A few weeks ago (October 27th to 30th) the Microsoft PDC took place in Los Angeles, for those who don’t know what the PDC is here is a summary: The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is an annual event that Microsoft organizes, the most skilled developers and software architects are present in this conference, this latter focuses on the future of Microsoft products. Lots of Microsoft developers and architects present their innovative ideas to be exploited down the road, in the PDC of this year I was impressed the most by Microsoft Azure, and the cloud computing that Microsoft has introduced recently, which will certainly change the way we see application development and deployment today, I didn’t see all the sessions, just saw some extracts, and I’m now downloading the sessions one by one, it will take a very long time to download them all because of my poor internet connection , but it’s ok, I’ll do it though. So for people who are interested in such an important IT event you can download all the PDC 2008 sessions videos and watch them offline as well as the presentation file of every session in PowerPoint format from this link. So let’s live the event!
I’ll try to post my notes of the sessions I’ll be watching soon.
PDC official home page:
If you have an iPhone or willing to buy one you’re about to benefit from the Google voice-based search, as Google announced today, they are going to release this functionality pretty soon on iPhones, I’ve been wondering why in the world they are targeting iPhones before their own Platform Android, weird, but apparently they are trying to get this service running on the today’s most successful and smartest phone iPhone first, for sure the support for Android won’t last long to be released. This application is free, and will be available on iTune store as soon as Friday.
This idea isn’t new at all, both Microsoft and Yahoo have their voice-based search services, but Google executives say that this service is very efficient and can translate complex voice queries to text queries, it’s not perfect certainly, but apparently it will be the best voice-based search in the world.
The giant of the web Google has released the source code of its mobile software stack Android, for those who don’t know Android yet, it’s a rich mobile platform developed by Google, mainly it includes an operating system which is fully Google-enabled, that means you can use Google services in a very efficient and easy way like Gmail, or Google Earth, the main features of Android are:
Optimized Linux kernel for mobile devices.
Integrated browser that is based on the open source WebKit engine.
Includes device emulators, development environment like Eclipse IDE, tools for debugging.
Supports a wide range of media formats that are: MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF.
You’ll find a lot more details about the Android features, on its official website.
Now that the entire source code is available, developers can take advantage of Android and build their applications on it, I’m not talking about simple applications, but about complex applications that require the operating system source code, such applications are now possible on the Android platform.
“Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community,” said Dave Bort, a google software engineer, the open source community can now use the source code and think about new innovative ideas to enrich the Mobile devices applications, if you’re thinking about developing a new useful library on Google Android, go ahead, you’ll find everything you need on this website.
To get more excited about developing new applications for Google Android let’s have a look at some videos, the Android features on the T-Mobile that is Android-powered:
And here is a video introducing the Android open source project, it’s a good starting point for people who are interested in developing new applications for the Android:
So, let’s think about creative ideas to develop this wonderful platform.
Microsoft innovation takes one step further, with the announcement of Windows Azure by Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professionnal Developper Conference in Los Angeles on October 27th, this upcoming operating system is based on cloud-computing, that means that the data processing is made by lots of machines in a collaborative and coherent way, that forms what is called a cloud, this latter then can be used to perform huge resource-consuming computations or to store data of big and growing size, this operating system hosts the Azure Service Platform that offers developers with a variety of tools and services like Microsoft Live, Microsoft .NET services.., that enable them to develop rich distributed applications that use the cloud services.
Azure services
For now Windows Azure has a great support of Visual Studio, other development environment and non-Microsoft languages are coming soon such as: Eclipse, PHP, Ruby, Python, all you have to do is to write your cloud application and host it in the Microsoft data centers that form the Widnows Azure cloud, these data centers are highly scalable, and offer lots of facilities such as infrastructure management, storage models…Developers should no longer worry about the growth of their applications, or the way their applications are accessed, everything is covered by the cloud! Life is beautiful, isn’t it? Now let’s see the announcement video, it’s a must-see!
Ray Ozzie announces Microsoft Windows Azure at the PDC.
Surfing the web has become trivial to the most of us who have eyesight and fingers, we’re lucky to be able to see web content and select whatever we want pretty easily, but what about visually impaired people? Or people who can’t move their hands? Or just people who have limited internet access? Well, Audiopoint has thought about these people, and it created VTS (voice terminal service) that might be the lifesaver to those people, it introduced a new technology called text-to-speech technology that lets you surf the web through mobile phones or just ordinary landlines, you for example can listen to your mails and respond to them without having to touch one button or to see something, it’s a complete hands-free and eyes-free solution.
This new service is not only for visually impaired people, it’s also useful to everybody who wants to surf the web while his hands are busy, it’s suitable for many daily situations for example we can drive a car and surf the web while keeping our hands on the wheel.
This service is very useful for people who have a low speed internet connection, since it relies on phone networks the data transmission is pure voice and so it’s pretty fast.
In order to use VTS, you have to pay for your subscription it’s 4.95$/month for 125 minutes, 9.95$ for 250 minutes, and 19.99$ for 1000 minutes.
VTS pushes the area of web access one step further, imagine how many impaired people are going to be able to surf the web easily, or just imagine how many people are going to use that service while they drive their cars.
It’s amazing how the authors of this solution are creative.
For more information about this service visit this link:
Thanks for stepping by my blog, I’m pleased to announce the creation of my first blog, I’m new in blogging so I’m going to do my best to post interesting stuff, my main passion is IT (information technology), especially coding, so this blog is dedicated to IT-related topics, so if you like IT, and care about its evolution especially in Algeria this blog is for you and you should add it to your favorites, I’ll try to post articles covering the current technologies, future IT insights, summaries of some important IT conferences, tutorials, and last but not least, important IT-related events in Algeria generally and in my university (USTHB) in particular. That’s it for now, I hope I can give the best of the topics I mentionned above. So stay tuned, and visit my blog regularly.
, but it’s ok, I’ll do it though. So for people who are interested in such an important IT event you can download all the PDC 2008 sessions videos and watch them offline as well as the presentation file of every session in PowerPoint format from this link. So let’s live the event!
