istartedsomething

Since it’s a fact the internet was invented to share pictures and videos of cats, it’s no surprise there’s a big cat following at a Microsoft. Wrapping my series of interesting projects organized by Microsoft employees to raise money for its 2011 charity giving campaign is none other than a cat calendar.

Coordinated by Karen Easterbrook of Microsoft Research, Kristi Minietta, Susan Bunch and Alex Sutton, the cat calendar is now in its fourth year – which is like 35 cat years. During last October, they received over 1,000 cat photo submissions cats by Microsoft employees which had to be spread across two editions.

The fact the calendar started from an idea on a cat-oriented mailing list is indicative of the enthusiasm from the cat community at Microsoft. Karen jokes “somehow, for four years, we have pulled this off, and had way too much fun doing it.”

Although no doubts they do it partly for the awwweee, they also support a great local cause – raising funds for the “Forget Me Not” animal shelter of Ferry County in Washington State (where Microsoft Redmond is located) which they have been supporting for several years.

Even with the calendar still selling, they are projecting to raise over $45,000 for the shelter this year with the Microsoft donation matching scheme. Their money has already helped secure dog kernels, help control feral cat colonies and support low-cost neutering for the community. It really sounds like a win-win-win relationship for the Microsofties, shelter and cats.

Between all the interesting charity projects I’ve written about this year – photobook, music album and auction, the cat calendar definitely scores highly on the cute scale.

A rare glimpse into Microsoft’s infamous and confidential global employee intranet portal “msweb” reveals a recent Metro-inspired facelift, thanks to the proud work of a design company responsible for the redesign project.

Design studio “If/Then” who posted the mockups to their portfolio reveals they were tasked to create a fresh new look for the internal website presumably sometime between 2010 and 2011 according to the placeholder content showcased. The designers described the Metro visual style as a strong influence in their work.

While most of the placeholder content is naturally out of date, the mockups do provide a sneak peek at the type of content that is shared including but not limited to “StudioCasts” which seems to be an internal video streaming and archives service and “Inside Track”, an internal news publication.

With a monthly pageview count of 5.2 million hits, I’m sure Microsoft’s 90,000 global employees will come to appreciate this redesign which at least looks rather appealing and should function just as well. At least according to the designers the feedback has been pretty positive.

Click through to the If/Then website for a couple more screenshots.

Microsoft Australia’s “Edge of the Internet” promotion came to a sooner than expected end over the Christmas break as a user only identified as “Thomas from Victoria” deciphered the clues to find the secret website and collected the $20,000 cash prize. I can only imagine his holiday became even better.

Posted to the Windows Australia Facebook wall on the 28th of December 2011, it was verified the winner found the winning page with its cryptic URL of https://www.microsoft.com.au/l4jl4385h5n1ksenak954/ almost a week earlier at 22/12 on 12:52pm.

If the clues didn’t make much sense to you, the organizers has indicated it will post a detailed description about the clues and how it translates to a breadcrumb trail of websites after the New Year. The list of websites include those about the evolution of the web, food and wine, interesting HTML5 sites, space exploration, and even diabolical atrocities of the web design.

Unfortunately for Microsoft Australia, this second iteration of the competition didn’t nearly attract as much viral publicity or participation as the first “Ten grand is buried here“, both of which was designed to drive awareness for new releases of Internet Explorer.

With only 556 registered participants this time round, competition was not nearly as fierce. Notably the Whirlpool thread for this promotion only collected 6 posts, compared to several thousands of posts the previous competition drew.

The only logical explanation is that Australians have become even more lazy. It’s a good thing we still have Australium to outpace the world’s economies.

Update: Microsoft Australia has posted the full step-by-step explanation of how the clues lead to the prize and confirms Thomas’ entry was legitimate and valid.

It’s hard to believe a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone is not only alive and kicking more than two years after its release, but sports some of the latest mobile OS releases thanks to an enthusiastic software modding community who persistently breathes new life into a device at least two generations behind.

When it was released in late 2009, the HD2 was state-of-the-art hardware as one of the first smartphones to sport the then-new Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor. The fact that many recent smartphones including the first-generation Windows Phone 7s still use the same processor is actually one of the main factors why this device is able to live such a plentiful life.

Although HTC did a noteworthy job with Sense UI customizations on top of Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft’s best mobile offering at the time, modders had other plans.

After the MAGLDR bootloader was released by a modding group DFT, the floodgates literally flung open. Now not only could the HD2 boot Windows Mobile-based ROMs but also any Linux-based OS which includes but is not limited to Android.

As of today, the HTC HD2 forums on xda-developers are by far some of the most populated. With constant development of customized kernels and drivers for Android and Windows Phone 7, it’s impressive what developers largely driven by donations have been able to reverse engineer.

As far as I know the HTC HD2 remains the only non-native phone that can run the latest versions of both Android Ice Cream Sandwich and Windows Phone Mango today with most practical functionality supported – cellular, WiFi, touch and sensors. And if you fancy a bit of nostalgia, there are still updated Windows Mobile 6.5 ROMs.

With the dual-core and GPU trend of Android devices I’m not sure the HD2 will be able keep up much longer. If anyone has one of these lying around still running WM6.5, it might be worth trying something new. I highly recommend the bleeding-edge “NexusHD2-IceCreamSandwich Beta8” ROM.

In contrast to the ever-so-slight tweak of angle on the Microsoft logo late last year, Daniel C. Young, a graphics designer at the Art Center College of Design has imagined what a much more radical Microsoft rebranding could look like.

Although the project appears to be entirely speculative. Unlike the recent HP rebranding exercise which was actually commissioned by HP but not executed upon, this is just Daniel playing with an idea, an interesting one at that – an logo and colors generated purely by algorithms.

Microsoft’s focus and leadership on natural user interfaces seems to be the main source of inspiration for his concept as he explain,

Generative logo and transmedia campaign for Microsoft Reimagined, a creative vision for Microsoft to lead innovation in natural user interface (NUI) computing through research and open collaboration with the art, science, and design communities. The identity system can generate infinite variations and unique color palettes for each of Microsoft’s product line.

Daniel’s portfolio contains a range of mockups demonstrating the applications of the concept in both print and digital. There’s even a nice website mockup of a Kinect information page. For a design concept, this is quite comprehensive and quality work.

No doubts there are many practical issues with this idea, notably it’s generative nature leads to a very ambiguous logo without the wordmark, but it’s worth admiring the effort to think outside the box. Due to the tangible and intangible costs of rebranding for modern corporations, it’s unlikely Microsoft will ever change as radical as this which makes it more fun to dream.

At an Microsoft Alumni Foundation event recently, former President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, Robbie Bach took to the stage to explain what he has been doing after leaving Microsoft at end of 2010.

Even though the story he tells of his path to discovering the meaning of giving through charity and philanthropy is respectfully important, he made short reflection on his 22 years at the company which included a fun and honest quip about the short-lived product that no one talks about now.

“There was that KIN thing that didn’t turn out so well”. Heh.

On a related note, at the same event Bill and Melinda Gates also spoke about their current philanthropic work with some interesting references back to their time at Microsoft. For example, “the last 1% (of polio) is kind of like that last 1% of bugs in a piece of software that proves to be non-linearly difficult“. Too true.