ChronoZoom is an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything. Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. By using Big History as the story line, ChronoZoom seeks to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences an enable all this information to be easily understandable and navigable.
I recently attended TechFest 2012, an inspiring event put on by Microsoft Research out in Redmond. The event happens once a year and allows Microsoft employees and select guests the opportunity to view research projects from Microsoft’s labs around the globe.
While there were some really, really amazing applications demoed at the event, I would have to say my two favorite projects were FetchClimate and Cliplets. They are both projects available for the general public to use and provide feedback on today!
FetchClimate is a fast, free and intelligent climate data retrieval service that operates on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. FetchClimate allows users to access climate data for any geographical region during year ranges between 1900 and 2010 in various formats and share this information via a unique URL.
An interactive application that allows users to create a type of imagery, a “cliplet” which resembles part photo and part video. The applications provides the ability for users to import a video and mask certain parts of the video to play and others to remain still.
Here is an example I created. Keep an eye on the bird in the middle!
I finally got around to compiling all of my social media sources on Microsoft and innovation and published them in a digital newspaper supported by paper.li.
Here’s a snapshot of the newspaper. It publishes daily, so subscribe or check back often.
