The Townsend Report

Michelle Greenwald of Forbes has recently written about Microsoft using Kinect technology to springboard into exciting new business areas: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michellegreenwald/2014/08/18/how-microsoft-has-leveraged-xbox-kinects-technology-into-brilliant-new-business-areas/ She highlights ten new Kinect applications, ranging from airplane and automobile visualization to physical therapy and clothing retail.  Two of these were developed by InfoStrat for its clients -- both relating to education.  The Kinect media wall at Liberty University engages visitors with interactions.  Kaplan Early Learning Company builds interactive games using the latest technology including motion sensing and touch. 

To put it simply, Azure is the Microsoft cloud.  Microsoft hosts an Internet-scale computing and services platform in data centers around the world.  Azure is flexible and hosts not only Microsoft servers and products, but the full range of modern computing capabilities. Several scenarios are appropriate for deployment in Azure: 1. Extend your data center -- if you run out of space, racks, computers or other infrastructure, you can start up Azure virtual servers for the same purposes you would deploy servers at your data center.  Azure servers can be set up in minutes rather than waiting days or weeks for physical hardware.  You could use these servers for development, test, staging or production servers.  You can run Windows Servers, Oracle, SAP, Hadoop and other servers. 2. SharePoint on Azure -- If you want more flexibility and power than you can get on shared hosting of SharePoint, you can host your SharePoint documents and data in Azure.  Migration is easy and you can interope

The Age of Empires series of games is a fun way to learn about resource allocation and strategy.  It imparts some lessons that are quite useful in business.  Should you build capacity now for future demand or maximize profit in the short run?  Hire more sales people or train your staff to be more productive.  Gaming is a great way to see how your choices play out, and strategy games help you understand trade-offs and the importance of fast decisions.