istartedsomething

Microsoft Australia’s internet treasure hunt is back and it’s even better than the last one with twice the reward. Aussies will have a chance to claim a $20,000 AUD reward for finding Dave who has gone “beyond the Edge of the Internet“. If your desire for money is greater than your standards of scientific plausibility, you’re in luck.

Unlike the last contest two years ago which attracted some heat initially for discrediting Firefox and Chrome users (which Microsoft admitted and later changed), the new contest aims to promote Internet Explorer 9 through the browser’s advantageous rendering speed than any artificial benefit.

When you register for the journey to the Edge of the Internet you’ll be given a bunch of links to other web pages – one of which was the last place Dave was seen before he got lost.

Your challenge is to make your way to Dave – click by click and page by page. Follow the wrong path and you could be clicking ’til the end of time. Follow the right path and you could be first to reach Dave and score $20,000. With so many web pages out there, you’re going to need a really fast browser – and Dave’s number-one recommendation is Windows® Internet Explorer® 9.

Another benefit of Internet Explorer 9 is that users can also pin the website to the taskbar which will notify them when there are new tips posted.

The first hint of the puzzle revealed today is an dated music video on YouTube with the comment, “Why do I have this song in my head???”.

Although there is no end date, the competition’s terms and conditions reveals there are “seven (7) web pages (Hunt Pages) that are a path to the final page (Prize Page)” which implies the contest will run for a few months before all the clues are exhausted, unless someone finds it before then.

The competition is only open to Australian residents and you can register here. Sorry US users, now you know what it feels like to be left out.

So I recently got a Microsoft LifeCam Studio to replace the last generation LifeCam HD-5000, or so I thought. Although the video quality is much improved – 1080p, faster focusing and more natural colors, the audio is downright horrible. It’s not easy to make newer technology worse but they’ve pulled it off.

A new Microsoft mobile site has been making some noise today that allows users of Android and iPhones to test drive the Windows Phone experience with nothing else but their browser. To idea to educate and entice users through an interactive demonstration that can be accessed with just an URL sounds great on paper, but how does it stack up? I decided to put it to the test, next to the real thing.

Testing both on a modded HTC HD2 phone running Android 2.3.7 and simulated iPhone browser via Safari, I’m impressed by just how much of the motion-driven user experience they’re able to replicate with some fancy CSS3 animations.

Side-by-side, most of the screens and functionality is simulated perfectly or extremely close, there were a few subtle differences. For example on the messaging screen in the demo, a picture message shows a preview in the list. On Windows Phone, I’ve never seen MMS messages display a thumbnail, instead it says “Media content in this message”.

Between Android and the iPhone there’s also some differences, notably only iPhone can replicate the tile flipping animation whereas Android only slides (due to a lack of CSS3 support I’d imagine). Incidentally this demo also proves it’s possible to design a Metro-styled yet cross-platform mobile web app.

In conclusion, this is a pretty smart marketing idea which has been executed very well. I’ve included a comprehensive set of side-by-side comparisons below for an afternoon fun game of “spot the difference”.

Nokia’s Communications Director Mark Squires tweeted,

Folk’s Nokia Drive will not be made available for other WP OEMs. It comes on our Lumia range and there are currently no plans to change that

What a shame. I’m sure there are many other people out there who are like me, happy with their current Windows Phones and would have paid ~$30 for a simple GPS navigation app with comprehensive map coverage. Nokia could have earned money at the expense of other Windows Phone OEM.

If it came to buying a phone just for the GPS, I’d buy a standalone Android device for the free Google Maps Navigation – the best mobile navigation by far. So much so I modded a HTC HD2 to run Android full-time. Now with tethering in Mango, I can even use it on the road sharing data to the Android.

In a Forbes interview with Microsoft’s Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, he contended that comparing Siri on the iPhone 4S and Tellme on Windows Phones are much alike. Craig says,

At least from a technological capability you could argue Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phone for more than a year… All that is already there, fully functionality for years.

I respectfully disagree. Tellme might be state of the art speech recognition technology, one of the most accurate and adapted to different accents, however its commands are still keywords syntax-based. “Call John. Find pizza.”

Where scenarios exceed the confines of syntax-based functionality, Tellme doesn’t have much to offer. The example Craig used of messaging, “message Person, say message, send” is more of an exception than the rule.

In comparison, I regard Siri as a speech interaction technology. Because it places much more emphasis on context, it appears to be accurate enough for the limited set of functionality it provides. Speech recognition might not be new technology, but Siri definitely puts a pretty face on it. It remembers your name, responds through voice and makes jokes.

“What’s the weather going to be like this weekend” is what you expect in a conversation, not “Find weather in Melbourne” which is like computer talk.

Now to say Apple invented this would be false, Apple bought Siri – a very smart acquisition. Of course Tellme, which was also acquired, has plans to make itself more natural too and they most likely will, but that’s not happening overnight. Siri is available today.

The next big phase of Tellme is in the upcoming XBOX dashboard update where it will power Bing search. You could say “XBOX Bing Batman” but the XBOX doesn’t talk back, like “Would you like to watch The Dark Knight?”. Although it makes you wonder what a voice for XBOX might sound like.

It looks like Microsoft isn’t just waiting around for their envision videos to become reality, they want to build it. Australian Business Traveller today wrote about a new partnership project Microsoft and Novotel has recently launched, Chambre 3120 (Room 3120 in French).

It’s a concept for a futuristic hotel room and you could book it for your 2012 Paris holiday.

For the price of 200 Euros a night, this is not your typical hotel room at the Novotel Vaugirard Montparnasse. To sleep a family of two adults and two children, the two contemporary-styled room are equipped with technology with both current and experimental technology.

Besides the expected bundle of XBOX, Kinect, tablet PCs and Windows Phones to deliver an array of entertainment to guests, there’s also a 1st-gen Surface table embedded into a Japanese-style tatami for the “play room”.

Linking the two rooms is an interactive mirror by Sensorit, powered by Kinect. As one of the first third-party Kinect SDK applications, it allows users to interact with real-time news feeds, weather and music using hand gestures on a mirror-like display.

For those of you who aren’t planning a trip to Paris, here’s some pictures from the room.

Beyond this concept room, “Novotel and Microsoft will continue their partnership through the deployment of specially-designed Kinect Experience stands in public areas across the Novotel network. They are also considering the possibility of offering the game console in rooms so that guests can benefit from an ultimate entertainment experience during their stay.”

Unfortunately the future is available for a limited time only. Bookings close 14th of February 2012.