Microsoft — You've Got My Attention

span>Share:I was duly impressed this evening. Brett Brewer, the GM of Microsoft Live Labs put on a kick-ass demonstration of Microsoft's latest web browsing technologies. The event was hosted by MITX, and was held at Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology (who knew Fidelity even had a center for applied technology?) It was a beautiful venue with environmentally-friendly decor mixed with high-tech gadgets.

Microsoft is bucking the system with Live Labs. Their approach is almost like a web-browsing bill of rights. Brett repeatedly voiced his dissatisfaction with how data is provided online, and how poor online image quality is. The reason for his impatience is because Microsoft has found a way to solve this with three products ready for prime time now; Pivot, Seadragon, and Photosynth.


Share:Pivot lets a user view large quantities of data in a useful and easy to understand way. Pivot can dynamically display data according to any number of criteria, and it does so in real-time, without having to wait for loading bars, or placeholder image blocks. Check out this introductory video.

Seadragon, (or Zoom.It as it is now called) eliminates the need for low-res, crappy quality images on the web. Every image online can be super high-resolution. Sound like a dream come true? It does this by loading only the data needed at each magnification level. See it work on their website. Goodbye 100px thumbnails!