The 12th annual Microsoft CEO Summit was held May 13-15th. At this forum, business leaders meet up to discuss the most pressing issues affecting global business today. This year's topics included decoding financial markets, establishing cultures of execution, and exploring how the Internet will evolve over the next five years. The keynote speech was by Bill Gates. One of the highlights of the speech was when he demoed a brand-new piece of technology called the TouchWall.

He described the TouchWall as an "intelligent whiteboard." The screen that had been behind him showing a static image was actually the TouchWall itself, ready to be used. After discussing natural computer interfaces like touchscreen tablet PCs, Surface, and Microsoft RoundTable, he then walked up the TouchWall and touched it to begin the demo. Like Surface, the TouchWall uses scanning cameras, but here they are located at the bottom of the device.

Using finger gestures, like swooshes across the screen and other now common movements to expand and shrink items, he began zooming in and out on what was a big, multimedia laden document, of which the static image that had been there before was only a small part.

Gates then showed how you could zoom in on a Word document and flip through the pages, zoom out then back in on a Powerpoint presentation, then out again and back in to watch a video. It was a very similar looking experience as to what Silverlight's Deep Zoom functionality provides.

In addition to just moving the document on the screen and zooming in and out, you could also use a pen-like feature that lets you draw on the TouchWall with only your finger, something you could use to circle items for emphasis, for example.

Gates also said that the whiteboard was a "natural extension for Office," and that the hardware "wouldn't be that expensive." He hinted that not only was the Office group working on it.

This definitely has potential. I know at one of my previous jobs, we had a semi-intelligent whiteboard that would let you take pictures of what you had put up there, but thanks to a crappy driver and confusing software, no one ever really used it for anything but a traditional whiteboard. Instead, everyone just plugged in laptops to a projector and launched a PowerPoint. The TouchWall was so much more interactive and visually stimulating, but even better, it looked darn easy. You just touch it.

You can watch the video for yourself here. The TouchWall is at about 34:50.

This week, G. Andrew Duthie joins us to talk about Maker Faire, the Zune 2.5 update, and much, much more...

Links from today's show:

Maker Faire
Big Dog
Big Dog Parody
Ray Kurzweil on the singularity
Zune 2.5 on Channel 10
Zune.net
Zune.net Social
Games for Zune
Alien Agressors
Teched Tweener

Today, the WorldWide Telescope has been made available to the general public. You may remember the WorldWide Telescope as the technology that made Scoble cry, but even without that hype, the project stands on its own as an amazing platform for scientific exploration and discovery. This virtual telescope is actually comprised of terabytes of imagery, collected and combined from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Using Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, you can use the telescope to pan and zoom through the night sky, moving in and around planets, stars, and even galaxies. Of course you can view the moon and the planets with WWT, but the imagery from this telescope also lets you do things you've never been able to before from your computer - like watching stars being born or galaxies collide.  

For both scientists and educators, the WorldWide Telescope will help to teach astronomy, computational science, and even provide opportunities for scientific discovery. For users of the telescope, there are rich media tours to that offer narration, music, text, and graphics to guide you through the night sky. It's like going to the planetarium without leaving your home! You can also make your own tours to share with others - a feature that teachers will really enjoy.

I've been playing with WWT tonight and it really is amazing to see the galaxies in their actual positions in the universe and be able to zoom and move them around on the screen. There are several different collections of images to explore - constellations, Hubble images, planets, and many more that I wasn't familiar with but were just as amazing. Click on one of the items from the collection zooms you right to the object in the sky. WWT is rich with technology that will appeal to astronomers, but it's still simple enough for the everyday user.

The telescope is based on technology that came out of Microsoft Research, an area of the company that has operated for 16 years which focuses on long-term, broad-based projects such as this. It's built on work that began with Jim Gray’s SkyServer and contributions to Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

You can view the WorldWide Telescope now from here: www.worldwidetelescope.org.

A new article over at PCWorld.com offers up 22 tips on more efficient ways to perform common tech tasks - things like reinstalling Windows, backing up your data, creating a podcast, making a web site, sharing photos, and more. Here are a few sample tips from the article:

Add a Folder to Your Favorites: Drag the beloved folder from Windows Explorer to the Start button, and from there to the Favorites menu. In Windows XP, you also have the option of opening the folder and then clicking Favorites, Add to Favorites from inside the Explorer window.

Fix a Photo's Exposure: Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery app improves on Vista's Photo Gallery program. Select Fix, Adjust Exposure In Windows Live Photo Gallery (which runs in both Vista and XP), and you'll get both Highlights and Shadows sliders and a histogram, as well as the familiar old Brightness and Contrast options.

Read the News: A number of free services can send you RSS feeds over e-mail. My favorite is SendMeRSS.com, which is so easy that you don't even have to register with the site, although doing so will make adding feeds simpler. Just enter the URL for the RSS feed you want, type in your e-mail address, and click Feed. From then on, new items will automatically appear in your inbox.

Email Large Files: My rule of thumb: Never e-mail more than 1MB of content without the express permission of the recipient. As an alternative, try YouSendIt, a brain-dead-simple take on the FTP transfer. The service is free for any file under 100MB, and individual files can be downloaded up to 100 times. You don't even have to sign up and enter a password (though the service offers additional features if you do, and even more if you pay). Just enter both e-mail addresses, point to the file, and click the Send button.

There are eighteen other great tips like those above, so you're sure to discover some tip, idea, or software app to use that you didn't already know about before.

Last week, the startup Xobni launched their public beta, so now everyone can get their hands on the Outlook plugin that turns your inbox into a social network. Xobni (that's "inbox" backwards!), taps into the hidden social network you spend time with every day: your inbox. The plugin runs in a sidebar where it analyzes and extracts info about you and your relationships.

During their private beta, they tweaked several things, fixed bugs, and even decided to streamline the plugin a bit by removing the "organize" tab, instead choosing to focus on their core product's offerings - super-fast search and relationship management. Using Xobni, you have access to features like threaded conversations, analytics, user profiles, a "related people" feature, shared attachments, and other automatically extracted info - like phone numbers for your contacts. To get in on the Xobni public beta, just visit the Xobni homepage and sign up.

Remember how I told you that you could add Wikipedia to your choices in Windows Vista's default search? Well, there are other ones you can add, too, like these:

Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%+

IMDB: http://search.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%+

Dictionary Search: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=%+

Now what I need to know is how I can use all of them - the gpedit.msc section (see earlier instructions on this) only lets you pick one. I want them all! Any ideas?

For eco-warriors and environmentalists, there's a new channel on MSN that will be of interest: MSN Environment. On this site, you can read news and blogs, watch videos, get eco-friendly tips, plus get access to tools like a carbon calculator and a water usage meter. The site is only on MSN UK (for the U.S., we have MSN Green instead), but there are certainly features on the site that will appeal to everyone interested in these issues.

If you want to follow various sections of MSN Environment, there are several RSS feeds to choose from, including:

• Environment Blog: Matthew Yeomans is the co-founder of Custom Communication an online media consultancy that provides environmental reporting. He reports for MSN on The Climate Report blog.
• Environment Features: All the feature stories from MSN Environment Editor including analysis.
• Environment Photos: All the photo stories from MSN Environment Editor including analysis.
• Environment News: Updated throughout the day with breaking and feature news stories
• Environment Videos: Stand alone features from VideoJug
• Green Living : Reports on Green Living

(via vnunet)

A new web site called Office Labs has just gone live. Here, you will find all sorts of projects, prototypes, proof-of-concepts, downloads, and more, all of which are centered around productivity. The site features tools for the Microsoft Office system and SharePoint, too. To get the launch started with a bang, Office Labs is already offering a bunch of cool projects you'll want to check out, including the following:

•  Community Clips - Community Clips is a place where you can find "how to" videos made by other users like yourself; you can also easily create your own.
• Search Commands - This is quite possibly the hottest of the current Office Labs offerings, considering how strong user demand was for just this sort of tool. Search Commands is an experiment designed to see if search is an effective way for you to find commands in complex software applications. You can download the Search Commands add-in into your Microsoft Office 2007 installation and begin using it today to help you find the command you need.
• InkSeine - A tool for Tablet PC users, InkSeine offers an innovative new interface for pen input
• Task Market - This is an online marketplace that can help you find freelancers skilled in graphic design, writing, editing, translation, and more.
• SharePointPedia - SharePointPedia is social community application that can help you find useful info about SharePoint technologies, tools, tips and tricks.

Steve Clayton just found some great links for those interested in Live Mesh - screencasts! Available from the "Learn More" section of the Mesh homepage, these screencasts show you how certain aspects of Live Mesh work:

• See "devices working together" in action
• See "anywhere access" in action
• See "simple to share" in action
• See "stay informed" in action

In addition to screencasts, you can also find videos on Channels 9 and here on 10 about Mesh:

• Ori Amiga: Programming the Mesh
• Abolade Gbadegesin: Live Mesh Architecture
• Meet the Live Mesh Team
• Ray Ozzie: Introducing Live Mesh
• FeedSync: Synchronizing the Mesh
• Do You Really Get Live Mesh?
• Hands on with Live Mesh

Being somewhat of a FriendFeed addict myself, this story on SEO and Tech Daily caught my eye: "Live.com Heavily Indexing FriendFeed." If you haven't already heard about FriendFeed (where have you been?), it's the hot new lifestreaming aggregation service that lets you keep tabs on all of your friends' activities on the social web. In one continuous stream of information, you can see when they post to their post, share a video on YouTube, add a picture to flickr, Digg a story, and much more from an ever-growing list of services. What's great about FriendFeed is that all your friends don't have to be on the service for you to enjoy using it - you have the ability to create "imaginary" friends if you know your friend's username on the service(s) you want to follow.

So, back to the blog post. What blogger Charlie Anzman noticed was that an ego-search (when you search for yourself on a search engine) on Live.com returned FriendFeed results for both the #1 and #2 spots. No one else seems to be doing that yet. I think this is great since finding someone on FriendFeed will quickly get you to their social network profiles where you can find out more about them. Of course, if that person if well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or something more official, those results would get ranked higher, but FriendFeed still has a strong showing.

It looks like I'll be people searching on Live.com from now on! 

We told you about PhotoZoom, the easy-to-use app that turns your PhotoZoom into a deep zoom collage and their Facebook application, but what if you want to build something a little fancier? For that, you'll need to download a copy of the the Deep Zoom Composer (and Silverlight, of course). Then, thanks to this excellent B.E.T.A. Daily blog post, you can have Silverlight app built in less than five minutes. Here are the steps:

1. Click on “New Project” and give a name to your project.  I have given the name as “Hide and Seek”
2. Click on “Add Image” in the “Import” section of Composer and the add the desired images for your project.
3. Go to “Compose” section and drag and drop the first image, that you want to choose as the background image, in the compose area.  Select “Fit To Screen” in the “View” menu from the top menu bar.
4. Drag and drop other images on the background image and shrink them till the time you start seeing a pointer instead of the image.  See the areas marked in red boxes in the image below for example.
5. Go to “Export” section, give a name, choose the export destination, select “Export as Composition” and “Export Images and Silverlight Project” and click “Export” to download the application that you built.

For more information, visit their blog for more details on this process. You can also check out the app they built using Deep Zoom here.

The Live Search page got a new UI. I actually first heard the news from a quick post over at the Windows Live Chronicles blog, so I went to check it out. I think it's rather pretty myself. What do you think?

There's a post on the official blog of the Live Search team about the redesign. Apparently, the homepage wasn't the only thing that received a makeover. In fact, quite a few changes have been made recently, including:

• Search box near results  - the header is slimmer putting the search box closer to the results page
• Room to breathe on the page  - the page is centered, on a fixed-width page, which is great for widescreen users
• Crisp, clean type  - In addition to new colors, the team decided to use Arial improves readability
• Intuitive video search  - video search is simpler, streamlined
• Health results integrated from many sources - in health search health information comes in from many different sources and is available all from one place

Microsoft has a growing design community that cares about figuring these things out. We even have some nice articles that will interest designers.

Now that I'm learning more about Mesh, I'm surprised at what a big undertaking it is. For example, this recent post on the Live Mesh blog talks about how they run the cloud services, which offers some interesting insights into how Mesh's "services" part of their "Software + Services" works.

In Mesh, writes Alex Mallet, a dev lead on the Live Mesh team, cloud services can be grouped into four areas:

1. Feed & Data Sync
2. Authentication & Authorization
3. Maintaining & Fanning out the Transient State
4. Connectivity Services for Sync and Remote Desktop Access

Mesh's front-end services are accessible only via HTTPS. Back-end services use HTTPS and custom protocols layered on TCP. Most services are written in C# and all services sit on top of a common runtime library.

What's really interesting though (and funny!) is when Mallet describes building the full-scale datacenter deployment and management system: he says they "chose the lazy smart route" to do so. The Mesh team used the the Autopilot framework, which is currently used by the Windows Live Search team to manage tens of thousands of datacenter machines. Mesh isn't there yet, but hopes to be!

If learning more about the services part of Mesh is the sort of thing that interests you, go ask your question in the comments section of his post.

By now, you've heard about the Popfly Game Creator and you're ready to get started building your first game. Great! But what do you do? Well luckily, there is the Popfly Wiki to help you out. On this web site, you can find helpful info and documentation about Popfly, including how to use the Game Creator tools. However, if you're a more visual learner, there are also several video tutorials available that walk you through making games using the Popfly Game Creator. These include the following videos:

• Build a Space Shooter Game
• Montage of Games
• Overview of the Design Area
• Editing an Actor's Appearance

Let us know about your game!

No, it's not really a secret setting. It's an add-in for Office 2007 that will finally give IT admins relief from that one user who resists change in all possible forms. The one that reminds you every day that how they had everything the way they liked it in Office 2003 and why did you have to go and change it on them? Who cares that Office 2007 offers awesome new features, they want it to be exactly the same. Had enough? Just download the Ribbon Customizer, an Office add-in that is available in a free starter edition or a paid Professional Edition. Using the tool's built in "Classic UI Tabs" you can turn back time and make Office 2007's ribbon turn into Office 2003's classic look.

However, it would be wrong if I didn't mention that Ribbon Customizer can do a lot more than just enabling a legacy mode of sorts - the tool can also be used for redesigning the Office 2007 ribbon UI in any way you see fit. You can add, remove, and edit tabs, reorder them, create groups, move commands around, make customized tabs you can turn on and off, and much more. The Ribbon Customizer is available here if you want to download and try it for yourself.

(via