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Hey Facebook
Few weeks ago I said farewell to Microsoft. Today, while at the beautiful island of Grenada where Mary and I have been relaxing for the last week, I decided that it was time to write few words about my next…
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Farewell Microsoft
It’s been a wonderful 9 year-long stretch at Microsoft. I’ve had the honor of working with incredibly smart people. I learnt a lot. From Newcastle To Seattle I was a researcher at the University of Newcastle, working for Paul Watson (@paulwatsonncl). I…
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Net neutrality
I am so happy the White House is finally taking a stance! More than any other invention of our time, the Internet has unlocked possibilities we could just barely imagine a generation ago. And here’s a big reason we’ve seen…
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Amazon’s echo
Amazon’s Echo looks promising. I’ve been a huge proponent of a ubiqutous, always-listening, ambient presence personal assistant experiences. There are many articles on the web speculating on the reasons Amazon is doing this.* Whether it’s about making it easier to order…
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Cortana is my sleepless personal assistant – how she deals with the Greek media 🙂
Over the last few days, there has been a bit of media noise in Greece around my name. Two articles were published about my path from Petinos (the little village where I grew up), my graduate studies and research career…
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Cortana and Third-Party Services – Foursquare Today… More to Come in the Future
Have you watched the movie “Her”? I think many aspects of the OS’s design in the movie will eventually find their way in personal assistants. Some already are here… “ I do believe that, in the not-so-distant future, personal assistant…
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Hackdays on schema.org and Quotes on a Facebook wall
We just completed a 2-day schema.org-related hackathon at the Facebook headquarters. So much fun! It’s so cool seeing companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yandex, and Facebook* come together to code, experiment, and brainstorm on structured data/actions on the Web. Everyone cares…
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Reactive Computing at the Heart of Cortana
In my QCon talk last year I talked, amongst many other things, about the need to react to the world’s information streams in near-realtime. The Bing Platform that powers Cortana and the Windows Phone OS were designed and implemented to…
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My Cortana Interests on Bing.com
Isn’t this beautiful? I am not talking about the photo, which is gorgeous. I am referring to my Cortana interests (weather, stocks, news) that appear at the bottom of the bing.com homepage. We know what the user cares about so…
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Cortana
You might have heard the news about Cortana, Microsoft’s entry in the personal assistant space. I am very excited to see Cortana out there, even in her current “beta” state. “The most personal smartphone assistant” (Windows Phone 8.1 features) I…
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Please raise your voice against fascism
Mpampis, my great childhood friend, recently posted on his Facebook timeline a variant of Martin Niemöller’s “First they came” poem. It’s been a while since I first read and loved that poem. To me, the poem is a great reminder…
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Honesty in user interface design
I liked the “Dark Patterns: inside interfaces designed to trick you” article by Harry Brignull. Honesty in how we interact with our customers through our products is probably an obvious practice to most of us. Unfortunately, ill-conceived business thinking lead…
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Make computers disappear from every desk and every home
Disclaimer: As everything else in this blog, what follows is my personal opinion! It shouldn’t be news to anyone that Ballmer is retiring from Microsoft. What follows is not about the past or present. It’s a quick note about how…
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Glastonbury 2013
Another year, another great Glastonbury. It’s already been a month since our trip to the UK for the annual Glastonbury festival, so this is post is long due. Better late than ever I guess 🙂 As every year, it was…
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I knew I had some alien blood in me 🙂
Mary and I recently did the 23andme thing. I know it’s not as accurate as other methods but I still wanted to support the company in what they are trying to achieve and their contributions to genetics-based research. Also, it…