Microsoft Press Release

Now this is strange though, despite having gone through a fierce battle with ODF and eventually having their standard, OOXML, ratified as a global standard as ISO/IEC 29500, why the turnaround now?

Quoting sniplets from their press release:

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF and will take part in the ISO/IEC working group being formed to work on ODF maintenance.

The company will also be an active participant in the ongoing standardization and maintenance activities for XPS and PDF. It will also continue to work with the IT community to promote interoperability between document file formats, including Open XML and ODF, as well as Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY XML), the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content.

Why now? Why create a standard and then go the other direction?

Lester & I just came back from Barcamp Singapore II, an event generously organized by the awesome people over at E27, PHP Usergroup as well as Garag3.

Andrew McGlinchey (Geo Product Manager for SE Asia, Google Singapore) started the Unconference by sharing with us the cool things developers have created using the Google Maps API as well as the new features that Google Maps are now sporting.

He also talked briefly on the whole Google Maplets API, and showed us this cool demo of a mash-up of two maplets which allows one to find the nearest hotels based on a street name/area and then calculate the distance between that hotel and any other landmark or position in the map.

Gerald Lim, Chief Technology Officer from Bak2u then proceeded on next, to talk about Mobile Security and why it is so important in today’s day and age.

We then broke into 2 breakout groups, one focusing on Mobile applications and the other on Webapps using Google Map’s API. We decided to attend the mobile application track as we felt that it was more interesting.

Watching all presentations by Widgeo.us, Tencube, MobileSorcery & Cinepura, really got us thinking about how can we push our company one step further. How can we differentiate from the already saturated hosting industry here.

We were really excited about Tencube & Cinepura. Tencube is basically a mobile security company, similar to the Bak2u guys, but we felt that Tencube have a really slick and aesthetically pleasing UI to their web application. Basically, Tencube installs a software on your mobile phone, which you can then control remotely online through their web application. Their service allows you to lock the phone, send out an alarm, backup your contacts, data and relevant information onto their web application and then re-downloads it to a new phone, as well as completely wipeout your phone in the event of theft.

Although there were many physical limitations to their software, like people just doing a hard-reset and having full access to the phone, we thought that the ability to store your phone contacts online and then sync it to another new phone (in the event that the lost phone is no longer recoverable), is something to lookout for.

Cinepura on the other hand is basically a simple web-based application that is optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows users to find out Cinema showtimes for the day as well as display IMDB ratings for the movie. So no longer do you have to manually look through the different films on IMDB just to grab the ratings. Everything is sorted by IMDB rating on Cinepura.

I don’t think many people know this, but we at FRRO, are also involved in web-development as well as web-design work. So if you guys have any web development work that needs to get done, drop us an e-mail. We’re available for hire and we do development mainly in PHP/mySQL.

We’d also like to hear comments from you on features or quirks that you think we can improve on or implement on FRRO.

Lets get in touch.