Microsoft Research

In January we presented Nabonidus to Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. We had a good two hour session convened by Alexander Braendle and attended by some of the technical researchers and the head of department was there for the first hour too.

It was excellent, lots of smart and difficult questions to answer and lots of interest shown by the Microsoft guys in what we are trying to do. Unfortunately Microsoft does not directly fund archaeological research but they agreed to help us in any way they can with software and development advice and perhaps a joint project when we begin development of a mobile interface for Nabonidus.

They were very helpful with licensing for Nabonidus too. We are aiming for an open source license and when we are happy with our code we will publish it all to CodePlex so everyone can help themselves to it and essentially do whatever they want with it.

We also tentatively agreed upon a timetable for the development of a Nabonidus smart client application (April 2007) and a mobile interface (June 2007). We are still on track with these deadlines and presented the Nabonidus Desktop version at the Computing Applications in Archaeology conference in Berlin earlier this month.

So all in all a very productive day with Microsoft Research. They gave us a mountain of things to think about and lots of new ideas which we hope to implement in future versions of Nabonidus.