Having just recently released Speed Launch, an application launcher for Windows, the Office Labs guys are at it again. This time, they’re releasing pptPlex, a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that provides zooming capabilities. With pptPlex installed, you can present your slides as a tour through a zoomable canvas – sort of like Silverlight’s Deep Zoom – instead of a linear deck. You may remember seeing a similar technology demoed by Bill Gates at this year’s Microsoft CEO Summit, but pptPlex is really just a take-off on that technology, which was called Plex. It’s not the same prototype as Plex.

First we get the Cooliris plugin for PowerPoint and now this? Wow, looks like boring slideshows may be a thing of the past.

pptPlex only works with Office PowerPoint 2007 and is available for download here. 

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This summer, Microsoft Researcher Desney Tan led a team that created a Facebook app called Collabio to investigate a new way of applying meta-tags to people – by using the power of crowdsourcing. In the game, friends label each other with descriptive tags that can include anything from physical or personality descriptions (curly-haired, organized, smart) to geographic locations to professional titles and more. When playing the game, you see a blanked-out tag cloud for a friend. By guessing which tags have been applied, you get points. Two or more people have to agree on a tag in order for you to receive those points.

While it’s fun for friends to play Collabio and see how they perceive each other, the researchers are more interested in how the knowledge contained in social networks can be tapped into and utilized for applications like personalization, expert matching, and so on. They plan to analyze the patterns revealed by this data to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of using games like Collabio to harness that knowledge. Using games to gather data can make social networks more of a useful and productive tool while still appearing to be a just be a place for simple, fun activities.

You can learn more about this project and their findings at http://research.microsoft.com/cue/collabio. To play Collabio on Facebook, go here: http://apps.facebook.com/collabio

The IE team recently announced the availability of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, the latest iteration of the upcoming browser which is now available for download from www.microsoft.com/ie8. This new version of IE features several new improvements and changes, but we decided to list our favorites below.

Smart Address Bar: Taking a note from Firefox 3’s  Awesome Bar, the Smart Address Bar offers suggestions as you type based on website history, favorites, and RSS feed. There’s even an autocomplete feature that will suggest sites based on what you’re typing. Domain highlighting is also used to highlight the domain name. This feature allows for improved security and is especially useful in thwarting phishing attacks.

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Freepath 2.0 is a new application that lets you create presentations that are mashups of web content and content from your PC. So, instead of a traditional PowerPoint, for example, your Freepath presentation could combine a PowerPoint file with images, videos, music, PDFs, Word, and Excel documents and play them as a seamless digital presentation. You can integrate web content like YouTube videos, slideshow’s from slide.com, music from Pandora, images from flickr or photobucket, and more alongside files saved on your PC like those from Office documents, PDFs, Quicktime videos, or Flash files.

The Freepath 2.0 software offers three different viewing modes: a preview mode which shows you digital assets on the right but also makes the playlist and playlist library accessible, a full screen mode  (like what PowerPoint offers), and a dual screen mode which shows the presentation both on your screen and that of an external monitor. This dual monitor mode is also compatible with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Live Meeting, and Intercall.

If you’re more comfortable creating presentations in PowerPoint and are hesitant to try a new tool like this, you can actually prepare your slides in PowerPoint itself and then drag them into FreePath’s downloadable software to take advantage of the other tools that it provides.

When complete, your presentations can be shared with the Freepath community on myFreepath.com, which is similar to how Slideshare operates. All beta users receive 100 MB of free storage space in this community.

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Xbox and Rock the Vote have partnered up in order to reach out to young voters through the Xbox community. Starting August 25th – the same day as the first day of the Democratic National Convention - Xbox 360 owners will be able to register to vote, participate in presidential polls, and voice their opinions to the presidential candidates through Xbox LIVE, a community whose members reach 12 million. Said Heather Smith, executive director, Rock the Vote: “To realize our goal of registering 2 million young Americans by this fall, we need to go where young Americans are, and there’s no doubt in our minds that many are on Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE.”

I remember in the past Rock the Vote was involved with MTV, but I don’t ever remember seeing them actually go seek out young voters through a gaming platform before – that is definitely a first. And how creative! I went and checked out the Rock the Vote homepage to see where else they were besides Xbox, and it turns out that they’re on YouTube, facebook, and flickr, too. (Hmm, someone should tell them about Twitter.)

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