A Media and Entertainment Group

Showcase: A screen designed for an Airline Company.

Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that integrates multimedia, graphics, animation and interactivity into a single runtime environment. It is compatible with multiple web browsers used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices like Windows Phone 7 and Symbian phones are also supported.

Microsoft Silverlight powers engaging, interactive user experiences wherever the web works. It’s a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and business applications for the Web, desktop, and mobile devices. Silverlight is a free plug-in powered by the .NET framework that is compatible across multiple browsers, devices and operating systems to bring a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works. With support for advanced data integration, multithreading, HD video using IIS Smooth Streaming, and built in content protection.

Why Use Silverlight?

• Synchronize the workflow between designers and developers

• Create applications and add interactivity without writing code

• Deliver uniquely styled and branded applications across many screens

• Use SketchFlow to quickly experiment with layout, flow, and transitions, making it easy to create and iterate on prototypes

Compelling Experiences with Silverlight

• Engage users longer and make the most of your content with interactive features and high-definition streaming video delivered through live and on-demand IIS Smooth Streaming.

• Build user “buzz” and differentiate yourself with innovative capabilities, such as Deep Zoom and Pivot, which push the boundaries of interactivity and data visualization, and provide new ways to present your brand.

• Silverlight enables Web-based applications to deliver the business functionality users demand with a modern, efficient UI while securely interacting with desktop files, devices, data and applications such as Microsoft Office.

• Create rich Web-based applications that quickly integrate with your existing back-end systems. Easily enhance existing Web and SharePoint sites by incrementally adding Silverlight components.

Designing for Silverlight

Developers and Designers can create user experiences using the innovative Expression Studio design environment. Built from the ground up, Expression Studio helps designers and developers to produce interactive Silverlight websites and rich media assets efficiently. Designers can design a broad range of Web sites and applications with an extensive set of rich media content types, from vector/bitmap graphics, text, video and audio to key frame-based animation and effects plus breakthrough Silverlight features like DeepZoom, Pivot and Smooth Streaming.

Overview

Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation, and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations.

Silverlight supports Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MPEG Layer III (MP3) media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, the Windows Media Player ActiveX control or Windows Media browser plug-ins. Silverlight makes it possible to dynamically load Extensible Markup Language (XML) content that can be manipulated through a Document Object Model (DOM) interface, a technique that is consistent with conventional Ajax techniques. Silverlight exposes a Downloader object which can be used to download content, like scripts, media assets or other data, as may be required by the application.

Silverlight 4

Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful features to business application developers, bringing innovative platform capabilities to browser-based experiences. Silverlight provides an ideal platform for developing and deploying modern business applications for both internal and end-user applications.

Top Silverlight Features

IIS Smooth Streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming enables you to deliver high definition streams that play back smoothly on any device running Silverlight.

Out of Browser

Silverlight offers a new set of features for building light-weight, sandboxed companion experiences for the Web that run on the desktop. It enables the application to be placed in a restricted store on the user’s machine; and then provide a link directly to it from the user’s desktop or start menu. This is all enabled within Silverlight without any additional download of runtime or the need to write applications in a different way. An application can now be easily found on the user’s desktop or start menu, and launched with a single click.

SketchFlow

SketchFlow, part of Expression Studio Ultimate, revolutionizes the speed and efficiency with which you can demonstrate a vision for an application. SketchFlow provides an informal and quick way to explore, iterate and prototype user interface scenarios allowing you to evolve your concepts from a series of rough ideas into a living breathing prototype that can be made as real as a particular client or project demands.

Deep Zoom

Silverlight Deep Zoom is the fastest, smoothest, zooming technology on the Web, bringing the highest resolution images and frame rates with the lowest load times to users. Deep Zoom also enables the display of thousands of items simultaneously, giving designers and developers new opportunities to create innovative navigation paradigms for both applications and the Web.

By optimizing the way images are stored and intelligently downloading only the pieces of information needed to fill the screen, Deep Zoom removes technical barriers and enables the delivery of engaging customer and content-centric experiences.

PivotViewer

PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. By visualizing thousands of related items at once, users can see trends and patterns that would be hidden when looking at one item at a time.

New Controls

Silverlight is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The controls come with eleven professional designed themes and the source code can be modified/recompiled or utilized as-is. The professional themes that make your applications stand out and improve the overall look-and-feel of your Silverlight UI are:

Bubble Creme, Bureau Black, Bureau Blue, Expression Dark, Expression Light, Rainier Purple, Rainier Orange, Shiny Blue, Shiny Red, Twilight Blue and Whistler Blue.

Media Format Extensibility

With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.

Perspective 3D Graphics

Silverlight allows developers and designers to apply content to a 3D plane. Users can rotate or scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a queue in 3D and transitions.

Skinning and Styling

Silverlight makes it easy to create graphics and then use them to customize controls. Silverlight provides XAML based templates for each control that allow designers to reach inside the control and change the layout or look of each part of the control without rewriting any code. In addition, controls can be themed by applying a style.

Silverlight 4 support for Platforms and Browsers

Silverlight is supported by all major browsers on both Mac OS X and Windows, and with Moonlight on Linux as well. Silverlight 4 ensures consistent experience on browsers including Internet Explorer 6, 7 8, Firefox 2 and 3, Safari 3 and 4, and Google Chrome.

Features of Silverlight for Windows Phone 7

Silverlight for Windows Phone will support core Silverlight features while optimizing for capabilities specific to the Windows Phone 7. Feature highlights include the following:

• Hardware-accelerated video with multi-codec digital rights management (DRM) and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming support

• Vector and bitmap graphics with perspective 3-D

• Multi-touch support with Accelerometer, an intuitive control that responds to motion

• Deep Zoom support for rich reading experiences

• Camera and microphone support

Microsoft Silverlight Toolkit

The Silverlight Toolkit adds new functionality for designers, developers, and the community to provide an efficient way to help shape product development. It includes full open source code, samples, documentation, and design-time support for controls focusing on both Silverlight 4 as well as the Windows Phone.

WCF RIA Services

WCF RIA Services is a new part of the .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 frameworks that lets you quickly build N-Tier Silverlight client applications without needing to focus on the service plumbing to get data into and out of your client application from back-end services, logic and data access.

Microsoft WCF RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Screen Designs

Web 3.0: GenNext of the Internet

The Web is entering a new phase of evolution.

Web 1.0 – The Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites.

Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era. Web 2.0 focuses on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. While the innovations and practices of Web 2.0 will continue to develop, they are not the final step in the evolution of the Web.

Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

The Next Generation Web: Search Context for Online Information

What Is the Difference between Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) and Web 2.0? Web 3.0 is an extension of Web 2.0. Web 3.0 will be a third generation web to take the center stage approximately between 2010 and 2020. In the Web 2.0 universe, searching Google for a specific name will yield a plethora of unrelated hits. Web 3.0 solves this problem by providing context to searching for online information.

Intelligent Web: Web 2.0 is about social networking and mass collaboration with the blurring of lines between content creator and user whereas Web 3.0 is based on “intelligent” web applications using:

• Natural language processing: It can understand spoken language

• Self Learning programs/browser or Machine-based learning and reasoning.

• Intelligent applications: To understand user search habits

The goal is to tailor online searching and requests specifically to users’ profiles, preferences and needs. Although the intelligent web sounds similar to artificial intelligence, it’s not quite the same.

Openness: Web 3.0 is about openness. By “opening” API’s, protocols, data formats, open-source software platforms and open data, you open up possibilities for creating new tools. Although unlike openness can result in identity theft, Web 3.0 attempts to remedy this through:

• Open Identity (OpenID): An open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner and this protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. OpenID authentication is now used and provided by several large websites. Providers include Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo!

• Open Reputation: This will be used for smarter searching of web sites, blogs, events, products, companies and other individuals. This can be also based on user's feedback through appropriate feedback channels. In general reputations systems collect, distribute, and may aggregate feedback about a principal's past behaviour. The availability of online reputation feedback systems and the use of data extraction mechanisms will eventually lead to the wide availability of reputation information about users (human, devices etc.) on the Internet.

• The ability to roam with Portable Device and Personal Data, for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another.

Interoperability: By opening up access to information, Web 3.0 applications can run on any device, computer, or mobile phone. Applications can be very fast and customizable. Unlike Web 2.0, where programs such as Facebook and MySpace exist in separate silos, Web 3.0 allows users to roam freely from database to database, program to program.

A Global Database: Conceptually, Web 3.0 should be viewed as one large database. Dubbed "The Data Web", Web 3.0 uses structured data records published to the Web in reusable and remote-queriable formats. XML technologies such as RDF Schema, OWL, SPARQL will make this possible by allowing information to be read across different programs across the web.

Focus on Individual: Web 3.0 focuses on individual surfer’s information needs. Information is linked to user rather than user being linked to information. Moreover, user can roam around from one program to another program, one database to another database for more relevant information. They can also participate in global social networking and also stay linked to niche information.

3D Web & Beyond: Web 3.0 will use a three dimensional model and transform it into a series of 3D spaces. Services such as Second Life and the use of personalized avatars will be a common feature of the 3D web. Web 3.0 will extend beyond into the physical; imagine a Web connected to everything not only your cell phone but your car, microwave and clothes, thus truly making for an integrated experience.

Control of Information: Where Web 3.0 is about control of information, Web 2.0 is about information overload. The most obvious example is in the sheer explosion of programs and passwords on the Web which claim to encourage networking and socialization. Web 3.0 attempts to bring order and allow users to be more accurate in searching and finding precisely what they want.

Semantic Web versus Web 3.0: What is most confusing is the difference between the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 – both are conceptual entities. However, rather than competing spaces they should be viewed as complementary. By adding the semantic web to Web 2.0, we move conceptually closer to Web 3.0. The underlying technologies of the Semantic Web, which enrich content and the intelligence of the social web, pulls in user profiles and identities, and must be combined for Web 3.0 to work.

An excellent example of a “semantic web” based application is Twine. Twine is the flagship product of Radar Networks, a semantic-focussed start-up and has been acquired by Evri, a company using semantic technology to deliver real-time search results around news.

Twine provides a smarter way for people to leverage and contribute to the combined brainpower of their relationships. It is basically knowledge networking. It's the next evolution of collective intelligence on the Web. Unlike social networking and community tools, Twine is not just about who you know, it's about what you know. Twine is the ultimate tool for gathering and sharing knowledge on the Web. It automatically organizes information, learns about users’ specific interests and makes recommendations. The more users use Twine, the better the service gets to know its users and the more useful it becomes. Twine is an example of Web 3.0 at work, combining the social elements of Web 2.0 with user-specific Semantic Web tools.

The Semantic Web will be tagged using Resource Description Framework (RDF) and ontologized with Web Ontology Language (OWL) so that pages and content will be meaningful. The newly added meaning will make it possible for other computers to use the content intelligently: by giving you more-useful and context-aware search results. Twine extends this to all of your information--email, sites visited, feeds--and will automatically generate the tags to "semantify" the data.

Each user of the hosted Twine service will have his own "twine," which analyzes and stores all the collected metadata for all of his information. Twine will offer several ways to enter content into its uber index of all your information--via a Web button, by importing from documents, receiving it from collaborators, or sending email to your twine. Connecting your twine to other users' will result in a network effect benefit to knowledge management.

Conclusion: Web 3.0 will enable a device to understand human actions and perform intelligent tasks like gathering relevant, measurable and specific information useful for the users. All this is expected from Web 3.0 by the year 2015. Web 3.0 will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents. Its primary goal is to organize, share and discover information within likeminded Internet users.