Updated 3 p.m. PT, with comments from Gary Flake.
Microsoft has decided to pare down its 3-year-old Live Labs effort, splitting the research-and-development team into different parts of Microsoft's online efforts.
The group was launched to some fanfare three years ago, with Gary Flake hired from Yahoo to lead the effort.
Gary Flake
Flake will remain head of the group, which will have roughly half as many people and will now focus more narrowly on search and Web experiences, such as deep zoom, and other navigational and organizational approaches. Other folks will be shifted to Microsoft's mobile or online-services units, but the company is not laying off anyone as a result of the shift, according to Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake.
"Several teams are transferring directly to product teams that are in need of Live Labs' talents to accelerate existing projects," Drake said. The effort was announced to Microsoft workers on Monday.
Drake said the economy did play a factor in Microsoft's shift.
"It had a role," Drake said.
Apparently, the Microsoft sandbox was a little too big, given the current economic environment.
Several interesting projects lived in the unit, including PhotoSynth and SeaDragon, as well as lesser-known ventures like Listas, a list-sharing service, and Thumbtack, a sort of clipboard for the Web.
In an e-mail interview, Flake said that the changes will allow the group to things at a bigger scale.
"We've always done many small things, but in this climate we thought that it made more sense to focus on the bigger ideas and bigger bets," Flake said. "Over the next year, you'll see us launch the most ambitious projects we've ever done."
When he launched the project, Flake said his goal with Live Labs was to help Microsoft develop software faster.
"Historically, the software industry has been an industry in which it was fine to have months or years in between product cycles," Flake said. "That is something that has been part of Microsoft's processes as well."
The splitting up of the Live Labs team was first noted by PaidContent.org
As noted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is launching yet another "Labs" effort.
This one is called Startup Labs, and according to a job posting Friday, it's part of Ray Ozzie's group. The posting didn't reveal much else, saying that the effort "will consist of multiple product development projects at varying stages of lifecycle."
Startup Labs joins other, seemingly similar projects, housed within specific business units, including , adCenter Labs and Office Labs.
I've asked Microsoft for more info and will update if I learn more.
A synth of images of the Lincoln Memorial. Click on the image for a larger view.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)WASHINGTON, D.C.--On Monday, I got a demo of how Microsoft was opening up Photosynth to consumers. On Wednesday, I put it to the test.
With my Canon Digital Rebel XT in tow, I headed to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to try it out. I quickly realized, though, that this would be a pretty tall order for the software, given that row upon row of names would be hard to separate. I decided to also take photos of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, which I thought the software would have an easier time with.
What Photosynth does is to look at a collection of digital photos of the same location, taken from different angles, and use those to create a 3D representation of the place. Assuming there are enough shots for the software to stitch together, one can pan and zoom through the different shots.
For those who have a Windows PC and are willing to install the Active X control needed to view it, here's a look at my synth of the Washington and Lincoln structures. For those who don't want to do the installation, you can see my work at the top of this post.
There were highs and lows of my personal experience. On the plus side, all I had to do was take the photos--I took about 150 of the Vietnam Memorial and another 150 of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial combined. The software does all the figuring out of how the photos fit together.
That can also be a downside. The software couldn't quite piece together that the exterior of the Lincoln Memorial and the interior were of the same place, probably because the Lincoln sculpture itself shows up so dark in the exterior shots as I approached it.
It also took a long time to upload the shots and my laptop kept going to sleep. That said, the software seemed to always pick up where it left off.
I tried to upload just the Lincoln Memorial images to ease the transition, in hopes the software would stitch together the exterior and interior shots, but my "synth" hung just at the end. I then tried to upload my Vietnam Memorial shots this morning, but got a message saying that the service was handling too many synths at the moment.
I'll keep trying and post an update once I have more synths up. (Update 6:30 p.m. PT--So much for that. All my efforts today to upload further synths have failed as Microsoft's Photosynth site has struggled to keep pace in its first day of being open to the public.)
Meanwhile, you can check out this video, in which I chat with Microsoft's Gary William Flake to about what you can do with this new technology:
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