[kGen] Tour: Microsoft meeting report...

[Daniel Harris <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Over the next month I'll send a few reports of happenings on the US tour...

On Tuesday Oct 16 I met with around 20 Microsoft employees at their HQ in Redmond spanning two two hour presentation and discussion sessions. We had legal, technical and creatives represented. The meetings were set up by Rich Lappenbusch, Director, Edge Computing Network. It was made very clear to all concerned that I was not under NDA and so everything we discussed was for public consumption...

- Getting the use of the Microsoft logo is a real tough one so let's not go there. Part of the reason is that Microsoft is really a collection of around 100 groups ('properties') and so getting sign off is a long and arduous task.

- Microsoft see their position to be more of referrer and matchmaker than a direct participant in Kendra: recommending certain clients/suppliers to get involved in the project. However, to do this they would need to see in place a clear anti-trust statement and rules for how intellectual property rights are handled. This is obviously the case for most corporates wanting to be involved in some way or other.

- From discussions, it became clear that the real benefit of Kendra Initiative existing, amongst the current plethora of standards bodies and industry groups, is the idea of providing a safe space for playing with interoperability toys to explore how an open marketplace could work. The collaborative design environment of the trials provide a safe sand-box where competitors and peers, from any link in the content value chain, can experiment with new ways of working to enhance and streamline cross-vendor processes.

- Microsoft has a bunch of tools and services that they would want to see play a part in Kendra's vision of an open marketplace for digital media. We had to clarify, as one would expect, that all tools can play in this space: be the code licensed as open or closed source.

- Obviously, clarifying Kendra's message and positioning and better presentation thereof - including the website - were high on the list of todos too.

- One suggestion came up that perhaps Microsoft could produce a light weight content tracking service/tool that would be less onerous than their current heavy weight DRM offering. This sounds really cool and very much in line with our thinking behind Kendra Signposts - which we'll be developing as part of the 'almost funded' P2P-Next project.

All in all this has proved to be a most valuable and encouraging few days and I look forward to the future with Microsoft. Big thanks to Rich Lappenbusch for setting this all up.

Next stop San Francisco where I'll be visiting Lucas Films amongst others...

If you have comments or questions then please reply to the list and share 'em - we are stronger together...

Cheers Daniel