Up until about four week ago, I used Windows Live Messenger almost exclusively. That was until Windows 8 Consumer Preview’s “Messaging” integration drove me insane with the lack of control on updates and disabling the ability to send group messages on other computers also signed in.

Because I had been more actively using Skype over the past year (after Microsoft bought it), I started using Skype for instant messaging as well. To my surprise, it’s now become my default instant messaging client and here’s just a few reasons why I would recommend others to switch too.

• Synced chat history across all clients – If you use as many PCs and devices (tablets, phones) as I do, you’ll come to appreciate the fact that chat logs aren’t stored on just one PC like they are with WLM, but they are in the cloud and automatically synced to any of your Skype clients. You can easily take a conversation from a home PC, to a phone and to a work PC without anyone the wiser.
• Easier group chat/collaboration – Group chats on WLM has never been reliable or predictable for me. Sometimes participants can’t join, other times they fail. In Skype they just work. The initiator can even remove users from conversations which is always handy. File transfers also work in Skype group chats.
• Screen sharing & voice/video calls – Sometimes it’s just easier and faster to just show or say what you mean. Even though group screen sharing and video calls in Skype costs extra money, the quality is much higher. Voice for the most part has been sufficient for me in group discussions.
• No annoying ads – There are some ads in Skype, but neither as annoying or as intrusive as the ones in Windows Live Messenger today. I cannot use WLM without A-Patch removing the ads.
• Better emoticons – Sometimes an emoticon like (hug) is just what it takes to set the mood for an important discussion.
• No nagging Microsoft SmartScreen messages – One less step between you and the cute cat pictures your friends want to show you.

Whether you’re taking shaky photos of Coke cans or a continent, Microsoft Research has technology that can help you remove the motion blur from the picture.

In 2010, a team of Microsoft Researchers published a method of deblurring images that relied on hardware motion sensors attached to the camera. Now several years later, this technology is now being applied to satellite imagery to make online mapping clearer and cheaper.

As nearly a textbook example of applied research, Microsoft Research recently posted a fantastic recount of how the Bing Imagery Technologies team reached out to the researchers to see if they could transfer the technology from consumer photography to taking much bigger and much higher photographs – photographs of Earth.

The Global Ortho program employs several airplanes mounted with computing equipment and highly efficient digital aerial cameras. The planes fly at the same time, about five miles apart, shooting 220 megapixels every two seconds at 17,000 feet.
…
Schickler was interested in the approach Joshi’s team had taken of using sensor data to remove blur because the equipment in each plane also included a tracking platform that collected data from gyroscopes, altimeters, and other sensors.
…
“This data allowed them to detect when an image would have been blurry,” Joshi explains, “and told them they had to send up the planes again. But until they saw our work, I don’t think they had considered taking that next step to use the data to recover the image.”

After some time adjusting the software algorithms to accommodate the larger imagery sizes and scale with gigabytes of pixels, Bing were so impressed with the results they decided to make deblurring part of its satellite imagery processing pipeline. The end result is clearer aerial imagery for users (in US and Europe at least).

And you can’t complain about clearer pictures of the roof on your house.

Note: The product illustrated above is not a real product nor is it officially associated with Microsoft. It is a fictional concept created by a third-party. You will be slapped if you makes a connection to the contrary.

The prestigious advertising awards Cannes Lions and ad agency AKQA has held an advertising campaign competition which challenged students to “advertise a product from a global brand in a way that couldn’t have been done five year ago”.

This year, several students submitted entries based around the Kinect – no doubts inspired by the Kinect Effect. However one in particular, submitted by “Anne Boisen”, stood out for me as not only a great mock ad but also a great product concept with real practicality and potential for the blind.

Assuming a mobile version of the Kinect is technically feasible, the idea Anne proposes it to hook it up with a vest with haptic-feedback capabilities that a blind user would wear. Using the depth sensor and image recognition capabilities of the Kinect, it would alert the person of obstacles and navigational instructions by pressuring different parts of the abdomen.

The other Kinect-inspired concept is a miniature mobile attachment that reads sign language which translates it to text to enable mobile communications for deaf users.

On that note, it’s quite interesting how both Kinect concepts benefit those with disabilities.

Update: Thanks to a heads up from a commenter, the idea is actually realized with a software project at the University of Konstanz.

Three years ago I launched my “Real Live Search” experiment to much fanfare and press. When developing the prototype, the choice between Google’s and Bing’s Search APIs was almost a no-brainer – Bing was faster, more modern and better documented.

Now year later, the search and maps API ecosystem has become a lot more restrictive. What was once free is now not, and quite pricey I might add. With an obvious opportunity to embrace the web developer ecosystem, it’s puzzling why Bing seems to be joining Google in shooing away developers.

Earlier today I received a phone call from a company Microsoft contracted to manage the licensing for Bing Maps informing me that I need to sign up for a licensing agreement to continue using Bing Maps in my Windows Phone Speedo Plus app (which is now free, go use the map while you can).

Apparently the reason my app doesn’t qualify for the free mobile license is because my app “tracks” user’s locations. Although she seemed just as confused as I was clarifying what that means, there was no hesitance when it came to asking me to start paying them money.

The timing of this, just weeks after Bing announced a huge change to their search API strategy and deprecation of the Answers API last year has led me to realize just how desperate they have become to restrict developer access.

Besides the fact that in my own experience Bing’s results are still as not relevant or helpful as Google’s and the Bing Maps coverage is woefully bad, charging developers a minimum $40/month for any access to search APIs is extremely prohibitive. I certainly wouldn’t have launched or even attempted the Real Live Search idea with that in mind. At least Google has a limited free tier.

For a company that has a reputation for embracing and supporting developers like no other, the changes Bing has and will be rolling out for its developer program is pretty much a slap to the face. And for what? Just a few bucks here and there from hobbyist developers?

Even elsewhere at Microsoft, Windows Live has recently made great strides to opening more access to their services and platform to third-party developers. Bing however seems to have lost the plot.

Even though I haven’t been blogging very often in the past few weeks (busy working on some pretty awesome things), and I don’t usually write about non-Microsoft stuff on this blog, I just had to share this. It’s the Valve Handbook for New Employees. Yes Valve, the most awesome games company in the world.

I had the privilege of visiting Valve’s headquarters in Bellevue (near Seattle and Microsoft) a few years ago and it was one of the most surreal experiences. I felt like a kid on the Willy Wonka factory tour. Their incredible corporate culture shines through this quirky and entertaining document. As an aspiring startup entrepreneur, it’s an inspiration.

Oh and don’t miss out on the glossary at the end of the documentation where you’ll find some gems like,

14-Year-Old Boy—If you see one running your project, don’t worry. That’s actually 57-year-old Josh Weier (see Josh Weier). If you have any extra stem cells, give them to him! He bathes in them daily

Australia—A place that’s either very near or is New Zealand where more than half of Valve’s employees were born.

WFH—Working From Home. What to do if a single snowflake falls out of the sky

Credits to @felipez who I saw tweet about it

If your mobile apps takes a few seconds too long to start, imagine if your Windows Phone could predict what app you’re about to use and intelligently cache it in the background so it starts instantly when you want to use it. A team at Microsoft Research’s Mobile Computing Research Center have not only thought of this but already have a small demo to show off.

To be presented at the MobiSys 2012 conference in June, the research dubbed “FALCON” is part of a broader Microsoft Research project called “Context Data OS (ConDOS)” which aims to enhance mobile operating systems by integrating and responding to context.

Falcon is one example of this, integrating location and time context to algorithmically anticipate which app the user might want to launch where and when respectively. The video above also demonstrates context from WiFi networks. One of the researchers, Tingxin Yan, describe it as

A context-aware mobile app preloading component for mobile OS. Based on intensive data analysis of app usage across multiple mobile users, FALCON presents a decision engine which exploits temporal and spacial characters of user behaviour to pre-load apps ahead of time, thereby improves the responsiveness of smartphones.

As an applied research group, the Mobile Computer Research Center have already demonstrated by taking their learnings to product like the touch keyboard improvements to Windows Phone. It’s very possible intelligent app pre-caching will make its way to a future of Windows Phone as well.