Futurecat - Michael Karek

Well, we are back. After a very long suspension, it is once again time to write about the cool new APIs that Windows 7 provides you for differentiating your application with compelling user experiences. I still owe you two more posts on Windows 7 Taskbar to complete the series, but the Sensor platform is way too cool to leave behind.

Before we dive into the API, I should explain the rational that went into the thinking process of the product team while building the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform. (I’ll talk about location in future posts.)

Why Sensors?

Lately we are witnessing the increasing role that sensors play in some very exciting scenarios. For example a mobile device that automatically changes its screen orientation from portrait to landscape based on its relative position to the earth (center of gravitation pull), or computers that automatically control their screen brightness when the lighting conditions change to facilitate a better reading experience. However, I think the best example is the automatic time zone change of a mobile device – when you travel, one of the first things you do once your plane lands is turn on your mobile device, which magically shows you the correct time, even if you crossed a few time zones.

Besides the obvious functional reasons, another good reason to have a “platform” is that it unifies the API and lowers the API and entry costs for developers. In the past, using sensors tended to be a very vertical solution. There was no specific definition of what a sensor was, what its data fields were, or how to access those fields. Lack of standardization made programming for sensors an arduous task. When using a sensor, like a GPS location sensor, you had to choose hardware from a wide range of vendors, each of whom had a specific set of drivers and APIs you had to learn about in order to work with that piece of hardware. If you wanted to change your hardware or vendor, you often had to learn new APIs to access similar information.

In Windows 7, we set out to solve this problem from the ground up (as we usually do). We addressed these problems by providing out-of-the-box support for sensors. The Windows 7 Sensor and Location platform provides a set of standard interfaces that free developers from the need to become familiar with specific vendor devices and, instead, focus on their application logic, treating sensors as just another “standard” input device. By providing these standard interfaces, the Windows 7 Sensor and Location platform offers a win-win-win situation, wherein it’s easier for developers to discover, access, and receive information from sensors, thus creating room for more developers to optimize their applications to environmental changes. In return, this creates a greater demand for sensor hardware and, if you are a hardware provider, you have a standardized way to target one set of APIs to integrate with Windows. And most importantly, end users get to experience applications that take into account the environments they are working in.

The location piece of the puzzle adds an abstraction layer on top of the Sensor platform with the sole purpose of providing an easy way to retrieve data about a geographic location while protecting user privacy.

Sensors Under the Hood

To better understand the Sensor Platform API, I want to take you through a quick overview of the platform architecture, explaining the role of the main components in the platform. The following figure illustrates the main components in the system. Note that this figure is doesn’t outline the entire platform, as it misses the location piece, but it will most certainly do for now.

The first component in the platform is the actual sensor device – shown as number 1. Usually, this is a real physical device that measures physical phenomena such as the amount of light, temperature, humidity, relative gravity force, and so on. However, a sensor can be a logical device (also known as a virtual sensor). A virtual sensor is a software-based sensor that can mimic sensor-type functionality by “impersonating” a sensor and providing data to the platform. Virtual sensors can be used to simulate real sensors to help the development process, as you’ll soon see.

Each sensor requires a driver that facilitates the connection between Windows 7 and the hardware device. This integration is achieved via a user mode device (UMD) sensor driver – shown as number 2.

To make it easier to write a device driver that exposes a sensor to Windows 7, the platform provides a sensor class extension – shown number 3. This is essentially a driver utility library that implements the common code required for sensor drivers. We are not going to talk about hardware or drivers in this post, however we have two excellent videos (Windows 7 Sensor and Location – Developing Drivers Part 1, and Part 2) with Gavin Gear describing in great detailed how to write a sensor driver.

After a sensor is installed and integrated, it becomes discoverable to the application via the sensor API – shown as number 4.

One of the main advantages that the Windows 7 Sensor and Location offers is that it enables multiple (different) applications to receive data from the same sensor at the same time – show as numbers 5 With previous Windows versions, devices usually used virtual COM ports to communicate with the system. One of the problems with virtual COM ports is that they don’t scale and can’t support multiple consumer applications at the same time; therefore, having a platform that supports multi-concurrency is a great advantage.

The last component of platform is the Location and Other Sensors dialog, which is part of the Control Panel. This dialog – show as number 6 enables users to control permission settings and other parameters the sensor provides. The following image is a screen shot of my Sensor and Location Control Panel. As you can see, I currently have two sensors installed – the Sensor Development Kit and the Virtual Light Sensor, and both are enabled.

The last topic to cover before we jump into the APIs is to explain how sensors are represented in the platform.

As we’ve seen above, a sensor can be either a physical device or a logical (virtual) sensor. Regardless of the sensor’s type, all sensors share similar properties, as explained in the following list:

• Category — A collection of sensors that are somehow related. For example weather station might include temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, and other environmental sensors
• Type – The definition of the physical phenomena that is being measured, like wind speed or amount of light
• Properties – The meta-data information that a sensor can contain, for example, the sensor-friendly name. There are read-only and read-write properties. The sensor-friendly name and its serial number are examples of read-only properties, while the requested data report interval is an example of a read-write property.
• Data Types – The actual data types a sensor reports for the defined type that it measures. For example, light is measured in LUX units, which are reported in a float variable. Location information includes latitude and longitude, and both are float variables. However as you will soon learn, location might also include civic address as a valid location, which is a set of strings. Data types change from sensor to sensor and it is assumed that you know what data types your sensor will return in its data report.
• Events – The main way the Sensor and Location platform communicates with your application, informing it when there is new data to consume or when the sensor state changes
• State – The definitions of the possible operational states for sensors, answering questions such as: “Is the sensor ready for use?” or “Has the user enabled the sensor?”

Armed with the above information, you are ready to start working with sensors and dive into the API. But to do this, you will have to read the next blog about the sensor and location platform.

Additional blog posts on this topics:

• Using Sensors in Your Application – Native Implementation, Part 1
• Using Sensors in You Application – Managed Part 1

Last week Steve Ballmer spoke at the Global Energy Forum in Houston, Texas and discussed the ways information technology is used in the oil and gas sector. Specifically, Steve touched on how the industry is impacting the development of new technologies and how existing technologies are aiding the industry’s innovation. Beyond the Global Energy Forum, the world is abuzz with conversations about how energy, oil and gas companies can create solutions that will reinvigorate the state of the industry. As a recent Microsoft News Center release noted, “Wild swings in supply and demand, volatile prices and shifting worldwide energy policies have made exploration and production more complex than ever.”

We’re pleased that Windows 7 is able to reduce headaches for IT Pros in this industry and enable them to improve productivity, enjoy a faster and more reliable management experience, and reduce costs. Check out customers below for more information:

• Moscow Integrated Power Company: Increased Employee Productivity – “Windows 7 and Internet Explorer deployment brings a new level of uninterrupted user support; now we are able to react to any software faults instantly, increasing our service sustainability,” explains Alexander Lebedev, CIO at Moscow Integrated Power Company.
• E.ON: Heinz Kohler, Vice President of Infrastructure for E.ON, says, “With E.ON Standard Desktop Version 3 based on Windows 7 we will give all E.ON market units working in different environments and with widely varying requirements the technology and tools that best support their goal to be amongst the leaders in the energy market.”
• Statoil: Improved Access from Branch Locations – by using BranchCache, workers based in remote Statoil branches will improve their productivity through faster access to resources. With BranchCache, employees at remote offices can access files more quickly than before. “In some of our locations where sufficient bandwidth is not easily available, being able to access a file locally using BranchCache will save our workers time,” says Petter Wersland, Leading Advisor for IT Infrastructure at Statoil. “Employees gain fuller, quicker access to a wide range of internal resources, so they can more fully participate in collaborative initiatives with colleagues worldwide.”
• Public Power Corporation (PPC): Reduced IT Costs – “With Windows 7, we will gain better, centralized control over all our computers so that we can better serve users while maintaining an up-to-date and secure environment,” Head of Office Systems in the PPC Information Technology department, Ioannis Symeonidis says. “We expect to cut our desktop deployment time, and costs, by one-third and thus increase by 50 percent the number of PCs deployed each day.”

For more information on Windows 7 for large, medium or small businesses, check out our business site, or read more enterprise company case studies or SMB case studies. We also have a resource dedicated to IT professionals: the Springboard Series on TechNet offers information, tools and guidance for migrating to Windows 7.

Early last month, Windows announced a new music discovery program in partnership with ReverbNation called Playlist 7. This program is exclusively for members of our Facebook, MySpace and Twitter communities.

If you’re already a Fan / Friend / Follower of Windows on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter then you already have access to 7 songs of your choice from 600 participating musicians every week when you visit the Playlist 7 website. If you’re not already a Fan / Friend / Follower of Windows, then you can become one instantly on the network of your choice, direct from the Playlist 7 website.

Once you’ve “connected” to Playlist 7, you will be able to check out this week’s Current Contenders to sample and can download your choice of any 7 songs. Current Contenders change every week (until the program ends of course), so you will want to keep checking Playlist 7 each week for new downloads. The 7 Featured Artist songs are the most downloaded songs from the prior week – they are also free to download for everyone who is connected.

In the first month, we’ve seen a fantastic early response for Playlist 7. Since November 30th, 20,509 Fans, Friends, and Followers of Windows have connected to the Playlist 7 and have downloaded 203,744 songs (which are absolutely free) in just 6 weeks of the program! And we’ve got 5 more weeks to go! Keep checking Playlist 7 each week for a new set of Current Contenders and songs from Featured Artists!

Are you interested in improving your home set-up but need some new ideas? If so, take a look Juan Goni’s master set-up in this edition of Show us Your Tech.

As a reminder, the Windows Home Server team has partnered with Microsoft’s Channel 9 , a video blog site that reaches of 5 million technology enthusiasts to revive a series called “Show Us Your Tech”. Similar to MTV Cribs, Show us Your Tech takes a look inside people’s homes. However, instead of looking in their fridge, it showcases some pretty elaborate technology set-ups that feature Windows Home Server.

In this edition, you will see Juan Goni’s set-up. Juan is a senior Program Manager at Microsoft in the Exchange Online Deployment group who has used Windows Home Server to connect his digital life and use it throughout his house. Juan has some pretty cool features in his set-up including the ability to control his home’s lighting with his PC, and also uses Media Center and extenders throughout his house to distribute video and music.

Check it out and get some new ideas for your own home!

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/Show-Us-Your-Tech-Juan-Goni-Edition/

Enjoy!

-Nicole

Nachdem Intel schon Ende letzten Jahres ein Firmwareupdate für seine SSDs veröffentlicht hatte, mit dem die Geräte das TRIM-Kommando unter Windows 7 verstehen können, zieht Samsung jetzt nach. Auf der Downloadseite für SSDs kann man für die Samsung MLC…(read more)

Wer unter Windows 7 anstatt einer Grafik eine einheitliche Farbe als Hintergrundbild verwendet, wird vieleicht bemerkt haben, dass der Rechner länger zum Anmelden braucht. Während der Loginphase zeigt er 30 Sekunden lang den Willkommensbildschirm an,…(read more)

Last weekend, I decided to go out and buy a new PC for at home. This PC would be used only as a “work PC” for when I do work at home. Sure, I could use my laptop but I’m sort of still a desktop guy. A lot of PC shopping happens online. Folks like Dell, HP, and many others have fantastic websites designed to give the consumer everything they need to make a purchasing decision for a PC. But a lot of PC shopping happens physically in stores too. I decided instead of ordering online, I would visit a local Best Buy and make my purchase there (of course if I found a PC I liked!).

I set out to find a PC based on the following criteria: doesn’t have to be a super powerful PC, has to be relatively low priced (around $500), had to have a small form factor (a desktop PC not a laptop), and had to carry the Windows 7 logo.

I wanted to primarily use this PC for blogging, email, and a bunch of scenario, hardware and software testing that I would end up blogging about. This PC wouldn’t be doing anything intensive like HD video editing.

I wanted in to Best Buy and went straight over to the Computers. I asked one of the Best Buy folks where I could find the small form-factor desktop PCs. He pointed me in the right direction. They had a row of tables with desktop PCs on them and section specifically for small-form factor desktop PCs. For most of their PCs, Best Buy puts out a label that has its price as well as hardware configuring usually listing a PCs processor, how much memory it has, how much storage (hard drive) it has, and sometimes graphics. I went an analyzed a few of these labels and weighed in spec and price for a few PCs. In the end – I found the perfect PC that met my needs exactly: the HP Pavilion (s5310y) Slimline PC.

The HP Pavilion Slimline PC came with the following specs:

• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Processor: AMD Athlon II X2 250 (3Ghz, 2MB L2, 400Mhz System Bus
• Memory: 4GB DDR3 Memory
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE Integrated Graphics*
• Network: NVIDIA nForce 10/100 Mbps
• Optical: SuperMulti DVD burner with LightScribe Technology**
• Storage: 600GB Hard drive

*Up to 256MB of system memory may be allocated to support graphics. This may result in Windows 7 reporting that you have 4GB of memory but 3.75GB “usable”.

**What exactly is LightScribe? Here’s a good explanation.

The PC is small, and slim which it gets its name from. It’s about 4 inches wide (thick), 12 inches tall (when standing up), and 15 inches deep (from front to back). It’s exactly what I needed to sit on a small shelf next to my desk next to my Windows Home Server.

Total cost for the PC was $509.99. Not bad. Just about what had been expecting to spend.

For work, I needed to join this PC to the corporate Microsoft domain. This allows me to enjoy access to our internal Microsoft stuff. However, the PC ships with Windows 7 Home Premium which does not allow for domain join. I ended up picking up a copy of Windows Anytime Upgrade to move from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional.

Moving from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional was extremely easy. Essentially the Windows Anytime Upgrade package provides you with a product key. This product key enables the upgrade to happen. On the PC I purchased with Windows 7 Home Premium, I went to the Start Menu and All Programs and chose Windows Anytime Upgrade. There I entered the key I had and the upgrade commenced.

The upgrade was pretty quick (took 2 reboots). I am now running Windows 7 Professional.

The rest of the evening I spent time downloading and installing the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta and setting the PC up just the way I want it (Windows Live Essentials, Zune, etc.). I joined it to the domain; Outlook 2010 picked up our corporate Exchange 2010 server and downloaded all my email. I now have a nice little work PC here in my home office!

From going to the store, buying the PC, and upgrading it to Windows 7 Professional, took less than 2 hours. I had a great experience – hope when you go out shopping for a PC it’s a great experience too!

Gastbeitrag von Michael Korp , Senior Evangelist in der Developer Platform & Strategy Group und zuständig für die Windows Plattform, Systems Management und Virtualisierung . Keine Sorge, ich möchte jetzt nichts zu dem Patch oder der zugrunde liegenden…(read more)

This blog post was written by MVP, Alexander Kent.  Alexander is the founder and principal of Kentdome LLC, a Los Angeles, California based company specializing in enterprise security, custom software engineering, network infrastructure and co-location services. In recent years Alexander has taken a particular interest in the Windows Home Server platform. As a result, Kentdome LLC has produced a number of WHS solutions under his architectural guidance. In addition Alexander has been a very active technology evangelist, sharing his excitement for the WHS platform. Today he will share some information about Remote Access challenges.  Enjoy!

Windows Home Server is generally considered a great file server and backup solution for home users. A lesser known fact is that it also provides superb Remote Access capabilities. The “Remote Access” feature allows you to control your computers and access files on your Windows Home Server over any internet connection, from anywhere in the world.

Have you ever traveled somewhere and realized that important files were left at home? Now, with the help of the Windows Home Server Remote Access technology, you can securely reach your home network and interact with it from any machine on the Internet.

Enabling the Remote Access feature prompts the Windows Home Server to try and automatically configure the network to allow inbound connections. Seven times out of ten times this works perfectly, but given the sheer number of different devices, and the ever increasing complexity of home networks, the process of configuring your network for Remote Access may have to be more hands on.

This article explains the most frequent Remote Access challenges and then walks you through the steps of making your Windows Home Server accessible across the Internet.

#1) UPnP is not enabled or supported by your router
The Windows Home Server Remote Access Configuration Wizard attempts to auto configure your router over universal plug and play (UPnP) standards. UPnP represents a set of networking protocols that allow devices to connect, interoperate, and be configured. In order for this to work, your router must have the UPnP feature enabled, and must support the correct UPnP version.

If your router does not support the UPnP protocol, or if your router has UPnP disabled, then the Windows Home Server Remote Access Wizard will report a failure when attempting to configure the router through the Remote Access settings interface.

Figure 1.0: Router configuration failed

In many cases, downloading and installing a firmware update on the router adds UPnP support or fixes UPnP issues. If you have not done any firmware updates, visit your router manufacturer’s website to see if any updates are available. We recommend installing the firmware update, enabling UPnP on your router (if applicable), and try running the Windows Home Server Remote Access Configuration Wizard again.

In some cases, Windows Home Server will report an error with the automatic router configuration, but the Remote Access functionality proceeds to work without a problem. This occurs in cases where the UPnP protocol may not be implemented properly on the router and Windows Home Server cannot confirm whether or not configuration was successful.

Figure 2.0: Router configuration failed but remote Web site is available from the Internet. (Okay to proceed!)

If the above information does not solve your problem or UPnP is not available on your router, then you must manually configure port forwarding from your router to your Windows Home Server. To learn more, please visit the Broadband Router Configuration wiki produced by the Home Server Land team in conjunction with the Windows Home Server Remote Access feature team at Microsoft.

WHS Remote Access UPnP Problems from HomeServerLand on Vimeo.

#2) Double NAT

Network Address Translation (NAT) refers to the translation of an Internet Protocol address (IP address) used within one network to a different IP address known within another network. For example, a translation from the Local Area Network (LAN: the private home network) to the Wide Area Network (WAN: the public Internet).

A good example of a NAT device is the network router which can be thought of as the agent between the public Internet and the private home network.

A typical home network is made up of a single network router (NAT), usually with a built-in 4-port switch, and a basic DSL or Cable modem that connects to the Internet.

Figure 3.0: Typical Home Network Diagram

For the Windows Home Server Remote Access website to be available from the Internet, the router needs to be configured to forward inbound web traffic from the Internet to the Windows Home Server on the local network. Therefore, if another NAT device is introduced into the network, it too must be configured accordingly!

A home network containing two devices routing traffic and performing Network Address Translation is known as a Double NAT. Such devices can include a combination of routers, modems, firewalls, wireless access points, and other network devices.

What people often fail to realize is that DSL Modems that employ Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) are frequently performing NAT and other roles such as Internet authentication and DHCP functions.

Figure 4.0: Double NAT network diagram

In a Double NAT environment, the UPnP protocol can only be used to automatically configure the nearest NAT device. Under these conditions, the Remote Access functionality will not work properly, and the Windows Home Server will report a failure when attempting to configure the router through the Remote Access Settings interface.

How do I know if I am behind a double NAT?
To determine whether or not a Double NAT exists, check the WAN (outside) IP address on the router nearest to the Windows Home Server. It should match the public IP address assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). One way to check your public IP address is by visiting a site like http://whatismyipaddress.com/ from your home network.

If the WAN IP address on the router nearest to the Windows Home Server is a private IP address, meaning a non-routable IP address reserved for private use, you are dealing with a Double NAT scenario.

Figure 5.0: IP Address ranges reserved for private use

The solution would be to reconfigure your home network so that only one device is routing data in a NAT configuration. Many network devices, including Cable and DSL modems, support a “bridged” or "transparent" mode of operation, which disables all of the routing and NAT in the device. This effectively puts your other router into the position of managing the Internet authentication and network address translation. Consult your modem manufacturer documentation or contact your ISP for support.

Another common network setup mistake is made by people who wish to add wireless functionality without replacing their existing modem or router. As a result, if you attach another router behind or in-front of your existing router, you are effectively creating a Double NAT.

Figure 6.0: Double NAT by means of two routers

In this case, the solution would be to consolidate both devices into a single unit that can route traffic to the wired and wireless networks, or to configure port forwarding from the first NAT device to the second NAT device. Alternatively, circumvent the double NAT by attaching the Windows Home Server directly to the first NAT device on the network.

WHS Remote Access: Double NAT from HomeServerLand on Vimeo.

#3) Internet Service Provider is blocking Remote Access Ports

The Remote Access website requires inbound port 80 (HTTP), port 443 (HTTPS) and port 4125 (Remote Web Workplace or RWW for short) to be available from the Internet. However, many internet service providers block email related internet ports to curb spam or unsolicited commercial usage. In some cases ISPs block additional ports such as the ones required by Windows Home Server Remote Access: inbound port 80 and port 443.
If you have configured your network for Remote Access but the remote access website is still not available over the Internet, then contact your ISP to confirm whether or not inbound connectivity on TCP ports 80, 443 or 4125 are being blocked.

Alternatively you can determine whether or not ports are blocked with the Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool.

WHS Remote Access: ISP Blocking Ports from HomeServerLand on Vimeo.

The Windows Home Server Remote Access functionality is a powerful and convenient feature that is well worth the effort to set up correctly and securely.

Hopefully the above breakdown of some of the most common Windows Home Server Remote Access challenges has been helpful. The Windows Home Server Remote Access feature team at Microsoft and the WHS communities are continuously engaged in improving and compiling data around compatibility and other home network issues. Feedback is always welcome and should you need additional help, please give us a shout in the forums where we can help you further.

-Alexander Kent

Today Seesmic has announced a brand new Twitter app for the Windows Platform specifically designed for the mainstream consumer called Seesmic Look. Seesmic Look brings a lot to the table making it easy for the average consumer, like your mom, to digest and take in Twitter content. This Windows app works with or without a Twitter account! Earlier this week in the midst of traveling to New York for today’s event, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur was able to spare some time to chat with me about Seesmic Look. We go into great detail on Seesmic Look and the future of Seesmic including some discussion on Seesmic for Windows! Loic is Seesmic’s Founder and CEO. Business Week Magazine named Loic as one of the 25 most influential people on the web recently.

Brandon LeBlanc: Seesmic Look is your new application. Tell us about it, what is different, and why should users download it right away?

Loic Le Meur: So, Look will be our “avatar” of Twitter clients because it is an entirely new category that is aiming at providing very rich and engaging ways for end-users to interact with Twitter. Basically for anyone – not just the computer savvy (or what we call “the geeks”). And that is what Look is. Helping, you know, anyone getting information and interact with Twitter in a way that we believe has never been done before. Especially thinking about, you know, people watch CNN and hear about Twitter, people been watching Oprah and heard about Twitter, and they may not have a Twitter account, they likely don’t have a Twitter account yet, and we’ve designed Look for them. It’s for everyone else basically who doesn’t use Twitter yet.

Brandon: So you don’t have to have a Twitter account to use Seesmic Look? It can totally be used and is accessible to the general consumer that doesn’t have a Twitter account – correct?

Loic: It’s the very first application that we know of that lets you interact, that lets you read, get information, get news about all your favorite topics without having to have or use a Twitter account – at all. The reason we made that choice is because we wanted it to be accessible to anyone. So you just download Look, you get it up and running instantly, and nothing prevents you from reading information – enjoying information about celebrities, about sports… but we’ll come back to that. Anything that is interesting to you. That’s something that no one has done, something that no one has done via the user experience and is rich and engaging.

The other thing really is we tried to make it feel like an experience close to watching TV if you just want to consume information and you can just sit back and relax and watch Twitter. That is something also that no one else has done and a very engaging, rich, way you can obviously… you can even use Look from your couch if you like with a remote control, something else that is new.

But the other thing which makes Look entirely unique is you can interact with it using touch. So it’s been optimized and is usable with all the new devices that use a touch UI. But also a remote control so you can actually sit from a couch and watch Twitter and that is absolutely new and extremely addictive. We’re trying to get an experience very close to watching TV – the other thing you can do with Look is use the “TV mode” button for Look (Note: in the app it is called Playback Mode). If you click it, you can see the tweets coming to you without doing anything. And that is also very entertaining because it is what enables Look to basically watch Twitter.

Brandon: So what you’re saying is if I have a Media Center PC in my living room, I could put Look on that PC that’s connected to my 42” LCD HDTV and using my Media Center remote to navigate and play around with Look like I would Media Center, right?

Loic: Exactly. I’ve been using it for a few weeks myself on a HP TouchSmart PC. And just using it and navigating it with my fingers or the remote control which is provided. It’s a very new way to interact with Twitter and also what I enjoy myself and we’re expecting our users to also enjoy is that you can go to your favorite categories. For example if you want to follow what is happening in Haiti and you really want to stay on top of news coming in you can select the “news” section of Look and put it in TV mode and let it run this way, all day if you like, which is also something not done before, and just watch the news coming in to you straight onto your, yeah, pretty much like a Media Center experience absolutely. It would be totally appropriate to have on a, you know, a LCD screen or TV – anything like that.

Brandon: You’ve talked about Seesmic Look making Twitter accessible for everyone. How does this change the experience for someone that is using Twitter for the very first time?

Loic: Basically we make it very easy for them to learn and also to discover users – which is why we have the directory there because when you start on Twitter you need to find people to follow. And also mainstream non-tech savvy users want to find popular names and brands. And that is what we have built into Look as well. When you open Look and go to News you will see the Wall Street Journal, you will see CNN, you will see brands that are reassuring for mainstream users and the same with celebrities or sports.

Brandon: What sorts of things does Seesmic Look bring to the table for consumers to consume Twitter content, like what are some of the features they will take advantage of?

Loic: The very first one is that we make it simple to consume information. First, the way Look opens is that it opens on Trends. So it gives you the most current trends and lets you go deep real-time wise on what everybody is talking about. Then what we have created entirely exclusively for Look and something Seesmic has never done before is a directory of interests so that you can go and check the main categories we have.

We have News, we have Sports, we have Entertainment, Celebrities, and I could go on and on but these are again consistent to our goal of helping Twitter reach the masses and with everybody watching TV and reading newspapers – this is very different. Basically Twitter has reached a point now it has to go mainstream. To go mainstream, it has to be extremely simple, to enter it and access it, for users who don’t know Twitter at all. So that’s a goal I think we’ve achieved with Look.

For example if you go to Celebrities and you hit (click) one of those Twitter accounts you will see that the user interface is extremely rich and innovative in the fact that we use the Twitter background for that celebrity (from their profile) and display it as the entire background in the application.

And so basically each time you check the user or celebrity or go to CNN you will have a unique experience per user. It offers environment which is something very, very new.

Brandon: What’s the difference between Seesmic Look and Seesmic for Windows?

Loic: Seesmic for Windows is an application which become quite popular is really designed for more of the power user. For daily, multiple hours a day users who almost some of them use it at a professional level to manage their communities where as Seesmic Look is really again designed for the mainstream, for people who will interact with Twitter with help – we should come back to that – we made it very easy to create a Twitter account and we are partners with Twitter on this application. But it is really designed for my mother – for “normal” people where Seesmic for Windows is a full featured application for current Twitter users to really manage their community online and are already into social networks and that is very different.

Brandon: Seesmic Look introduces several new features never before seen in a Twitter client – one of those is branded Channels. Can you tell me a little bit more about Channels?

Loic: Our objective was to get in front of the new Twitter users or people who are discovering it, with a reassuring environment with brands they trust and they know. We are working with a group of launch partners and what we call a channel is a branded environment, which is basically a piece of real-estate we created from scratch that is very rich in terms of interaction. And that lets the user access those brands and environments they know. So you will find Red Bull in there for example. As launch partners – we have a number of brands free that will feature more than other than just Red Bull.

So if you go to Red Bull, you will find an environment that basically respects the way the brand communicates to consumers. And what they (Red Bull) chose to feature to them (consumer). And you will see that it’s not actually featuring the products at all but it’s more about featuring the Twitters who are basically in the Red Bull environment in all their different categories like Air, Athletic, Moto, Action, and so on and so forth. And when you get into that, you find you can actually discover interesting Twitter users and athletes who can do all kinds of things like jumping out of airplanes, doing some moto-racing, and so on. And this is just for Red Bull.

This is one example of something never done before in any (Twitter) application that brings so much integration of the brand environment which is entirely powered by Twitter.

We have a number of brand launch partners, and we’re very excited to make this real-estate available in Look.

Brandon: Now you’ve been very busy lately. In December you announced Seesmic for Windows, you’ve announced a few mobile apps, and you’ve acquired Ping.fm and now you’re launching Seesmic Look. So what’s next for Seesmic?

Loic: We’re very busy and we’re the only company in the Twitter ecosystem that operates on so many screens. And that is a vision we shared with Ray Ozzie on stage at the PDC conference where Ray explained he wanted Microsoft and specifically Silverlight and Windows to help developers get on all the screens and that’s exactly what we’re doing because as you said we’re on 2 mobile platforms, to answer your question we have more mobile platforms coming. We want to be everywhere the consumer is in terms of interacting with Twitter and social networks. That includes the desktop and also on the web.

So Look completes our offering because we felt really strongly that we needed an application that could be used by the millions of users who aren’t power users.

And what’s coming next is something we’ve announced at PDC – we’re working on a plug-in architecture for Seesmic for Windows which is coming together very well with the next month. And that will open new opportunities for developers to tap into our user base which will be to create any form of application and services that can get integrated into Seesmic for Windows. So right now geo-location is very fashionable and there are a number of applications in that field like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp – we want to support all of them. But with a small time, obviously we cannot build everything that is available (into Seesmic for Windows) ourselves so the plug-in architecture will allow anyone to create a plug-in and get in to Seesmic for Windows. We’re getting ready to launch this in the coming months and is our main focus right now (after of course launching Look!).

Brandon: In a world where some people are talking about everything going to the web, Seesmic has made an investment and a bet on these apps running on richer client experiences. Why is that important?

Loic: I agree many people have been explaining everything should go web-based, and while we have Seesmic Web for our pure Web presence, we believe there are a number of interactions and user experiences that you cannot provide when you’re only web-based. And there is a category of users who really value that design and that experience that you can only do/get in a desktop application. Or even a mobile application. And it’s the same on mobile by the way, you have a lot of web clients which work really well with applications but you can see by how mobile apps are downloadable – mobile apps are booming these days which shows the desktop and mobile applications have a huge future ahead of them.

There is no other way to provide that kind of interaction which is very close to somewhat like a gaming environment than just reading webpages. And we really believe that interaction and design are extremely important and probably more important than features themselves. Look is fully featured of course but the look and feel of Look is very unique because it’s an application. And it couldn’t be made on a web app at all – and we really think it’s going to make a big difference.

Brandon: Thanks Loic for taking the time to talk us through Seesmic Look today and congrats on an awesome release! It’s fantastic to see Seesmic launch such a bleeding-edge Windows app for consuming Twitter content.

So what are you waiting for?

Go download Seesmic Look today and give it a spin!

If you’ve got some not-so-tech-savvy family members or friends who might like to read what’s happening in the “Twitterverse” you should point Seesmic Look out to them. I know my mom is going to love Seesmic Look to follow all the celebrity tweets. She loves that kind of stuff. But even some of my more geeky friends will also love Seesmic Look.

Pssst, you Seesmic for Windows fan outs there keep your eyes peeled… I’m told a Seesmic for Windows update is coming soon!