It’s been a long time coming, but it looks as if we may have NFC payments on our phones. I’ve had to do quite a bit of research, but Windows 8 phones are enabled to do NFC payments (I recently purchased one of the new Nokia 1020 phones, but even the HTC 8x has NFC as well, too bad for Apple users). According the this page, http://www.windowsphone.com... ......

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Normally April 1st is filled full of practical jokes and funny stuff with Google being the most notorious about the scams they try to pull. This year Google tried to trick us into believing a new product called Google Nose. I love when they say “Our mobile aroma indexing program.” It makes it sound all official like. Oddly though, my renewal as a Microsoft ......

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Pictures - 2013 Microsoft Global MVP Summit VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL Back in February, I had the honor to attend Microsoft’s annual Summit for MVP award winners. As an award winner we get invited to visit the Redmond campus (and satellite offices around Seattle) for packed week full of good information, the direction that Microsoft is taking and ......

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It’s always my favorite time of the year! Looking forward to bringing my wife to the largest events for Microsoft MVP Award winners. Each year is a plethora of knowledge and getting to know who the best and brightest are in the Microsoft community. In some small way I’m hoping my wife will be excited to see this world, but she admit’s she’s a tad nervous. ......

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For most of us, springtime is exciting. The warm weather and the sun puts us in a better mood and makes us want to venture out into the world. But as I am so familiar with, many people out there reach a critical mass and enter an almost depressive state during springtime. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had many (over 5) close friends reach out about ......

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As most of you know, Microsoft gives MVP awardees access to some great benefits. I’ll admit, this is the first time I’ve used it to have access to something fun and non-work related. While I only had the opportunity to play it twice (it’s just hard to find the time to play games), the new Age of Empires Online game is quite interesting. I was able to ......

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http://www.microsoft.com/vi... Finally, I can blog about this interesting piece of technology from Microsoft. For beginner to intermediate developers (1-4 years), this piece of technology will WOW you. I’ll admit, how can you not be impressed by pointing to a database, saying “alakazam”, click a couple of buttons, and blammo, ......

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http://www.libraryjournal.c... In the library world, OCLC controls the flow of information. A non-profit organization, it is the center hub for libraries all over the world to share information and loan books to each other. Think of it as a tollway for books. When a Marc / metadata record ......

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As many of you know, I have a passion for music. And after being gone 3 weeks, it’s nice to be home and discover the new music that has hit the scene over the past few weeks. One song in particular struck a cord with me and in a matter of a few weeks while I was gone, it went from being unheard of to being ranked number 3. So the chorus of the song ......

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I made a mental note from earlier in the year. Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload. From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors. You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number). Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services ......

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