The Cricket World Cup is the third largest sporting event in the world - sitting behind only the Summer Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. It is televised in over 200 countries to a global audience of over 2.2 billion extraordinarily passionate viewers. To put this into context, at the previous tournament in 2011 the semi-final match between India & Pakistan on March 30th 2011 drew a global television audience of 1 billion viewers – a record that still stands across all sporting codes. Tickets sales for this years’ tournament have surpassed 750k and are forecast to exceed 1 million total attendance across New Zealand and Australia before the end of the tournament.

I took my family to the pool match at Eden Park last Saturday between New Zealand and Australia. My father took me to world cup opener at the same ground in 1992 and to this day I remember many of the games from that tournament, something that I want to share with my daughters. Needless to say the game didn’t fail to deliver and I found myself with an elevated heart rate for most of the match!

This year, New Zealand’s BLACKCAPs have a very real chance of winning the entire tournament for the first time – and this possibility has captured the nation’s imagination. Three weeks in New Zealand is currently #1 in the tournament standings with four wins from four matches.

New Zealand Cricket is the driving force behind the game in this country. They are the governing body for professional cricket in New Zealand and are responsible for developing, administering and promoting the game at all levels from grassroots up to the international level.  With the eyes of the world turning to New Zealand, they knew they needed to step up and deliver. Enter NV Interactive and Microsoft Azure.

NV Interactive have been supporting the technology behind New Zealand cricket since 2006 and are a great partner to architect and deliver the next chapter in this journey.

At the core is the blackcaps.co.nz website. Initially launched in 2008, the site now attracts over 200k unique visitors & generates over 3 million page views every month during the New Zealand season. The site also provides ball by ball Live Scoring for all domestic cricket and international matches played by the Blackcaps. This season the website was completely reimagined as a modern, responsive web experience and the underlying publishing system was also re-architected and migrated to the open source .NET based Umbraco Content Management System.

As part of this major project, NV & NZC developed MyBLACKCAPS, a far-reaching & long sighted project to connect with cricket fans & players in New Zealand. Alongside the website, NV & NZC also developed a suite of cross platform mobile apps for iOS, Android and a universal app for both Windows Phone and tablet. Built on the Cordova framework, these cross platform apps share a common codebase and are all strategically aligned around MyBLACKCAPS, providing another channel for membership benefits including push notifications and exclusive content like video highlights from matches.

Core to the success of this programme of work was ensuring that the infrastructure behind the multiple systems was up to the task – and the challenge of scaling exponentially to meet the international demand during the six week long Cricket World Cup.  Should service falter in a period of peak demand major commercial arrangements would be placed at risk. With the recent opening of the Microsoft Azure AU datacentres, the approach was clear.

Whilst having a large international following, the primary audience for New Zealand Cricket’s digital channels are New Zealand based. NZ Cricket were amongst the very first granted access to the new Azure AU datacentres as part of the Australia Geo Managed Private Preview programme and in December 2014, they completed a full migration of all New Zealand Cricket systems to Microsoft Azure, replacing four dedicated servers in their Auckland based datacentre.

Press Articles:

• New Zealand Cricket bolsters website capability
• Cricket NZ readies website for traffic
• Kiwi ingenuity online wins a standing ovation

I took the opportunity when I was in Christchurch to talk to Gus Pickering, Technical Director at NV Interactive about the technical details behind the project:

‘The immediate issue we faced was we felt the existing hosting solution was not going to be ready for the imminent increase in inbound traffic generated by the upcoming tournament being hosted in New Zealand. One thing we knew for sure, we did not have the flexibility to scale any further within the existing platform at short notice, which is crucial for live sporting events with unpredictable and peaky traffic patterns.

As long standing Microsoft Partners, we host a number of systems in Microsoft Azure including a Video Analysis system for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) which has been running since 2011. One factor we had to consider as part of the review was the location of the data centre and therefore connectivity to New Zealand which has often been a show stopper for hosting local clients in the cloud.

We undertook an architectural review of the overall hosting solution with the assistance of Microsoft New Zealand. This partnership gave us access to the necessary expertise and coupled with our new appreciation for some of the newer Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, our recommendations to New Zealand Cricket for their ICT review changed considerably over those two months.

What we ended up with is an incredibly flexible and massively scalable solution, hosted out of the Azure Australia data centre using the following Azure services: 

• Azure Websites – SSL
• Deployment Slots
• Azure Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 (separate staging and production)
• SQL Database as a Service
• Service Bus, specifically Notification Hubs
• Storage (Queues and Blob)
• CDN
• Operational Insights

This combination of IaaS and PaaS allowed us to run any of the older systems and tasks without modification but allowed our re-architected solutions to take advantage of newer PaaS offerings such as Azure Websites.  We found the new PaaS offerings really exciting and are focused on solving difficult problems such as scale.

A good example of Azure changing how we approach a solution is the integration of video highlights from third party providers. We needed to provide a robust system which could reliably and consistently initiate a publishing workflow when an automated email notification was received. The end solution uses Web Hooks to connect the email notification event to the initiation of the import process. This would not have been possible without an Azure Queue or Service Bus to reliably (and loosely) connect the systems.

One of the biggest advantages of modern Microsoft Azure based solutions is the increased alignment with the wider Microsoft development platform and technology stack. One obvious example is Visual Studio and Management Studio, but due to our heavy investment in the Microsoft stack there are other benefits for us such as being able to extend our automated deployments using MsBuild and MsDeploy (WebDeploy) with little or no modification.

We were also able to run our solutions unmodified, which were made up of ASP.NET, MVC, .NET console apps and WebAPI projects. 
One of the more recent projects was the launch of a suite of mobile apps across all platforms for New Zealand Cricket, adding new functionality such as push notifications.  

As we were scoping this upgrade, the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova where released as a preview which we bravely started trialing. This ended up being a great choice and ultimately made the developer and design integration workflow much easier and faster than anything else we've used. Although some bugs exist, the tools are extremely impressive and have made us much more productive and focused on the app design and features. We also introduced Notification Hubs for push notifications for all mobile platforms as part of this upgrade which has integrated well.

At the time of writing, we have used the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova and released to the platforms below, making the BLACKCAPS app truly cross-platform.  All apps are running the same code base and have complete feature parity: 

• Windows Phone 8.1 (Universal)  
• Windows 8.1 (Universal)
• iPhone
• Android Phone  

With a large amount of infrastructure and services deployed in production, we needed a way to manage the overall health of the system. We have been successfully trialing the Operational Insights Preview which has provided a dashboard view of our environment, while allowing us to drill down into low level detail on our Virtual Machines. We have also made the most of new features in the Preview Azure Portal, which has allowed us to add a level of monitoring on our PaaS services, for example we're sent email alerts if the BLACKCAPS website homepage doesn’t respond to ping tests.’

All in all this is a fantastic example of  leveraging the opportunity of an anticipated increase in demand along with capitalizing on a range of new platform service offerings to deliver a world-class solution on a global stage. The new platform has been holding up really well to the unprecedented demand and I was very happy to sit in the stand on the weekend and receive push notifications on the phone app every time the blackcaps took a wicket against Australia.

Onwards and upwards! Go the BLACKCAPS!

It was a cold Wellington August in 2003 only a few weeks before the Lord of the Rings Return of the King needed to be complete. At the time WETA Digital ran the 3rd largest supercomputer on the planet (3300 processors) and it was running at 95% capacity. The most complex scene in the film, the Battle of the Pelennor fields that pitted 120k digitally rendered orcs against 8k digitally rendered Riders of Rohan still had to be rendered. Scott Houston, then Weta Digital CIO, estimated that it would take almost a year to render the scene with the resources that he had available. That would subsequently delay the film beyond the world premier planned to take place in Wellington on Dec 1 2003.

Peter Jackson would not accept delays or compromise on his vision so Scott flew in new servers on private jets to Wellington into a brand new datacentre. Ten short days later with true kiwi “can do attitude” ensured that the team had built the capability to render the scene and finish the film on time!

It was what happened next that sent Scott on a path away from WETA Digital into his own kiwi based start-up. After the film the additional hardware was no longer being utilised. WETA Digital entered into a JV with Gen-I to create the 2nd largest supercomputing facility in the world at the time. Scott was operating this facility and identified a business opportunity as the resources in the centre were manually provisioned making it not economically viable for smaller customer workloads. In June 2006 Scott formed GreenButton (formally known as InterGrid) to be based in the supercomputing facility in Wellington to provide the interface for customers to get access to computing resources on demand as they needed them.

GreenButton were ready to expand globally and Microsoft was ready to help them. By this time it was 2009 Microsoft had just launched our start-up programme BizSpark to help companies get started on Microsoft technologies. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Wellington five years ago meeting Scott Houston and Dave Fellows for the first time and being inspired by their vision. We talked about what we were bringing to market to help start-ups take advantage of cloud computing on the Microsoft Azure platform. GreenButton proceeded to migrate its namesake solution to Windows Azure in early 2010. In 2011 as GreenButton progressed through the BizSpark start-up program and their global revenues and customer base grew Microsoft entered into a Global Alliance with GreenButton (article) to help them expand in the US. Also in 2011 GreenButton was declared as Microsoft Corp’s Windows Azure ISV Partner of the Year, they also won the Microsoft NZ BizSpark Partner of the Year, Software Exporter of the Year and Dave Fellows won the Solutions Architect of the Year.

In the last four years GreenButton has expanded further and built a world class engineering team in Wellington. I filmed this case study with Dave Fellows for last year’s TechEd Keynote in Auckland where Dave announced that GreenButton had helped a film studio in Mexico render the world’s first full length animated film entirely in the cloud in three short months!

GreenButton has been a big part of our TechEd events over the years:

• Real World Windows Azure - What GreenButton Learnt – 2010
• Real World Windows Azure from GreenButton – 2011
• Episode 134: GreenButton Cloud Fabric, Mission Control and SDK with Dave Fellows
• Building on Azure: InterGrid/GreenButton
• Ivan Towlson – TechEd Sessions
• Mark Young – TechEd Sessions
• Amy Palamountain – TechEd Sessions

Last September we brought down Scott Guthrie (Microsoft Executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, reporting to Satya Nadella – CEO) to deliver our TechEd keynote. We organised a side meeting with the leadership team at GreenButton which was very interesting to be a part of. During the meeting I saw how the team’s vision was aligned to Scott’s vision for Microsoft Azure. Scott was very impressed at the quality of the platform that the GreenButton team had built and commented to Dave on what they had been able to achieve with the 18 strong development team in Wellington.

Roll forward to today and I’m proud to announce that Microsoft Corp. has purchased GreenButton.

The best part is that in addition to integrating GreenButton’s intellectual property into Microsoft Azure cloud solutions, Microsoft will retain and invest in the team and infrastructure, which will remain in Wellington, New Zealand after the acquisition.

Personally I can’t wait for the team to be integrated and for New Zealand to have a core part of the engineering for Microsoft Azure based here!

GreenButton was one of the first companies to graduate from the Microsoft BizSpark programme in NZ. Over the last five years we have had over 700 start-ups enrol in the BizSpark programme in NZ with the majority choosing Microsoft Azure to power their start-ups. In the 6 months since July 1 2013 we gifted over NZ$200k worth of computing hours on Microsoft Azure that was consumed by 264 kiwi based start-ups. We have also invested over NZ$2.4 million in software and developer tools to 395 start-ups in BizSpark in NZ in the last year.

It is moments like this that make me proud to work for a multi-national that works with local subsidiaries and the people of the countries that they do business within. I love working for Microsoft and I love being based in New Zealand, working as a loyal kiwi helping kiwi developer’s stay here and take on the world. I am proud of the work that my team does every day to help kiwi entrepreneurs, visionaries and technologists fulfil their dreams.

Paul Muckleston (Managing Director Microsoft New Zealand) and Scott Houston (Founder of GreenButton) talk about the acquisition on TV this morning.

More details:

• http://microsoft.co.nz/getstarted
• New Zealand Windows Azure Case Studies - GreenButton, Serko, TranscribeMe & Timely
• New Zealand Application Showcase (PDF)
• Dave's Blog Post
• Microsoft plucks Kiwi startup from the cloud
• Lord of the Rings triggers Kiwi tech 'success story'
• Microsoft Acquires GreenButton To Deliver Big Compute
• Microsoft buys GreenButton, adding Hobbit power to the Azure cloud
• Microsoft Acquires High-Performance Cloud-Computing Company GreenButton

For me and the team 2013 has been a breakthrough year. Thank you to the more than 4,000 who attended our events and trainings throughout the year.
In addition to our events I am proud of the work that we do with kiwi students and start-ups. The Microsoft Imagine Cup this year received 550 student team submissions from across NZ, culminating in an expo in Auckland where the winning team was selected to go to St Petersburg to represent NZ.

This month we have partnered with the University of Auckland and a number of kiwi businesses to train 150 students in building Windows apps and have placed them in companies for 12 weeks of work experience over the summer.

We now have more than 600 start-ups in NZ through our BizSpark programme and more than 1/3 of these start-ups are using Windows Azure, with 15% using it at huge scale. It was a real highlight having Scott Guthrie back in NZ talking Windows Azure. Thank you to the great kiwi customers and partners that have helped us to tell the story along the way - check out the Azure customer booklet and the kiwi success stories, Start-ups, apps, Azure and Visual Studio.

Over the last quarter we have seen huge growth with Windows 8.1, Windows Azure and Windows Phone. Windows Phone has finally broken through with large gains in share in NZ in the late part of the year. You may have heard that Windows Phone is now the fastest growing mobile platform in the world and New Zealand is doing much better than the world wide average selling through 15% share in July. We have more than 1,500 registered kiwi developers releasing apps for Windows with many engaging millions of users. Keith Patton's windows phone game Alphajax has over 3.5 million users playing on Windows Phone, that is more users than Trade Me and Xero combined!

For NZ branded apps I'd like to welcome the latest Windows apps from the All Blacks and New Zealand Cricket, Yellow, Eventfinda and the University of Auckland along with line of business tablet apps for CPIT, Silver Fern Farms, Sealord and Ultranet onto the Windows store.

With all this growth we have finally made a breakthrough with some of NZ's best known and most popular mobile games. It took just 5 months for PikPok's Into the Dead game to pass 10 million downloads. I am proud to announce that Into the Dead is now in the Windows Store and will be in the Windows Phone Store shortly.

I am also pleased to announce that Rocket Jump have released Major Mayhem for Windows Store (I personally can't stop playing this one). To round out the set Flightless have released their hugely successful Bee Leader to the Windows Store and Windows Phone.

If you are like me, happy to see these great "kiwi made" games arrive on the Windows platform please buy these games and rate them to show your support for the teams!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

More than 3 1/2 years ago I wrote about the epic battle that was brewing between browser manufactures and video formats.

At the time two key things happened:

• May 19, 2010, WebM announced leveraging VP8 and Theora video codecs with support from Chrome, FireFox and Opera
• Jan 11, 2011, Google announced their plan to remove H.264 Video Codec Support from Chrome

“Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.”

At the time I concluded that H.264 was and is the “industry standard” for video.

Two years ago I wrote a post - How to Navigate the HTML5 Video Maze

I bought up the challenge of Live Adaptive streaming and referenced the three proprietary solutions:

• Microsoft Smooth Streaming
• Apple HTTP Live Streaming
• Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming

I introduced Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) which was in Draft International Standard at the time.

I gave a couple of presentations on the topic:

• 5 Things You Need to Know to Start Using <video> and <audio> Today. – 2011
• WDCNZ–HTML Media: Where We Are & Where We Need To Go – 2011

This got interesting a few months ago when IE11 on Windows 8.1 was announced as supporting DASH (IE11 shipped as part of Windows 8.1 in a free update to Windows 8 users worldwide last week - this feature is not supported in IE11 on Windows 7).

Anthony Park VP Engineering at Netflix delivered a session Building Media Streaming Apps and Sites Without Plug-Ins Using MPEG-DASH and announced that Netflix.com would start delivering protected adaptive streaming to Netflix.com for IE11 on Windows 8.1 users leveraging PlayReady (for content protection via W3C Encrypted Media Extensions) and MPEG-DASH for streaming. Netflix and Google also support this method for ARM-based chromebooks.

At the same conference Mingfei talked about Windows Azure Media Services – DASH preview through Dynamic Packaging more here.

Ok to summarise

• IE11 on Windows 8.1 released worldwide last week with MPEG-DASH support
• Windows Azure Media Services is adding support for creating MPEG-DASH media content (currently in preview)

Along comes Google:

I suspect Google is no longer planning to remove the H.264 codec from Chrome and appears to be fully supporting MPEG DASH on YouTube moving forward.

Why do I say this?

YouTube has added Media Source Extensions to their checks at https://www.youtube.com/html5

If you join the trial and play a video, right click and there is a new “stats for nerds” option that shows the video is playing back using MPEG-DASH (see below)

The twist in the tail of all of this is that Google has also appeared to have removed the 480p and 1080p streams for non-DASH browsers when they choose not to use the Flash player.

I guess the next question will be if Apple will choose to move away from HLS to MPEG DASH in future iOS updates, the ball is now firmly in their court.

Update: It appears that once again there is a twist in the tail, Web RTC has emerged as the next battleground and Google is holding fast on VP8 while Mozilla reluctantly goes H.264 through a partnership with Cisco.

• Mozilla has reluctantly chosen to add H.264 to its browser through a new partnership with Cisco
• Google still thinks that VP8 is the best codec for real-time communication on the web.

I remember reading a blog post from Sean McBreen selling the role of a Developer Evangelist

IMO - It’s an awesome role, you get to work with Microsoft’s most cutting edge developer products (Whidbey, Burton, Yukon, Avalon, Indigo, Longhorn) and be the person who brings these to the local audience. You also will be working to develop the local community by presenting to our customers and partners though Microsoft and community related events.

I started asking myself questions: Was I technical enough? Could I start in front of an audience and speak naturally? Where would this journey lead me?

Eight years on I’m proud to be leading one of the strongest technology teams in New Zealand and I’m happy to be hiring a Developer Evangelist specialising in Windows apps. Ryan Tarak has been doing a fantastic job working in this role for a number of years and he has recently moved into a Partner Business Evangelist role within my team opening the door for a deep technical applicant that has experience building apps for Windows and Windows Phone.

The role is listed at https://aka.ms/winappsFTW if you wish to apply or know of someone that would be perfect for the job. Don’t worry if you are Wellington based, I’ll consider applicants in Wellington and I am updating the job ad to show this as well.

You may see that experience in game development is a plus, this is due to the app nature of the world that we now live in and the strength of NZ’s game development community. As a result many of the top global apps that are built in NZ happen to be games built in C++ or modern frameworks like unity so experience with these will certainly be a plus.

In addition to this role we are also actively recruiting a Solution Specialist for Developer Tools https://aka.ms/devtoolsSSP this role is particularly interesting as it is a sales role that expects technical expertise in Visual Studio, ALM and modern software development. If you are a senior architect or dev lead that is looking to switch path into solution/ product selling this could be the job for you.

Good luck, putting your best foot forward, you won’t regret it!

The annual Game Developer's Conference kicked off in San Francisco last week.

Coinciding with the event it was awesome to see the first Unity title released on Windows Phone 8, Temple Run. The beta SDK for the Unity 4 game engine for Windows 8 is available now and I expect improvements as the team move towards a final release.

Recently London based HTML game dev studio Mudvark created the HTML game Mortar Melon, for Windows 8 using the Scirra games engine and took out a recent Windows 8 competition. Mudvark didn’t expect the more than a quarter of a million downloads that they got in the first month and a half on Windows 8 and they are now considering Windows 8 as a possible primary platform for future titles.

Likewise Aussies Halfbrick have earned over $100k from their games on Windows 8 in the last 30 days!

With all this winning going on I wasn’t surprised to see that the student team that placed 2nd in the games category at the recent imagine cup finals in Auckland have already had 10’s of thousands of downloads and their game 2150 A.D. in the Windows Store is receiving over 1,000 downloads per day.

This is not unique as there are other stories of indie devs making $30k per month on their Windows Store games.

If you think back it was a game for Windows Phone, AlphaJax that took out the Best Mobile Application category at the 2011 ONYA awards in Wellington.  Alphajax was subsequently acquired by Microsoft Game Studios in 2011. The acquisition provided some of the seed capital required to start Marker Metro in Auckland (the worlds first agency 100% dedicated to making apps for Windows) has been profitable from day 1.

All of this opportunity bodes well for the awesome kiwi game development industry that earns the majority of their revenue from original intellectual property and royalties. So if you are into game development now is a good time to start looking at porting/ building your apps for Windows.

I have recently upgraded my primary machine from a Samsung pre-launch prototype slate to a Surface Pro that I ordered from America. I gave my kids the use of the build slate (I say use because they have their own account profiles and picture passwords). Indigo loves the build slate partly because of the stylus which she has grown up with. She especially enjoys local kiwi app Art Rage.

In the comparatively short time ArtRage has been available through the iTunes store - the iPad version was released in October 2010 - it has come to represent "a few 10s of per cent" of Ambient Design's income.

That hasn't come at the expense of ArtRage's desktop sales, Fox-Wilson says, which are holding up.

I also have a Surface RT that I have received through work that I actively use for reading on the Kindle app (my Kindle Fire hasn’t been turned on this year) and in meetings and all day conferences when I’m on battery and travelling light and also outputting to the TV to watch streaming live TV via a Flash website is a bonus.

The Surface RT is a hit with the kids as well through their own family safety monitored child account, they love having their own login’s with all their own apps on the front screen!

That said last weekend I chose to sell our second Windows RT device that I had imported from the US last October as I firmly believe that there is such a thing as too many devices in a home and I like to limit my children’s access throughout the day.

I set a low reserve and a low buy now price because I wanted someone else to get a bargain and enjoy the device, since they are going on sale tomorrow in New Zealand I felt an imported/ second hand price should represent a discount on what you can buy new one for in the shops here.

My plan backfired, world media jumped on this story and the Surface RT has sold for $704 on Trade Me (only $35 less than a new one!)

As a result I have chosen to donate all the money to charity (in fact Cure Kids).

The lesson for me is next time not to link my Trade Me account to my Twitter account and keep private things private.

Thanks,

Nigel

It’s been an incredible journey starting as an ambitious young evangelist and developing into an ambitious not quite so young evangelist.

Microsoft has been an incredible place to work everyday, it’s challenging and it has a level of intensity seldom found elsewhere. Microsoft hires some of the best people that I have had the privilege to working with (when I first started I was awestruck and liken it to making it to the Olympics and finishing in last place). Microsoft also invests heavily in developing their people and I truly believe I am much more skilled in a number of areas today than I was eight years ago when I first started. I have a quest for knowledge and here I am always learning. Working for Microsoft New Zealand once we have delivered on our “must-dos” we have the freedom to make a difference in New Zealand and beyond, I love that!

Today I am happy to announce that I am the new Director of Developer & Platform Evangelism for Microsoft New Zealand!

So what does that mean, I hear you asking. It means that I now have the privilege to lead the awesome NZ DPE team to “continue” to excite and engage customers and communities about Microsoft’s new and emerging technologies how and in the future.

To use a sporting analogy I am now moving from a player to a player-coach like Tana Umaga did in his transition with Counties Manukau.

Where I Have Come From:

During the last eight years I have lead strategic change with New Zealand developers, government agencies, start-ups, top NZ websites and media companies. This work has evolved into the app focus that we have today in DPE with Windows Azure, Windows Phone and the Windows 8 development ecosystems.

When I sit to write a post like this I ask myself, what have been the real highlights? I present the following list like a TV sitcom’s greatest hits show:

• Web09, Expression for Art’s Sake and introducing Silverlight and Expression to New Zealand
• Many many TechEd keynotes from my first in 2006 to Lou Carbone (“the best keynote ever”) to my Three Screen & A Cloud Keynote to last years keynote featuring the always awesome and inspiring Jer Thorpe.
• A side point on this was in helping to convince Rowan Simpson to start a blog while driving to the rugby with the Gu in 2006!
• Working with the Webstock crew from the beginning to the great heights that they have reached today
• Karl and CJ share their memories
• Chatting to Eric Ries about Start Ups and Webstock
• Chatting with Chris Shiflett at Webstock
• Five years ago I was privileged to present at Webstock a talk aptly titled ‘The Internet Is Not Private Get Over It!’. I think many of these issues around privacy and data portability still exist today.
• My dad (Ted) died suddenly in August 2009 – it shocked me to the core and I responded with a presentation “Failure is the Best Possible Outcome” at the inaugural TEDx conference in Auckland where I was privileged to present alongside other great New Zealanders including Sir Ray Avery.
• I have loved my time at Kiwi Foo over the years and I thank Nat Torkington for including me in many of these ground breaking events.
• My write up from the inaugural 2007 event
• The video wars of 2010 was a particularly interesting topic for me
• This resulted in my presentation at the MIX 2011 conference in Las Vegas on the topic
• I then followed this up by presenting with Chris Double from Mozilla at the inaugural WDCNZ event.
• It was a fun party as well, hanging out with ex Google developer relations gal Pamela Fox
• Traveling to the PDC/ BUILD and MIX conferences in the US on many occasions have been a highlight
• I remember the MIX event at Las Vegas 2010 with Keith Patton, Ben Gracewood and Gus Pickering. This was the event where Windows Phone was unveiled.
• It was this trip that inspired Keith to write his own game for the new platform that eventually lead to his new business working fulltime building apps for Windows.
• Fast forward a couple of years and we make it to the launch of Windows 8 and the awesome NZ built apps that we helped nurture.
• Constantly evangelising within Microsoft, I liken this to trying to steer an aircraft carrier with a tug boat often the best way to get results is to whisper into the ear of the pilot. Our current focus on web standards, design and interoperability I like to think I’ve played a small part in all of that.

What I Have Built:

In my mind the hardest thing about being an evangelist is staying up to date with the doing as well as the showing! I love staying hands on with the technology and I have amassed an interesting portfolio of work over the years in role.

• Building the interactive web experience for the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series 2009
• Building a live production video player in Silverlight for tvnz.co.nz
• Building the Slice of Kevin - New Zealand IE8 Web Slice Competition
• Working on the Photosynth project to launch the All Blacks Jersey with Adidas
• Working as a technical project manager on the 2011 Rugby World Cup
• Working with the NV Interactive team on the NZ Cricket Video Vault
• Building the wall of fashion for Air New Zealand Fashion Week (hosted on Windows Azure)
• Creating NZsynth for the Web09 keynote that lead to the work at Te Papa developed by Tim Tait - Kura Pounamu and The Mixing Room
• I was a finalist in the Microsoft Be What’s Next global innovation competition with this story
• Building On Sale New Zealand for Windows Phone and Windows 8 leveraging Windows Azure in the backend.
• Building the NZ Herald Windows Phone app including the Windows Azure back-end piece used for tile generation (stay tuned for an updated Windows Phone 8 version coming soon).

Where We Are Going:

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to act in the DPE Director role in New Zealand for a few months. I shared my learning's at the time. The experience was very positive and I was encouraged by the opportunity to focus on the broader aspects of our business and team.

The number one thing for me in the new role is to stay passionate! It is infectious. Leading a team of driven awesome people is an honour and awesomeness happens when we all strive to make a difference collectively.

In DPE we are the team that creates Microsoft’s future. It is our job to create a future that we believe in. Our team operates with the highest level of integrity, we are honest with ourselves and each other even when the news is bad. The next six months are particularly exciting and challenging and as a young team we have much to learn and to teach each other. We strive to stay curious, take the time to listen, learn and observe. We deliver excellence in everything we choose to pursue and we respectively challenge the process, think differently, when it is clear that the old way no longer serves us. We speak up when we see ourselves heading off track. We plan our strategy and lean forward rather than always drawing from the past, we have the freedom to choose.  Above all else as a team we have fun, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we enjoy the journey as it a path that we have chosen together.

If you are reading this (yes you got this far) and the thought of a career as an evangelist at Microsoft is something that makes you hungry, it absolutely must be a lifestyle choice and not a job please reach out to me and or others in our team.

I am not replacing my previous role straight away but I am certainly starting to think about how best we can work as a team to tackle head on our exciting new challenges in the months and years to come.

I am a big fan of Seth Godin especially (We are all Weird, Poke the Box, The Dip and Linchpin). It is no accident that when I was leaving Singapore a few weeks ago I picked up All Marketers Tell Stories (formally known as All Marketers Are Liars) because Seth’s words resonate with my world view and this was one of his original titles that I hadn’t yet read.

Having just finished reading it I want to reflex on it along with a couple of other stories that I have read in the last few days.

In the book Seth dissects the concept of wants and needs and how they are framed in a person’s world view.

Today it is more important for a product to satisfy a person’s wants than their needs.

The book draws in on the point that people notice only the new then make a guess.
1. Look for Difference – when we encounter something for the first time, we compare it to the status quo. If it’s not new, we ignore it.
2. Look for Causation – Once we choose to pay attention to something, our brain sets out to figure out how it happened. We instantly make up a rule or theory about how this thing came to occur.
3. Then we make a prediction. We predict what will happen next in our world. If our prediction is right, external surprises will cease and our brain can settle back to ignoring things again.
4. Rely on Cognitive Dissonance – Once we’ve made some predictions we ignore contrary data for as long as we can get away with it.

I was thinking of an example of this in the review that Juha wrote for the NZ Herald on the Surface device.

Juha wrote: Due to the ARM processor, Windows RT is unable to run normal Windows applications on the Desktop, which seems to be there just for Office. The logical next step for Microsoft would be to dump Desktop mode in Windows 8 RT completely, but right now, it was probably too difficult to do.

There are plenty of programs for the Windows 8 side of Surface RT though, in the App Store, but it's odd to have a Windows computer that doesn't run much Windows software so to speak.

Compare this comment above to the formula Seth suggested and you see how we all start to frame and create our own world views.

Combine this with The Formula for Change created by Richard Beckhard and David Gleicher,

D x V x F > R

D = Dissatisfaction with how things are now;
V = Vision of what is possible;
F = First, concrete steps that can be taken towards the vision;
If the product of these three factors is greater than
R = Resistance
Change Occurs.

Apply this formula to change to Rod Drury’s recent foray into Window Phone 8.

Rod has dissatisfaction with iPhone that has set him down a path of looking for difference.

D = Dissatisfaction - Rod wrote – I’ve been growing less comfortable with Apple’s view of the world and feeling like they have too much control.
V = Vision – Rod Wrote -The Windows Phone keynote resonated for me. A people-centric phone operating system.
F = First, concrete steps– Rod Wrote - Today the Nokia Lumia 920 launched. I happened to be driving past Telecom’s main retail store so I grabbed one.

All in all the products of these things over came Rod’s resistance and drove him to change.

A few days later Rod switched back to iPhone so what happened then?

I suspect that Rod’s resistance didn’t change nor did his dissatisfaction with Apple but I think some new dissatisfaction with the device and apps on the Nokia Lumia 920 weighted the formula against windows phone.

Rod wrote - The new iPhone 5 is a lovely bit of hardware, I pick up the iPhone.  It is so small and light. It’s fast. Familiar.

Incidentally after using a Nokia Lumia 900 for a month I went back to a Nokia Lumia 800 for the same reason.

Rod wrote -The apps I use are not quite there yet.

I agree with this but in the other direction. I’m invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. I love my live tiles for my apps and I really love my music, I have been on subscription music for years and it has changed my appreciation for an awesome cloud based service that is truly amazing and revolutionary. When I use my iPod or iPad I can’t believe how poor iTunes is. It is a terrible user experience for a music player on the idevice, it is expensive to buy music and it does nothing to stream music across devices.

I am very happy that Windows 8, XBOX and Windows Phone 8 has gone so far to free people from the old world of downloaded mp3’s and impossible playlists and sync services.

That brings me to my worldview. I am still using a Nokia Lumia 800 as my primary phone that I have owned for a year now, I continue to love it. The only app that I really miss is Instagram, but I have that on my other iDevices so I still use it occasionally.

In addition I love my new Surface RT, I don’t need it but I love it. It is a great travelling device (I’m using the touch cover to type this blog post by the pool in Fiji). I can connect my digital camera via the USB to work with my photos and video and it really offers everything I need in a portable computer. I was surprised but my 6 year old daughter loves it more than her iPad because it is personalized to her wants (I didn't see that one coming). Also I love that it is red, others may not care but I do.

That brings me to my next purchase. I have ordered a Red Nokia Lumia 920. Not because I don’t like my Lumia 800 anymore (I do) but because I want to try something different for a while. I like that it is red, and I like that it works with my Xbox Music collection. Call me shallow but those are my wants right now. Oh yeah and I continue to use http://dabr.co.uk for twitter on all my mobile devices, windows phone and iPod as it works best for me.

I am happy that people like Karl and Rod are noticing Windows again and are liking what they see, I really enjoyed delivering the overview session on "the new Windows" at the Auckland devmob event. I can't help but think the people centric approach to software may just stick around and change a few worldviews of what mobile experience should be like for tomorrows users.

I highly recommend that you check out the just launched iSupr8 app from MEA Mobile in Hamilton. Their film grade effects are world-class!

Check out the following 30 Kiwi Made apps in the Windows Store! There are many many more apps that are also in the store that are kiwi made. Ryan has made a complete list of the first 100 kiwi made apps that made it to the store. Enjoy!

This is only the beginning! Now which device are you going to buy?

Also windows phone is now sitting at around 7% market share in NZ. It was great to see Stuff launch their Windows Phone app this morning along with Flicks. I’m looking forward to Windows Phone 8 (4 days to go) to change the game on mobile as well!