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London scrubs up to a high gloss finish with Windows Azure and Windows Phone 7

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The Mayor of London is an entertaining fellow. A regular on the TV news quiz “Have I Got News For You” (the clip is very funny…).

Here he presents a Windows Phone 7 app using Windows Azure at the back end which allows Londoners to report grafitti, rubbish dumping and so on. Of course the local council get a photo of the offending eyesore, plus its location.

Windows Azure and Windows Phone 7 app to clean up London

It’s a great example of that H+S+S (Hardware + Software + Services) caper that keeps raising its head. What I like about this is that it’s pretty difficult to forecast the likely success (as someone once said – “forecasting is a very difficult job. Especially if it’s about the future…”) of this. Will Londoners completely ignore it, or will they take to it like ducks to water? It’s one of those 4 key Windows Azure workloads. Whether it’s a storming success with tens of thousands of graffiti reports per hour coming in from all corners of London, or just 2 or 3 reports – the local council can scale this to give whatever citizens use it a great experience. In that sense, I think it means government departments and local authorities can take chances on things they’d have never considered before because the cost of building an infrastructure for an idea that may never be successful is now so low.

Planky – GBR-257

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2011
    Is the services generic enough that you can be extended to other mobile devices? Like Android & iPhone?