MS Salesforce Automation Meets PWC Tickertape

Text2Paper - It looks like a timeclock from the movie "Brazil," but one gizmo is actually a mobile phone calendaring accessory created by Microsoft researchers in Cambridge, England. Image Credit: DEAN RUTZ / SEATTLE TIMES

MS Salesforce Automation Meets PWC Tickertape

It's weird, a throwback to a time where typed communications were the standard.

The Dow Jones Index stock trades were once communicated over a wire to a machine that printed out each transaction within minutes of the transaction happening.

This week, Microsoft held a "TechFest" where they unveiled projects that some of the engineers of the company showed off what they had been working on.

Excerpts from the Seattle Times -

Touring Microsoft's TechFest
Posted by Brier Dudley - The Seattle Times - 3-6-2007, 05:22 PM

Here are a few of the demonstrations I saw today at TechFest, the annual "science fair" being held this week by Microsoft's advanced research group.

The company gave press and bloggers an early peek at some of the exhibits before the full show opens up to employees Wednesday and Thursday. Microsoft also posted Webcasts of presentations and demos here.

Some of the projects are being shown for the first time at the event, and the researchers generally don't know if their work will ever end up in an actual product. Some could even end up in products made by other companies, since Microsoft is now licensing the research group's intellectual property.
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Text2Paper, the device receives and prints short SMS messages sent from phones onto clear stickers. The labels can then be pasted onto an adjacent paper calendar, on the appropriate day. The idea is that family members could send appointments, shopping lists and other info to this system, which would most likely be mounted in a kitchen. Each printout also has a bar code that can be read by camera phones, so you can take a picture of an appointment with your phone and have it automatically synced with the device's calendar.
Reference Here>>

Technology solutions are were you can find them ... even when it makes everything old, new again.