What is the Origami Project?
Microsoft has launched a teaser website promoting the release of something called the Origami Project on March 2nd. There is ongoing speculation on some well read blogs about what exactly The Origami Project is. Engadget actually dug up pictures revealing it to be a personal device. My two cents: the “Touch Me” reference on the website is a pretty clear indication that it has something to do with touchscreen technology – I say its a touchscreen controlled media player. Regardless, Microsoft has gotten people’s attention.
I think its fantastic that Microsoft is using word of mouth marketing to generate buzz prior to the official launch. However, they could have done more. The Flash piece on the Oragami website isn’t all that interesting and the site doesn’t give you anything to do beyond subscribing to a RSS feed. They could have given away advance samples to the first 500 people who registered or at least added an email sign up. Something more. A smaller company without Microsoft’s brand would have to do a better job to get people’s attention. Who knows though, the site teases at a three week online campaign, so there may be more to come.
Update #1: Here is a video of the device – looks like a small tablet PC. Video is also available here.
Update #2: Here’s a story detailing what it is in more detail.
Multi-Touch Interaction Research
Single touch screen displays are pretty common at museums, airports, bookstores, etc. But the technology hasn’t been there for the kind of multi-touch interfaces hinted at in movies like Minority Report. Researchers at New York University are working on it and have a great video demonstrating what’s possible.
A Look Under the Hood
I’ve spent some time this week micromanaging the relaunch of The Bivings Report (TBR) and as part of the process I’ve been taking a fresh look at various blogging tools and add ons. I figured I’d provide a rundown of what tools we’re using on the off chance its of interest to someone in the process of setting up a blog.
The original version of TBR was custom built in late 2001 by our in-house developers. There were a few blog tools around at the time, but they were pretty primitive so we just built something ourselves. In redoing it, we decided to switch to WordPress after investigating all the usual suspects. We chose WordPress because it has almost all the functionality we wanted built in, has a robust set of accompanying plugins, is highly customizeable and utilizes our preferred programming language/platform. Its also free.
We used this plugin to create the weighted display of categories we are using to classify posts. We decided to run our RSS feed through feedburner to make it easier for people to subscribe. And we ended up using BlogBeat to help keep track of the hundreds of thousands of visitors that will surely start flocking to revamped The Bivings Report. In the future we may add a listing of Digg stories and/or maintain a list interesting bookmarks on del.icio.us.
Anyway, let us know if you’ve heard of anything cool.