Jonathan Wong

Free Installation of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate 90 days Trial Innovative applications can catapult your business forward providing you with a competitive advantage. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution allows you to realize the strategic value of your custom software investments. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an interoperable family of products that help make it easier to create, test and deliver custom software solutions. A rich set of integrated tools and server infrastructure coupled with flexible and agile process’s that represent a breakthrough for development tools, help you manage and optimize your entire software development process. This event gives you a valuable opportunity to learn more about how Microsoft’s Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution can help you reduce cost, reduce development time, increase quality, and improve project visibility and manageability. To register for this event email Sandy at MSmarketing@swap.com.sg or call for more information at +65 6227 7445. ...

ABOVE Solutions today announced the first interactive media application, TangoFX™, on Windows Phone 7. TangoFX is a context aware interactive service that provides live and on-demand cinematic experiences for viewers to watch their favorite content anywhere, anytime and on any screen. Through the Microsoft BizSpark program, ABOVE worked closely with Microsoft to develop TangoFX and create a world-class media application for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. TangoFX is also the industry’s first open standards-based real-time collaborative interactive media platform. The software platform runs an advanced user interface and video applications in a limited memory footprint, allowing for optimal implementation on a variety of network and devices. Using smart on-screen widgets, the interactive service enhances the cinematic experience by allowing viewers to connect with friends and family, and pick, share and discuss scenes of mutual interest while watching live or on-demand content. The interactive service leverages several patent-pending technologies to provide individual and shared interactive program guides that allow viewers to completely personalize their viewing experience to match their media & entertainment lifestyle. TangoFX is built on a next generation interactive media platform that is customizable for telecom carriers, content providers, and social media networks. Poonacha Machaiah, Chairman & CEO of ABOVE Solutions had this to say about the TangoFX platform: ...

Two weeks ago, we held our Imagine Cup 2010 Awards Ceremony at Marina Bay Sands. The special guest of course, is none other than the CEO of Microsoft himself, Steve Ballmer. The event was attended by over 600 academics and students from IHLs in Singapore, as they experienced a demo fest of Microsoft’s latest technologies, and witnessed the crowning of Singapore’s top software design team, Mama-Bear from Temasek Polytechnic, who will represent us in Poland come July. Hosted by John Fernandes, the event also awarded Hu Zhengbin from Nanyang Polytechnic with the IT Challenge Award. Zhengbin is currently ranked top 3 in the world, and will slug it out in Poland to see how he ranks on the global stage. Three students also posed a variety of questions to Steve that ranged from questions on his ambitions as a teenager, our cloud computing strategy and some of the key learnings he has had as CEO. Steve had a great time interacting with the students and vice versa as they shared a couple of lighter moments during the award ceremony and Q&A. Congratulations to Zhengbin and Mama-Bear, and a very big thanks to IDA and Nanyang Technological University for making Imagine Cup 2010 happen! See you guys next year! For those of you who missed the event, here are the videos from the event: [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/12297285[/vimeo] [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/12283185[/vimeo] [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/12197623[/vimeo] Click below to see a slideshow of all of the photos we took from the event (close to 400): [iframe: title =“Preview” scrolling=“no” marginheight=“0” marginwidth=“0” frameborder=“0” style=“width:122px;height:137px;padding:0;background-color:#fcfcfc;” src=“http://cid-dda3d8710dc750f8.photos.live.com/embedalbum.aspx/Imagine%20Cup%202010%20Awards%20Ceremony"]

Today is Friday, and if you are a PHP developer with nothing to do this coming weekend, here is a new API library that you can try out over the next couple days. We are happy to announce a new Bing Search Library for PHP,available on Codeplex.com under an open source BSD license. From the project homepage on Codeplex.com: The Bing Search Library for PHP allows you to easily use Bing’s API to fetch search results and use in your own PHP application. The library for PHP is designed to give PHP developers an object-oriented interface to access the Bing API. It supports fluent interfaces in PHP so that options can be easily chained together for readability. ...

Since the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, we have witnessed a phenomenal demand for the progress towards Natural User Interfaces. There are now new generation of PCs enabled with multi-touch functions and touch-optimized applications being released as you read this. The market for touch PCs is heating up. About 10 percent of new PC models in 2010 will support touch technology, says Amy Leong, research director at Gartner Research. “In the next few years, we are going to see touch technologies being tested and deployed for many applications. More than 6 million PCs with touch screens will ship in 2010, nearly four times more than in 2008.” Microsoft has worked closely with HP, one of our largest partner PC manufacturers, during the development of Windows 7 to ensure hardware design presents a flawless symbiosis of software and hardware integration. This collaboration between Microsoft and HP result in a truly intuitive, innovative and engaging computing experience that brings technology to life in ways never available before to a mainstream consumer audience. To further unlock the potential of HP’s touch-enabled hardware and TouchSmart 3.0 software together with Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, HP is now seeking software developers to join the HP TouchExchange Programme in creating cutting edge and functional applications that will revolutionize the future of the touch technology and bring new innovations to consumers. If your application holds commercial potential, HP may provide you with a HP TouchSmart PC and a sizeable start-up capital to help you develop your application and commercialize it in the market. With the wide range of touch-ready Windows 7-based computers coming to market this year, with some priced low enough to put touch within just about everyone’s reach, it offers great potential for you to showcase your solutions to a huge audience. The Windows 7 Multitouch Platform is a very powerful development platform. Microsoft with HP aim to provide you the necessary support and resources to help you succeed, connect with the relevant business partners and expand your market reach. For more details on the HP TouchExchange programme initiative, please read here. The Microsoft Innovation Centre is more than willing to help you achieve success. ...

Over this past weekend, local game development company Touch Dimensions was featured in an article in TODAYonline. The key part of the report: Microsoft has commissioned Touch Dimensions to create some 20 free casual entertainment applications that run on the Windows Mobile operating system. These range from a digital sketchpad to a Whack-A-Mole-type game that lets you smack mosquitoes to oblivion. This piece of news has gotten a fair bit of coverage over the weekend, and been picked up by both WMExperts and WMPoweruser.com. (Incidentally, is it just me or does it feel like nowadays every article that appears on WMExperts will also appear on WMPoweruser.com, and vice versa?) The TODAYonline report further states: ...

Eighteen months of incubation and one billion printed Tags later, Microsoft Tag is finally coming out of beta. (If you are not sure what Tag is, it’s basically an advanced mobile bar code technology that allows you to use some very nifty custom designs as 2D bar codes.) The basic Tag services are still free of charge, including creating a standard Tag, reviewing standard analytics, and using the Tag Reader application. The Tag team also plans to add other value-added features over time such as advanced reporting and analytics and real-time location services. As part of this launch, Microsoft Tag also offers the following new features: ...

It seems that Christmas has come early for us here at the Microsoft Innovation Centre! Look at what we found last week: Yes, this is none other than the prototype LG Panther devices that have been seen in the wild for the past week or so. Here are some more photos, including the box that it came in: [gallery link=“file” columns=“3” orderby=“rand” exclude=“776,807”] Where did we get these devices from? Well, we wished we could say that we found it at a local Starbucks because someone left it there after a caffeine high, but in reality these were sent to us so we can start testing our Windows Phone 7 applications in Singapore on an actual device instead of only using the emulator. A few early observations: ...

Last night, I was invited by IEEE GOLD to speak at a cloud computing event they organized for their members. They wanted me to share with them about what Microsoft was doing in cloud computing. (For those who don’t know, IEEE GOLD stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Graduates Of Last Decade. That’s a long name!) I didn’t know what to expect, since I was told the audience would be a mix of current students, graduated students, researchers, faculty, alumni and industry people. And being an IEEE event, it meant that most of the audience came from an electrical engineering background, instead of an IT background like the technical audiences we normally reach out to. I mean, do electrical engineers really care about cloud computing? Well, surprisingly (to me), yes! As I sort of expected, the audience got the most excited when I spoke about the massive investment that Microsoft is putting into building data centers all around the world. I spoke about how Microsoft is using 4th-generation data center designs and cutting-edge technology allows Microsoft to achieve an average PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.22 in their data centers. (As a reference, Google’s twelve-month energy-weighted average PUE is around 1.18. We are only a little bit behind. :)) And as expected, the PUE discussion triggered off a flurry of questions and further discussions around how PUE is measured and optimized in data centers. All in all it was a great night of conversation with a very passionate audience that was very engaged. Here are the slides that I used for the presentation last night: [slideshare id=4168237&doc=microsoftandthecloud-jonathanwong-100520005112-phpapp01]

There is a lot of excitement in the benefits that cloud computing promises to bring to society. However, what’s equally important is the notion of cloud interoperability, or the ability of one cloud to work with other platforms and applications and not just with other clouds. This is paramount if we want to realize the full potential of cloud computing and all the benefits that it can bring to us. At Microsoft, our approach to cloud interoperability is based on openness - i.e. documenting the proprietary protocols of our leading products, making sure open source technologies work with our technologies, and most importantly, support popular standards in our products and services. We’ve said in the past that we take a pragmatic approach to interoperability. The same holds true for our approach to interoperability in the cloud. Cloud interoperability is hard work, but we strive to provide the world’s best platforms, not only for Microsoft’s technologies, but for everyone else’s too. To help you understand some of the cloud interoperability scenarios that Microsoft helps enable, here is a nice infographic to illustrate a day in the life of Isabela Interop, a busy environmental studies researcher who like many of us, has busy days juggling work and family. Let’s look how interoperable technology is connecting Isabela to her work, family and community. ...