SmileySteve's Blog

As I mentioned, I was really busy last week with the Windows Azure Incubation week held at Microsoft in Alpharetta.  The event was a week long event from Monday until Friday.

Windows Azure, a new cloud computing platform for storage, sql, and processing

The first major surprise that we learned was that the Microsoft people wanted us to use ASP.net coding and not use the offshore development team (Thank You Dmytro@  Soft Serve) for primary development.

The project that I worked on was Chris Stuckey’s FandomU, a social networking site focusing on conventions, fans, and vendors to extend the connections you make at the actual event.  Hopefully FandomU will be able to launch with the MomoCon Japanese Anime convention in March 2009.

Our front login page

The week was quite the experience. Microsoft brought in a handful of advisors and consultants to teach us about the Azure platform and (particularly for us) to use Asp.net technologies.  Jeremy Likness from Wintellect taught me the basic asp.net connections between the ASP and C#.

Here is the front page of our part of our prototype site, in the 4 days that we had to develop, we developed a few key features, registration, the beginnings to shopping, and the introduction to an idea of things like sharing images and videos on the cloud.

In addition to knowledge, Microsoft provided a great overall experience. We had nice co-working space with brand new “beta” style windows 7 computers at the MTC.  We had 3 meals provided 5 days of the week, and not just fast food pizza, but some pretty classy changes including Indian and Thai food.

Thursday, Microsoft spokesman Larry Gregory came and introduced us to all of the great features that Microsoft offers to entrepreneurs and startups. They have a lot of features that I’m sure will be great. We also did an interview regarding our progress that will be posted on Channel 9 – spoiler: I somewhat

Taking notes on one of the speakers teaching us about Azure products and the startup pitch process (Sanjay P)

embarrassingly spit Microsoft Marketing for the PHP community.

Speakers came in throughout the week, and on Friday, these speakers, and other startup voices in Atlanta sat as a judging panel for all of the startups. This was really valuable, as we all got a chance to practice our pitching abilities.

Because we sucked up more than a little to Larry Gregory by mentioning that we could expand from a conference like Momo Con to others like Dragon Con, or his interests like Farscape and Motorcyles, he presented us with our “incubation” week diploma.

Presented with an award

My group thought that the week would be more about coaching and less about technology, along with better planning for working with the offshore team as opposed  to us needing to be incredibly familiar with Microsoft products. It was slightly awkward to find that only 3 of 7 companies there had only just reached an idea and planning it out.

I’ll post later about some of the teams that I met.

I’ve really enjoyed the recent helium experiments that people are doing, whether it is for upper atmosphere  photography or just a publicity stunt.  In combination with watching Jame’s May’s ig Ideas (from the BBC) I started thinking about all of that force that is relatively being exerted for a balloon to fly that high – in effect, for upper atmosphere testing – 1lb for 104km.

And it got me thinking about wave energy as well, because, a BUOY is going to have an even greater buoyancy differential in water.

A Floating Buoy would rise right out of water

But I couldn’t figure out how to harness this energy, something was/is missing. We have this awesome lifting force (in the deep sea) that we can only use once to create energy (and it uses more energy to be able to repeat the process.)

James May”s Big ideas do cover the kite idea of wind power generation where one kite flies high to generate power until you make an adjustment and have it sink down until the next Kite flies and generates all of the electricity it needs.

So what I’ve been trying to figure out for days is if it is at all possible in some way to generate power from this contained force – which is the problem, by containing the forces you no longer have any WORK actually being done. In fact, the closest I came to an idea was that the spring would change temperatures as it expands or contracts in a newtonmeter – which would still only be the work of the spring stretching.

Seems like a linear motor buoy is still the best option to use these ideas to generate electricity, because both the seas and the atmosphere have currents and so a sort of linear action will occur.

I had thought that the easy reason why all of this thinking was just a perpetual motion dream because undoubtedly a balloon bladder can’t contain a tiny gas element forever. Forward on though, because at least I’m in the ideation mood.

I still want to make a linear prototype buoy for a lake… because I know a lot of people who like lakes, like making wakes, or like wakes to be dissipated. If we can take all of the waste energy from boat’s excess wakes, then it could power a boat lift? or the lighting? or maybe, given enough charging time, an electric boat. Why not add the additional balloon at the side posts too?

white paper on the subject for more science.