Microsoft’s Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects to retrieve information about them from the Internet as well as to automatically capture and annotate data from them.
Microsoft Research Ready with Aura
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Just as they admit on the second page of the article, this is not anything new or innovative. Symbol Technologies Inc of Holtsville, NY brought this to the market when they partnered their barcode scanner to a Palm Pilot in around 1999. I remember sitting in cafeteria in their manufacturing facilities in Bohemia, NY (before they laid everyone off & shipped manufacturing to Mexico) & watching video of Symbol creator & then Chairman Jerome Schwartz prophesying on how the nature of info seeking & info sharing via barcodes would become ubiquitous as PDAs become commonplace. The video then displayed a woman reading a newspaper who then eyes an ad in the paper of some product. Since this ad piqued her interest, she pull out a Palm Pilot and scans the ad’s barcode. She then moves to the PC & uses the Palm Pilot to direct the PC to the internet location that the barcode had contained in it. The video demonstration continued with another woman scanning products from a catalog which would then be ordered when she synced the Palm Pilot back to the PC. Obviously these ideas did not catch on & keep Symbol stock price high.
WiFi, Bluetooth, & cellular 2/2.5/3G networks have removed the crutch of syncing to the PC thus bringing the cellphones & PDAs a variety of connectivity options. Microsoft appears to want to use the public blog (a word that I hate) as some value added resource. Microsoft wants to be the glue tyeing it all together.
Nope, not any ground breaking innovation here. Just an idea to use the hardworking public to fill their datawarehouse so that they can state they have originality while the free & open source world does not.
So if the idea is not 100% original they are not allowed to make an attempt to bring it to market as a reality and maybe pick up where others failed?
Radio Shack had CueCat and the technology was suprising popular. People figured out and hacked up all kinds of uses for the device.
I often go window shopping for stuff and miss the ability to read a review online about it, maybe that ability is something this technology can bring to the masses.
Maybe keeping a local inventory of items in your own household or kitchen. Want to know how much milk your house consumed in the last year? You could graph it next to Pepsi.
“So if the idea is not 100% original they are not allowed to make an attempt to bring it to market as a reality and maybe pick up where others failed?”
They certainly are allowed to research & spend money where they see fit. I admit that my post is rather onesided but it was done to be short & sweet (or sour). I meant to point out the inaccuracy of Steve Ballmers recent comments against free & open source software. He claims they don’t innovate & I point out that MS is not innovating in this idea space either.
“Maybe keeping a local inventory of items in your own household or kitchen. Want to know how much milk your house consumed in the last year? You could graph it next to Pepsi.”
Not a bad idea and it could certainly be useful to track consumption versus spending or spending versus nutrition. It could certainly help with a diet. I would hope that something like MS’s idea or this idea would not be datawarehoused & datamined from the public.
Microsoft has the worst research department. Microsoft spend almost 5% of their spendings in research and what they get out of it is sh*t. I think they should invest that money in At&T or IBM research labs because historically both these companies’s research has produced remarkable technology.
Damn even SUN made Java but nothing like that from Microsoft.
On the other hand, Microsoft is good in adopting technology and then aggressively capturing market in that area. I hate SUN for being so LAME that even after inventing Java, they screwed it up. Stupid fag**ts couldn’t increase the speed, give a good UI and do all those things that Microsoft is now gonna do with C# and virtually kill Java on Windows platform for sure.
Agreed. MS does little original and neither do most other large companies.
the name of the game here is risk aversion. Large companies don’t take chances because the payoff from doing is too small compared to the size of the overhead which they must bear.
Microsoft, nokia, etc. have adopted what was once considered the japanese business model. In the past, japanese companies spent on average 75% of their R&D on process improvement and only 25% on new product innovation. The opposite was true for the US.
the idea here is to let someone else do the “product innovation” because what is important is delivering something that works (well enough in MS’s case) at the right price point. the Innovator is rarely the market share leader.
the entire PC industry including microsoft follow this. they let apple and smaller companies do the innovation and they offer something similar for a lot less.