innovation for innovation’s sake is meaningless. And so here we go… What is innovation for? Automation enabled worldwide mass production, and what innovation is enabling is a worldwide mass varietization. There was a time when standardization was sought after as a means of achieving conformance. Parts were supposed to adhere to a standard. Today, standardization is looked upon as a means of achieving variety (companies now support a standard, don’t they?). HTTP, HTML, WWW and so many building blocks of the information revolution are examples of standards that enable variety to emerge and thrive. Open source only takes this variety-production-ability to the next level by freeing up the mass production of software.
Today’s teens and the so-called millenials have limited attention span, want a huge variety to choose from, and are just not afraid of the ton-loads of information that is being off-loaded on them. Mr. Henry Ford’s customers might have been content with “a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”, but today’s teens expect to choose from a free-flowing variety of options. Great companies of the future will be those that realize this need for variety and capitalize on it. So if you are building software, remember the following:
I have a feeling that this list will look a lot clearer in hindsight, but if you can add, please do. I am letting things go a bit myself!
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Following is an interactive flash image of the evolution of variety amidst us.
This post was thought out and written over 2 days. The two diagrams above were built with Raptivity in about 20 minutes.
