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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 have been involved, as the Architect of the Bing cloud platform that powers her, with…
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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 of the need for all of us to remain informed, engaged, active participants in the…
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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 to products that place profit in front of users. Not surprisingly, as Bringull suggests, users…
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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 I personally see the future and Microsoft’s opportunity to shape it. Even in the late…
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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 an amazing just being there. The great music, art, performances were added bonus! Before the…
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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 was Mary’s Xmas present so I had to do it 🙂 Well, the results are…
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Convergence of User Experiences
Disclaimer: These thoughts do NOT represent strategy or plans by my team or company. They are just that… thoughts. The way we consume information and services has transformed over the last few years. Small, specialized applications on smartphones and tablets have displaced the Web browser as our primary window into the digital world. Could the…
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On Graph Data Model Design – Relationships
Context: Jim mentioned in his QCon talk that I am advocating for hypergraphs as the model of choice when designing a graph store. That’s not true. The previous post has the details. Jim and I have been discussing graph store/database design for a long time now. As it is always the case, we argue 🙂…
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QCon London 2013 – “A Platform for All That We Know”
A couple of weeks ago I attended QCon London 2013* where I had the pleasure of giving a version of my “A Platform for All That We Know” talk. I had to keep the talk on the abstract side since Qi Lu, our president, hadn’t yet talked about the “Bing Information Platform”. My very good…
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Let’s teach kids how to code
What a great initiative from the leaders of our field: “code.org is a non-profit foundation dedicated to growing computer programming education.” Programming “is the closest thing we have to a superpower” 🙂 (Drew Houston, Founder and CEO of Dropbox) I love to code. It’s my hobby, my way of expressing myself, my art, my profession.…