blyberg.net » Yes to all. Yes to all.

Yes to all. Yes to all.

Alan gave me a heads-up on Microsoft’s new Surface this morning. We want them in our new library. Strike that. We will have them in our new library:

(link)

Can you imagine plopping a CD or DVD down on this thing and getting an instant preview, then checking it out by simply placing your library card anywhere on the table?

How about letting the kids go nuts on it.

Or using it as a reference tool, “…have a seat while I blow your freakin’ mind.”

At about $10,000 a piece, these might just be a killer app for libraries.

(more info)

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14 Comments so far
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I love the form factor… that’s genius, and it looks like a great application for the multitouch stuff, but I can’t imagine that this won’t be crippled by DRM restrictions and compatibility matrices a mile long, just like overdrive. Overdrive is the best product available for ebooks and eaudio for libraries at the moment, and it’s great, other than the fact that it doesn’t support 80% of the digital audio players (ipods) that people actually own.

I’m sure surface will work beautifully if you’re running windows mobile on your phone (between reboots) and have a microsoft digital media player and digital camera and they can run and have installed the firmware updates that support microsoft’s surface extensions to bluetooth and the user knows how to turn on discoverable mode and you tagged your items with rfid tags that adhere to the standards of microsoft’s rfid business partners and you’re willing to develop applications for the thing in silverlight or whatever their marketing department wants it to push.

Sure is cool though.

Oh you’re so jaded, Eli! I’m sure they’ll release an SDK like they did for XP Tablet Ed.

My mind was freakin’ blown. I thought “oh wow oh wow oh wow…LOVE it!! …must have” too… but I’m pre-Millenial.

I think that within 3, maybe 6 months, this will be sliced white bread to the kids. What we see as “super desk” will be “yeah, so what? impress me with the next thing” to them. (Maybe then we can whip out some old or new tech and impress them with ….gasp…powerful content!!)

[...] Blyberg posted on Microsoft’s Surface technology. This is flipping incredible. Check it [...]

I love that you said “We will.”

[...] sounds like a great opportunity for libraries if there ever was one. John Blyberg seems to agree. I think libraries should start imagining right now what the future of public internet access [...]

[...] John Blyberg posted a brief blog about it, and you can see all of the Microsoft videos on Youtube. Think about what we could do with something like this! [...]

[...] 3rd, 2007 at 4:27 am (Magical Thinking) I share John Blyberg’s excitement about Microsoft’s Surface. Imagine the possiblities! How [...]

Looks like fun, but I’m skeptical of the usability in the field. When the user puts down their camera, a half-dozen photos spring out (instantly, I might add), rather than the 500+ that are on my mother-in-law’s camera. Similarly, where’s the keyboard? I’ve used enough wedding registry kiosks to understand the frustration of using a flat, glass keyboard. Shiny, yes. But useable? I’d like to see it first.

That occurred to me as well Mike, but I think we would probably use it much differently in a library setting.

[...] I’m late to the party — nods to John Blyberg and Rob Styles — but damn(!), does Microsoft have some exciting visualization projects or [...]

Nice - but you lost me at plopping down a DVD for a preview. Can’t reliable even pop a DVD into a computer around here, due to region coding limitations. We have discs from at least 5 regions. Heck, mainland China just a few miles away is a different region than our site in Hong Kong, which is a different region from Japan. We have designated PCs for different regions, and most people just say the heck with it and go to a multi-region non-computer DVD player. But I love the surface for other things anyway.
-Spode

Edward,
In my mind, I was envisioning that the table would key on an RFID tag and trigger a preview hook from an online database of movie previews–not play the DVD itself.

[...] Yes to all. Yes to all. (blyberg.net) [...]

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