September 9, 2009

Joining Microsoft

I am thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the Seadragon team at Microsoft Live Labs as a research intern. Ever since I first watched Blaise Agüera y Arcas present Seadragon & Photosynth at TED, I knew the Seadragon team was at the cutting edge of changing the way we will interact with vast amounts of visual information in the future.

All Good Things Come To An End

I’ve had a blast and learned a lot during my internship at Seadragon. More importantly, I was fortunate enough to meet and spend time with many great people whom I dearly miss now.

The internship ended at the beginning of January and I’ve returned to Switzerland in February.

Getting the chance to be a part of this group of extremely visionary & talented people is a feeling I cannot describe. I am looking forward to finally meet some of the people I’ve had contact with over the last months in person, among them Ian, Aseem, Ben, Kevin, Lutz, James, Bill, Jay, and all those I haven’t got to know so far.

They are the brilliant minds behind products & projects such as Silverlight Deep Zoom, Seadragon Ajax, Seadragon Mobile, Seadragon.com, Photosynth, WMP HD Photo JPEG XR, Infinite Canvas, Gimme Shiny! and PSP Player.

Personally I see working at Microsoft as a great opportunity to work on all the things I’m passionate about and potentially reach millions of people around the world.

Stay tuned as I’ll share my stories about settling down in the Seattle area and hopefully a bit about the stuff I’ll be working on!

Yours,
Daniel

P.S. OpenZoom

As of next week active development of the OpenZoom SDK on my part will be put on hold for the duration of my internship. I consider the features and components already included (0.4.2.1 release) fairly stable and as many people have shown it’s very well suited to be used in real-world projects. Apart from that, I’ll still try my best to answer questions and help out on the OpenZoom community whenever possible.

I’d like to point that I made sure that the status of the OpenZoom project itself is not in any way affected by this announcement. It’s still open source and free. Actually, I’d like to encourage other people to fork it and continue where I left off.