Product is crafted by people. It is not a sum of collaborative work. It’s usually a combination of work, excitement, collaborative ideas, feedback loop inside the team throughout the whole project lifecycle. Passion is right at the heart of every person, and if environment tends to motivate - a person will work hard to achieve a good result (appreciated by the team and himself). Moreover, working with passionate team amplifies the overall product, makes it bigger than sum of efforts. ...

When developing Storia.me iPhone app, we had the following circles to deliver to: - Developers - QA - Early adopters - General Audience (AppStore) And the following problems to solve: - Provide Beta access with faster update pace and immediate critical bug fixing for early adopters (as in microsoft’s inner circle); - Make AppStore version as stable as possible; - Receive feedback on earlier stages, experiment with a limited set of users and influencers. A scheme we came up with eventually, has three (four in special cases) versions before the final AppStore release. Each version is rolled out out for certain circle, with different readiness level. ...

Well-coordinated work across teams - let’s say design and development - is a huge deal when it comes to delivering a good product on time! So, part of my job as a project manager is making sure that the assets passed from design into development are ready for implementation. At the very heart of the process, design review is nothing complex. You should know human interface guidelines, platform restrictions, requirements and a little bit of common sense =) ...

Werner Vogels, the amazon CTO, in a very informal way talked with Conten.ly, Distill Networks, and some other CEO/CFO/CCO’s on how the start-ups were scaling. Werner still claims that Amazon is a startup. Yeah, just with billion valuation and an IPO. How cute, noted Shane of Contently. (UPD: this was shared lightning fast all over the media, see the full transcript) ==== “How much time do you spent time on hiring?” Vogels asked. “At Amazon, of course, we’re a 20 year-old startup by now —” ...

German writer and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once famously said, “silence in the face of evil is evil itself.” When there is potential for storytelling or reporting to create a tangible impact, is there an obligation for the journalist or greater media ecosystem relay a call to action to the reader? What is the role of the journalist in getting the audience to emotionally connect to what they are reading, potentially at the expense of objectivity? Presented by The Knight Foundation". ...

How to accurately estimate external projects This is a first article from “How to accurately estimate incoming projects” series, aimed to help you see the possible future pitfalls. This includes both outsourcing projects and the ones where different teams around the world are involved.IT industry is dynamic. Companies change APIs, IDEs, upgrade hosting servers software, raise new compatibility issues. Of course improvements are welcome, but there is no way you will have a perfect product once and forever – it needs to be re-iterated. Don’t forget about hundreds of different environments that the system should work on. And people. ...

Nothing new this 2 weeks. Well, in fact tons of new stuff this 2 weeks, but no time to blog at all. We are experiencing extreme-2-week-game-development and are almost ready to release “how not to screw up big projects” book (this is a joke, everything’s under control). Meanwhile, we posted some stuff at codebranch blog, and want to say “HI” to our folks at LeWeb in Paris this week ;) Here are the previews for two next posts: ...

Latest post by LongZheng reveals MS Research’s plans to ship JS library for kinect-enabled website. We already mentioned this in our twitter, but today’s little article will take a look at opportunities that this fact brings to the market. Kinect has been a revolutionary addition for XBOX and sold millions of copies first year, becoming the fastest selling product in Microsoft’s history. Although, I didn’t like the release name (codename: “Project Natal” was much smoother to our ears), we all now take it for granted. There are still no hardcore games for Kinect, titles like Sesame street (a must-notice title for parents out there) and Kinect adventures are great for kids so they sell well, while Dance Central series popularize this device as an entertainment. ...

This is really interesting to watch! One of the best argued and balanced critical statements come from MS’ former employees, that’s why I follow for example Scott Barnes (@MossyBlog). Check this out ;) [vimeo http://vimeo.com/53237950]

Having worked in the sound recognition field in mobile space (bird sounds) I know about this hard process a bit. Mostly I was using predefined algorithms and just implemented them in c#, but my poor knowledge and puny brain would never do such amazing stuff! [youtube=http://youtu.be/Nu-nlQqFCKg] Natural UI comes to life! You can always see that some awesome MS Research powered speech recognition displayed on MS keynotes almost in real-time, but yesterday’s article on The Next Web highlighted the new addition to that wonderful feature: same voice tone speech translation in Mandarin! Check this out! ...