Thursday, May 28, 2015

Launching the Azure User Group France association

Today, we are announcing the official launch of a new User Group in France: the Azure User Group France

https://twitter.com/azugfr
https://www.facebook.com/groups/azugfr/

As a co-creator, we had the chance to announce this at Microsoft France, Azure Camp 2015 during the keynote, on May 28th 2015.


On stage !

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The Design of the Kakemono done by Estelle. Everything was validated by vote using Trello.
https://twitter.com/FollowEstelle/status/603832805156487168 
Image result for inkscape image

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We got T-Shirts !
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That was fun spending all nights designing Logos with  Inkscape Project and submitting ideas to Markus à midnight !! then, we end-up spending extra many hours in pear-designing Logo !! (didn’t know that was possible… but in a rush, everything becomes possible!).
We wanted to get the design of the AZUG FR logo correctly for our new association.
We submitted right at the proper time for printing the Kakemono for the D-Day of the launch of our association the “Azure User Group France”, during the

In order to design properly the Logo with an opensource tool, I chose  that can draw excellent vectorial images that can scale massively, because the Keynote will be presented in on gigantic monitor.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Imagine the future of shopping with HoloLens and Microsoft Azure…

As I am extremely lazy (hence I love automation to kill repetitive boring tasks and I’m in IT !!), every time I go shopping with my shopping list I am facing the following question:
“Wouldn’t that be that great to have an application that tells me the optimized path to shop everything I need in a minimum amount of time ?”
Lets dream slightly to think about an App on a mobile phone :
  • You would have entered before-hand a shopping list (on the left below)
  • The apps would walk you through the supermarket thanks to arrows modeled on the telephone
  • Whenever you reach a product present on my shopping list, it is highlighted;
    • each product would have a RFID tag, so that the App knows precisely its price, its ingredients (handy for allergies or specific diet), the total cost of my cart, …
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A better version with V2
  • Now as you are approaching and facing articles, the application knows you are allergic to a given ingredients or that you want a “full fat free”. Hence, it automatically scores it out non matching items and highlights relevant ones!
    That would be such a great amount of time spared !!
  • Then you keep on following the green arrows (notice you have on the top left hand side, a small top-view map of your location in the supermarket)
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An even better version with V3 and in 2015
Now we are in the near future,
  • instead of using the small mobile phone,
  • or instead of picking a Gen-Code reader at the entrance of your supermarket
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With the usage of HoloLens, you would be able to walk in your supermarket:
  • according to an optimized path,
  • picking up rapidly, without spending hours in reading all ingredients (allergies or specific diet),
  • as you pickup the articles, you would visualize tons of information related to the product (may be cheaper prices with 5 miles), all those information flies toward Microsoft Azure into a centralized datastore where AI and anonymized recommandations could be performed,
  • have the total of your bill all summed up for you, with the corresponding discounts if applicable.
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Final version with V4 and in 2016 … This is the laziest variant of it !
Imagine all this, sitting comfortably in your sofa ! while watching TV for instance or doing gym! and get the order delivered for you ! All this would be powered by Microsoft Azure with its IoT offering, where the Azure Machine Learning would be offered as a service and will predict you your needs !!
Well this dream is not that far, with :
  • HoloLens, MS Azure, Machine Learning, EventHubs, Stream Analytics, IoT and Windows 10 !
Remixed image © Bretz Marilyn licensed under the Creative Commons Cultsofa image
Then you’ll have more time to go out, enjoy meeting real people, and have fun… away from those technologies ;-)