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At the risk of being a lit­tle MS heavy just lately, I’ve been catch­ing up on recent posts from TED and came across the demo of Pho­to­synth. It’s the result of the acqui­si­tion of image tech com­pany Sead­ragon and some awfully smart thinking,

Pho­to­synth recog­nises the sim­i­lar­i­ties between pho­tographs in a way that allows it to cre­ate a vir­tual 3D envi­ron­ment. You can then zoom in and out of that envi­ron­ment, mov­ing through all the avail­able images of that scene. And it’s really rather impressive.

The TEDtalk can be found here. If any­thing, how­ever, the fol­low­ing demo gets it across bet­ter:

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I guess it was only a mat­ter of time.

Just goes to show how easy it is to re-cut and re-voice any­thing these days. Of course I prob­a­bly won’t find it so funny the day any of my work gets this treat­ment. But until then…

Just a quick aside that’s a bit off-topic, the best re-cut I’ve seen is the fol­low­ing trailer for the Shin­ing (the feel-good version).

Com­mon Craft has got a cou­ple of ahh-sweet videos on the (absolute) basics of RSS and wikis.

RSS in plain English:

Wikis in plain English:

Not so sure about the boo and yay bits but I love this way of pre­sent­ing ideas. If any of our clients are read­ing, expect to see this in a meet­ing near you soon.

Source: Bokardo

Geek.com has put together an inter­est­ing video ‘ad’ for the HTC Touch high­light­ing how you can get most of the iPhone fea­tures right now.

Over at Jupiter Research, Michael Garten­berg comments:

It’s a shame that no one over in Red­mond is think­ing like this and putting out an offi­cial mes­sage in this way.

Really? I don’t know. Sure, if we hadn’t seen the iPhone this device would be very cool. But we have seen the iPhone and all the deriv­a­tive mes­sag­ing in the world is just that, deriv­a­tive. It’s the same with all the iPo­da­likes on the mar­ket.

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Even after the vol­umes of ink that has been spilt describ­ing China’s mete­oric rise to the “hottest” econ­omy on the planet, it is still a coun­try that defies descrip­tion. It is a coun­try that takes every pos­si­ble dichotomy – com­mu­nist vs cap­i­tal­ist, 3rd world vs 1st, 25th cen­tury vs 16th, blind­ing wealth vs abject poverty – ampli­fies them ten­fold and then puts them out on dis­play in a way that wrecks total havoc on the senses.

It was into this milieu that Rod Ban­ner and I dove. Attempt­ing to ascer­tain if there was the oppor­tu­nity to expand Banner’s offer­ing into Asia. To see the mar­ket for our­selves, chat to local experts and try deci­pher the com­plex­i­ties of China.

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The world of con­sumer mar­ket­ing gets a good kick­ing from a pretty funny video by Microsoft Dig­i­tal Media Solu­tions.

Per­son­ally, I think much of the indus­try has moved on from the car­i­ca­ture but it’s still a good video and makes some fair points. There’s also a blog attached to it.

For me, how­ever, there are a num­ber of issues this brings up.

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Over at Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen they’ve got a post about Ben­jamin Zan­der, who’s day job is as a con­duc­tor (with a par­tic­u­lar fond­ness for Mahler) and who, out­side of this, is sim­ply an inspiration.

He is co-author of one of my all time favourite non-fiction books The Art of Pos­si­bil­ity which I can’t rec­om­mend highly enough. It’s one of those books you go back to time and again to restore your human­ity and pick you up.

(Another is Gor­don Mackenzie’s Orbit­ing the Giant Hair­ball.)

And the race to deliver the first multi-touch prod­uct is won by… Microsoft.

Of course they had to rename it. So for the peo­ple of Red­mond, multi-touch is now Sur­face Com­put­ing. Here’s a teaser video which fea­tures all the wow-stuff that gets peo­ple excited about this technology:

Check out their microsite here. Some addi­tional com­men­tary can be found here and here.

At the moment (despite the impres­sion the video gives) Microsoft are aim­ing Sur­face squarely at a busi­ness audi­ence (in store, enter­tain­ment venues etc). So we’re unlikely to see a rush of Sur­face office desks any time soon.

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