The campus is located in Reading, Berkshire in the south-east of England it consists of five huge office blocks set in extensive gardens with a lake and nature trail.  This is lovely actually and the first place I headed for even before going to main reception.  There is all manner of wildlife including some ducks that are clearly used to getting scraps of people’s lunch.

The gardens are also home to a summer house with free tea and coffee making facilities, juice and cola.  This is a nice touch and there are free drinks all over the Microsoft campus along with bowls of fruit scattered around.

The five office buildings, which house around 1,800 staff are enormous and quite intimidating too in military grey.  Main reception which is where I was headed is in building 2, but there are other receptions in different buildings for specific areas such as the customer centre.  All of this though contributes to a very relaxed feeling and a very comfortable atmosphere in the offices themselves, that was very welcome.

I had several meetings, first with Ian Moulster, Product Manager on the Windows team and then lunch with Simon May an IT Pro Evangelist among other people.  I’ll talk about some of the specific topics we discussed in part two of this write-up and show some of the technology I got to play with.

As for lunch, I ought to point out for anyone who’s ever been to Ikea that the Microsoft canteen made me feel I was back in the Swedish superstore, though there were no meatballs.  They did have plenty of apples but when I asked about Penguin biscuits they admitted it’s not something they ever had available… hmm.

There are always lots of events going on at Microsoft’s UK headquarters and this day was no exception with the UK finals of the Imagine Cup, a worldwide student technology competition that we stopped in on while they were chilling out to a dance game on the Kinect.

It’s clear that this certainly won’t be my first visit here as there are plenty of other people I’m about to be introduced too so I’ll probably be back in Reading long before the end of the summer.  I have to say that Microsoft’s UK campus is a genuinely friendly place to be.  Everyone seems incredibly happy and they made me feel very welcome.

All told I spent a good portion of the day there in various meetings and on a tour.  I’ll talk about this tour, about the meetings I had and more in part two of this write up on our sister site Windows7News.

I’ll be meeting with the Windows and the Windows Phone teams and touring their “Technology Centre” with all their cutting-edge prototypes, which I’m certain will be extremely interesting, and will take far longer for me to get round than the time they’ve got pencilled in for it!

I thought it only fair and reasonable to throw the doors open to you, the fantastic readers at gHacks to get out there any and all questions you’d like me to ask when I’m there. You might want to know about legacy support, Windows 8, Windows Phone sales projections or the future of Kinect. I’ll also be taking my camera to document all the cool stuff I expect to find (and will hopefully get to play with) in the technology centre.

So feel free to submit all your questions below in the comments, I’ll be subscribing and will keep them all safe in my email. No question is too silly, believe me I’ll a fair few myself, and I’ll try and get any many in as I can during my meetings there or afterwards by email.

I’ll also be tweeting live from Microsoft on the experience and what I see and find out.  You can follow these tweets live on Wednesday 20th April from 11am (UK BST), 3am (PST) by following me here.

That’s where Topicmarks can aid you. The service is currently in beta and free, but the developers plan to add a point system later on where everyone gets a few free points they can use to create text summaries.

Topicmarks can process documents that you upload from your computer, text that you paste directly in the interface or website addresses that it then parses automatically. You need to create an account before you can access the information, but the creation is fast (you only need to enter an email address, temporary email services work).

The service sends you an email whenever it has finished processing a text that you have added to your account. During the processing it will show you how much time you can save in reading, understanding and memorizing the text. The figures appear to be a bit far of, considering that the service estimates that you can read and memorize Shakespear’s Hamlet in less than 5 hours.

Topicmarks displays an overview for each processed text, that displays some of the important facts, a summary and keywords. Each of those items plus a word index are accessible via tabs in the main interface.

How reliable are the information provided by Topicmarks? That depends largely on the analyzed text. The facts and overview work best on factual texts like Wikipedia’s information about Saturn. The facts and summary of the Hamlet text on the other hand were not usable at all. That does not necessarily mean that it was not useful to process the Hamlet text, considering that you get a word index and keywords that you can explore.

The index lists the most prominent words and phrases of the text. A slider at the top can be used to increase or decrease the coverage. This can be very handy to find all occurrences of Horatio, the queen or Hamlet in the play. Each entry is linked to the facts section and the full paragraph of the text.

That’s in my opinion the biggest strength of Topicmarks. The overview and facts are nice on their own if the service manages to get them right. But the index is useful despite that, even if the facts and summary do not make sense at all.

Topicmarks users can install a bookmarklet in their web browser to send text that they encounter on the web to the service. Text can also be imported from Evernote, or send by email to Topicmarks.

You can head over to the Topicmarks website if you would like to test the service. A similar service that is only displaying page summaries is WikiSeer Keynotes for the Firefox web browser or the web service Great Summary.

That’s where the Firefox add-on WikiSeer Keynote helps the reader. The add-on basically creates a summary of the text on a given web page, and displays it to the reader. The developers claim that the text gets reduced by up to 99%, which is a lot. A more realistic figure is probably 75%, which still saves a lot of time, if the quality of the summary is high enough.

keynotes

The add-on offers two operation modes. In the first mode, the user needs to right-click the icon in the status bar and select view page keynotes from the menu to generate a summary of the current page.

The summary is displayed in a popup overlay that disappears if the user clicks outside of the popup area. The summary contains various options to interact, including adding a rating, leaving a comment and sharing it by email, Twitter or Facebook.

The second option can be enabled by left-clicking on the status bar icon. This enables link mode, which can then generate summaries of links on that page as well. Just hovering over a link displays a summary of the linked page on the active page, so that it is not necessary to follow the link to read that page’s contents.

The add-on offers a history that can be accessed from the right-click context menu as well. The history displays the most recent keynotes that have been created by the add-on.

About the quality; That largely depends on the page’s contents. It ranges from being a solid summary to a summary that is hard to read and not really helpful at all. There is no option to increase the amount of words used in the summary, which is something that the developer’s should consider adding, to improve the quality of the summary.

WikiSeer Keynotes is available for the Firefox web browser.

Update: WikiSeer Keynotes has been removed from the Firefox add-on repository by its developer. I’m not aware of any add-on alternatives. A solid online service is Topicmarks which can summarize documents.

Readability is a bookmarklet that aids the Internet user in improving the online reading experience. We have discussed other options before like the Tidyread add-on for the Firefox web browser or Washer which turns colors into grayscale for better readability.

Readability is a little bit different as it offers some choices during the creation of the bookmarklet. The reader can select an individual style (newspaper, ebook, novel and terminal), size (small, medium, large and extra-large) and margin (narrow, medium, wide and extra-wide) to improve online reading. The bookmarklet will use the parameters that the user selects during configuration.

But Readability will not only change the text that is displayed on the website; It will also remove all the clutter – and by all we mean everything from advertisement, sidebars and comments – from the page so that only the title, images and text remains. Below is a screenshot of the original article HP Photosmart Premium All in one of Otakugadgets.com and the same article after having used the Readability bookmarklet with the ebook, medium, medium settings.

You can configure and bookmark the Readability bookmarklet (via Shellcity) to improve online reading at the developer’s website.

LibraryThing, a great online book catalog essentially, helps you a lot because it allows you to manage your bookshelf virtually, but also to give and get recommendations and a whole lot of other info. LibraryThing of course knows all the default things about each book, writer, title, ISBN, publishing info and so on, but it ads  an extra layer by providing social information.

People can review a book, tag it, and even have conversations about it, making book choosing much more productive. Actually this time, you may not spend less time, since this is such an absorbing experience, but at least you will choose a good book every time.

LibraryThink also supports group creation, private and non-private groups, bookstore info with GoogleMaps integration and a load more. I’ll be cataloging my book collection soon, and I hope to find the most awesome books, interacting and sharing my knowledge. I think I’m going to spend a lot more time here than I thought…

It’s a simple book stand that has an easy to use mechanism for turning the pages. You still need to do this yourself, so this is not yet perfect, but it is much simpler than lifting the laptop, turning the page (adding half a pound of grease to the book), carefully positioning the laptop back and resuming the lovely meal.

The handy tool is small enough to put in your pocket (although you will look a bit weird) and is sturdy enough to hold most books. It is available through Cool Tools for a quite attractive $15. I really am thinking of placing an order, if someone has used one of these please do share your thoughts. (Found through Lifehacker)