55 minutes inside Microsoft Research’s new “#99″ building
Everytime I watch one of my own videos I see something that I could improve.
We spent half a day at Microsoft Research’s new building getting a video tour of the new building. Kevin Schofield, General Manager, gave us an awesome tour and introduced us to several of Microsoft’s smartest people.
One problem: it’s way too long. Pretty interesting stuff in there, if you hang out for the 55 minutes, but it would have been better to chop it up to its component parts, rather than try to run it all together.
Actually doing that would help us with Google, too. Google rewards atoms, not molecules (this video is a molecule).
So, what are the atoms?
Atom One: 00:00-2:55 Kevin Schofield giving us an introduction to the building.
Atom Two: 2:55 - 06:57 Martha Clarkson, who helped design parts of the building, explains some of the innovations in the building (and there are many)
Atom Three: 06:57-19:59 Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs, theory researchers talk with me about their research, about building a new research center in New England (which they are heading up and which will use many of the same things in their new building that were done here).
Atom Four: 19:59-30:07 Kevin Schofield continues his tour, showing us several things in the building that the researchers themselves helped design.
Atom Five: 30:07- 39:12 Schofield brings us into the signal processing group, where we get a look at the anechoic chamber (sound proof room) and he introduces us to Phil Chou, principal researcher in the signal processing group. You can really hear why TV studios try to build sound-absorption systems in. The audio gets noticeably better.
Atom Six: 39:12-41:52 Schofield explains why Research builds hardware and gives us more insights into the building and shows us some of the work areas in the new building.
Atom Seven: 41:52 Schofield takes us into meet Andy Wilson. If you haven’t seen my videos before, you might not know that Andy is doing probably the most bleeding edge work at Microsoft (he build the Surface table-top computer which you touch with your hands). If you only watch one part, you’ve gotta check out his lab in the new building.
Atom Eight: 50:51-55:05 Schofield talks about how they built a public area of the building so that groups, even outside ones, can have meetings inside the new building and concludes the tour.
Thanks for hanging in there through the 55 minute video. We’ll work on the UI so we can cut these things up into smaller pieces and still bring you most of the good stuff.
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March 20th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
The break down of the video into smaller pieces and the text menu is a great addition. Thanks for going the extra mile!
March 20th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
hmmm…I thought that the little images where video snippets. This remains cool nevertheless :-)
March 20th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Edwin: yeah, they should be, shouldn’t they? I gotta import this into Viddler and then we could do something like that.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
You have subscribe, but can I download a single video?
March 20th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I think that it would help but the text menu is already a great step forward. Have you ever seen the TED player? They inline in the player a little outline of the content. May be an extension to add to the fast company player.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Samir: not yet, but very soon. Maybe even next week (the devs have that on their list of things to do).
March 20th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Really nice video. A suggestion though would be to have lapel mics on the main people (Scoble and Schofield in this video) and keep the regular mic around for additional people. Your arm must be killing you from holding that mic the whole time.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Todd: thanks, we now have lapel microphones. They are a HUGE improvement. They didn’t arrive in time for this shoot, unfortunately.
March 21st, 2008 at 12:52 am
Got through the 55 minutes. Nice building and good interview. I think that the challenge for Microsoft research is to seat back and try to determine why they are not able to produce the flickrs, youtubes, ipods, iphones, facebooks and nings of the world. Somethings seems to be broken and as good and effective this new building seems to be, it is not clear that it is going to address the root of the problem.
March 21st, 2008 at 5:47 am
I’m going to be nice and not mention the hojillions of times commenters here told you your videos were too long and needed to be edited or chopped up into cohesive chunks and you claimed they were all wrong and it worked much better this way.
Oh, darn… :-)
March 21st, 2008 at 5:53 am
[...] 55 Minutes Inside Microsoft Research’s New “#99″ Building (Robert Scoble) [...]
March 21st, 2008 at 7:50 am
Robert,
Yes if you break up the video it would be better for Google SEO however is that your primary concern? I mean there are people that like to watch a fluid storyline. Editing I believe should be for people and not bots. Although breaking up the video into smaller chunks would help with bandwidth for those that do not have a high speed connection and there are still a few out there.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Well better snip slices, if a bit chaotic, but no matter how many times you goto Microsoft Research (this is the 6th?), it’s never interesting. It’s a sales pitch, geek tinkers going unpractical and pointless MAKE-magazineish and demoing the gee-whiz wow golly-gee “coming soon” stuff. Seems like an exercise just to save their jobs.
Surface might be cool, but it’s eons away, and will cost too much, and have the usual showstopper Microsoft bugs, and then less excited as I have ’surface’ with my Archos 5th gen and Touch iPod already.
Not going FEDD?
Full - too long, Scoble Show snooze.
Snipplets - too random, context is lost, hard to get even divisions.
Full Edit Down Divided Up (FEDD) - the answer, imho.
An edited down full…55 to 20, broken into 2 parts, without any cliffhangers, yet continual. Doing it that way for my current stuff, seems to work…
March 23rd, 2008 at 11:02 pm
@Edwin Khodabakchian
Great insight. I read year after year about Softie blowing billions into research (and now a fancy research center staffed with ‘top brains’), yet the output is a joke. If this does not change, Shareholders will finally question what they are getting for their investment.
“I think that the challenge for Microsoft research is to seat back and try to determine why they are not able to produce the flickrs, youtubes, ipods, iphones, facebooks and nings of the world. Somethings seems to be broken and as good and effective this new building seems to be, it is not clear that it is going to address the root of the problem.”
March 30th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
[...] es den Mitarbeitern bie Microsoft ebenfalls gut ergeht zeigt Robert Scoble. In seinem 55-minütigen Video stellt er das neue Gebäude von Microsoft Research [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 11:15 pm
[...] visiting the new research building we parted ways, but not before I was able to convince him to give the class thumbs-up [...]