Excellent!

Just after I mentioned this cool flashlight interface, Mashable points me at a nice video from Chris Harrison on Skinput which is some research collaboration between himself (at Carnegie Mellon) and Desney Tan and Dan Morris from Microsoft Research.

Arm Tetris anyone?

As Mike said, I’ll be helping out on the Client development day at TechDays in the UK. There’s a great line-up for that day including Ingo Rammer and Ian Griffiths, so from my keynote, things can only get better…

Still time to register – take a look.

I’ll be loitering about the rest of the week too and in particular helping Paul Foster with an “After Hours” event on 14th April where we’ll be talking about anything from home entertainment to augmented reality. Join us, it’ll be ace.

Spotted elsewhere, but Stevecla is where I first saw this great demonstration of a game running across a Win7 PC, A Windows Phone 7 Series device and an XBox. It’ll never catch on :)

Talking of phones (which we sort of were), worth a look at Charlie’s post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, and his list of those contributing which bits. The full session list for Windows Phone development at  MIX has now been published too. Yum yum.

Talking of travel and discovery: ever felt a bit stupid when you’ve held up your iPhone in front of your face whilst wandering down the street to take advantage of some augmented reality application or other? I have. (Actually, I’ve felt more like a target for muggers: “Hmm, he’s lost and he’s showing us his wares”.)

Perhaps that’s because although we’re coming closer to realising the dream of being permanently surrounded by contextual information, we haven’t necessarily got the right interfaces/devices to make it as usable as it might be. So I loved this concept (via Clementine), which uses a flashlight device to… well… light the way I suppose.

Probably the mother of all SatNav errors given that I’m actually heading to Paris, France today.

It’s the first time I’ve used St. Pancras for Eurostar and never have I seen so many people drag so much luggage up stairs with no escalators. Still, I’m sure it’s onwards and upwards from here: Paris being one of my favourite cities.

Talking of France, I’ve been enjoying “Raymond Blanc: Kitchen Secrets” on BBC: I think they’ve managed to pull off a bit of energy and entertainment from what could have been a very dull, forumulaic show. (Coincidentally, I learned how to make those little chocolate cups he did in episode 1 only the other day). So this piece in today’s Observer made me chortle:

“… Does anyone know what Raymond Blanc is saying? Not since Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau has there been such an inspired take on the French accent. … Thus secrets they remain. But it’s enough to see him kiss his bunched fingers and exclaim: “Voila!”. Forget his cooking, the man’s a comic genius.”

Badge concepts on the web are interesting ways of motivating people to add more and more detail to their lifestream. I guess it was just a matter of time before they physically manifested themselves.

Check these out over here, and thanks to SwissMiss for the spot.

Sure, the cloud is cool and all that, but there are times when you just need a standard PC and printer rig. This is one of those times.

HP - invent from Tom and Matt on Vimeo.

Saw this on Techfluff. Posted on March 1st and already had – deservedly so – 3.5m views.

Just finished watching Steveb talk (video will be up here in a bit) – at the University of Washington - about the cloud. He described “5 dimensions of the cloud”:

1. The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities.
2. The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action.
3. The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions.
4. The cloud wants smarter devices.
5. The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud.

You can take a look at where Microsoft is and where we’re headed right here. We’re all in.

Also on stage was Blaise talking about Bing Maps – really to highlight how cloud services (such as maps) can be enhanced with (for instance) user generated information: geotagged blogs, photos etc. You can try that demo here: http://bing.com/maps/explore

Nice demo of Sky Player on XBox too.