Word: milan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Italian fashion designer Gianfranco Ferre, 62, died Sunday after suffering a brain hemorrhage on Friday in Milan. He was an architect both in his heart and in his work. His flare for structure and volume along with his love of travel, particularly to Asia, defined his work throughout his career...
...were from two very different companies, Apple and Microsoft, and oddly enough, they were in many ways demos of the same product. One is a gimme: the iPhone, Apple's brilliant deconstruction of the common cell phone, due out June 29. The other is a product mysteriously code-named Milan, from a new branch of Microsoft called, not much less mysteriously, surface computing. What the two have in common is a very advanced touch screen...
Imagine an iPhone the size of a coffee table, and you'll have some idea of what Microsoft has been working on for the past five years. Milan is, in fact, a table, with a large touch screen for a tabletop; the format will remind the nostalgic among you of the old cocktail-style arcade games. Like the iPhone, Milan's screen can accommodate multiple touches at once. My first reaction was that I was looking at a patent death match in the making, but the underlying mechanisms turn out to be very different: Milan uses a system of infrared...
...Milan looks like a large, expensive toy--or maybe a dedicated virtual finger-painting workstation--but Microsoft and its partners have been very shrewd about coming up with practical applications. For example, place a Bluetooth-enabled digital camera on the tabletop. Milan recognizes the camera, wirelessly sucks out your photos and displays them on the tabletop in a stack. Anybody sitting around the table can then pass the photos around and even stretch and shrink them, iPhone-style. Or imagine the Milan as a restaurant table: diners sort through a tabletop menu, dragging and dropping appetizers and entrées, swapping...
...layout of every board game ever made. "I think we're just scratching the surface," says Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, realizing a second too late that he's making a pun. "If you just go through any business, you can find applications." Milan will start showing up in public this fall; the first units will be information kiosks in the Harrah's family of casinos...