Gieno Startups : Ad for www.officelabs.com |
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This post was originally aimed for Microsoft employees who also have a side project, or a hobby project. It turns out, they have a nice internal thing called “The Garage” that is aimed to specifically support and foster such “evenings- and weekends projects” by Microsoft employees. I just put it here to share something may benfit startups. What they do Usability study I realized that Live Geometry is still far from being intuitive and there are a lot of things that they can improve. I’ve gathered a lot of valuable information which I was able to convert to more than 50 actionable bugs(already send to them)! Another useful experience that I gained is how to conduct a good usability study. I've learned the following:
Other events They organize a range of other events: Stay Late and Code (pizza provided), Improve a Project (where they demo projects and gather user feedback), Speed-dating for innovators (they bring together the folks who need help on a project and folks who would like to participate in a project or help out), help with hosting a project, etc. Productivity Science Fair Also recently One of my friend participated in a semi-annual company-wide exhibition called the Productivity Science Fair. It generated a lot of interest and was very crowded. It was so much fun! So, if you’re a Softee AND have a side project or projects, do check out http://garage/ (inside MS). What’s there for non-Microsofties? http://www.officelabs.com/ I wouldn’t blog about this at all if there wasn’t some goodness for folks external to Microsoft (I'm already out of there). Well, guess what, some of those side projects eventually become external so you can benefit too! Check out http://www.officelabs.com/, especially the Grassroots Innovation projects: http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Grassroots.aspx?category=grassroots for a sample of several projects already out there. Garage is actually sponsored by Office Labs and it's nice to see innovation being fostered both internally and externally. Microsoft Education Labs - www.educationlabs.com One other thing Quinn from the Garage team was helping me with is getting in touch with folks from Microsoft Education. I didn't know it, but there is a site called http://www.educationlabs.com/, which is similar to the Office Labs innovation site, but specifically aimed at educational software and products for students and teachers. I might be working with these guys to see if we can collaborate to release Live Geometry as educational software for schools. That would be really cool! Semblio - digital learning from Microsoft Last, but not least, at the Productivity Science Fair I've met folks from Semblio, which is a really interesting product I didn't know about. Here's a quote (read more here):
Essentially, they leverage WPF to create rich interactive learning materials. We've met with the Semblio team and they were really excited to learn about Live Geometry. They were particularly happy that it's easy to create a WPF User Control hosting a geometry drawing and that I use XML as the serialization format, because this way it's super easy to integrate Live Geometry content with the Semblio framework.
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