UK Government Crowdsourcing Mashups

I just stumbled across a great initiative from the UK Cabinet Office.  The ‘Show us a better way’ site asks the world at large how it could best mashup the vast data sets the UK government has at it’s disposal to provide useful services.  To support this the Power of Information Taskforce have released some previously unavailable data to get people started (no personal info!).

Given the vast amount of raw statistical data that a government must hold, there’s got to be a serious amount of potential there.  There are already hundreds of ideas that have been submitted, and looking through them quite a few look like they would be useful if built.

Rightly or wrongly I’ve often thought that the public sector seems to lag behind the private sector in terms of its utilisation of new technology.  Initiatives such as this show that in some areas the opposite is true. 

Hopefully this will lead to some new useful services for us Brits, but more than that this has to be an encouraging sign for things to come.  I can’t remember a government crowdsourcing a problem before, could this be the start of a new trend?  For things like this it would seem to make a lot of sense.  It’s good to see the government trying to harness some of the ingenuity innovation out there in the world.   At the very least it shows that areas of government aren’t ignorant of the changing word around them.

DeepPhoto

Liveside have just posted about a cool new technology MS is building called DeepPhoto.  It looks like a mashup of tools like Virtual Earth and PhotoSynth and allows photo’s to be mapped against the geometric data being built up by the virtual earth team.

With all of this information combined you can do some pretty interesting things.  The video demo the LiveSide guys recorded shows how knowing the real world 3D references for objects in a photo allows the technology to de-haze images that are hazy for example.  The real interesting stuff for me though comes at the end of the demo.

A photo of the Yosemite valley is mapped against the geometric model from Virtual Earth.  This allows the software to increase the accuracy of the 3D view by extrapolating colours and textures from the real image.  You can then move around this composite view in 3D – in effect filling in the gaps between the photos in a PhotoSynth scene. 

Working for a company that does loads of GIS work, and produces visualisations of new projects, I can see this sort of technology as being genuinely useful to business.  Assuming there’s some sort of API for adding your own data into the views (hyperlinks and additional models for example) it would be a very powerful way of visualising the sort of change we plan and design every day.

The LiveSide Video:

Microsoft Midori Speculation

There’s been quite a lot of talk over the past few days about an project MS is running called Midori that may, or may not, be the makings of a new legacy free OS.

The prospect of an entirely new OS is quite an exciting one, the world has moved a long way since the WinNT code base that XP and Vista are based around was first written.  It’s probably fair to say that to some extent today’s hardware is held back by the legacy components that the OS are forced to include.

That said, as Ed Bott talks about on his blog, such a change is not something to be taken likely.  There are A LOT of existing Windows users and applications that would need to be supported in any change.  As I believe MS discovered with Vista, the cost of migrating applications to a new platform is a huge obstacle to business migration.

Or is it…

Virtualisation technology is advancing hugely, if not in overall functionality then in the ease with which it can be utilised.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V is part of the basic server OS, and as I understand it will be core to Windows 7.  Application virtualisation is maturing nicely as a tool and is, I believe, about to become mainstream.  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is now something that enterprises can realistically consider, again Windows 7 will drive this even further forward.

With all of these components in place, the release of a new OS should be much simpler than ever before.  Application compatibility, the big killer of migrations, should slowly become less of a challenge.  The toolset needed to run applications across multiple OS’s on the one system is pretty much all there.  Of course those apps won’t benefit from whatever advances Midori might bring, but as cover for a transition period that’s not so important.  As long as they work, both independently and with each other, that’s a huge problem out of the way.

I agree with Ed that any new OS is likely to live in parallel to a standard Windows product for some time, but I do think the migration will be quicker than we’ve seen before.

HTC Touch Diamond – First thoughts

3-4_left_weatherYesterday I got a HTC Touch Diamond to play with for a few days.  I’ve been wanting to see one in the flesh for a while, partly because I need a new phone, and partly because we’re a Windows Mobile house here and with the 3G iPhone looming we’re thinking hard about future direction.

The Diamond… well it’s a sight to behold.   The phone itself is tiny, with sharp styling and is very lightweight.  One comment I heard yesterday was that it makes any phone you sit it next to look 10 years old.  I like the look of it a lot.  The rear surface (as you’ve probably seen in photos) isn’t flat, it has slightly raised jagged pattern that makes it look like it’s been cut from stone, or well… diamond.

The small size of the device poses some interesting question.  Previously WM Smartphones used to be the smaller option, sacrificing the touch screen for a smaller footprint.  Now however, this full WM device with all the GPS and stuff is small enough that it doesn’t matter.  I’m not sure what future the Smartphone OS has if devices are now this small.

Powering the thing up, the first think I noticed was the quality of the screen, off hand I’m not sure what the resolution is, but I’ve seen desktop LCD monitors with worse picture quality, it’s very very good.  This allows the interface to use small, sharp fonts without them being hard to see or use. 

The main ‘home screen’ interface is miles ahead of any other Windows Mobile phone I’ve used (and that’s quite a few!).  At the bottom there’s a scroll bar of buttons for the main functions (contacts, photos, music, settings etc) that is easy to use and and quite intu itive once you realise it’s there.  You just move your finger across the screen until you reach what you want, for example photos, the bulk of the screen is used to show previews that you can then scroll through.  It’s all great looking and reasonably well thought out.

In fact, in terms of the user interface I’d say the worst thing was the underlying Windows OS.  Once you find a function or task that isn’t covered by the HTC installed user interface, the jolt of going back to the old Windows Mobile interface is quite shocking.  I’ve always got on quite well with WM before, but the Diamond really does highlight that MS need to start concentrating on the ‘Mobile’ part of their OS not the ‘Windows’ part.  The normal windows like GUI just doesn’t cut it in the mobile space anymore.

Would I buy one?  Not sure… If there wasn’t a 3G iPhone just days away then yes, without a doubt.  As it is I’ll wait and see.

 

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