Interested in Microsoft Surface 2 and all that it can do??
Website: www.surface.com

Watch the full podcast:

Video Transcription:

Liz :Hi and welcome to the TNI podcast series, where we interview web, social media, and interactive market professionals.

Today we’re talking with Briand Sanderson. He’s a senior product manager from the Microsoft Surface team. In January 2011, Microsoft released their newer, sleeker Microsoft Surface 2 table. In this podcast, we’ll learn about this unique technology and how some businesses are using it. Briand, thanks for joining us.

Briand: Thanks for inviting me.

Liz: We’re really excited to talk to you about the Microsoft Surface 2 technology. Just to kind of get started, can you tell us how it’s changed a little bit from the Microsoft Surface 1 technology that was released in April of 2008?

Briand: Sure, Liz. It’s changed actually quite a bit, there have been a lot of changes. I think I’ll just highlight a few of them.

Liz: Perfect.

Briand: Number one is a 4-inch thin form factor. So as you might recall Surface V1 was about 18 inches in terms of how large it was, and now we’ve been able to reduce that down to 4 inches.

We’re using a 40-inch screen size so we’ve increased the display size from 30 inches to 40 inches, and we’ve gone to a 16 by 9 form factor. We now allow vertical implementation, so you can actually mount the Surface V2 on the wall. The way that we did all of this is we invented a new technology we call Pixel Sense. This Pixel Sense essentially let’s an LCD screen see, whereas with Surface V1 we used cameras that were embedded in the system.

Liz: And that was a question that I had for you. So in the Microsoft Surface 1 table, there were actually a series of small cameras that were recording your movement? Is that how that technology worked?

Briand: Exactly, if you think of webcams today. You know you might have a webcam sitting up on top of your monitor. We had four, actually five, webcams in the body of Surface V1 that were facing up. Now if you imagine those cameras were looking up and seeing what was being displayed, or what was being put on top of the table.

The image was stitched together to form 60 frames per second. Now with V2 we actually have a sensor at every pixel site. Imagine, if you will, your DSLR or your camera that you’ve stretched that sensor all the way across the full screen size. It’s embedded in the same layer as the pixels and we see objects that are placed on top of the screen.

Liz: Can you explain a little bit more about how with Pixel Sense you can actually see like documents and images that are placed on the table, how it picks up that image and then projects it?

Briand: Sure. So, one thing to note is we don’t actually see well enough to do optical character recognition. So when we put a piece of paper down on Surface, if it has text on it, we really can’t see the text. But if I draw a large, “I can see”, and I place that down. Then you can see that the pixels actually see the paper. It’s about a 27 dot per inch vision system.

So we’re really not aiming at scenarios where you put receipts, or pieces of paper that you can read down on Surface. We can see objects like paint brushes. We can see our hands and our fingers. We can see the outline of the Coke can for example. We can also see tags. So we have a special kind of tagging system that allows us to track and recognize really quickly tags that are placed on Surface. Those are just a pattern of dots that we can recognize.

Liz: Very cool. I know that in Mashable in January they published that these technologies, sort of like what you were saying, like the items that they recognize like a Coke can, we’ll see these technologies in places like Hard Rock Cafe, Royal Bank Canada. How else might we see these companies use this technology?

Briand: Well, we’re actually aiming at a number of different key verticals. That includes retail, hospitality, health care, even automotive, financial services, public sector. Even the information worker to some extent. Just some quick examples, in addition to the ones you mentioned, Clinique is actually using Surface in their Smart Bar in Bloomingdales in New York City, and Holland American cruise lines is also using Surface on their cruise ships.

Liz: an you talk about how exactly they’re using them? What they’re actually doing with them, and what type of objects people are integrating and incorporating with them?

Briand: Sure. In the case of the Clinique Smart Bar, you can actually go in and have a consultation with an expert around make up or some of the products. If you’re a guy, there are also men’s products as well. They can put those products down, they’re tagged, and show you which products correspond to your particular skin type. So, that’s how Clinique is using the objects.

Liz:That’s very interesting. So, this might be a really big question so you can answer it as in depth or not in depth as you like. How do you develop for Microsoft Surface? What does that process look like? Is it sitting around a table writing on a white board? What goes into developing for that application?

Briand: Well, I think the first thing I like to talk about is our SDK, our SDK for V2 was launched in July and is now available. The nice thing about the SDK is you don’t actually have to have hardware to develop the Surface application. So with the SDK we actually have a simulator that allows you to simulate multi touch, simulate objects, and get a feel for how the applications going to work with any Windows 7 device.

If your Windows 7 device happens to be touch enabled you can also use the touch on the Windows 7 device to simulate Surface. So you can actually get started developing for Surface right away with the Surface SDK without the hardware. It’s a very familiar environment to must developers. We use WPF, and we also allow XNA well. We support both of those programming models, and really you can get started because the controls we provide with the SDK do a lot of the high-level or low-level stuff for you. Such as a scatter view might. That’s one of our controls that allows you to just throw some objects on the screen and let them be moved around as physics, resizing. All that stuff is built in so you can actually get started with this Surface application in about 15 minutes.

Liz: Oh, wow. So, it’s really easy to get started, but it might be a big project after that.

Briand: I think the biggest thing for people to get around is that there is not up, down, left, right, like there is on a monitor. With a monitor, you don’t have to worry about your dialogue boxes and your windows. They’re all going to be orientated up, down, left, right exactly like they would on your monitor, but on Surface you have to think about there are people standing all around the table, a 360° approach.

Liz:Viewing it from different angles, interacting with it in different ways.

Briand: You have to think about multiple people using it at the same time. So there are a lot of considerations that people don’t think about until they actually start to develop for Surface.

Liz: That’s a really interesting consideration, especially how it will sort of change our interaction in retail places, restaurants, running errands. It really could bring a lot of benefits to a lot of the things that we do in everyday life. I know that a lot of the marketers that are listening would be curious to get your opinion on what you think the most creative use of this technology has been and what that benefit is for the marketplace?

Briand: Well, there have been a lot of creative uses of it. I think the one that I like to talk about the most, which is a real world application, is what the Royal Bank of Canada is doing. They’ve deployed some pilot Surface V1 units with an application that brings new customers in to their stores.

What they did is they sent out a mailer to the residents in the area that’s served by that bank and they actually got a really fantastic return rate. They had new customers come into the bank and because you’re interacting around a table. You build up a support and trust system much more quickly.

So what Royal Bank of Canada found is that a lot of customers who came into the bank to learn more about what the bank offered through this mailer, actually converted into customers and actually went in and used RBC products and became new customers.

Liz: Wow. So, yeah, it would definitely be a great learning tool in a lot of those sales and sort of instructional type of situations. I can definitely see that working really well for that.

We’re actually nearing the end of our time. Thank you so much for joining us. Again, Briand, we appreciate it. We look forward to developing for the Microsoft Surface in the future. So, hopefully we’ll be in touch. For anyone who’s listening, please visit the Microsoft Surface website at Surface.com.

Briand: Perfect.

Liz:Thank you very much Briand.

This post highlights 5 quick and easy user experience tips that will improve how visitors interact with your web page.

1. Prioritize the conversion goal. The screenshot below shows The Net Impact (TNI) Event Speakers page. The purpose of this page is to make it easy for website visitors to schedule one of TNI’s event speakers. In a prominent location (top right web page corner), we included contact information for inquiries. This gives priority to the conversion goal of this web page.

2. Horizontal and vertical linking. Both horizontal (child page-child page) and vertical linking (parent page-child page) can optimize user experience on a web page. Make sure to include horizontal linking (as illustrated in the “About” side bar, which facilitates linking to equivalent third-level navigation elements) and vertical linking (as illustrated under each speaker listing that links from the third-level page to a fourth-level page).

3. Make Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and your company blog links top reusable content.  These icons should appear on most every web page in a web site – unless there is a compelling reason to exclude them.  See TNI’s social media icons, shown in the top right corner of the page.

4. Put videos, images and downloadable content at the top of the page. In most cases, users prefer to interact with videos, pictures and downloadable content when provided. If these media elements make sense for your web page, create them and make sure they display at the top of the page.

5. Entry page link. Links to logical entry pages provide users the ability to navigate back to the parent page. This facilitates further movement through the website and further discovery.  Always a plus with Google Panda.

The Net Impact offers professional website user testing services. View TNI’s user testing case studies.

1. Your brand is not a logo, advertising, your mission statement, etc. Your brand is a gut feeling (as articulated by Robert Brunner, Ammunition Group). Or you could say, a brand is the intangible sum of your assets (Tom Schmittdiel, PSG Marketing).

2. It is important to identify every touchpoint of your brand and then deliver on the brand promise that you’ve made AT EACH touchpoint.

3. You cannot tell people what to believe about your brand, but you can be consistent with your branding efforts. Words create a challenge you must live up to, actions give you the opportunity deliver on that challenge.

4. Communicate your brand consistently online through your navigation, social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and beyond.

5. For EVERYTHING you do, ask yourself, “Does this follow the brand that I’ve created?” If this brand were a person, would it do that? Here? In this way?

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If so many consumers recognize and use QR codes, it is time to employ standard practices for QR codes. Generators may use several different methods to encode, or store data in a QR code. Some of these encoding methods are more standardized than others. We researched Google’s standard format suggestions and have provided a simplified version of that list in this post. We arranged the list by data type (i.e. URL, email address, telephone number, contact information, SMS, MMS, location data and more).

If you’re attaching the following data type to a QR code, you should encode the data using the corresponding data format:

Users respond more favorably to QR codes that scan allowing a preview of the final destination. For example, the user views the URL before going directly to the website. Or the telephone URI code prompts the user to hit dial instead of automatically dialing for them. If you select a generator, develop a generator or develop a bar code scanner, incorporate these standard usability features.

Check out a few comprehensive QR code generator lists:
708media list
2d-code list

Watch the full podcast:

We encourage you to find Diane and The Metro St. Louis Cinderella Project on the web:
Website: www.cinderellastl.com
Twitter: @DonatePromDress

Video Transcription:

Liz: Hi, and welcome to the TNI podcast series. Where we interview web, social media, and interactive marketing professionals. Today we’re talking with Dianne Wolferding. Dianne is involved with both community council of St. Charles County in Missouri, and the Metro St. Louis Cinderella project, an organization that collects, sales and gives away gently used prom dresses every spring. Diane actively assists in bringing high profile recognition to the Cinderella Project, getting attention from local and regional news organizations, and, even, Seventeen magazine. Today she will tell her story and share her online brand and experience on this TNI podcast. Thanks so much for joining us Diane.

Diane: Thank you for having me.

Liz: We’re very excited to learn about everything you’ve been doing with Cinderella project. If you can just sort of start off by giving us a two minute history of how you’ve worked with the Cinderella Project and where it’s come since it started.

Diane: I’d be happy to. A couple of years ago, the community council of St. Charles County, which is our main non-profit organization, we were receiving phone calls from high schools, teachers, and counselors, calling us asking us if we knew anywhere high school girls could get prom dresses for little or nothing. There wasn’t anyone doing this in our area that we were aware of. So, some of the ladies within the office, started making some phone calls to friends of theirs, and started cleaning out closets. Within a couple of weeks, just through phone calls and e-mails, we had collected about a thousand dresses. This was a very grass roots project, we did it here in our offices, had the girls come in and try on dresses, and it was just very, very successful. We decided that this could really serve a need in our area, and at that point, we had to brand what we were doing. We liked the name Cinderella Project because it really explains what we’re doing, we’re giving girls that thought they would not be able to attend that big day in their high school lives the opportunity to go. Over the past two years that we’ve actually been branded as the Cinderella project we’ve had a huge calling for dresses, people wanting to donate, different organizations wanting to get involved with us. It’s very, very successful. We’ve served hundreds of girls that have come and received a free dress. We also give them hair do’s and makeovers, and all the little special things that any other girl would expect to have on the day of their prom.

Liz: If I’m not mistaken, one of the reasons that you’ve been so successful, is that you’ve continued to update the image and keep it fresh an innovative. When you are updating the image, what are some of the main branding objectives that you try to accomplish as you’re mapping out the new brand and new websites, new social networks, how does all that play in?

Diane: Our main target audience is girls from about the age of 16 to 20. These are girls that we’re trying to appeal to. Of course, social media is a very important part of what we do to get our word out. We wanted a youthful look to our website. We’re a non-profit organization and community council, so a lot of what we do is very serious, and has a lot of information, and we needed a website that would be easy for girls to find, easy for them to get on to find out whether or not they wanted to donate dresses, or find out where our boutique was going to be located, or even to volunteer. So, the look and the image had to be appealing to a young girl. Then we also wanted it to have a high end look, though. We didn’t want it to be like a second hand store type of image, we wanted something that looked professional and easy to find. Picking out our web domain was probably one of the biggest accomplishments, getting cinderellastl.com.

Liz: Was that a difficult URL to find? Were there a lot of other Cinderella based URLs?

Diane: There were a lot of Cinderella Projects, because there are people in other parts of the country that had that name, but we wanted to maintain the St. Louis area image, and we did go ahead and get .com and .org, .org from a 501c3 stand point, was beneficial for us, but for a girl who might be looking to donate a dress, or find out when one of our boutiques was going to be open, the .com was the way to go. Something that was easy to retain. Then the fight that we also wanted to keep our original name, which was Prom Dresses With a Purpose, but we kept that on our tag line, we used it a lot when we’re spreading the word or marketing this project, between Prom Dresses With a Purpose and the Metro St. Louis Cinderella Project, we just always try to have that front and center on everything we do.

Liz: What was your biggest branding challenge that you faced while you were doing this project, or while you continually work on this project?

Diane: We chose creating awareness. This is something that a lot of girls have heard of. The idea of donating a prom dress, just keeping it front and center so they know where to find us. If they just go out and look for community council, that’s not a name their going to retain. Once they work with us we hope they know who we are as an over leading organization, but for someone, maybe a mother, or a daughter that’s wanting a prom dress, or girls in weddings that have gazillions of bridesmaids dresses, something that was easy to remember, that made sense, that was front and center in their mind that they could find us easily enough.

Liz: How did you use your website, or how did you use your Facebook page or your Twitter account, how did you use that to overcome that challenge? You’ve got taglines, you’ve got imagery, what were the top things that helped you overcome that challenge in your opinion.

Diane: I think a lot of it was getting it out in front. We have, really, three audiences, the girls and the mothers who donate dress in front of us, we have the girls that want to go to prom that can’t afford to go to prom and their parents, and then we have volunteers that want to come on board to help with project. So we had those three different categories of women that we’re trying to appeal to. So, of course, Facebook’s a great thing because we just had that third party recognition. Everyone talking about it, talking about how they’re clearing their closets out, or how they’ve come and volunteered and what a great project it is, we have girls that are posting photos of themselves in a dress that they got at our boutique. Facebook’s been a really, really important part of what we’re doing. A lot of our partners donate to us and send their employees over to volunteer; they’re spreading the word about it also. Then, we always pull it back to our website to get all of our information. It’s basically a whole line and everything they need to know on the website.

Liz: Well, Diane, we really appreciate you sharing your work with the project today and taking the time to talk with us and we wish you all the best of luck with the Cinderella Project in the future, and we hope that you experience great success using online tools and social media.

Diane: We love it. Thanks so much.

Liz: Thank you, Diane:

Diane: OK. Bye-bye.

Liz: Again, that was Diane Wolferding with the Community Council of St. Charles County and the Metro St. Louis Cinderella Project. You can learn more about the Cinderella Project at www.cinderellaprojectstl.com or by visiting their Facebook fan page. I’m Liz, and thanks for joining us for another TNI podcast.

According to ICANN President Rod Beckstrom, “ICANN has opened the internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” (BBC NEWS). Limitless, it seems, as long as the domain ties to an identifiable and established brand. ICANN is hiring numerous IT experts and consultants to verify that domains are registered by the appropriate companies or governments.

Using real estate as an analogy, this stringent application process is, “Roughly the equivalent of getting approval to build a sky scraper,” according to Bruce Tonkin of Melbourne IT, a domain registry service. ICANN will charge $185,000 for each domain name to cover the costs of new staff, domain development, and potential legal fees for gTLD disputes.

The high price point prohibits many smaller firms from registering for gTLDs, but larger corporations and municipalities will have unprecedented control over an online brand with the new naming convention. Many organizations already expressed interest in pursuing gTLDs for two principal reasons. According to research in Business Wire, most companies pursuing gTLDs seek to protect their brand from infringement and gain a competitive brand advantage.

Whether corporations are strengthening a brand or guarding against domain name cyber-squatting, ICANN will put its new investigators to use when the application period begins early next year.

However, with the vast array of monitoring tools available, it’s essential that a business finds the right fit. To help clarify, we took a look at some of the top social media monitoring tools: Alterian SM2, Lithium Social Media Monitoring, Radian6 Dashboard, Sysomos, Attensity 360, Hubspot, and Viralheat.

Prices vary from $1500 per month to under $100 per month, so it’s important to consider the functionality needed and resources available. The most advanced tools provide detailed, sophisticated reports and allow direct comparison against competitors. Also consider workflow needs when selecting a monitoring tool. A strong integrated workflow helps account users collaborate and coordinate when responding to social media posts and most importantly, it allows social media managers to track influential social network users. Lastly, it’s important to take into account user interface and reporting capabilities. A tool can be far more effective when the interface is intuitive and the reports are informative.

Social media monitoring tools allow a business to better understand its consumers and the state of its brand. With so many varied tools available, there are numerous options for any organization looking to listen and engage with social networks. For more information on effective social media strategies, contact The Net Impact.

Free smart phone apps like Google Maps, KakaoTalk, YouTube, Facebook, and Pandora, all better our daily lives. But for Earth Day 2011, the team at Unidev and The Net Impact is putting aside our selfish technological whims and focusing on five free apps that better the environment by reducing wasted paper and other materials

Evernote is a simple note-taking application, which allows users to type, draw, capture or record notes and then sync those notes to their Evernote web account, a hard drive widget (PC or Mac) and a smart phone. Millions use Evernote each day to keep track of meeting notes, sideconversations and daily tasks. Evernote’s built-in OCR capabilities allow users to search image text as if it were typed text. No more wire bound Mead 5-Subject notebooks here.

Checklist Lite is free but comes with a few “in-app” ads.  As a devoted Post-it^® note user, this app helps me save a ton of Post-its.  It also allows me to create reusable checklists for grocery shopping, weekend trip packing and monthly “to-dos”.

Mobile Boarding Pass. Type the search term “boarding pass” into the Android Market search bar and it returns 11 airline mobile apps on the first page. The American Airlines, Delta and KLM apps top the list as the most downloaded airline apps.  Not only will these apps allow users to check-in remotely (avoiding those long hotel kiosk lines), they also display flight schedules, flight status, manage travel details and even download games.  Your carry-on just got a little more earth-friendly.

Expense Manager eliminates the need to collect receipts and stuff them in coffee mugs for later review (oh, you don’t do that?).  Whether you save receipts or not, Expense Manager makes it easy to track your income, expenses and account history.  Users can schedule payments and recurring transfers, set up custom expense categories and export important data.  This is mobile banking at its finest (and free-est).  And no thank you, I do not need a copy of the receipt.

iScrap, the final app on our list, allows users to locate nearby scrap yards, calculate scrap pick-up pricing, request containers at a specific site, take and send pictures of materials for asking disposal questions and more.  iScrap takes the guess work out of recycling and disposal research, so there is no question that materials have been disposed of in the most earth-friendly manner.

This concludes the Earth Day Mobile App post.  Interested in building your own mobile app?  Contact us on Twitter at @TheNetImpact or email us at info@thenetimpact.com.