Yogi Land

A group from the University of Southern California has created the coolest Xbox Kinect hack yet: gesture-based spell casting and controls for World of Warcraft.

USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies has created and released FAAST, or the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. It’s a middleware toolkit that helps integrate full-body motion controls for games via the Kinect’s sensors. Essentially, ICT makes it possible to map full-body gestures to different keyboard commands.

A YouTube video demonstrating and explaining the technology has already generated over 350,000 views. In it, an ICT team member demonstrates how its hack can target enemies, cast magic spells, control the camera and move across the World of Warcraft landscape using only body movements like leaning forward or moving the left hand side to side.

Currently FAAST is only available for Windows, but the Institute intends to develop a Linux version. It also plans to open-source the project so other developers can create more dynamic projects with the toolkit. The Institute hopes that FAAST will help open a whole new world of healthy gaming.

While the World of Warcraft hack only allows for basic controls, it’s still amazing to behold. We can see a world where gaming is done through dynamic motion controls, rather than through the mouse and keyboard.

More About: Activision Blizzard, gaming, kinect, microsoft, video, world of warcraft, xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox Kinect

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Everyone has a dream job. Whether it’s a company you’ve been pining to be a part of or a new product you’re dying to throw your creativity into, there’s always a line of work that seems like the perfect fit.

Though recognizing your ideal position is easy, actually getting the job is the hard part. For those looking to start a career at tech giant Microsoft, the sheer size of the company makes the hunt seem even more overwhelming. Resumes can get lost in a sea of applications, and finding the right contact to reach out to can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up on your dream of working at one of the most successful and dynamic corporations in the world. Here are some tips and resources from the company’s recruiters and employees for landing a job at Microsoft.

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Getting Started

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With so many locations and products, the first step in starting your Microsoft job search should be deciding where you want to work and what you want to create. Visiting the Microsoft Careers website can help answer these questions. There you can look for a specific position in the navigation bar or choose a country from the drop-down menu. On the Find Your Fit page, details on the company’s various professions and technologies are laid out to help you explore opportunities.

Once you apply by uploading your resume to a specific job posting on the site, it’s up for review. So how do you get that resume noticed?

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Standing Out

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Many recruiters use keyword searches to pull up resumes — but that doesn’t mean every other word needs to be “motivated” or “team player.” Be sure to list the names of certain technologies and programming languages you’ve used in each project you include. This will allow a recruiter to see what you know and how well you know it.

When putting together your resume, think about how you affected your environments and less about the basic facts of what you did. “Often, applicants write their resumes like a list of job tasks, but it’s even more important to call out your major achievements and the difference you made: what you did, how you did it, and why it mattered,” said Gretchen Ledgard, communications manager for Microsoft Recruiting.

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Doing Your Homework

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Microsoft is known for its difficult interview process and obscure questions. The best way to nail it? “Do your homework on us,” Ledgard said. Candidates who come in with knowledge about the role, team and location tend to already have an idea of how to frame their answers and are ready to ask solid questions.

Thom Mitchell, a Microsoft account technology strategist who was hired earlier this year, couldn’t agree more. He researched each person who was interviewing him and read up on the products he would be responsible for in the role and the competition for those products. He even prepared a short PowerPoint presentation about Microsoft products in case he was asked to present something on the fly (he wasn’t). When Mitchell asked questions, they were substantive and role-related — not “How are the health care benefits?” or “Is there a gym reimbursement?” More importantly, when he didn’t know an answer to a question he was asked, Mitchell simply said so and didn’t try to talk around the issue or come up with a fake answer.

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Following Up

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If you have questions after submitting your resume, many Microsoft recruiters are open to being contacted via social media, Ledgard said. Microsoft Careers is also open to connecting through social networks and has resources for potential job candidates on its advice hub JobsBlog.

But how do you strike a balance between keeping your name on the radar and being a nuisance? For Mitchell, the key was checking in as needed. He followed up with the recruiter after each screening interview and sent brief thank you notes to the hiring manager he interviewed with in person — but not to each person who interviewed him. Mitchell said his recruiter let him know what would happen every step of the way, so there wasn’t a need to over communicate.

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Finding a Fit

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There’s a big focus on not only job fit, but also company fit at Microsoft. Recruiters look for people who go above and beyond in everything they do, whether that’s taking the most difficult computer science courses or working on extracurricular projects, Ledgard said.

Still, there’s no fool-proof formula for landing a job at Microsoft. Even though the position you’re applying for might feel like the perfect match, sometimes it’s just not. Microsoft’s recruiters and hiring managers are the experts on what type of person will be a good fit for both the job and the company culture. The best advice? Relax. If it’s meant to be, it will.

Have you scored a job at Microsoft or are you trying to? What has your experience been like? Tell us in the comments below.

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More Job-Related Resources from Mashable:

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- 19 Resources to Help You Land a Job in 2011
- The Future of Human Resources and Social Media
- HOW TO: Score a Job Through Facebook
- 5 Ways to Get a Job Through YouTube
- HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags to Boost Your Job Search

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Tomazl; Flickr, Pawel Niewladomski

More About: advice, careers, hiring, how to, interviewing, job recruiting, jobs, microsoft, resume, social media

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Adobe isn’t the only company being tempted by the sweet taste of HTML5, Microsoft has a hankering for the stuff too.

Despite its past efforts to shape Silverlight into the leading cross-platform runtime for the web and the desktop, Microsoft now says that its strategy and plans for Silverlight “has shifted.”

ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley spoke with Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft’s server and tools business about the lack of focus on Siverlight at the company’s Professional Developers Conference this week.

Muglia’s response was pretty telling. Although he reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to making Silverlight the development platform for Windows Phone, he noted that the cross-platform solution Microsoft sees going forward is HTML.

Speaking with Foley, Muglia said, “HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”

This is a big admission from the company that has spent years trying to push Silverlight as a cross-platform technology forward. As a video technology — indeed even as an application technology — Silverlight and WPF are actually pretty nice. I attended a two-day XAML workshop held at Microsoft’s Atlanta offices in 2009 and was very impressed with the capabilities and the toolsets that were possible within Silverlight.

However, despite the prevalence of the .NET platform on Windows and in the enterprise, Silverlight has had a problem gaining traction across the web. With the exception of the Olympics and a few other live broadcasts, you almost never see Silverlight used on the web.

Likewise, the number of desktop applications built using Silverlight are nascent in comparison to the growing number of Adobe Air applications. Aside from Seesmic Desktop, it’s hard to think of any cross-platform apps that are built using Silverlight.

All the while, Microsoft is increasingly embracing HTML5. The company’s recent launch of Internet Explorer 9 beta was promoted using a number of different HTML5-specific web pages and promotions. Silverlight may not have been mentioned much during PDC, but HTML5 certainly was.

It’s clear that Microsoft — like Adobe, Apple and Google — sees that HTML5 is the technology that will work across the broadest stretch of devices — and more importantly, will work on future devices.

Yes, the W3C has stated that the HTML5 spec isn’t yet ready for full use, and in a broad, global sense, this is true. However, when you look at the types of devices that individuals will be buying today and tomorrow, and not the device they already own, it’s clear that HTML5 is the technology that is going to have built-in support.

As a technology, Silverlight has a lot of promise and we think it is still interesting. Still, we can’t help but think Microsoft is making a better strategic move to focus on HTML5 as its cross-platform solution going forward.

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Reviews: Google, Seesmic Desktop, Windows, adobe AIR

More About: HTML5, microsoft, pdc, Silverlight

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Microsoft has just announced the 17 games that will be available on launch day with Kinect for Xbox 360, the tech giant’s highly anticipated controller-free gaming system.

Kinect, which launches on November 4, is Microsoft’s answer to the Nintendo Wii’s motion controllers, which helped turn that console into one of this generation’s most popular gaming devices. Both Sony and Microsoft have been playing catch-up with the PlayStation Move and Kinect, respectively.

17 Kinect-enabled games will be available when the device makes its debut next month. Here’s the full list:

• Kinect Adventures: This is the game that is included with every Kinect device. It helps introduce gamers to the Kinect interface, letting them transverse the rapids, float around in space and challenge their friends to races, among other minigames.
• Kinectimals: Think Nintendogs, but with no controller.
• Game Party: In Motion: This includes a collection of party minigames like Darts.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 The Videogame: You can now control Harry’s magic with your hands.
• Your Shape: Fitness Evolved: A fitness game from Ubisoft that is similar to Wii Fit.

• Dance Central: This game, made by the creators of Rock Band, tracks your dance moves. We’ve heard good things about this one.
• The Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout: A game from THQ based on the TV show.
• DanceMasters: Konami’s version of getting your groove down.
• EA SPORTS Active 2: A fitness game with body tracking, heart rate data and the ability to share workout data. EA has gone all-out with this game, which sort of explains its $100 price tag.
• Zumba Fitness: See a pattern yet? This is a dance fitness game.
• Kinect Sports: Microsoft’s version of Wii Sports.
• MotionSports: This game from Ubisoft includes live in-game commentary and 40+ sports challenges.
• DECA SPORTS FREEDOM: While this game only has 10 sporting events, there is a focus on making it feel as real as possible. Figure skating should be interesting.
• Kinect Joy Ride: Controller-free kart racing.
• ADRENALIN MISFITS: This racing/battle game focuses on fantasy worlds.
• Fighters Uncaged: Fulfill your Fight Club fantasy without the bloody concussions and stitches.
• SONIC FREE RIDERS: Yup, Sega is bringing Sonic the Hedgehog to Kinect.

What do you think of Kinect’s launch day lineup? Let us know in the comments.

More About: gaming, kinect, microsoft, Microsoft Kinect, project natal, xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox Kinect

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When tech bloggers discovered an icon for the popular mobile game Angry Birds in a Windows Phone 7 promotional image, it seemed like confirmation that the game is coming to Microsoft’s smartphones, but the developers behind Angry Birds tweeted a denial of any commitment to the platform.

Microsoft reps then sent a note to TechFlash admitting that the image was a mistake. “It appears information was mistakenly posted to Microsoft’s website, and has been removed,” the statement said.

Microsoft will need developers like Angry Birds developer Rovio to make Windows Phone 7 attractive to iPhone or Android users who are accustomed to having a large selection of high-quality apps. Rovio said it was not thrilled because, “We don’t like others using our [intellectual property] without asking.”

However, we don’t want to overstate the blunder. We expect that Microsoft and Rovio will both move on and work together if the market for a Windows Phone 7 version of Angry Birds is there and waiting to pay for it.

Rovio even admitted as much in later tweets: “Nothing to do with if we do or don’t, it’s just that we decide that for ourselves … We could do a WP7 version of Angry Birds, not the issue. We have not agreed to do that (yet). Will support all relevant platforms.”

Angry Birds is a standard-setting iPhone game that also appears on Android, webOS and some Nokia phones. It has sold at least 6.5 million copies to date, so it’s a perfect example of an app store success story — a story Microsoft would like to see told on the Windows Phone 7 platform, too.

[Via Engadget]

More About: angry birds, apps, developers, games, gaming, Mobile 2.0, mobile games, rovio, smartphone, video games, windows mobile, windows phone, windows phone 7, wp7

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The rumors are swirling today about a secret meeting between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. While a meeting between the heads of two tech giants isn’t uncommon, reports say that they discussed a possible Microsoft acquisition of Adobe.

That is what we call a potential game changer. The question is whether it changes the game in favor of Microsoft and Adobe, or whether it benefits their main rival, Apple.

The chatter stems from a report in The New York Times. According to the publication, Ballmer arrived with a small entourage at Adobe’s offices to discuss Apple and its increasing influence over the mobile market via the iPhone.

Microsoft, which has lost significant chunks of the mobile market in recent years, is trying to make a big comeback through Windows Phone 7. Adobe on the other hand suddenly became mortal enemies with Apple after Apple banned Flash from the iPad.

What’s really got the markets stirring though is how the two companies might respond to the Apple threat: via acquisition. According to the report, the possibility of Microsoft acquiring Adobe was discussed. That little tidbit of information drove Adobe’s stock price up 11.5% today.

Let’s be clear: today’s rumors are just that. The most likely outcome is that Microsoft and Adobe never pursue anything more than informal discussions. However, if Microsoft did put down $15+ billion for Adobe, it would be a game changer, but not in the way they would hope.

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Adobe Doesn’t Help Microsoft Fight Apple

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Microsoft and Adobe are both software giants with a large array of products. Adobe controls Photoshop, ColdFusion, PDF, Acrobat, Premiere Pro and Flash. Microsoft’s list of products are too numerous to mention, but it has plenty of products that could be bolstered by Adobe, including Expression Studio, Paint, Visual Studio, Windows Movie Maker and Silverlight.

Could the two companies combine their different software lineups into a coherent lineup? Probably, but it would take years of work before they got it right. Combining Flash and Silverlight would prove especially difficult.

Would that software lineup really help them fight off Apple, though? We sincerely doubt it. It’s not like Microsoft’s going to force Adobe to pull Photoshop from the Mac; that would just be bad business. Microsoft couldn’t pull Flash from Apple’s iPad and iPhone because it isn’t there to begin with. Both the iPhone and the iPad have done quite well without Adobe’s help.

An acquisition would just distract Microsoft from building a killer phone platform that can compete with the iPhone. Photoshop alone would generate billions for Microsoft, but that wouldn’t solve its most pressing problem: Google and Apple’s rapidly rising influence.

The synergies in a Microsoft-Adobe pairing are there, but it wouldn’t help Microsoft at all in the mobile market. If the company’s goal is to really win back mobile, it will have to look elsewhere for ammunition.

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Reviews: Adobe Photoshop, Google, Windows Phone 7, iPhone

More About: adobe, android, Flash, Google, iOS, iphone, microsoft, Opinion, Photoshop

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Is the notebook going the way of the dinosaur? Not a chance, says Best Buy.

Earlier today, a report made the rounds, depicting the decline of notebook sales since the launch of Apple’s wildly popular iPad tablet. According to the report, U.S. retail notebook unit growth rose by 70% in December 2009 while it actually shrank by 4% in August 2010.

The story gained further traction after Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn was cited in a report from The Wall Street Journal. In the story, he told the Journal that “internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs, especially netbooks, by as much as 50%.”

Except Best Buy is now saying that the comments weren’t quite accurate, and the company has released a statement to set the record straight:

“The reports of the demise of these devices are grossly exaggerated. While they were fueled in part by a comment in the Wall Street Journal that was attributed to me, they are not an accurate depiction of what we’re currently seeing. In fact, we see some shifts in consumption patterns, with tablet sales being an incremental opportunity. And as we said during our recent earnings call, we believe computers will remain a very popular gift this holiday because of the very distinct and desirable benefits they offer consumers. That’s why we intend to carry a broad selection of computing products and accessories to address the demand we anticipate this season.”

The statement pumps up computers as a core part of Best Buy’s line of products. What it doesn’t do though is refute the stats credited to him in The Wall Street Journal’s report. It’s clear though that the iPad is transforming the entire computer market in its favor, and no statement from Best Buy is going to change that.

More About: apple, best buy, ipad, laptops, microsoft, netbooks, Notebooks

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Today, Microsoft is releasing the first public beta of of its next-generation web browser, Internet Explorer 9.

With the release of IE 9, Microsoft is aiming at a total reboot of its venerable (and often derided) web browser. We’re talking renewed emphasis on performance and an investment in web standards.

Still, for many web developers and designers, IE is viewed as a necessary evil. You support it and test around it because of its large userbase (a userbase that has been in steady decline over the last six years), but it isn’t taken very seriously.

With IE 9, Microsoft is hoping to change that. Here are some of the big reasons that designers and developers should care about the latest version of Internet Explorer.

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1. Standards, Standards, Standards

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In the early days of the web, Microsoft was actually a pretty involved party when it came down to drafting and implementing web standards. Microsoft is a member of the W3C, but over the last decade or so, standards and IE have rarely worked well together.

This is frustrating because it means that designers and developers have to designate little work-arounds to make a web page work with IE. With Internet Explorer 9, it looks like fewer and fewer work-arounds will be necessary.

IE 9 boasts support for lots of the features that are in the HTML5 spec, including:

• HTML5 audio and video elements
• The new WOFF web font format
• SVG
• HTML5’s Canvas bitmap
• ECMAScript 5

IE 9 also offers much more robust and true CSS3 support. In other words, more and more of the sites and features you build for Firefox 4, Opera, Chrome or Safari are going to work without IE 9 the same way. This is great news for designers and developers alike.

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2. Performance Gains

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The new IE 9 is faster and more efficient. In the modern browser wars, JavaScript is becoming the new battleground for speed supremacy. Right now, Google is really taking charge with its V8 JavaScript engine, but Microsoft isn’t backing down with its new engine, dubbed Chakra.

Chakra is similar to V8 in that it can run JavaScript directly from the processor, rather than through some sort of layer. That means that animations and scripts can run faster and with less overhead.

Charka has also been optimized for modern hardware, so if you’re running IE 9 on a multi-core Windows 7 machine, you can really see a big difference in performance, especially when several highly intensive web apps are open at one time.

As we’ve discussed before, Microsoft is also taking charge on making sure IE 9 has support for GPU acceleration. By using the graphics card rather than the CPU to offload things like animations, you can get higher frame rates, more detail and use less processor resources.

Microsoft showed off some of this GPU acceleration support back in June and the results were impressive.

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3. More Modern, Easier to Use

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Designers and developers often build and test around what browsers and versions their users use. Firefox and increasingly Google Chrome are starting to become the de facto browsers that even less tech savvy users reach for.

Chrome in particular is really gaining popularity because it has a clean interface, focuses on speed and knows how to get out of your way.

Microsoft has taken a lot of cues from Chrome’s playbook, and the UI in IE 9 makes the browser decidedly less prominent. The focus is instead on the website.

Because of these enhancements, as well as the better performance and better support for modern standards, we expect that more and more Windows users will give IE 9 a chance and consider using it as their default browser.

That means that even Mac designers and developers (like myself) need to be prepared to open up a virtual machine and run their sites through IE 9.

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Your Thoughts

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IE 9 is a huge step for Microsoft and we think that the current beta shows a lot of potential. For the first time in a while, Microsoft might actually help push innovation forward instead of holding it back in the browsing space.

Designers and developers, let us know your thoughts on IE 9 in the comments. Do you think this is a chance for IE to become relevant to the developer community again?

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More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Implement Google Font API on Your Website
- Top 10 Accessories for Typography Nuts [PICS]
- 40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners
- 10 Tools for Getting Web Design Feedback
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Reviews: Chrome, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Windows

More About: Browsers, HTML5, ie 9, internet explorer, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft, tech, web browsers, web design series

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One of the most visible battles in all of technology is Mac vs. PC. Earlier in the week, we asked you, the Mashable readers, to weigh in.

Our Web Faceoff this week focused around the device you’re probably using right now: the computer. We wanted to know whether your loyalty lies Microsoft or Apple, Windows or Snow Leopard, John Hodgman or Justin Long.

After over 23,000 votes…

…PC handily defeated Mac. With 15,102 votes, PC was able secure 63.99% of the vote. Mac mustered 8,015 votes, for a 33.97% share of the ballots. Votes for “neither” totaled in at 480, or just 2.03%.

Do these results surprise you? Do you think the poll results could be different a year from now? Five years from now? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Reviews: Windows

More About: apple, mac, microsoft, pc, Snow Leopard, web faceoff, Windows

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Microsoft is working on a new technology, dubbed Street Slide, aimed at reshaping the street-level mapping space currently dominated by Google Street View and Microsoft’s Bing Streetside.

The company plans to present the technology at SIGGRAPH 2010 later this week. The big advantage of Street Slide is that it allows users to position and change the viewpoint of the camera, rather than relying on the limited view panorama that current technologies utilize.

Multi-perspective is the name of the game with Street Slide and looking at the demonstration video, the difference between the old method and the new method is immediately apparent.

Check out this Street Slide video:

While the improved contextual viewpoints of Street Slide could be useful in any context, the real benefit is on the mobile side. MIT’s Technology Review spoke with the founder of EveryScape, a startup that captures panoramic imagery of buildings, who has already created a version of Street Slide that is compatible with the iPhone. According to EveryScape’s tests, Street Slide helped people find places on unfamiliar streets 17 seconds faster on average than on Google’s StreetView.

We look forward to seeing Microsoft’s full paper and presentation at SIGGRAPH, and hope that some of this technology makes its way into Bing Streetside soon.

What do you think of Microsoft’s latest take on street-level mapping?

More About: mapping, microsoft, street slide, streetview

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