The week in tech: Ushering in change

Change can only be a good thing. blur Group supports it in leading businesses while we try to make our own, and this week has most definitely been good for new approaches. Sony and Microsoft have both surprised, the former trying something out that sounds very much impossible with current technology, and the latter bringing back on old idea with a brand new lease of life. A smaller start-up brings with it equally impressive ideas for a new presentation software

Presenting companies in a new light

The Sociable waxes lyrical this week on Presentation.io, a beautiful piece of software that allows audiences of a lecture to run a ‘second screen’ of a presentation on tablet, smartphone, laptop etc. If enabled, community commenting is also possible in real time. Like Google Docs, then, except that the presentation slides move in sync across lecturer and audience screens – you can have the public come along for the ride, then, and that doubles up for those watching on webinars. A fresh new approach to the traditional route of presentation can only be a good thing.

Quite the challenge for Sony 4K

The astonishing details of Sony’s Playstation PS4 4K video service are emerging, and right now something’s not adding up. 100GB videos? Hmmmmm. We’re not quite sure how that’ll work with conventional broadband, even if as they say a new form of compression will be helping things. We certainly won’t argue with the astonishing up in quality that this will bring, we just can’t for the life of us understand how it will work.

Microsoft Azure is back

Amazon might actually have some cloud competition at long last. Having pretty much sewn up the market, it’s been quite the pleasant surprise to see Microsoft bringing back Azure with a new Community Portal that brings with third-party user-created source applications and language runtimes. It’s still nowhere near as functional as readwrite is quick to point out, but does it suggest that Microsoft is gearing up to bring the fight to Amazon properly? We’d love to see a real competition here.