I’ll bet you didn’t know that Microsoft had any interest in family-history oriented items. In fact, there’s been some interest on their part
for years now. When I was working for Heritage Quest, Brad Steuart negotiated with the Microsoft folks from Redmond, Washington for quite some time. Nothing ever came of it, but there was an interest on their part.
This evening I ran across an article that tells of several products that are family history oriented – all produced in prototype by a group of Microsoft folks from the UK – and brought to Bellevue to be displayed at the TechFest in Redmond. The three products are:
TimeCard: The prototype being about the size and shape of a medium-sized photo frame. This experimental device can organize your photos, scans, and other digital files along a timeline. If you stop and think about it, our lives run along a timeline too – so this type of product makes sense.
CellFrame: Shaped to look like a 60s television console (but not much bigger than an iPhone). The CellFrame is dedicated to one viewer and uses the mobile-phone network, receiving photos and short text and e-mail messages from afar.
Family Archive: It looks like a table with a flat, multitouch top, and it replicates the way a researcher might store souvenirs and photos in marked boxes. This one sounded really interesting to me…
For details on these three prototype products, check out the article titled “Microsoft Research finds future value in family history,” in the March 7, 2009 edition of betanews.com.