Chief Experience Officer, CXO

After CIO (Chief Information Officer) came CTO (Chief Technology Officer), the province of one-man startups when they start to commercialise. Now comes CXO (Chief Experience Officer) to look after the user experience. As an advocate for many years of the importance of human-computer interaction (now referred to as user experience)  I am very glad to [...]

Real-world Online Application Experiments

Wow, is Microsoft actually doing something cool? Is this another influence of Ray Ozzie? Mary Jo Foley tells us about the new Microsoft ExP system for conducting scientific online design experiments.
We have an unprecedented opportunity to run A/B tests with online
users and innovate more quickly based on actual user response. Microsoft
needs to shift the [...]

Books24×7 - An Essential Tool for Teaching IT Subjects

I have been using the Books24×7 ITPro collection for almost 4 years now and continue to rely heavily on the content for my teaching and research. Particularly of late the electronic book collection contains significant numbers of recently published texts full of the very latest technology. In Australia I have found the response times have [...]

Microsoft Developer Tools - Soon to be Free to all Students

In our Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development and hence the School of IT we have a MSDN Academic Alliance licence. This gives the Faculty’s students and staff free copies of Microsoft developer tools, operating systems and servers, amongst other software.
However, Bill Gates has just announced DreamSpark which is the free availability of Microsoft [...]

Microsoft Developer Tools - Soon to be Free to all Students

In our Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development and hence the School of IT we have a MSDN Academic Alliance licence. This gives the Faculty’s students and staff free copies of Microsoft developer tools, operating systems and servers, amongst other software.
However, Bill Gates has just announced the free availability of Microsoft developer and designer [...]

Computer Science as a Postgraduate Discipline

In an article entitled ‘Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?’ Dewar and Schonberg lament:
It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in [...]

Reflections on Mix on Campus at QUT

I attended the first Mix on Campus event at QUT on Tuesday. For Microsoft this was the first event of its kind aimed at students and staff to introduce innovations taking place in web design and implementation. An old acquaintance of mine, Simon Kaplan, now Dean of the Faculty of IT at QUT provided the [...]

The Hypertexters have their history told, again

Peta Hopkins points us to a gem of a talk by Alex Wright on YouTube in the Google Tech Talk series. Alex also has a new book, ‘Glut‘, that must repay its investment in reading time.
In his talk Alex takes us back almost a century to some notable precursors of information science before the information [...]

Microsoft Sync Bursts on to the Scene

Wow, another major code framework announcement in a week with the release of the Microsoft Sync framework. Since the release of Google Gears which enables web apps to work offline I have wondered how Microsoft would respond. Well, in a surprise to me, we now have the Sync framework which absolutely swamps Gears. In fact [...]

Impressive Google Campfire One

Google created a new style event called Campfire One complete with tree stump to launch their OpenSocial API and let their partners demo their social apps. OpenSocial reminds me of the Silverlight demos at MIX07 where the commercial partners were able to design, implement and deploy their apps in a matter of weeks. In the [...]