I need constant stimulation. Any down time in stimulus leaves me antsy and fidgety. I’m the guy who checks email on his phone while stopped red lights, the guy who needs the TV on for background noise. Imagine my restlessness when I use the microwave. Time passes so much slower when I’m hungry and I can see a countdown of the time until I can house some Hungry Man frozen dinner. Good thing some University of Pennsylvania students created the μWave (pronounced micro-wave, mu-wave, or u-wave), a device that helps ease my hunger pangs by distracting me with Youtube videos.

The μWave is a combination of an Internet enabled tablet and microwave. When a user inputs a cook time, the μWave finds and plays a Youtube video the same length as the cook time. Brainchild of UPenn students, the device won first place in the PennApps hackathon securing the students $2,500 and the chance to present their hack to Google NYC.

The μWave is the classic “why didn’t I think of that” hack that solves a problem I never knew I had. By just knowing the μWave exists, I find myself more impatient than usual when I warm up day old pizza. Suddenly, I wish there was a Youtube video playing at work while I nuked instant oatmeal. It would make the office microwave line less awkward and I wouldn’t have to fish for topics to talk about. Waiting for the microwave timer to tick down is more painfully boring than ever.

Using established familiar technology means it is easier for the hack to gain consumer adoption. There’s no new cutting edge hardware with the μWave. There’s no new complex software to learn since nearly mostly everyone can figure out how to use a microwave. The incredible insight comes from the alleviating the minor distress of waiting for something to heat up. That small downtime is replaced by having Youtube entertainment beamed into my eyes while my popcorn is beamed with 2.5 gigahertz waves. The future is now!

I am first to admit that the premise of this device, fulfilling the need for constant stimulation, is far from a good thing. I’m ambivalent to having so much content readily available to consume through computers and smart phones. Sometimes it’s great because I feel connected with the world and what’s happening. Other times, I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t consume it all. The second I stand in a line I pull out my phone to check Facebook and Twitter. When I wake up in the morning I rollover and turn on the TV to find out the news and weather. There’s never a time when there isn’t something to do, when there isn’t something to consume. It’s great and horrible at the same time.

In order to consume and do as much as I can, I find myself multi-tasking constantly. There are only so many hours in the day and I feel like I need to cram as much into it as possible. I answer emails on the toilet, eat lunch at office meetings, and confirm friend requests waiting for the train. The μWave lets me heat up a Hot Pocket while watching a cat video. Essentially, it fulfills my strange wants.

These UPenn students are perceptive to notice how people use something as simple as a microwave and improve upon it. Some may see their hack as silly and useless, but I see it as insightful and clever.

Opened in March of 2011, Microsoft’s Technology Center campus in Malvern, Pennsylvania is one of only eleven MTC’s in the United States. The Technology Centers themselves serve as collaborative environments where customers can envision, design and deploy their product while being provided access to innovative technology, specialists and Microsoft staff.

The idea behind these state-of-the-art Technology Centers is to utilize Microsoft resources in order to shorten time-to-market production while conceptualizing the best solutions for customers. By integrating Microsoft products and technologies, companies can benefit from such a powerful organizational resource.

I had the opportunity to take a personalized tour of the Malvern facility. And while I’m far from being Charlie Bucket and finding a golden ticket in my Wonka bar, Microsoft did their best Willy Wonka impression when they gave this geek the keys to their Chocolate Factory!

As I was waiting for MTC Director, Bob Kuhns to begin our tour, I couldn’t help but notice how aesthetically pleasing the office space was. Even though the space had a sterilized technological feel to it, it still had lots of plant life, rocks and waterfalls to seem warm and inviting. All elements of life appeared to be represented and manipulated in some way or another. To the left from the waterfall were fluorescent glowing server racks and uninterrupted power supplies sealed off in a custom transparent room. It was perfect balance, I debated that maybe… I finally achieved Zen? The energy in this space was unmistakable and I could already begin to understand why people come here to help conceive their ideas.

Bob Kuhns, my tour guide insists that we begin in what is referred to as the Envisioning Center. He stresses that this room is where ideas finally become interactive. The purpose of this Envisioning lab is to demonstrate new technology and have the customer start interacting with the product for the first time. Here, Microsoft attempts to recreate the environment where we normally do work: the office, at home, at the airport, traveling, etc.

“The Envisioning Center gives the customer the opportunity to truly feel immersed into the product at this stage of the process while in a practical environment,” Bob stressed.

At this point during the tour, Eva Dickerson, Microsoft’s Operations and Community Manager joined us in the Envisioning Center where I asked her about Microsoft’s role in the Philadelphia community.

“We’re seeing an increasing interest in technology from children today, Microsoft’s role is to show youth the possibilities of this technology,” Eva clarified.

While actively participating with the Boys and Girls Club of Philadelphia, Eva doesn’t hesitate to point out that technology awareness can ultimately help cultivate future IT careers. Through cooperation with local school districts, Microsoft has also implemented organized technology-related school activities and has assisted in coordinating technology curriculums across Philadelphia. In addition, awarding various scholarships and internships to inspired young thinkers is a terrific way to encourage growth within the industry. Microsoft is clearly passionate about learning and it’s evident in my conversations with Eva and Bob.

Wrapping up my tour, it was my pleasure to spend a few moments with Brian Marranzini who is one of the Lead Technology and Infrastructure Architects at the Malvern facility to get some one-on-one Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory tutorials. I was also encouraged to drink more coffee (quite the lavish kitchen!) and play as much Kinect/XBOX360 as I could fathom. I suppose this was my Veruca Salt moment. Saddened that my time in the Chocolate Factory was up, I thanked the Microsoft Technology Center, Malvern staff and was on my way. But I didn’t leave without playing with a few of their awesome toys!

For more information on the Microsoft Technology Centers and Envisioning Labs, visit their official website.

When it comes to geeky documentaries, I am pretty sure it doesn’t get any geekier than a doc about the Amiga, which was THE computer to have in the late 80s and early 90s.

Well local Philadelphia filmmaker Zack Weddington is sharing his love for the Amiga with his documentary Viva Amiga, currently in production. You can also donate to his Kickstarter here.

I’m quite possibly the only geek on the site to have owned an Amiga during its heyday, and look forward to checking out this great looking documentary when its finished.

As a film geek and someone who is currently in producing a short film, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to take a day and learn something new about one of my favorite video editing programs on the Mac platform.

This course which runs 3 days and will be held every 2 to 3 weeks on Thursday, Friday and Saturday is meant to prepare students for Apple Certification in Final Cut Pro.

The classes are pleasantly small, which is great because there was plenty of time for the students to interact with the instructor and ask plenty of questions. Which when dealing with a complicated program like Final Cut Pro, is definitely a much needed plus.

Students learn by working on Mac Pros with footage from various television shows and standard promo fare. The day I attended they were using a sequence from Leverage to learn the finer points of honing an edit and editing a two camera shot. I think the hands on approach is a great one when dealing with these programs, where there is about 3 different ways to do one particular thing.

The class is a very intensive bootcamp approach to one of the most difficult programs on the Mac. The class is meant to help ready students for the Apple Final Cur pro certification test which they take on the final day of the course.

While I wouldn’t suggest the course to anyone looking for a more general look at Final Cut Pro, I would suggest it to someone with prior experience looking to get Apple Certified. This is due to the fast paced nature of the course and the high difficulty of the program. I see it as ideal for film students and people with some editing experience already under their belt. You can find out more about the course here.

Guest Post By Jared I. Greene

A well known torrent site – www.suprnova.org – recently decided to leave the torrent business and move to something less controversial. Suprnova.org owner Andrej Preston plans to completely change the direction of the content while keeping the same name. Preston has always loved entertainment, but recently decided that he no longer wanted to consume media, but also create it. Thus, his decision to change Suprnova.org to a TV website hosting original, reality-based short shows that are 1-7 minutes long.

The power of instant feedback in the internet drives the website, users will have the ability to make requests and comments on the show, what they’d like to see and what they wouldn’t. Preston says, “I want the content to be user inspired. I want all the shows to also be created in a way where people are encouraged to say how they feel about something and instead of just watching the show, participate in a discuss(ion) that goes on way after they have seen an ‘episode’.” Shows will give viewers a dependable, continuous source of entertainment, rather than random video clips (virals anyone?)

He says, “The goal is also to get community involved and be able to participate in forum like discussions based on the episode that they just saw” which will give viewers an interactive experience with the shows unseen with television, “I want the content to be user inspired.”

I know what you’re thinking now, a website that allows its users to request videos and comment on them, sounds like Youtube or Dailymotion to me. The new Suprnova.org, will not be “anything goes” as Preston points out, “It is intended for shows which are released weekly and people know what they will get instead of watching a brand new clip of a double rainbow (if you know what I mean).”

There are four videos currently in production, the website is planned to launch some time in January 2011.

Also, be sure to note that www.suprnova.com still exists, but it is clone scam site, it does not offer torrents; it just steals your money, and is in no way affiliated with suprnova.org, despite the fact that it looks identical to the old layout of suprnova.org. Don’t be fooled!

My friend Justin was observant enough to catch this and post it on his blog, and I was just so giddy with Apple glee I just had to share it.

Looks as if they are FINALLY putting up the Apple logo on their Center City store on 1619 Walnut St., and it’s about damn time. When this store will open has been subject to much rumor and speculation. All we do know is they have been taking applications on Apple.com for over a year.

This newest Apple store in the heart of Center City doesn’t bode well for me and some of the other Apple fanboys and girl on this site. Expect us all to declare bankruptcy a few months after the store’s opening.

Photos Courtesy of Justin Campbell Check out his blog here.

Microsoft Student Insiders interview Twitter Platform Team from Hilary Pike on Vimeo.

To end our journey to Las Vegas for MIX 10 in March, Tom Ziegmann and I sat in on Raffi Krikorian’s session titled “Adding the Where to the When of Social Applications” to learn more about our favorite internet obsession, Twitter. More specifically, we learned a bit about where the social is network headed, but still wonder why it’s watching us. It’s kind of creepy.

Thankfully, we later had the chance to ask him some burning questions about geotagging, which helps reveal exactly where the 7-11 is in which your friend just bought milk (you heard it here first, folks). More importantly, we discussed geotagging’s social and security implications as well just who is the real Raffi. Speaking of which, I need to form the search party!

Like this, only a little smaller.

It’s been a long time since I went to a good ol’ fashioned LAN party. You know, the sort where you devour giant bags of Doritos for breakfast, lunch, and possibly dinner, while gaming until your eyes are dried up. Well, the IST Club at Penn State Brandywine are bringing the LAN party back, and want you to come join on April 17th.

Called the “80 Man Lan”, this annual event takes place every year at Penn State Brandywine in Media, PA. This year, the event will take place in the new Tomezsko Building (Room 203), from 10am to 11:30pm. It’s an open event, so you don’t have to be a Penn State student to participate.

The first 50 guests to show up will receive a complimentary 2GB flash drive, with that day’s games preloaded, and all attendees can enjoy free food, including pizza, soda, and other misc (Doritos!) snacks.

So bring your desktop, laptop, gaming system, television, monitor… whatever it is you’ll need to play. Expect epic games of Soldat, Counter Strike, Track Mania, Armagetron, Quake, Tribes, Savage, and Stronghold, as well as console games on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

There are prizes, but those prizes are a secret. Come out and find out.

80 Man Lan @ Penn State Brandywine
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
10am to 11:30pm (OMG)

Associated Press’ Windows Phone 7 news application

Thanks for clicking your way into the Microsoft Student Insider Feature Series, where I get the incredible opportunity to speak with some of the movers and shakers of Microsoft’s various product offerings. While at MIX 10 last week, Jeremy Bray (Microsoft’s Windows Student Insider) and I sat down with Senior Director of Product Management on the Mobile Communications Team, Todd Brix. As you may have already guessed, his dreams are pretty much filled with dancing Windows Phone 7 devices, touch screens aglitter. Let’s get right into what’s in store for us this coming holiday season.

Normally, these types of products have a specific target audience be it enterprise or casual. Brix claims that Microsoft is trying to create something that brings those two walks of life together.

“We’re trying to build an experience that spans their personal life, their work life and the fun and playful things they do around that all the time,” says Brix referring to the Windows Phone 7 target audience.”That’s really the genesis of what we’re doing.”

The Windows Phone 7 team has accomplished this through apps and services that blend the consumer with the professional with fun services like Xbox Live integration or Zune functionality and useful ones like the Microsoft Office hub, according to Brix. It would be interesting to see a business professional use a Windows Phone 7 device to pull up documents during a meeting using the Office service only to check his Gamerscore compared to his work buddies’ during lunch. More on what Windows Phone 7 means for you and I after the break.

Speaking of Zune, a good question is what is the fate of the quirky little music player in the face of the Windows Phone 7? According to Brix, Zune ain’t goin’ nowhere.

“The Zune experience is one that people want on their phone, which is why we brought the Zune audio and video playback experiences over to the Windows Phone,” Brix explains is the reason why Windows Phone 7 has Zune integration. “A lot of the [Zune] code is used in Windows Phone 7.”

However, Brix feels that there is going to be a market for people that want dedicated media playback devices. Why, you ask? Music fans like a lot of music.

“My Zune HD is 32 GB. I don’t know if there is going to be a 32 GB flash [memory] that’s going to be available from all of the OEMs, for example,” Brix contemplates. “So if I have a really large music collection, I might want a dedicated device.”

Microsoft plans to continue its support of the current Zune HD as well as with future versions of the device, according to Brix. Also, expect to see the Zune media marketplace service squeeze its way into various “screens and platforms”.

The Harvest on Windows Phone 7

Coming back to the star of the show, we all know it will support both Silverlight 4 and XNA Game Studio 4 as means to make Windows Phone 7 games. With two tool sets to create games, how will it be decided which games include Xbox Live integration?

“In terms of achievement and leader board integration, that’s only going to be available to what’s called ‘Xbox Live enabled games’,” Brix explains. “That’s a manager-publisher relationship we have between the Xbox Live Team and a set of publishers… and we’ll support both [Xbox Live and non-Xbox Live enabled games].”

According to Brix, Windows Phone 7 game developers will have the choice whether to go with Xbox Live integration when creating their games and other avenues of social integration will be supported such as Facebook Connect.

So, since a lot of games developed through XNA and Silverlight 4 can be quite identical regardless of platform (see The Harvest demos on both PC and Windows Phone), will we be able to buy a game or app once and have it translated across platforms? That’s a no-go, according to Brix. However, there will be ways to expand our game and application experiences across platforms.

“There’s going to be some interesting innovations that different partners will announce surrounding companion app experiences,” Brix alludes toward some interesting speculation. “So, maybe you buy a game for the Xbox [360] console… and by doing that you also get a free companion app experience that’s also available for Windows Phone 7.”

While this model already exists for many MMO titles such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Armory app, those both cost some coin and are pretty limited to games that already offer those services through a web browser. It’ll be interesting to see what developers think up to accompany games that generally don’t offer these services via the ether already. A Grand Theft Auto altered reality game (ARG), perhaps? I’d be so in (I need to get around to copyrighting this stuff).

While games are always fun, let’s get down to business. If you haven’t noticed by reading my reflections on MIX 10, I’m weirdly excited by Windows Phone 7′s “I’ll Be Late” calendar feature and was anxiously awaiting to find out exactly how it would work.

“We’ll be integrating calendars from a wide range of providers as well as all email accounts,” Brix divulges about how the feature will operate. “So, you’ll have one calendar that kind of shows you a merged view of your personal calendar appointments that you might have on Windows Live with your business appointments you have from your Exchange server, for example, and be able to see a unified view of that.”

Graphic.ly on Windows Phone 7

For you developers out there, Jeremy asked what the process would be like for getting your application or game approved and ready to sell or distribute on the Marketplace. According to Brix, Microsoft will both conduct and publish policy and technical tests that scan your app or game according to a set of criteria your product must pass before approval.

“We’ll go through and test each of those [policy criteria such as lewd content or potential malware presence], but we also publish those policies as well,” says Brix on how the process will work. “Here’s the criteria and here’s the tests… that you can go run yourself and know whether or not your application will be certified.”

So what type of lasting impact might the Windows Phone 7 have? Well, perhaps it will contribute to the survival of traditional news media through new and interesting advertising models.

“I think what you saw of the AP app [the Associated Press app demo during the keynote] is the example of a company taking advantage of the panorama design aspect, which introduces a whole new kind of user interaction model where people can relate and interact with content,” Brix speculates for the future. “I do think it’s a big opportunity, particularly for companies who focus on news and text activity to build those kind of experiences.”

According to Brix, every app — potentially including the awesome Graphic.ly comic app — that was demoed during the MIX 10 keynotes were built in three weeks or less. If this is what is capable in just that time, imagine if given months of development and design time. We shall see how Windows Phone 7 effect the future of not only mobile user experiences, but the fate of media driven technologies (and the media that support them).

Welcome back to yet another exciting installment of the Microsoft Student Insider Feature Series, where I get to probe the minds of some of the Expression Studio team’s most influential members. This week we have the illustrious and adventurous (more on that later) Vivian Chan, Design Audience Lead on the Expression Studio Developer Marketing team. We also have a ton more of these free 60-day Expression Studio trial discs, so starting this week we’ll be giving away two within each post! Find more details on how to win at the end of today’s feature.

When she’s not rock climbing in Chang Mai, Thailand (i.e. rocking it Lara Croft style), Vivian focuses on one goal that drives pretty much everything she does from atop the Microsoft offices in Bellevue, Washington: make Expression Studio relevant to designers.  More on exactly how she accomplishes this and a look into some of the nifty Silverlight applications Vivian introduced me to after the jump.

Vivian’s one job, to understand the designer audience and what makes them tick as a way get Expression Studio into their hands and minds, may seem simple at first. However, it’s a bit more complicated (and fun) than you might think. One of her most important tasks is to conduct formal research on what designers are up to, says Vivian. This includes  figuring out who they are and what tools they’re currently using as well as their habits and frequency in using these tools.

It’s only with this understanding that she can direct marketing and community campaigns that include specific benefits of Expression Studio and Silverlight that are relevant to her audience, Vivian claims.

Let’s take a creative design and development team that for as long as they could remember used Adobe tools in Mac based environments, Mess Marketing. After collaborating with Vivian and preparing their Macs with Windows partitions for Expression use, the folks at Mess have created Mess With Silverlight, an ongoing project and blog focused on using Silverlight in a Mac development environment to create some pretty awesome apps.

Most notable of these Silverlight-on-Mac amalgamations is RSS Tunes, an app that acts as an RSS feed for music blogs. Well, that sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it? Here’s the catch: rather than display the posts from your favorite music blogs, it plays the tracks provided by the blogs in a music player that can be ran from within the browser or from your desktop.

RSS Tunes also has Twitter and last.fm integration so you can share what you’re listening to from within the app as well as have it play tunes from your last.fm stations. It’s pretty amazing considering  it behaves like an RSS, which means you’re constantly getting new music as your favorite music blogs update with news and features.

According to Vivian, the Mess team reported some hiccups with developing using Silverlight and Expression Studio, but have come to see it’s advantages. While it may take some getting used to, developing Silverlight apps on Mac is 100% possible and even beneficial considering Silverlight can run out of browser, which the Mess team have attested to.

This last project hosts one of the more interesting features of Silverlight: Deep Zoom. Some of you may be familiar with this basketball player named Michael Jordan. Alright, I would hope all of you recognize the guy who put a face to the game for the last two decades (Space Jam, anyone?).

Nike’s Mosaic 23/25 project is a Silverlight born web app that coincides with the physical mosaic which  was on display just this past weekend in Dallas, Texas  to celebrate 25 years of Air Jordan shoes. The ability to zoom in real time and interact with the work’s fan submissions that comprise the entire image is made possible through Silverlight’s Deep Zoom. How the tool works is that it refreshes images at set pixel intervals to guarantee high resolution images at nearly all sizes. Seems like quite the interesting alternative to Flickr to share your photos.

Check back next week for our next installment of the Microsoft Student Insider Feature Series as well as more chances to win some Microsoft swag! For this week’s chance to win a trial copy of Expression Studio 3, leave a comment linking to one of your favorite pieces of photography on the web (keep it safe for work, please) and tell us why it takes your breath away. Contest ends Wednesday, February 24th so get to it, you artsy-fartsy folks!