wotudo

‘ Speech technology on cell phones getting better..’ states the Silicon Valley’s Mercury News . Microsoft’s Tellme Mobile Speech group leading the way with automotive and mobile phone speech recognition technology.

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If you are chomping at the bit to learn about Windows Phone 7 Series development you’ll be pleased to know the full session abstracts are now published on the Mix site .

Following on from my rant on the widgets , Richard Wong – venture capitalist and guest TechCrunch blogger – makes the point with more finesse, although we disagree in technology beliefs. In his post ‘ In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It’ , Wong lays out the issues of the mobile marketplace and why we aren’t going to see it simplified with ‘common standards’. He also spells out how to approach a mobile application project in a pragmatic manner. Here are the first two items from his list...

There is a really interesting write up of several MSR projects in the topic of natural user interfaces over on the Research.Microsoft.com site. One project I’m very interested in is led by Desney Tan, a senior researcher in the Visualisation and Interaction for Business and Entertainment (VIBE) group. Tan is working on providing ‘mobile natural user interfaces’, which he demonstrated with his project called ‘NUI with Physiological Sensing’. The demo has two parts. One utilizes electromyography—the...

Shout it from the roof tops Windows Phone 7 Series application development uses Silverlight and XNA!! If you’re a .Net developers today – you just became a Windows Phone developer, able to deliver rich applications with Silverlight and amazing games with XNA. Charlie Kindel summarises the latest Windows Phone 7 Series announcements on his blog post here . The Twitter Q&A from the announcement is here . Most frequently asked questions: Windows Phone 7 Series is not backwards compatible to Windows...

So you now really want to learn Silverlight and XNA to be ready to build applications for the coolest new phone on the block? Here is a list of resources to get you going: XNA: Setting up XNA Games Studio on your machine . You can install the current version of XNA on your Windows PC today. This isn’t the Windows Phone 7 Series compatible version but it does allow you to learn XNA by building applications for Windows and Xbox 360 (it supports Zune too but I’ll assume you don’t have a device to run...

Parrot a French company, has created a quadricopter with near military grade algorithms for flight stability enabling it to compensate for breezes and shifting air currents. The drone can be controlled over a wifi network via iPhone and iPod touch devices. Parrot are releasing an open API platform for the building of augmented reality games using the drone. see http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/en/intuitive-piloting#start

I attended the Screen Yorkshire hosted Vodafone AppStar developer day in Sheffield yesterday. It was an interesting day on many fronts but not how the organisers might have hoped. 50’ish people attended the afternoon presentations – at least one taking holiday from work to do so. But despite an enormous 1million Euro prize fund for Vodafone’s AppStar (top prize being 100k Euros) no one could be enticed to stay for the hackathon part of the day, intended to get developers started toward their AppStar...

engadget has photos and a brief video of LG’s Windows Phone 7 Series device. Details are here . Points of interest: Slip out keyboard, small size, me like!

Don’t miss out on the VBUG4THOUGHT spring conference. Booking is already open! http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/April-2010/VBUG-4Thought-Spring-Conference-Birmingham.aspx Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon, Warwicks CV35 0BJ With the imminent release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net framework 4, VBUG announces VBUG4Thought, a spring conference to help to celebrate and highlight these new products. This conference is ideal if you wish to learn about the new enhancements, features and capabilities...

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Todd Brix has published a new blog post talking about the current status of Windows Phone and some planned upgrades going forward. Its only been a year since Windows Phone marketplace was announced and 4 months since it has been up and running (where does time go?). Yet there are 1325 ISV registered on the marketplace and 1245 apps – unfortunately I’m part of that delta. I got myself registered but I haven’t been able to finish off my app idea to get it published :-(. There are some good improvements...

I’m compelled to share with you my simple program for copying files into Windows Azure blob storage. Now you may already have this sussed – it isn’t that cutting edge – but when I searched for examples I found such a range of out dated Azure material, and no simple 101 solution that I had to pull this together. I did pull it from a webrole example I found somewhere (think is is the additional examples download) but I still had to add bits to make it work. So here is the single button windows form...

If you want to get into the detail of Windows Phone 7 Series here are the top resources: Presspass demos from today's press conference Insight into our strategy: http://www.windowsphone7series.com/news/News2 Engadget’s Live Feed: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-and-impressions/ Check here for the recording of the live press conference from MWC, screen shots, and the press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/Default.aspx Channel...