Microsoft Ignite Australia

Developers, IT professionals and curious minds across Australia are heading to the Gold Coast next week (14-17 Feb) for Microsoft's Australian Conference, Ignite. Attendees are expected to walk away with new connections and new ideas about how to do things faster, smarter and better.

At nsquared we're most excited about Dr Neil Roodyn's six presentations.
Come and say hello, and remember nsquared is hiring developers.

Conversation As a Platform Part 1

Tue 14 Feb, 4:15 PM

Speak to me, make your app conversational. In this session you will learn how to integrate Cortana, speech, and the Microsoft Bot Framework into your applications.

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Building apps for Surface Hub - 30 minutes of tips, tricks and q&a on Surface Hub dev.

Wed 15 Feb, 1:00 PM

In this session come and find out about building apps for Microsoft’s biggest most stunning screen.

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Conversation As a Platform Part 2

Wed 15 Feb, 6:30 PM

Enlighten me, make your app smarter. In this session you will learn how to integrate cognitive services and machine learning into your conversational applications.

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Developing for Surface Dial and Surface Studio

Thu 16 Feb, 11:30 AM

If building great software for really cool hardware is what gets you up in the morning, this session is for you!

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Building apps for Surface Hub - 30 minutes of tips, tricks and q&a on Surface Hub dev.

Thu 16 Feb, 3:00 PM

In this session come and find out about building apps for Microsoft’s biggest most stunning screen.

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Building apps for Surface Hub - 30 minutes of tips, tricks and q&a on Surface Hub dev.

Fri 17 Feb, 9:45 AM

In this session come and find out about building apps for Microsoft’s biggest most stunning screen.

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How Old Do You Really Look?

The Microsoft How Old? Project has been a phenomenon. The app, built to show off the new Windows 10 facial recognition API and the power of Azure cloud, uses algorithms to determine how old a user's face looks. And, understandably, it has become the definition of viral. It has grown faster than Facebook. It has even grown faster than Angry Birds. The stats speak for themselves:

• 1.2 million visitors per hour in 48 hours
• 540 million photos analysed to date
• More than 1/2 billion photos uploaded in 1 month
• 0-50 million users in just 7 days.
• Ellen even tweeted about it:

But don't stop at Ellen. THERE'S MORE.

We have exciting news: in a world first, the nsquared team is helping to bring the How Old? online experience into a real life experience.

All this work on How Old? has seemed to have weathered nsquared's faces by a few years, but stay tuned to see what this wrinkly crew has to offer. 

Sydney Design Award Winner

We are super excited to have been announced as a winner of the Sydney Design Awards for the nsquared digitable55. Of course we always believed we had an awesome digital table product that we know our costumers love. To have the design validated by a panel of design experts makes the team here at nsquared extremely happy.

As a quick reminder of the product and the process of building the product watch this short video about the the nsquared digitable55.

Finally here is a picture of our industrial designer, Hayley Wood, and project director Neil Roodyn collecting the award earlier this week at the design awards event.

If you would like to find out more about the nsquared digitable55 or other interactive digital tables please get in touch.

It's Finals Time...

It's happened! As of today we're officially into the finals for the 2014 Sydney Design Awards. Needless to say, we're looking forward to finding out whether we've been judged good enough to go one better and take the prize. For now though, we're enjoying the right to flash our "Finalist" graphics around.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Sydney Design Awards

As many of you will know, we've recently launched the nsquared digitable55.
We are excited to be working with a number of customers already but the bigger news for today is that the digitable55 has been officially shortlisted for the 2014 Sydney Design Awards!

You can view the entry (and vote) for the nsquared digitable55 here .

How it all works.

Once our entry was accepted it was open for rating along with the other entries. They will be rated
by the design100 judging panel, respected industry members and the marketplace. Once all ratings are in, the scores will be averaged across the three respective ratings to ensure that the Awards showcase the best entry as determined by all three panels.
Rating closes on 17 August, 2014 and we understand that the top five rated entries in each category will be named finalists. We're hoping to be on the podium with other winners at the Awards Presentation on 20 August 2014. Time will tell...

Connected. Beautiful. Powerful.

We’ve just finalised our latest fantastic project and we’re very proud to announce the new nsquared digitable55. It’s connected. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful. And, it's clever.

When we sat down to design our latest digitable we wanted a great looking piece of furniture with digital capacities that were second to none in the space of tabletop computing. We believe we’ve achieved both of those goals and judging by the reception it’s getting, there are a plenty of people who agree with us.

One of the first deployments was last month at The Porter in Sydney. The Porter is a highly activated executive co-working environment that’s full of beautiful, high quality furniture and the most exciting technology for business. The nsquared digitable55 fits right into The Porter’s gracious spaces where it’s being used for sales pitches, business meetings, collaborative planning, and creating better solutions.

  

The flush tabletop boasts a massively multi-touch 55-inch embedded projected capacitive LED touch screen panel that’s able to respond to at least 200 simultaneous touches in real time.

Powered by the latest Intel i7 chip, a high end dedicated graphics card, and Windows 8.1 kernel, the nsquared digitable55 has been designed so that it can be easily upgraded as and when technology improves. It was really important to us that we create a piece to stand the test of time in terms of aesthetics and functionality. We didn’t want to add to the growing worldwide refuse problem that is being fed by an increasing throwaway culture. The nsquared digitable is anything but throw away.

Its classic, timeless design provides a workspace that’s big enough to comfortably stand or sit at. People around the table can view and annotate digital architectural plans; search online with multiple browsers; brainstorm and capture new ideas; or work with multiple virtual documents. Different files can be open on the table at the same time and viewable from any position. It responds to touch and stylus input, and connects wirelessly and almost seamlessly to your personal devices as well as cloud storage services such as Dropbox and OneDrive. *

To find out more you can visit us on the web and call us on +61 9262 3386

*These features are dependent on internet connection and the installed software

nsquared rooms makes booking meeting spaces easy.

Did you know........ 
..........that nsquared rooms is great for finding available spaces for ad hoc meetings?

Being part of a large organisation can be a great thing. In a big company there is always plenty going on and lots of people with whom to collaborate and learn. It is often hard to find available meeting rooms at short notice. The room booking systems can be overly complicated and support personnel won't have time to make the booking for you that quickly. So you then end up in a noisy café, which is not a good scenario for a confidential chat. What if you could search for, and book a room, as soon as you knew you needed it?
With nsquared rooms you can do just that.

You can find out quickly what rooms are available within your timeframes. Better than that, you can book any of the available rooms all by yourself. It’s all connected to Microsoft Exchange so the information is updated immediately, which means interruption-free meetings.

We’ve seen it used in building foyers, at floor entrances by the elevators, and dotted around university campuses and business estates where they’re being used to great effect. Take a look here to find out more about nsquared rooms.

Is your software up to date?

Did you know...

... that nsquared software is constantly being updated and improved? 

At nsquared we have have one ambitious, straightforward goal; to get people talking and collaborating together again to move the world forward. 

So that we can achieve our goal, we're constantly reviewing our software. We're considering the feedback that we receive from our customers while we pay close attention to how our software is used, and how it could be used. This allows us to plan how to improve the software you use, and then go about making it better. We want to make it so that you can use it with more speed, more fluidity, and more ease. This will allow people to reconnect. It will enable conversations to flow and be inspired. It will enable creativity and collaboration even more so than it does now.

Updated software keeps the conversations flowing.

We've just run another set of updates for our digital table and Windows 8 software; our customers will shortly be receiving notifications and updated download links.

To find out more about nsquared's multi-user collaborative software download a catalogue, give us a call or email us.

Celebrate Australia Day with nsquared

While nsquared is a global company we are proud to have our development team in Australia. January 26th is Australia Day and we have created some fun educational content packs to help you get in the spirit and celebrate Australia day with us on your touch screens and digital tables.

Celebrate Australia Day

With nsquared makewords you can learn to spell Australian animals, places and artefacts.
Try to collect the correct number of Australian icons in nsquared herding.
Compete with your friends to match up all the Australian objects in nsquared snap.
Try to put together the nsquared Australia puzzle in nsquared jigsaw.

Happy Australia Day

If you are in Australia these packs give you the perfect excuse to get out of the sun for a few hours in the heat of the day and keep celebrating.
If you are in colder climes, then wrap up warm and learn more about Australia with your friends around the screen.

Find out more and download our free Windows 8 education apps here.

How to power up your presentations with the humble USB stick.

that you can load content from a USB stick into nsquared presenter, nsquared thoughts, nsquared documents and nsquared attractor!

USB sticks are common tools for all of us. We use them as a quick way of storing and accessing content that needs to be available when we’re on the move between our desks, and homes, and our meetings. 

With nsquared software, you can use your USB drive to easily and quickly bring fresh new content and ideas to the table.

Places and situations we’ve seen this surprisingly powerful functionality being used are:

Reception areas, Waiting rooms and Sales spaces. Quickly refresh or update messaging by connecting a pre-loaded USB drive to nsquared attractor for instant, fresh results.

Project meeting spaces where attendees bring individually created content to the table for presentation and discussion. Concepts are quickly crystallised when USB content can be accessed  and shared on demand.

Real Estate sales presentations in which the Agent quickly wants to show clients some fresh and exclusive new options that might not available in the organisation’s file system. Personal or proprietary content can be displayed almost instantly when a USB drive is connected.

University group project meetings in which all team members bring their contributions to the table to share and discuss their work. Several USB drives can be plugged in simultaneously.

Product comparison discussions where fresh up to date content can be displayed on the table to make web site development decisions easier because they’re based on relatively concrete visuals from a USB drive, rather than abstract verbal discussion.

We are sure there are many more situations in which being able to load USB content is really useful and we’d like to hear about them from you. 

Drop us a line at info@nsquaredsolutions.com, or post your comments below :-)

Your digital tables are safe when using nsquared software

nsquared software innately prevents the introduction of malware to your digital table whether it’s a Samsung SUR40, Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC. 

How does it work to prevent members, guests or students from making things crazy, I hear you ask?

It’s simple. nsquared software doesn’t display pop ups, or files that are irrelevant to the contextual case for which it’s designed.  Files that are relevant (such as images, videos, PDFs and MS Office files) are displayed as rendered images of those files, not live files, and any links are inactivated. This means that there isn’t an opportunity to click on malware executable files disguised as harmless links in Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF files.

nsquared maps and nsquared web, both of which display content directly from the world wide web, block pop-ups. This means that in User mode, there is no way for any of your members or guests to activate malware (or any other software) installations. 

Even if a USB stick containing malware files is introduced, the only files that will be recognized and rendered are PDFs, image and video files, and MS Office files. The software isn’t designed to seek or display other files (such as .exe files) so even if malware files are present, they won’t be recognized or rendered by the software.

When using nsquared software the security of your digital table and network is honoured by design. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us 

nsquared presenter for iPhone

As a seasonal gift from nsquared we are happy to offer you the iPhone version of nsquared presenter for free.
With nsquared presenter for iPhone you can send images and movies directly to your digital tables, touch screens and presentation screens that are running nsquared presenter.

iPhone 5s running nsquared presenter

Download nsquared presenter for iPhone from here.

Tricks & Treats - New Halloween Theme

New Halloween Theme!

For the month of October we have jumped straight into the Halloween spirit. With All Hallow's Eve just around the corner, our team have unleashed a new set of 17 new Halloween themed assets guaranteed to thrill and excite. 

“These spooky words will scare your socks off! Celebrate this Halloween by learning to spell all the beasts and ghouls you might see in the night. Trick or Treat!” - how could you resist? 

You can now download these in-app Halloween content packs from three of our FREE Windows 8 education applications,

-   nsquared herding

-   nsquared makewords

-   nsquared snap

nsquared herding

A multi-user game that teaches object recognition and basic counting. The game offers both competitive and collaborative opportunities. Players win points for collecting the correct number of required objects.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/nsquared-herding/93f9f3cf-6b52-4afb-ba7e-3ea12dd352f7

nsquared makewords

This structured educational game will help students learn object recognition and differentiation, and improve their recall and spelling.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/nsquared-makewords/e182deac-77d6-4679-91a9-71ebfea82515

nsquared snap

This turn-taking memory game requires students to match overturned cards. Only two cards may be turned over at any one time in attempt to find a matching pair.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/611c6c14-d7cd-45ec-a90c-ba87236468a6

Join the spooky spirit today and download these fun content packs!

Taking the magic of touch technology to Tamworth

Yesterday nsquared traveled with our partners at Samsung and Worlds Best Technology Distributors to demonstrate the power of touch technology to Tamworth, New South Wales.

The event was hosted at the Tamworth TAFE and attended by a number of key decision makers, all of whom were interested in bringing leading edge technology to their students.

It was great to see the educators literally get their hands on the technology, a Samsung SUR40.

One of the main attractors was the nsquared presenter application. nsquared presenter allows you to collaboratively create and deliver presentations using all the devices you find in a meeting room – tablets, mobile phones, overhead projectors and multi-touch tables. Groups of people are able to come together to build a presentation “timeline” of content including slides, spreadsheets, documents, images and videos from different  files. The staff felt this application had the most potential for their educational environment as it has the ability for students collectively interact with their digital course material over a familiar table setting.

Some of the other crowd favorites included:

- nsquared circuits

- nsquared paint

- nsquared chemistry 

    We are very excited to be working with Team Tamworth and look forward to helping them engage their students through multi-touch technology!

Update: nsquared makewords on Windows 8. Perfect for the Surface Pro!

We have been working hard here in the nsquared studio to update our FREE educational app on the Windows 8 store - nsquared makewords. 

This educational game is aimed to help students (aged 3+) with object recognition, differentiation and to improve their recall and spelling. nsquared makewords has the ability to switch between a range of content packs, therefore allowing you to change and download new content as it is released.

Features 

- Multi Touch, Multi User (for up to 4 people)

- Drag tiles to spell different animals, objects, flags and more

- Competitive and co-operative learning against the clock

The update features the following:

- Fun music and sound effects

- Better, easier to use layout

- Great visual feedback for incorrect letters and words!

- Reshuffle the letters to make it easier to find the ones you're looking for 

- Use the bottom app bar to choose between vertical and table mode play

- Word order in each pack has been randomized for more replay-ability

- Completely revised and updated menu system

Please try nsquared makewords today for FREE - http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-au/app/nsquared-makewords/e182deac-77d6-4679-91a9-71ebfea82515  

An introduction to Digital Tables

Enhance the meeting room
conversation with a
digital table

A digital table defines an obvious meeting place, offers a true multi-user experience and enhances collaborative engagement. If you’ve started to think about purchasing a digital table then this article will help you decide what type of hardware and software you will need.

Tabletop computing and digital tables are becoming integrated into business life and work places at an increasing pace. The integration of these devices into business, education and sales spaces is largely in recognition of the increased value of collaborative activities over directed activities.

Where we’ve been using interactive whiteboards and relying on a single person to talk us through a PowerPoint presentation, we’re now engaging in higher levels of discussion for information sharing and problem solving. The technology needs to support and enhance this shift in behavior. While interactive whiteboards offer opportunities for some interaction (by one person who is often facing away from the audience) they cannot replace the humble table as a meeting place and they do not encourage face-to-face communication. 

Digital tables are obvious meeting spaces. The form factor of a table is perfect for face-to-face conversations and true multi-user experiences. The digital tabletop further supports and enhances conversations and collaboration by providing quick access to resources. Business, education and sales spaces consistently report increased engagement and long-term connection of participants interacting with digital tables, with corresponding increases in sales revenue and educational success.

Multi-user devices are designed to bring people together and help them to engage and connect at much deeper levels than they would normally. When single user devices are present, they often detract from collaborative experiences, providing distractions from the core conversation and in turn reducing the value of the conversation. Think about the differences in interactions between sitting around a dinner table and standing in front of a digital sign.

A digital table at an auto show

Microsoft released the first commercially available multi-user product, named “Microsoft Surface”, in 2008. 

Five years later Microsoft Surface’s successor, the Samsung SUR40, still provides a premium experience, though in a significantly sleeker form factor than its forebear. Following the lead of Microsoft and Samsung, various other hardware providers have also created digital tabletops. Some of them utilise vision systems and others continue with time-honoured and proven touch detection methods. Each has its benefits and drawbacks. These will be discussed briefly in the following passages.

While there is magic in the hardware, it is the software interface that will determine how the devices can be used and whether or not your space is set up for productive, engaging collaboration and discussion. The design of the software interface will determine the level of engagement and productivity that can be gained from your investment and whether or not your space is set up for true multi-user experiences. 

Multi Touch or Multi-User?

As a first step, decide what you need to achieve. Do you want to create:

1. a space that enables people to browse digital content and discover information; or
2. a space that enables several people to interact with each other and digital content seamlessly and simultaneously?

If you’re looking to achieve the latter, you’re looking to create a multi user space.

Digital multi-user spaces enable discussion and collaboration around digital content. To ensure that everyone around the table has equal access to what’s on the screen, you’ll require a table form factor with massive multi-touch capabilities, and a 360-degree software interface. 

How many touch points are required?

For premium experiences, we recommend that you allow for five to 10 touches per person that you plan to have around the table. That said, the decision will be highly budget dependent and for groups of two to ten people, the device and software both need to be capable of responding to a minimum of three simultaneous touches per person. This is especially true for smaller groups of two to four people. In a few cases, you might be able to get away with catering for fewer touches per person. This is generally due to the fact that as groups of adults get larger in number, less people in the group are likely to interact with the device simultaneously. Allow for three simultaneous screen touches per person at a minimum. 

Benefits of multi-user screen spaces and digital tabletops

A multi-user experience is one in which several people will be working on the same screen at the same time. A great multi-user experience can be created with a canvas where all users can face each other to directly interact while still sharing, creating and annotating digital content. Placing interactive screens horizontally, to act as the table around which the users can gather and engage, can create this digital canvas. 

In a sales meeting a digital table can help focus
people's attention on the content

The horizontal screen becomes a shared space for all the users to work together and focus on the task at hand. 

Compare this with many meeting room experiences where the participants arrive with personal devices (laptops, tablets, phones) and the activity on each device is hidden from the other people. This often leads to more distractions during the meeting as people start answering emails, chatting on IM or even other personal tasks rather than being focused on the meeting.

By keeping the people focused on the content, meetings around a digital table should be faster and more focused than those using an interactive whiteboard as the focus for the meeting.

The benefit of a table hosting the content, as opposed to a vertical screen, is that people are face to face and no one has their back to the rest of the team at any time. Vertical screens are often used for presentations, which are an exercise in pushing information out rather than creating a discussion involving everyone at the table. Horizontally mounted screens promote information sharing and problem solving better than vertically mounted screens. 

Screen Size

We consider 30” to be the minimum size required for a good experience by more than two users. Bigger is not necessarily better, once a horizontal screen gets past around 60” some areas on the screen will become hard to access by everyone sitting around the screen. Once a screen is bigger than 100” then the software needs to be designed with the consideration there will likely be an area in the center of the screen that will be hard for anyone to reach even if they’re standing. For digital tables, the most functional screen sizes are between 30 and 65 inches.

Screen orientation

For a true multi-user experience, the screen will need to be mounted horizontally like a table. This allows people to sit or stand around the device and meet as they always have, face to face around a table, and without extraneous distractions.

Placing the screen horizontally changes the way people can engage with the content.

Remember that as soon as there is any vertical component in the mounting (such as in the case of a lectern), it’s difficult to see the content on the screen from all angles and sides. Make sure that your multi-user space offers a horizontally mounted screen for multi-user engagement.

Do you want object recognition capabilities?

Do you want internal users to have quick, direct access to their own content?

Do you want to be able to place content or objects onto the table and invoke different behaviours? Do you want to be able to put your phone on the table and access specified content? If you want any of those features, you’ll need object recognition capabilities that only a vision system with camera-like functionality will provide.

Lighting

If the space has a lot of natural sunlight, or is flooded with halogen or other incandescent lighting, and the hardware you’re considering operates with an infrared vision system (such as the Samsung SUR40), you’re going to have to make some choices. 

These will most likely involve considering removing or reducing the infrared light sources by replacing halogen or other incandescent lighting with LED or CFC lighting; and (or also) the installation of physical screens like walls, or specialized infrared filtering film (3M’s PR 40 and PR 70 window films are known to block infrared sufficiently in several cases). Work with your supplier to determine what the best way forward is for you.

Software

The most important piece to the puzzle is the software. Just as the hardware needs to promote face-to-face interaction, so does the software. Whether the software is custom built or an off the shelf solution, it should always enable multiple people to interact simultaneously, and at least as they would if the table wasn’t a digital one.

Good multi-user experiences are those in which each person around the table can access the interface equally and easily no matter where they are located around the table. Everyone should be able to consider the content the right way up. No one should have to look at anything upside down. The software should automatically adjust items to the orientation of each individual viewing it.

In addition, those same people need to be able to rely on the device to respond without lag to each and every touch made. People-to people and people to digital content interactions should be intuitive, smooth, and relatively effortless.

Custom Build or Off the Shelf (OTS) Software?

The budget you have available will always be a factor for consideration. Generally speaking, off the shelf software will always be financially less taxing than having custom software built for your organization. Procurement times should also be far less for off the shelf solutions than for custom builds. As time goes on and the market for digital tables increases, it stands to reason that there will be more off the shelf solutions available.

Digital Table at Australian Museum in Sydney

There will always be cases where custom builds are required. That said, unless you already have significant experience using tabletop computers in day-to-day business activities, it’s always best to start with off the shelf offerings that provide close to what you think you need. Check the features. Many applications provide administrator tools that allow you to customize certain aspects of the application for your preferences or brand. This way you can spend time assessing whether you really need all of the features on your wish list, and whether the custom build you’d envisioned will be justified in terms of return on your investment (ROI). Good off the shelf software may be all you need and at the very least will allow you to determine your absolute requirements at significantly lower costs and delivery time frames than those associated with custom builds.

Sharing content with personal devices

People will often arrive to a meeting with content on their personal devices that they have gathered or created. A good tabletop experience will enable those people to easily transfer that content onto the digital table for the conversation. It should be a single hit transfer, where the materials being shared can be placed on the table without the need to constantly refer back to the personal device. Once the content is on the table, it is best for the personal device to be put away. Private personal devices are still an important part of the digital world and digital tables should interact with those devices in a way that promotes the content being shared when suitable. Ensure the software enables quick and easy transfer of content between personal and corporate devices where relevant use cases exist. 

Conclusion

Every situation and scenario is different, but wherever you are creating indoor spaces for people to gather in order to collaborate you can expect digital tables to enhance that experience. In the coming years you will start to see more and more digital tables emerge in meeting rooms, libraries, schools, universities and even as peoples’ work desks and in their homes.

Depending on the environment and number of people involved, different hardware options need to be considered. The software should always account for people approaching the table from any side and work seamlessly for all the participants around the table.

For More Information

If you have any more questions regarding about digital tables or which solution is right for you, contact us at nsquared:

Web: http://www.nsquaredsolutions.com 
Email: info@nsquaredsolutions.com 

AU Phone: +61 2 9262 3386 
USA Phone: +1 206 236 0354