So this past weekend I went to Seattle to participate in the first ever Holographic Hackathon. This event sponsored mainly by Microsoft gave a select number of lucky individuals the opportunity to work with the Microsoft HoloLens device. As an organizer of hackathons for the past few years I was beyond excited to be a participant for a change. True this weekend was not the first chance for me to be around the device, we had several at our AEC Hackathon last month in SoCal, but it was the first time I had an uninterrupted weekend dedicated to developing for it.

For those that are not familiar with this augmented reality headset, see the video below from Microsoft’s Build 2016 keynote.

Hackathon Day #1

The Holographic Hackathon was held at Fremont Studios just north of downtown Seattle. The venue was a super cool open space with blue lights and black curtains along the walls.

The crowd was an interesting mix of software & Unity developers, audio engineers, artists, and non-technical professionals from various industries. I was pleasantly surprised to see several folks from the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, & Construction) space present and over a dozen others that have participated in either the VR or AEC related hackathons I help organize in Seattle. This diversity of skill sets and knowledge excited me more about the weekend.

The Friday evening started off with a networking mixer and then with an introduction from the Microsoft HoloLens team, Seattle VR, and Windows Holographic User Group Redmond (WinHUGR) Meetup groups. They laid out the agenda for the weekend, shared with us some great resources to help our hacking, and then opened it up to team formations. People wrote their ideas on a huge paper tablet and either stood at their table or walked around looking for team members or teams to join. While I came with a team of three, none of us are pro Unity developers (the main developing environment for HoloLens) so we actively sought someone who could assist our project. After giving the pitch to a few visitors to our table, we finally nabbed a Unity developer named Nicholas Abel that was excited to help us with our construction related application. After teams formed, HoloLens were distributed two per table and wasting no time we setup and begin holo-hacking away.

Our Application
The goal of our team’s weekend project was to create a HoloLens version of a building application my tech team at IDEAbuilder has developed for VR (video) and browser based web3D using the Kinect (Wired article). This application uses digital fabrication ready 3D models of building components to 1) give the user/general contractor the ability to place these items in a scene to build a structure and 2) provide them a price of our material and machine time costs for fabrication at our factory. Think of the application like a Lego builder app but with pricing information and other data for building real houses.

Getting Started
As stated, I am not a Unity developer. Sure I can do basic things in the game engine but as a open standards web guy with a focus on real world industries, it is not my tool of choice. While the rest of my team got hacking away at the project, I began building up my knowledge of the tool for HoloLens development via the tutorials at Microsoft’s Holographic Academy website. Hands down this site is among the best resources I have ever accessed for learning anything tech related online. The video and text tutorials were very clear and gave step by step instructions on how to develop for the HoloLens. These tutorials are so well put together that I feel anyone, even if completely new to Unity, can get up and running with development for the device in no time. I was so excited about the progress I was making with the device that time flew by. Knowing it was going to be a long weekend, I called it quits a little after midnight.

Day #2

By mid-day I had created a few different HoloLens examples and even had time to show some others how to build for it as well while the rest of my team cranked away at our project. One application I made showed the digital fabrication model of a home IDEAbuilder helped build in Tahoe AR’ed into the room. Seeing this model in the HoloLens impressed the hell out of me as it is a lot of polygons (750,000+) to render in any mobile AR device. While not accurate in its scale, the model still took up a huge amount of the venue’s space. The video below of this app was recorded with the HoloLens’ video record feature.

I continued my HoloLens education for the rest of the day and night when not helping my team members with items related to finishing our project. I was having so much fun learning and building that 8:00 AM Sunday morning snuck up on me. This is when I realized I should probably nap for a few hours since I pulled an all-nighter and I face planted on a big super comfy beanbag chair.

Day #3

I awoke a couple hours later to jump back into it with my team. The energy of the room was intense as everyone was getting their projects and presentations ready for the hackathon deadline. At little after 1:00 PM the presentations started and what a variety of projects they were.

There were close to 20 teams and HoloLens apps for medical, storytelling, shopping, and more. There were even a few AEC related apps by AEC Hackathon alumni. Cody “Kick-ass” Nowak’s team made a cool AR measuring app and Willard “the Wizard” Williams showed what architects can do with the device. I could write a whole post on what all the teams created but recommend you check out what they have shared on Twitter using the #HoloHacks hashtag and here at the HoloHacks Facebook page. I hope the Microsoft team puts the videos of the presentations online as well!

This video shows some presentation slides and video footage taken in the HoloLens of our Wall Builder project.

Although our team didn’t win any of the three categories and receive the Unity Pro license prize, we all feel the weekend was a huge win and success in itself. I have much love for my team members Chris, Nicholas, and Greg. Thanks guys for all the hard work and awesome time. We really pushed up the bar for innovation in one of humankind’s oldest industries.

I learned a lot, made new & saw old friends, and am definitely excited about developing for the HoloLens. Our team is going to polish and take our app much further. I will publish the hackathon version of the Wall Builder app to the HoloLens store in the next couple weeks and update this post with links and make announcements on social media for those interested in trying it.

I thank Dona Sarkar, the Microsoft HoloLens team, and other organizers that made this the best hackathon I have ever participated in as an attendee. I look forward to participating in future HoloHacks and using this device to augmented and improve my reality. Now I just have to get my own to keep the innovation going.

Last year we heard that Apple was moving away from its licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance and building its own team to create a neural-net deep learning system as used by Google and Microsoft.  To date I have not heard any big announcement on how far they have progressed, but they may want to push down on the gas if they do not want to see users leaving Siri and moving to Cortana. Although Siri was a great feature when it was first released, the addition of voice actuated watches, TV, cares and more IoT voice enabled objects coming on the scene, intelligent voice assistant technology supported across multiple devices will become highly desired to expected functionality in the near future.  And right now Siri is not meeting the new coming standard, but they may not be too worried.   Mature Google Voice has been on iOS for more than a year and I have not heard anyone who had dropped Siri for Now, not because Siri is better, but because they are used to it and its a default voice system. However, given a significantly better system, that could change.

At its Build Developer Conference in San Francisco today, Microsoft provided some new details on its HoloLens virtual reality device it announced back in January. HoloLens is a head-mounted, holographic computer with a depth camera that provides a mixed-reality experience for a range of applications. I briefly covered the HoloLens in a previous post and was hoping Microsoft would share more about the unit today. It seems someone in Redmond was listening to my geek prayers.

Today Microsoft showed off various HoloLens applications that work with Windows 10 and even one that controls a Raspberry Pi robot. They also announced support of HoloLens by the Unity3D game engine.

The Verge has a great recap of the day’s announcements and HoloLens in the video below.

Another demonstration today during the Build Conference keynote session showed the integration of HoloLens with Trimble’s SketchUp 3D modeling software and the Trimble Connect collaboration platform. While these applications are still in development, it really gets one thinking about the HoloLens use in built environment related industries. It will be exciting to see what AEC Hackathon hackers create with this device when it is made available to developers.

I will be following HoloLen’s development as Microsoft has definitely made this an exciting time for augmented reality.

Microsoft does have there own line of ‘watches’ although they are more exercise bands then watches, but so far they have not gone full-in on the smartwatch market.  They may at some point, but that is not why I think Microsoft is going to try to get on the Pebble.  They want Microsoft everywhere. And right now, the Pebble watch works on the two major OS’s, iOS, and Android.  If Microsoft wants to be considered a major OS in the mobile market, its a bit of an embarrassment that they are not considered important enough that Pebble, maintaining its position as a major watch brand, is not included.  As such it would make sense for Microsoft phones to be able to use the Pebble watch as well showing they are a major player.

So for now, you can downloaded from a link provided by windowscentral.com from their post. I have not tried it so proceed with cation.

Image from: http://blog.laptopmag.com

This has been building up for sometime.  As with the Great Mobile War and Browser War, the Great Office Cloud War has 3 players, Google, Apple and now Microsoft.

In the beginning, there was Google Docs.  Google docs were pretty simple but had one great advantage.  You could start a doc on one machine, go to another and there it was, all through a web browser. Did not matter what OS.  Simple enough but amazing for people like me.  Then the fact I could access on a tablet and somewhat on a good phone was even better!   And then I could share it?  Crazy.  But Microsoft was not too worried about that, they were more concerned with Firefox and Chrome finally taking market share away from I.E.

As time goes on Google’s Docs get more sophisticated and connected with Gmail and Google Drive and other 3rd party apps, you could run your office completely in the cloud.  And many people did. Especially those of us in the Valley in startup land.  Now  Microsoft was starting to pay attention, although its was mostly geeks and start up companies with little money that were dropping office.

However when Apple decided to drop Office and create their own work suite did bells start to go off at Microsoft.  Suddenly the cash cow that did not seem to ever have an end, was losing market share.  Making things worse is more and more people were beginning to use tablet and mobile devices at work, both of which were controlled by Google and Apple.  Suddenly the battle lines were drawn.  The next king of the Office would be the service that can provide powerful tools as we are used to with:

1) Anywhere anytime cloud support,

2) Real-time Collaboration, and

3) Support on any device from any OS.

Microsoft was weak on all three fronts.  Office could not fully run in the cloud, real-time collaboration required expensive 3rd party tools and Apple and Google owned the tablet and mobile space.

But of course, this is Microsoft, they do what they always do when threaten, throw a bunch of money at it, screw it up, then throw more money and finally get competitive.

Fast forward to the post Balmer era and we are seeing Microsoft move into cloud based services in a big way. So much so that soon Microsoft’s biggest product will no longer be Windows, or Office, or XBox, but Azure, their cloud service. Many people have not heard of Azure but it will become center all Microsoft services, many of which will be called 365. Office 365, Windows 365 and even Video 365, more on Video 365 later. Also we have seen Microsoft buy Acompli and rebrand it as Outlook for mobile and I recently downloaded OneNote on my iPad. Microsoft is making a big push into cloud services on non windows devices with its Office 365 suite soon to be followed by Windows itself.

So why is Microsoft moving so hard and so fast? Because they have already lost out on the mobile phone market and with Google drive and Docs and now Apple releasing iWork on iCloud, allowing anyone to use Apple Office tools, they are seeing a threat to its dominance with MS Office. Worse, a new generation of users are not interested in buying software licenses but instead, ‘renting’ services for only when they need it and typically through a cloud service, and the market is growing VERY fast. Further, options like ChromeBook using the Google suite is a far cheaper and almost as effective means for running a virtual office. Many users, myself included, do pretty much all their work on the cloud using cloud based apps. I have dropbox for my files, use google docs for most of my writing and collaborating and even now I’m writing the second part of this post on my ipad after starting it last night on my main PC. Microsoft knows it needs to moving its services to satisfy how a new generation of workers demand to be able to work; anywhere, anytime, on anything.

So what to watch..  Microsoft is not giving up on Windows phone but they know the need to get their services on the devices people are using, that means Android and iOS.  I do not imagine Apple or Google is going to be too excited to help Microsoft out, but I know who might.  Samsung.  Samsung is one of the largest competitors to Apple in the mobile market.  Although losing some space recently, they are not the ones to give up.  I expect Samsung to fight for market share as well as keep on the leading edge with wearable and even VR displays.  Microsoft needs a partner like Samsung to quickly make a play for getting their office apps on mobile devices quickly.  There is not enough time to ‘wait’ for Microsoft phones to one day become a market player.

Another battle front just starting to open is micro PC devices.  Right now you can get a cheap Chromebook to pretty much do 90% of your information processing needs.  However, watch for the Microsoft ‘Stick’ to come onto the scene running Windows 10.  This device will fight for ownership of your TV’s HDMI port just as ChromeCast has done.  And VR?  Who has NOT seen Microsoft’s AR device preview called HoloLens?

Times they are a changing. The days of Microsoft and everyone else is gone, Microsoft knows this.  Its going to be a Battle Royal!

image from netsolutionsny.com

I upgraded from Windows 7 to 8 then 8.1  I have not had any more major issues with it short of the UX/UI that is basically common knowledge at this point.  I’ve downloaded Windows 10 and although I have not experimented with it too much, its a better experience then 8, so I feel I’m getting the ‘upgrade’ that was promised.  Whats just as cool about this is the fact that I’m getting this for free!  And Microsoft claims I will get all future upgrades for free..  Yeeahh..  Thats … wait.., what?  All upgrades for free?  And then what is this I hear?  They have applied for a trademark for Windows 365 and announced a subscription service?  Hmm.. So we already know about Office 356 going subscriptions, Adobe seems like they are happy with it.  Already on my phone I get my OS upgrades for free, first Apple and then on my Android.  Windows phone I hear will be the same.  A major sea chance is taking place here…

I think the days of waiting for a major OS upgrade from Microsoft is over.  Lets think about it.  One of the major issues with Windows’ security is the fact that many people do not keep their machines up to date.  Browsers were first of the box to deal with this by auto updating just like Flash and Java.  So I can imagine the updates we see from Microsoft every now and again will not just to be bug and security fixes, but changes at the OS core that normally are reserved for numbered OS upgrades.  Also, if you offer it free, you can finally get the army of Windows 7 users to upgrade reducing the number of older OS out there and thus reducing the security risk that Windows is known for.  What if ALL windows users could upgrade for free?  That might make a lot of sense from a security and support point of view.  Now we know XP and Vista and not supported anymore, but with a subscription, and assuming it was cheap enough, they may just upgrade, although I kinda doubt it, its not THAT much to upgrade windows and if you are still on XP or Vista its because you have some legacy software or you just fear change.

But if I have my Windows machine constantly being updated and upgraded, like a browser, then do we really need numbers anymore?  At what point do I go from Windows 10 to Windows 11?  Unless the change the core is so substantial that you HAVE to use an external install and lose your applications, you may as well stop saying Windows, 8,10, 11 or whatever and just say, Windows.  Done.  Or as we have recently learned, Windows 365.  Of course you will still need build numbers just to be sure that the application you bought will still run, but even then I would be there will be some sort of windows service that will run older apps in a completely sanitized box, almost like a virtual machine, to allow older code to work but not expose the current OS to bugs or security threats. And some older code, kind of like what happens with some Apple apps that do not keep up with the upgrade path, simply stop working and your out of luck.

I think the could be the last major ‘Upgrade’ we see from Windows for a long time.  We have Windows 10 coming, but after that, it will be Window 365… until another sea change takes place.

Photo credits: techloob.com

It was announce through Forbes that Microsoft is planning on releasing a watch in the next few weeks.  No solid news on what it will look like yet, but my bet is that it will look somewhat like the LG; clean, simple square.  It is reported that it will have bio metric tracking as is now considered default for all higher end watches (don’t know why) but the big news is that it is expected to have 2 days battery life.  This is a big deal since all but the Pebble, including the yet released Apple watch, are only good for 24 hours. Also big news is that this watch is suppose to work with iOS, Android and Windows phones. This is not a surprise since Microsoft only has  ~2.5% of the smartwatch market. A good move for a first major project launch with Satya Nadella as CEO.  Something Ballmer may or may have not done.

However, this is something Microsoft HAD to do.  I do not think Microsoft is giving up on the smartphone market and to have a device out there that does not have ANY smartwatches that work with it make Microsoft phone users feel a bit second class.  The Microsoft watch does not have to be amazing, or beat out Apple in design, or Samsung in functionality, it just has to performs the basics that we come to expect from advanced smart watches. Apps, voice control and not look ugly.  If Microsoft can hit these performance markers, then they have seceded.

Is it too little to late?  Google and Samsung are first the market with color smart-watches with Samsung the current market leader and Apple fanboys will of course only buy Apple.  Pebble, surprisingly is holding on approaching 400,000 units to Samsung’s near 1m.

No word on the price of a Microsoft watch but I would expect to fall in the 299 to 399 range to be competitive with other watches on the market.

Cant wait to see what happens.  This should be good.

Microsoft Sway

View original story here.

Does it show the SSD at all? I would check to see that it’s indeed being picked up by the BIOS and if not, check the cables.
Occasionally, Windows setup can chuck a fit when it discovers a drive with an invalid MBR/boot sector and won’t install to it. To fix this, you could try the following
1.Boot up Windows 7 disc.
2.When the welcome screen comes up on Windows Setup, press Shift + F10, which will display a command prompt.
3.Type “diskpart” (no quotes) and press enter.
4.Type “list disk” and press enter.
5.Hopefully you can see your SSD in the list. You should see a number identifying it. Now type “select disk X” (where X is the number identifying your SSD) and press enter.
6.Type “clean” and press enter. This will write a blank MBR, YOU WILL LOSE ANY DATA ON THE SSD if you did have anything on it.
Hopefully one of these tips helps :

Rumor mill has it that there will be one more update to win8 and that will close it out.  The lessons learned on win8, both from a useability point of view as well as coding will be rolled into win9. However, something else will be rolled into win9 as well; remote authentication.  Perhaps the opening salvo into a subscription model as done with Office instead of using a key system, which is constantly hacked, especially in China.  Here is a quote from WZor on the Russian-language Ru-Board

It’s assumed that the activation of products distributed via ESD-RETAIL channels will be more tightly associated with a specific PC and that activation will be done when user will log in to Microsoft Store. Activation key won’t be given to user and he won’t need to enter key manually.

So what is interesting here is the possibility that windows will join the update path that many OS now follow instead of having a major release every 18 to 22 months. Stay tuned.