Hi all,

I share with you a great presentation made by Guy Kawasaki…

Link: http://www.guykawasaki.com/files/rules/Rules.pdf

Hi all,

I couldn’t wait for the nest Thursday to blog about the news that came out on a Portuguese newspaper “Jornal de Negócios” that I follow.

“Jornal de Negócios” announced that Microsoft will invest a tremendous capital in Portugal in such way that will be the biggest investment till now made in Portugal. But the good news is that the money will be invested directly by Microsoft. This means that Portugal will have a staff and infrastructures for something.

I don’t have any kind of inside information whatsoever but I bet that it has relationship with Internet or Yahoo nom acquisition. It was awesome if Microsoft builds a datacenter in Portugal or maybe a webteam for livemesh/live. And if it both…

Tick, tack, tick, tack… Thursday never comes… I anxious for next Thursday…

Hi all,

I didn’t do backups till now! What changed?

Not a long time ago, making backups was a task that I had to burn some CD/DVD or buy an external disk. In both cases I had to buy something and the true reliability wasn’t very good because I sooner or later will need the disk space or I’ll lose the track of by CD/DVD backups. If you think in a SMB (Small, Medium Business) you will not buy a robot like ADIC and Veritas software to do it. You will use tapes and some kind of less expensive backup software. Typically the backups were only made to servers and clients have to push and pull their files into a file server.

This architectural model has its benefices but it has some big disadvantages. One of these disadvantages is that the end user is the one that will choose if he will put the file locally or in the server. Ok, you can use for example Sync Center of Microsoft and if you are, it’s right, because if most of the work is made on ERPs, CRMs, Intranets (SharePoint), Intranet Apps, etc, there are lots of files that are in the chain of business but not on constrained to client-server architecture.  Another huge disadvantage is that if you really want to be certain about your data security you will need real Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and be willing to worry/pay for the infrastructures (co-allocation, outsourced or indoor) – it depend what tier that you chose to work with from your BCP and scalability issues.

Off course we continue to talk about SMB because if you want I can speak about Citrix and other systems that give to an organization a higher adaptability and some “bullet proof” systems.

So, I mentioned some disadvantages about “local” backups and I’ll give some reasons to have an indoor backup system. I think that they are quite obvious. It’s faster to recover the data and apps (depend of the tier); SLA (Service Level Agreement) is mostly at 99.99%; the security worries are mostly physical because typically you have all in tapes or in some kind of data storage equipment.

Back to track! I think I made my point of view and this post it’s not about “traditional business continuance or personal backup systems VS Cloud backup” it’s about Cloud Backup.

Read the rest of this entry »

Viva a todos,

No dia 20 de Maio, no Dia da Inovação na CulturGest a Microsoft Portugal lançou um novo programa de incentivo à inovação e ao empreendedorismo: Boost - Acelerador de Inovação.

O programa está bem desenhado e agrega alguns dos programas já existentes da Microsoft Portugal dando-lhe um ainda maior significado.

Programa Boost: Innovation Accelerator
Boost - Innovation Accelerator é um programa da Microsoft que visa tornar mais rápido o processo de criação de empresas de tecnologia inovadoras em Portugal. O Acelerador é constituído por quatro fases nas quais a Microsoft e os seus parceiros intervêm como promotores e catalizadores : Estímulo – Formação – Suporte - Promoção.
O Programa Boost abrange as iniciativas da Microsoft que potenciam a Economia de Software Nacional, tornando-a mais competitiva e com um maior potencial de exportação. Este posicionamento é decorrente do facto do programa ter como intenção a melhoria das condições para a criação de empresas no mercado nacional.

São 4 os macro objectivos da Microsoft para o primeiro ano de operação do Programa Boost:

• Recolher cerca de 100 projectos/ideias inovadoras com potencial empresarial, no domínio da tecnologia;
• Completar o ciclo de formação em gestão e empreendedorismo para cerca de 150 jovens de elevado potencial;
• Inclubar 20 produtos inovadores nos MIC – Microsoft Innovation Centers e estimular os seus criadores a formarem as suas próprias empresas;
• Criar pelo menos 10 novas empresas portuguesas na área de tecnologia.

Fica link para informações mais precisas:

http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/boost/default.mspx

Eu já faço parte do Boost sendo um Microsoft Student Partner. E tu… queres aproveitar o Boost???

Hi all,

Yesterday, in my last class it was question me about a new way to communicate to the media using press releases. I gave my opinion how a press release 2.0 should be and after I finish Alexandra Mariz told me that in a conference “Conversas Unicer” they show a formalization of a press release 2.0. I totally agree with the format and I really think that the “text, text” that tries to describe something it’s out of business or it should be. If we want to communicate efficiently we have to prove the concept we any means available like image, video, RIAs and sound.

Press Release 2.0 image:

I was invited by Alexandra to be there but unfortunately I wasn’t able of. Now I see that I lost a great event and if it occurs next year and obviously I’ invited I won’t miss it.

Dear all,

Some time I hear that Microsoft doesn’t do anything good or even that they are the devil on de IT world. Maybe that’s true if you see with the wrong eyes! Here in Portugal we used to say that “the worst blind is the one that doesn’t want to see”… I can speak about HPC for breast cancer, info exclusion, Microsoft internships, social responsibility, Bill Gates Foundation, etc…

Anyway, this was not the issue that brings me here to write! Microsoft Research (MRS) recently produced a video about what they do in MRS as well as MRS identity, purpose, directions and culture.

If you pay attention to the video you will see what’s coming out and some prototypes that are being developed. I’m very exciting about all!!!

So, let’s see the video:

Hi all,

Yesterday I was at Fernando Pessoa University to give a talk about “Creating Games with XNA 2.0”. The room was almost full and interactivity with the attendee was great. The talk went quite well because it was funny and I could pass the full message to the attendees. At the end the feedback of everyone was very good!!! Hopefully was the true one…

In my perspective I really liked UFP. They have excellent infrastructures and above all, amazing people. The environment it’s on a high education level that brings huge incomes for the students. I never had an attendee that was making my demo in parallel with me and asking questions about it!

Once again, thanks to Carlos Velasquez, to coordinator of the degree Prof. Nuno Ribeiro and to UFP Ombudsman Eng. Jose Vasconcelos for the call.

In conclusion I’m always available for UFP.

Viva a todos,

A ZON multimédia lançou o prémio ZON Criatividade em Multimédia dividido em três categorias: Aplicações, Conteúdos Multimédia e Curtas-Metragens.

O PRÉMIO!!!

O prémio será atribuído anualmente. Este ano terá um valor global de 200 000 Euros, distribuídos da seguinte forma:

• Prémio de 50 000 Euros para o primeiro classificado de cada uma das três categorias.
• Prémio adicional de 50 000 Euros para o Grande Prémio, escolhido entre os vencedores das três categorias.
• Será ainda atribuída uma Bolsa de Investigação, com estadia temporária, na Universidade do Texas em Austin, no âmbito do programa UTAustin-Portugal (Colab).

Os trabalhos devem ser criativos, inovadores e de preferência susceptíveis de implementação prática.

A participação no prémio é aberta ao público em geral (individualmente ou em equipa), mas está especialmente vocacionado para empreendedores, jovens ou não, que tenham ideias inovadoras e que pretendam uma oportunidade para as pôr em prática.

Fica o link e votos de uma excelente participação!!!

http://premio.zon.pt/

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) brings some cool stuff. One of my favorite is Webslices.

If you hadn’t heard, WebSlices are a new IE8 feature that let you subscirbe to content directly within a web page. You access them from your IE Favorites Bar, where you’ll be able to click on them and see real-time rich internet content.

Even wikipedia is in!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/webslices.mspx