Archives for posts with tag: social experiences

Lili Cheng: Designing Experiences for Social Computing

March 3, 10 //
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March is Women in Technology Month. We kick off the festivities on Channel 9 with a great conversation with an industry thought leader in interactive user experience design and architecture. 
 
Meet Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, which focuses on software and services that are centered on social connectivity, real-time experiences, and rich media. Lili’s a big fan of and active participant in social communication and the interactive design of social computing on the web.

Lili talks to @ritzy and @Carmine007 about her tenure at Microsoft which started in 1995.  Lili is another shining example of a successful woman in technology, but more importantly her full time job consists of both pushing the envelope of social interaction and the inventing new experiences for social computing.  Push on, Lili and team!

Kodu Now Available for PC

January 13, 10 //
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You may remember seeing the Microsoft Research project Kodu for Xbox last year. The game allows programming novices to develop robust games on the Xbox and control interactions between the characters. Now the PC version is available in beta form which is great news as most schools don’t have Xbox 360’s.

With Kodu, the idea is to give kids a way to accomplish something they didn’t think they would be able to do while strengthening their design, math, and problem-solving skills. It was created as Matthew MacLaurin, director of Future Social Experiences Lab, watched his then three year old daughter interact with a computer. Realizing there was a disconnect between the passive experience she was having and the coding that went into applications, MacLaurin began the project. Kodu is now used in more than 60 educational institutions around the world including a pilot program across 26 schools in Victoria, Australia. You can download Kodu for PC and get started here.