Microsoft Australia’s head office in the suburb North Ryde of Sydney might not compare to the Redmond campus by size, but a recent renovation makes it probably one of the most stylistic Microsoft office anywhere in the world.

Thanks to a couple phone pictures courtesy of Deeps De Silva, Windows Product Marketing Manager, it appears the former cubicle-like layout has been completely replaced by an open-space format more commonly seen at trendy internet startups and Google. Although the renovations are still ongoing, “green leaves” seems to be the theme of the design, complete with what appears to be real tiny pot plants.

Check out all the pictures below.

Continue reading →

You may want to add Microsoft Tag to your arsenal against the ever-impending zombie apocalypse as a mobile-based alternative reality game played out a couple of months ago at the University of Colorado at Boulder has demonstrated.

Posters for “Zombies vs Hippies” around the campus teased people to scan a tag with their mobile phone which led them to a site that provided some back-story to the game. Players had objectives that involved entering codes, scanning tags and group missions that scored points both for the team and themselves. The person with the most points also scores a $500 gift card.

Although the student team from Boulder Digital Works, a creative technology program at the university, claims this was a physical and virtual game blended with the campus culture to meet and socialize with students on-campus, it’s result (zombies won) speaks volumes to how under-prepared we are.

Microsoft Channel9’s Laura Foy recorded an amazing demo of a soon-to-be mass-market water-repelling technology being showcased at the Mobile World Congress 2011. The infamous Arthur C. Clarke quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” couldn’t be more true here.

I’m glad she got it on video because she would have had a hard time convincing people otherwise. “What do you mean the tissue was dry inside a bowl of water.”

Wikipedia has a brief but simple explanation of the magic science behind all this and there’s also some great demo videos on the P2i’s company website.

Although I’m not sure if it’s plausible, this could be an interesting way to make phones submersible. Imagine being able go for a swim with your phone in your pocket. Windows Phone 7’s pocket to picture feature would be even better, underwater.

To coincide with the security-oriented RSA Conference 2011, Microsoft today introduced a new community technology preview release of its acquired U-Prove technology, along with a couple interactive and fun (a virtual smart card is as fun as security can be) web demo of its U-Prove Agents component. It’s quite compelling to say the least.

Tipped as the replacement for the poorly-received CardSpace technology introduced in Windows Vista, important differentiators for U-Prove appears to be “minimal disclosure, unlinkability, and untraceability” – internet security without compromising privacy.

To help adoption of U-Prove, in this new release Microsoft added cloud-based U-Prove Agent services that handle the retrieval and release of personal information. Using Microsoft’s agent for demonstration (agents can be any number of organizations or governments), you can play with the auction or unemployment benefits demos on your own, all with dummy data of course.

Although the process looks similar to OAuth-style authentication from Facebook and Twitter, the big difference is that the two parties are never associated. This separation means an identity issuer cannot track where the information is used, and the receiving website can’t access any other personal information beyond the verified information it requested.

For example, although the unemployment benefits site will trust the personal information issued by a bank, it can’t associate that with a bank account number or any other unique identifier.

On the other side of the world in Germany, Microsoft is already putting some of this in practice with a trial implementation of the U-Prove technology and Healthvault on top of the German eID smartcards that will be issued to every citizen. Although the video below is more of a promotion for Healthvault, it does tease a smartcard-based future we might find ourselves in.

With the help of advanced CSI forensics (a.k.a. fixed ratio marquee in Photoshop), I have found evidence to suggest the oddities of the home screen tiles on Nokia’s concept Windows Phone 7 is not a mistake.

Looking back at the catalog of Nokia smartphones, one commonality stood out – many of them have the screen resolution of 640×360. In fact, Nokia coined this resolution “nHD” and as far as I know is not used by any other brand on the market.

Now, using the ratio of that resolution which is 1.77 (or more commonly known as 16:9), placing it over the Windows Phone 7 home screen yields an interesting but not unfamiliar result – four tiles plus a bit.

What might be happening here is that Nokia, who like all other OEMs, are trying to minimize costs in adding a new model to their product line. It’s common for them to utilize existing components such as a screen and display sensors and. It would not be surprising if Nokia is reusing nHD as they’re familiar with the technology and its manufacturing process.

In response to criticism that these images are “rough designs”, I would say for a CAD model as polished and as detailed as Nokia’s to be shown to the public at a press event, it’s extremely unlikely the designer would base it off “hunches”. To that effect, the designer simply don’t add and place elements as they wish, instead, they would be given quite specific if not scientific measurements on all the elements that make up the hardware’s exterior.

Having said everything about the Nokia concept device, let me be very clear, there is nothing wrong with this phone. In fact, I quite like the bold colors and clean lines on the industrial design. However, it’s specifications can have ripple-like impact on the rest of the ecosystem which up and till now was evangelized to be consistent.

We’ll have to see when the specifications of this device is revealed if it’ll stay that way.

Update: Commenter “Juan Camargo V.” also raises an interesting point that this might be part of a hardware specifications refresh from Microsoft coming at Mobile World Congress 2011. iPhone 4’s qHD (960×540) also has an aspect ratio of 1.77 which makes it a contender for a future-proof resolution. Nevermind that, iPhone 4 has a 960×640 (ratio of 1.5) screen.

Update 2 (16/02): At the Mobile World Congress 2011 financial analyst briefing, Microsoft’s Andy Lees, SVP of Mobile Communications Business, said in response to how quickly OEMs can design a WP7 device,

It varies a lot by OEM. If you were to start completely from scratch, it takes a while, 18 months. But, you don’t often need to start from scratch. If you’re asking specifically with Nokia, Nokia has lots of components that they can use in order to get a much faster start.

I may have miscommunicated the issue the first time around, but there is yet another interesting aspect of Nokia’s concept Windows Phone 7 device. This time, an extra hardware button on the right side of the phone sits alongside the per-Microsoft-specified camera and volume buttons.

On its side, the button’s icon appears to be a lock which would indicate this is a screen lock button. This of course would be in addition to the power button that already exists at the top of the device that all current Windows Phone 7 devices use to turn off and lock the screen.

Although this might be a welcomed featured to some, what worries me is that little things like this will have a butterfly effect on the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem in the long-term if the hardware and software diverge, like Android has. Having said that, fragmentation doesn’t seem to affect market share but it will muddy the platform experience.

Of course I understand these images are concepts, but you would agree they’re not sketches on the back of a napkin either. There’s an attention to detail in these 3D models that takes it over the line of “a rough design”. There’s no reason not to believe this is what Nokia intends to manufacturer and apparently they have the power to do so.