How Microsoft had a hand in inventing Google's glucose-sensing smart contact lens

Google X may have announced its smart contact lens project, but Microsoft Research says it worked on it first.

Do you recall how Microsoft claimed it invented, or invisibly runs, practically everything? Along those lines, Microsoft Research is claiming partial credit for the smart contact lens project that Google unveiled last week.Microsoft's hand in inventing Google's glucose-sensing contact lens

Google announced that it was testing smart contact lens that has "chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair."

We're now testing a smart contact lens that's built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. We're testing prototypes that can generate a reading once per second. We're also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we're exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds. It's still early days for this technology, but we've completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype. We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease.

After Google's announcement, Desney Tan, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, was bombarded with questions about his "long-time friends and colleagues Babak Parviz and Brian Otis who declared "their intent to develop a glucose-sensing contact lens." Tan's "inbox and voicemail are stuffed with calls for comments and queries about the relationship of this project to the one Microsoft Research worked on with Babak and Brian a few years ago."

So Tan wrote:
As background, my team and I here at Microsoft Research had the pleasure of supporting and working with Babak and Brian and a number of other collaborators very early in this project. Babak and Brian were still full-time faculty at the University of Washington. In our collaboration, we demonstrated the feasibility not only of embedding displays in the contact lenses, but more importantly, of glucose sensing as well. As one would imagine, we tackled numerous hard problems around miniaturization, wireless power, wireless communications and biocompatibility.

What's occurred here is a great example of why we and others must continue to invest in basic research, pushing the boundaries of science and technology in an effort to improve the lives of as many people as possible. Most of the time here at Microsoft, we do this in partnership with our business group colleagues, who can take direct advantage of our work and deliver it directly to our customers. But there are other instances where we do this through partners, and sometimes even through competitors. Our open research and deeply collaborative model allows us to work with the best academic and industrial researchers around the world, and we will continue to do so as we certainly believe in the philosophy that "we" is smarter than "me." This open approach to working with and through others has consistently delivered outsized rewards for Microsoft and for the world at large.

I'm not faulting Tan, more power to him, just pointing out that Microsoft apparently had a hand in Google's glucose-sensing contact lens. After all, Microsoft has taken credit for inventing, or its software invisibly running, almost everything. To be fair, Microsoft Research has over 1,100 researchers who work on everything from privacy and security to healthcare.

In fact, Microsoft Research recently adopted an Open Access policy for all research publications.

Microsoft Research is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible because we recognize the benefits that accrue to scholarly enterprises from such wide dissemination, including more thorough review, consideration and critique, and general increase in scientific, scholarly and critical knowledge.

Like Microsoft, Google has a lot of power and money. However, unlike Microsoft Research, most of the "moonshot" research that goes on inside Google X, "Google's secret lab," is hush-hush . . . at least until the company decides to shock the world with its projects like Google Glass and the Google driverless car.

In the end, if you have diabetes and someone invents something to help you out, then you might not care whether it is Microsoft or Google in your eye.

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Ubuntu 13.10 takes aim at Microsoft, Apple, Google

Canonical is making a serious run at the cloud, client, server and smartphone markets

Ubuntu is moving into the rarified class of operating systems that cover x86/x64 clients and servers, ARM-based tablets/smartphones, and commodity cloud instances. Meaning that it's taking on everybody from Microsoft to Red Hat to Apple and Google.

On the cloud front, Canonical’s announced compatibility with OpenStack APIs for both internal, Ubuntu-hosted or external clouds speaks to Canonical's attempts to make Ubuntu instances a default choice. (Watch a slideshow version of this story.)

On the client side, Ubuntu’s Unity GUI starts to go places where Ubuntu-derivative/associated distros like Linux Mint cannot: onto smartphones and tablets. It took pains for us to obtain a smartphone that would run Ubuntu 13.10, but the Nexus 4 we used is essentially identical in functionality to installations we put on notebooks and virtual machines.

The server version is targeting enterprise scale-out as well as scale-up implementations. Ubuntu server editions are still Debian with Canonical clothing, but thanks to attention paid to hypervisor compatibility and leadership in both the OpenStack compatibility and Amazon Web Services EC2 worlds, 13.10 Server wants to rock rapid rollout and play everywhere, with every hypervisor. That includes stacking application instances inside of itself for what Canonical calls “compactness”.

+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Ubuntu 13.10: The good, the bad and the ugly +

It works, and there are aids to rolling out 13.10. But the stability of OpenStack will be a target for criticism as various vendors tilt and mangle OpenStack towards their own pursuits and goals.

Ubuntu 13.10 client

Dubbed Saucy Salamander, the 13.10 client has changed very little from the previous version, although the GUI plumbing underneath is in transition. This may be the last version of Unity that uses X.org underpinnings, as Canonical transitions to the windowing/GUI system Mir and its X.org-Mir translator.

The support life for this OS is only nine months and the next version, 14.04, will be a five-year supported version that might contain the debut of XMir and Mir -- which would be somewhat radical for Canonical in an Long Term Support release.

The Ubuntu Dash dashboard has been upgraded to allow opt-out searches through the Ubuntu One cloud storage service. Queries sent when opted-in are sent to Ubuntu One, and Canonical serves as a proxy information broker among the current 50-plus third-party providers, listed here, sending the results back to the user. Call it: Answers-As-A-Service, or AaaS.

On one hand, this allows searches across numerous providers, and hopefully, the Canonical parsing engines are smart enough to pick suitable answer-providers from among the third-party supporters. This also means that as Canonical ostensibly anonymizes user information and privacy policy prevents Big Data ad engines from coming into play. This will please privacy advocates.

The other hand is that Canonical does store the query and account information associated with the search transactions by Ubuntu One accounts. This information is stored and can be the subject of a subpoena or other order, hence possibly revealing user/query information -- to the chagrin of privacy policies and mandates.

The Dash update, however, is deceptively handy. Yes, Amazon is featured prominently in searches for products. A sampling of various queries was enlightening, and OCD query searchers will become rapidly addicted to the amount and variety of results, when using the uprated Dash. It's perhaps the key secret sauce that makes this edition useful.

Inside this version are updates of the Linux kernel (3.11), Firefox (24), and when we tried to update SAMBA 4.04, it cratered the instance, even though a prior version was installed. The second time was a charm.

Ubuntu Server 13.10

Through installation, we saw no real server changes on the surface. We could choose to install Open SSH, DNS, LAMP, Mail, Print, SAMBA, Tomcat, and/or virtual machine hosts or add a Postgre database. Or our own manual package selection from the installation menu. We tried various combinations in several instances.

Oddly, Canonical still packages MySQL as its default LAMP database, where many in the industry have gone to MariaSQL, a fork of MySQL. Perhaps it's been retained for compatibility sake -- and the fact that Oracle can be hired to make it work.

Part of the reason we like Ubuntu Server 13.10 is the ability to use Juju to spawn app instances into Linux Containers/LXC. Our problem with this is that LXC isn't due to go to production (a 1.0 version) until February of 2014. If you're adventurous, and we were, it's possible to use a Juju charm to deploy applications into containers that are similar to Oracle/Sun's original idea of a container -- with a few additions, such as a bridge with network address translation and unique IP addresses (only IPv4 for now), and other walled-instances that remind us of how SELinux and other neo-virtualization systems can place significant walls around app instances within servers.

The LXC components start with a shared bridge, and several other adaptations that define kernel name space, and kernel addressing -- but not those found in full bare-metal hypervisors, rather, the kind championed by Parallels in their Virtuozzo kernel-sharing scheme. Instances aren't necessarily unique, and they're not as simple as chroot, which redefines user space for partitioning an application.

Prior to 13.10, Juju's behavior was to dutifully launch applications into their own instance, which was fast, but wasn't very efficient, and made a lot of revenue for cloud providers, as they often charge by the instance. It's possible, using the pre-production LXC method, to launch apps into their own containers, and provision the containers on the fly with comparatively simple commands. But this is alpha code, and is still experimental in nature, rather than more mature products whose rules and qualities are comparatively well known.
Ubuntu

The LXC setup contains templates that can be used, although some are experimental. We chose to boot a simple application (a WordStar-like text editor) into an AppArmor shell. SELinux barriers and constructs are also supported. We set up an LXC bridge, provisioned it, then stuffed the application inside the container. It takes about 10 lines of code from initial start until the app is deployed, all of which can be built into a script with arguments to provision many containers simultaneously, much as the popular Puppet instance controller product provisions OS instances through a communications bus. Everything can be setup to boot at once, by dependency choice, and/or at restart time. File system mounting is easily supported, and one needs to be careful that file locks don't thwart multiple app instance access.

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IIS 6.0 does not serve aspx pages out of the box

IIS 6.0 does not serve aspx pages out of the box

I have used ASP.NET for quite some time. I have probably always been lucky that the infrastructure or deployment person always enabled aspx on IIS for me. I use a Windows XP with IIS 5 sometimes or Vista with IIS 7. They do serve aspx pages by default, on XP once the .NET framework is downloaded and installed, there is nothing else to tweak.

On Friday afternoon, I had to deploy to an IIS 6 box on windows 2003, to my surprise, it didn’t serve any of the aspx pages. Even a small Hello World project on an simple label. I missed the happy hour with my colleagues and went home completely puzzle. Why? ASP.NET was already available when Windows 2003 saw the light. To my surprise there was nothing on the event log.

The answer came a few hours later and after few Google queries:

IIS 6.0: ASP.NET Is Not Automatically Installed on Windows Server 2003
1. Open IIS Manager, expand the master server node (that is, the Servername node), and then select the Web service extensions node.
2. In the right pane of IIS Manager, right-click the extension that you want to enable. In this example, this is Active Server Pages.
3. Click to select the Allow check box.

Add a New Web Service Extension to IIS 6.0
To permit IIS to serve content that requires a specific ISAPI or CGI extension that is not already listed in the Web service extensions list, follow these steps:
1.Open IIS Manager, expand the master server node, and then select the Web service extensions node.
2.In the right pane of the IIS Manager, click Add a new Web service extension under Tasks.
3.In the Extension name box, type a friendly name for the extension that you want to add (for example, FrontPage Server Extensions).
4.In the Required files box, click Add, and then select the path and the name of the file that will handle requests for the specific extension. After you select the path and the file name, click OK.
5. If the extension must be enabled immediately, click to select the Set extension status to allowed check box.
6. Click OK to save your changes.

Hopefully Mono will run seamless on Apache one of these days…

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7 things on Microsoft's 2014 to-do list

7 things on Microsoft's 2014 to-do list
Microsoft needs to make Nokia work, get Office on iOS, and find Ballmer's successor in 2014

2013 was a busy year for Microsoft, which announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will leave the company after 33 years, upgraded its controversial Windows 8 platform, doubled down on its Surface tablets, reveled in the success of Office 365, and successfully tweaked Windows Server. But there’s more to do in 2014.

Here’s a look at seven things Microsoft should put on its to-do list for 2014.

No. 1: Make Nokia work

Microsoft could have just strengthened its partnership with Nokia, perhaps investing heavily in the company to become a major shareholder with sway over what Nokia does. Instead it ponied up $7.2 billion to own it. In buying the company Microsoft gains total control over its hardware products – phones primarily but also tablets.

The Nokia deal falls in line with Microsoft’s aim to be a products and services company. It did a pretty good job with its Surface hardware, even when it had virtually no tablet-manufacturing experience. Nokia is already credited with making good phones, but they’re saddled with the Windows Phone operating system, which has yet to capture the imagination of buyers like Android phones and the iPhone have.

+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD A complete list of Outlook 2014 stories +

However, measuring the success of the Nokia deal isn’t about whether its hardware can unseat these more popular devices. Worldwide there are vast markets for low-end phones in markets where cell service is still taking hold and where Windows Phone can make headway, says IDC analyst Ramon Llamas.

Nokia makes the Asha family of low-end feature and smartphones -- three of which the company claims are the top three selling phones of their kind in India, the Middle East and Africa, which are considered undeveloped markets that hold vast potential for new sales. Nokia announced three new Asha smartphones this fall to sell in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East (two of them in Latin America as well) for between $69 and $99.

Windows Phone is doing well enough that it might finish the year as the No.3 phone operating system - albeit at a great distance behind Android and iOS - and beat out Blackberry, says Llamas. In the last quarter Apple sold about 34 million iPhones versus about 7 million Windows Phones, he says. “They’re not falling by the wayside, I have to give them credit,” he says.

Owning Nokia will enable faster decision making and turnaround times on innovations, he says, potentially making the phones more competitive. If Microsoft can differentiate Windows Phone from high-end competitors, it could make advances in the developed markets of North America, Japan and Europe. “Android and Apple are entrenched but not 100% locked down forevermore among users,” Llamas says.

Nokia tablets could also be a boon. Microsoft’s Surface RT tablets sold well at drastically reduced prices as the company tried to unload inventory in preparation for selling its successor, Surface 2. That’s a device without cellular connectivity. Nokia already sells a tablet based on the Windows RT operating system plus 4G wireless for $399 through a service-plus-hardware deal with AT&T. It’s also announced Lumia 2520, a Windows RT tablet with LTE for $499.

Nokia’s Lumia 1520 and lower priced 1320 phablets – smartphones with screens between five and seven inches – give Microsoft an immediate entry into the relatively new phablet market that last quarter accounted for 22% of all smartphone sales, according to IDC.

No. 2: De-Ballmer the company

With Steve Ballmer on his way out as CEO, Microsoft needs to leave him behind. The new boss must quickly state the company’s goals and set up an internal structure that can convincingly support those goals.

That’s important not only for achieving the goals, but also for convincing investors of the company’s ability to execute. Microsoft’s stock price has jumped up and down over the past month on rumors about who will be the next CEO and when that person will be announced.

Despite the company’s continued enormous profits during Ballmer’s tenure as CEO -- $5.2 billion last quarter, up 17% from the same quarter last year – critics have been calling for his replacement for years, and his successor must address some of the reasons they’ve been so vocal.

Clearly Ballmer did a lot of things right, but his missteps hurt critics’ perception of him. Ultimately a lot of complaints had to do with speed.

"Hey, dude, let's get on with it," Microsoft board member John Thompson told Ballmer earlier this year, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. "We're in suspended animation."

The conversation was about Microsoft taking measures to catch up to Apple’s and Google’s consumer products, but it was emblematic of some other notable snafus during Ballmer’s 13-year tenure as CEO. Microsoft participates and is expected to lead in markets ranging from enterprise software and services, to consumer software and services, to games, to tablets, to phones, to search. Its competitors are well heeled giants focused on fewer products on which they bring to bear enormous amounts of cash and expertise.

But under Ballmer, Microsoft missed the main wave of the mobile revolution in both tablets and phones, offering products in both areas that just didn’t capture customers and have gone through iteration after iteration trying to catch up. And as Ballmer himself says, his biggest failure under his leadership was Windows Vista, which he says in a Fortune article took too long – eight years – to get right with the shipment of Windows 7.

Ballmer took steps to address this lack of agility earlier this year with a corporate reorganization and management overhaul that has been playing out over the intervening months. Those changes have to be endorsed and taken on by his replacement or rejected and reworked if the company hopes to move more quickly in such a variety of realms.

The new boss also needs to make sure that when products do launch, that they’re ready. Under Ballmer, Windows 8 was an ambitious change from Windows 7 that would have taken some getting used to no matter what because of intentional differences from its popular predecessor. But only 10 months later with the release of Windows 8.1 did Microsoft address problems that should have been resolved at launch.

Microsoft entered the computer hardware market with its laptop/tablet Surface line but wound up writing down $900 million in Surface RT losses, something the company can afford financially but that hurt its reputation in a market it wants to dominate. Its Surface RT (now Surface 2) looks like an attempt to better Apple’s iPad by adding Microsoft Office to a tablet. It’s solid hardware but is doing poorly because of price, and a dearth of apps that customers actually want.

These are part of Ballmer’s legacy, and the stigma should leave when he does. His replacement needs to make clear that nothing Ballmer left behind is sacred.

No. 3: Build on the success of Office 365

Microsoft successfully bet that customers would rather buy Office as a service that is available from multiple machines – including phones - and is constantly updated than to buy it as software they have to install and upgrade as they go along. It comes along with cloud storage, too.

Office 365 scored 1 million users back in May. That doubled by the end of October, a strong start and an important part of transitioning users from software buys to continuing services. At $100 per year for Office 365 Home Premium, that’s already a significant revenue stream that seems to be soaring. It helps validate the company’s definition of itself as a services and devices operation.

No. 4: Make Office available for iOS

Businesses are dealing with Apple devices as part of their bring-your-own-device programs, and it’s time Microsoft acknowledged it.

Since corporate customers are not limiting their employees to using Windows-only devices, Microsoft should not freeze out those other devices from using their popular productivity suite. Popular isn’t not a guaranteed status, and there are competitive alternatives -- such as Google Apps -- that Microsoft should not ignore. It’s better to sell a product to Apple customers than it is to ignore them and drive them to buying someone else’s product.

No. 5: Chase down Amazon Web Services with enhancements to Azure

Microsoft has been chipping away at Amazon Web Services, racking up impressive numbers of new customers and producing a constant beat of new features for its own cloud service. This includes multi-factor authentication for services, adding big-data analytics based on Hadoop, auto-backup to Azure, and creating a public cloud for government (planned).

No. 6: Get more Windows 8 apps

The Windows Store boasts more than 135,000 applications, but no single one of them nor even a collection of them is compelling enough to cause customers so choose Windows 8 in order to use the apps.

Microsoft needs such apps and needs them soon. Think the next Angry Birds.

Without an A-list of apps, customers will seek other platforms that have what they want without giving Window 8 much consideration despite its other merits.

The company has been luring apps and game developers for more than a year to create apps and games for Windows 8, offering deals on tools and attractive splits of revenue when their products are sold through the Windows Store. It’s even given away Windows 8 laptops and tablets to attendees at its developer conference.

It has also partnered with third parties for Windows 8 versions of popular games. One example is Disney, which in some cases has released Windows 8 versions of its games before releasing them for Android -- a step toward making Windows 8 relevant.

Its efforts seem to be working. In August, user-interface developer Infragistics came up with the 100 must-have apps that are available for iOS and found that just 54 of them were available for Windows 8. The 100 were a smattering of social-site apps such as Google+, services such as HBO GO and PayPal, and resource sites like IMDB. Now, though, 72 of those apps are available for Windows 8.

Coming up with the next Angry Birds requires inspiration and innovation in a way that can’t be plotted out, but Windows 8 needs that kind of lightning to strike.

Beyond that Microsoft needs compelling business apps to be written for Windows 8, taking advantage of its touch-friendliness. Expanding the usefulness of Windows 8 by making workers more productive when they use it will make it more attractive.

No. 7: Promote Windows 8.1 for business

It may already be too late, but as Windows XP fades into end of support this April, Microsoft needs to do all it can to push those XP diehards into buying Windows 8 machines as a replacement.

Figures indicate that Windows 7 is gaining in popularity while Windows 8 is dipping, according to NetMarketshare statistics.

One remedy for this could be pushing Windows 8 into large businesses, which would not only boost sales but also promote consumer popularity by forcing workers to become familiar with the operating system.

But adopting Windows 8 wholesale into enterprises is a longshot given that the touch aspects that make Windows 8 superior in some cases to Windows 7 aren’t needed to do many corporate jobs. Those that lend themselves to touch, such as mobile workers and sales staff, could transition to Windows 8 while others remain on Windows 7, but that’s a long process. It could result in businesses hanging on to Windows 7 until Microsoft irons out the kinks, much as they did by hanging onto Windows XP, skipping Vista, and ultimately adopting Windows 7.

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