General

You won’t find a more relevant discussion about the current state of startups in the United States than in Clt-Alt-Compete. The documentary, which is screening privately at the moment, follows the lives of 5 startup founders and their teams. While shot in the US, I think many of the issues raised, mindsets showcased, also reflect the attitudes of startups here in Singapore - minus the flamboyance and with a little less ego. I refuse to spoil the movie for you, because I’m insisting that everyone interested in the startup scene should watch it. The show is peppered with tonnes of great quotes from superstar entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Micah Baldwin of Graphic.ly, Ben Huh of Cheezburger and venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners (who is somewhat a demi-god VC author at Both Sides of the Table). Some of these scenes from Clt-Alt-Compete left a lasting impression on me, particularly: ...

“A day in the life” at Contoso - Work Smarter with Future of Productivity (5 Series) Date: 21st March Time: 7:00PM - 9:00PM Location: Level 21 Auditorium, Microsoft, No.1 Marina Boulevard, One Marina Boulevard, Singapore 0189189 SharePoint, Office and Messaging Talk user groups are co-organizing a series of meet ups on Future of Productivity! The activities in this whole series is represent a day in the life of the characters at work during a busy period. Karen starts her day remote and on the go. Along with her fellow Contoso employees, she will be keeping up with email, responding to a sales request and finding people and information in order to effectively analyze data needed to complete a sales proposal and presentation. Karen involves Allie and the Contoso Singapore office to complete a sales proposal and presentation for a customer, A. Datum. This will break out into 5 different Series (5 meetup) Series 1 - Be Productive on the go Series 2 - Stay on top of your inbox Series 3 - Communicate and connect in real time with customer Series 4 - Gain business insights Series 5 - Create content collaboratively Come and experience how Microsoft can help you in productivity. *Note: Due to there is not enough of laptop, please bring your own laptops with Office 2010 installed to participate by accessing SharePoint 2010 and be a part of the experience as well.

Microsoft researchers are one step closer to making the Babel Fish from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” a reality - minus the fish. The team demonstrated the software, which learns the sound of your voice and uses it to speak in another chosen language. The potential in this is to make language learning software more personal, or to make tools for business or casual travelers. Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed off his software, which could immediately read out text in Spanish using the voice of Rick Rashid, Chief Research Officer at Microsoft . In a separate demonstration, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, was given the ability to speak Mandarin using the same software. Check out the really cool demo that took place in Redmond for Techfest 2012 here. (The demo starts at around the 12th minute) The new software can also be used to help people learn a language by hearing foreign phrases in a their own voice. Frank also demonstrated how the system could allow a synthetic English voice on a navigational phone app read out text written on Chinese road signs as it relayed instructions for a route in Beijing. While it is still in training mode, it’s exciting to imagine how powerful this piece of technology could be when integrated with smartphones. No matter which part of the world you may be, you will potentially never be lost in translation again!

Welcome to developing for Windows 8 Consumer Preview! You’ve witnessed the brand new Windows 8 experience from the Consumer Preview. Why not start developing for it now? This start-up kit will help you create exciting new experiences for Windows users globally. Let’s get started! Step 1. Check for recommended system requirements to ensure optimal development performance. If you’re all revved up to start developing apps for Windows 8, check for the list of recommended system requirements. ...

I saw this post by John Westworth couple of days back. John Westworth is a Technology Strategist at UK. I like his post a lot. I don’t have any child myself, but I can relate to his story. This is how he sees System Center 2012. For more details go to: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/default.aspx Try out System Center 2012 through one Single download today!

I always say Microsoft Virtual Academy is a great resource to go to. Why? As Windows Server “8” is available to all FREE, the new course on Windows Server “8” is also available to help you to be ready! Join MVA and enroll to the FREE new Windows Server “8” course! Course introduction: Attend this course to learn how to cloud optimize your IT with Windows Server “8”. We will show you how you can take advantage of the skills and investment you’ve already made in building a familiar and consistent platform. Windows Server “8” builds on that familiarity and cloud optimizes your IT. With Windows Server “8”, you gain all the Microsoft experience behind building and operating private and public clouds, delivered as a dynamic, available, and cost-effective server platform. The course will cover how Windows Server “8” delivers value in four key ways including how it takes you beyond virtualization, delivers the power of many servers, opens the door to every app on any cloud, and enables the modern workstyle.

The 5 Must Have Games 2012 promotion for February is nearly over, but don’t worry, Microsoft has just announced several new mobile Live titles for upcoming March release. Excited? Us too! Xbox Live for Windows Phone 7 game line-up for March 2012 includes: Gerbil Physics - We love the idea of turning an already popular Xbox Live Indie Gameinto the mobile version. The Windows Phone version is said to have three times as many levels as the original, plus lots of new animations and music. Gerbil Physics will be released for official price of $2.99. ...

Microsoft Japan worked together with Square Enix – famous for their award-winning Final Fantasy roleplaying games – has just released a HTML5-based mini-game called Mog’s Tweet Catch to promote the latest incarnation of the legendary game franchise: FINAL FANTASY XIII-2. Check out the super cute screenshots below: The objective of the simple game is to use ‘Mog’ (Final Fantasy’s cute game mascot) to catch tweets online talking about Final Fantasy. The more tweets that you can catch, the better chance you have to unlock web-only goodies such as downloadable Twitter avatars, wallpapers and so forth. The entire experience is co-branded with IE9 and Xbox 360. Try it yourself! PLAY NOW.

Recently we have series of IT Camps on Virtualization and Private Cloud in Singapore. Check out Spiffy.sg article to find out more about the IT Camps. One of the topics that generates quite a lot interests is the Hyper-V Network Optimization. We covered quite few network optimization technologies during the Camps. Here is a quick summary on these networking optimizations TCP Chimney offload VM Chimney VMQ Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) TCP Chimney TCP Chimney Offload is a networking technology that allows the work associated with moving data across a network to be offloaded from the host computer’s CPU to the physical network adapter. In Windows Server 2008, TCP Chimney Offload enables the Windows networking subsystem to offload the processing of a TCP/IP connection to a network adapter that includes special support for TCP/IP offload processing. The offload capabilities must be enabled in the driver for the physical network adapter in the root partition. VM Chimney VM-Chimney (TCP Offload) allows the CPU workload associated with TCP/IP traffic to be offloaded to the physical NIC, reducing processor usage and increasing network performance. This has been available for physical host, now it is available for the guest operating systems. VMQ VMQ is a technology that allows the physical NIC to create unique virtual network queues for each virtual machine (VM) on the host, allowing network packets to be passed directly from the hypervisor to the VM. This reduces a lot of overhead normally associated with network traffic. Note: If a NIC has support for both VMQ and VM-Chimney, VMQ will be used. Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) resolves the single-processor bottleneck by allowing the receive side network load from a network adapter to be shared across multiple processors. RSS enables packet receive-processing to scale with the number of available processors. This allows the Windows Networking subsystem to take advantage of multi-core and many core processor architectures. Jumbo Frames Jumbo frames are Ethernet frames with more than 1500 bytes of payload. Conventionally, jumbo frames can carry up to 9000 bytes of payload, but variations exist. Many Gigabit Ethernet switches and Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards support jumbo frames. Hyper-V Networking Best Practices Use multiple network adapters on physical hosts To ensure good networking performance, you should use separate physical adapters for the following different networks. ...

Skype and Facebook have teamed up to make it easier than ever to stay in touch. Now the newest version of Skype for Windows, Skype 5.8.0.154 allows you to make video and voice calls to all your Facebook friends direct from Skype. The feature works even with Facebook friends who are not Skype users. Even before this update, Skype was already integrated with Facebook and allowed you to chat with friends, read status updates and more. Highlights of the new Skype for Windows update includes: ...