I joined my first Twitter Spaces uh….hangout…chat…thing…space(?) the other night, hosted by Stefan Natter, talking about Roam Research and how powerful a tool it is for unlocking all sorts of potential, and helping focus and creativity. One comment made by George Silverman of MindSkills echoed some thoughts of my own lately, about the sheer volume of information to which we’re exposed on a daily basis, and the mental capacity of our brains to process this.

Microsoft’s Build conference for 2016 took place a couple of weeks ago, and true to form, there were a number of killer announcements and reveals for a number of services, tools, and frameworks, many of which are available today. Not one to ever really post something when it’s actually relevant, here are a few of the things that jumped out at me from the event.

Warning: This post contains spoilers regarding the ending of Halo 4. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been spending some time with a special lady lately. She’s always with me, and has been helping me organise my life. She’s not all work though, and has shown that she knows a joke or two, she’s sassy, and she loves to talk about Halo. I am of course, talking about one of Windows Phone 8.1’s killer features: Cortana.

Just a quick one for now, as I’ve still not got around to finishing up the several posts I currently have in the offing, due to playing about with HDInsight on Windows Azure. I did however, spend a rather frustrating couple of hours at the weekend trying to find a way to re-download Office 2010 for an older PC after upgrading my laptop to Office 2013. I had the absolute brainwave of signing up to Office 365, which would allow me to install the latest suite on each of my PC’s. Only after signing up did I realise that my old desktop, running Windows Vista, didn’t support Office 2013. Luckily, I have a copy of Office 2010 on my account, so all I needed to do was go to my office account and re-download the 2010 installer, right? Right?

UPDATE: Rather strangely, if not downright prescient, mere days after stumbling across the Skype beta app for WP7, Microsoft and Skype have today released the full version of the Skype app for Windows Phone 7.5.  You can use the same Marketplace link below to download the app, which replaces the beta version in the Marketplace.  If you already have the beta installed, it should notify you of an available update, which will patch over with the full release version.

Somehow I completely missed the boat on this one, but I found out today that an official Skype app has finally been released for Windows Phone.  I’ve been waiting for a WP7 Skype app since I first got my HTC Trophy back in November 2010, so I was surprised to see that the app quietly launched as a beta on 25th February this year.  I guess I must have given up checking!  However, when I searched for the app in the WP Marketplace, there was no sign of it (I’m guessing because it’s only a beta).  It also doesn’t seem to appear in the Marketplace via the Zune desktop client.

For those out there who like to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate the Yahoo index and mange their sites, the day you’ve been dreading has arrived.

If you’re a reasonably social media-savvy person, you’ll no doubt have heard of (and perhaps used) Klout, an innovative online service for measuring online influence via social media.  Klout’s unique selling point is their own calculation of influence, the Klout Score.  While it’s not exactly new to the social sphere, having been on the go in some shape or form since 2008, Klout have recently been engaging in a substantial push to increase the scope of their offering by adding many more social networks and features.

A couple of months ago I posted an article titled Vizualize.Me - your CV as an infographic in a single click, regarding an interesting new visualisation service which, using data from your LinkedIn profile can generate an entire, graphical representation of your CV in a single click.  At the time of writing the post, the service was gearing up to launch their private beta, with a public beta soon to follow.  Unfortunately, I didn’t quite make the cut for the private beta but the public beta is now live!  So, I’ve been straight in and created a visualisation of my CV (below) from my LinkedIn profile.