Bryan Dickens

Penn State PM Intern Summer 2013

Toast News

Why the current news is NOT working…

▪ Too Impersonal▪ Unreliable▪ Uninteresting▪ Unconnected

▪ Too Slow▪ Not real-time▪ Not efficient▪ Not predictive

Era of Information Overload!

Too Impersonal… Missing the News that Matters

News should narrow BIG data to MY data. Personal news.▪ If there’s traffic on my usual road to work, tell me + alert the best

alternative route. ▪ Hurricane approaching my parents’ city, let me pull up an email/phone

call to see if they’re okay.

Too Slow…Need Real-Time Data for Real-Time Decisions

News should be fast, efficient & predictive… what is happening right now could affect you, and you should know about it ASAP!

Newspaper Television Websites Apps

Time it takes for your personal news to get to you

How can we use technology to improve personal

response time on the things we care about most?

Too Impersonal Too Slow

Introducing Toast.IDEA: Combine Outlook’s alert updates (toasts) and outside sources to give you a personal influx of data instantly!

No more refreshing of sites and no more sifting through information that doesn’t interest you. Toast brings data you want to your fingertips.

Traffic Accident on Route 520

Click for alternative route to workFantasy Sports Ray Rice out for the season

Click to switch your fantasy lineupWork t-bdick finished code review

Click to see the edits

… and many more!

Why Toast?▪ Simple design & easy learning curve▪ Fades away if you don’t want it! No more need to clean

an inbox▪ Already coded technology within Microsoft, just need to

apply it uniquely▪ Can emphasize cross-platform collaboration within

Microsoft:

link your Office document to your account and whenever it is changed you can click the toast and jump right to it

Bring it all together with Toast!

Bing Windows XboxMSN news Office Skype

▪ News is more than just the media, it’s anything new that you

are interested in!

Toast lets you get alerts for any app, any website, anything you can think of!

Microsoft has the ability to broadly span the market by being in everyone’s PC, phone, and home system:

ALWAYS connected and instant personal news.

Customizable

Visual Story▪ Take any two diverse demographic people:

▪ This is a visual draft of how they would “select their toast” with an in-windows experience (similar to the personalization settings control panel)

Signed in with their Microsoft account there would be a storage of all their interests and suggestions personal to them, as well as an option to “Toast this” to any program they opened

Grandma Interested in the weather, gardening, and cooking.

Junior Interested in sports, video games, and pop music.

Grandma

She clicks the Weather link as well as typing in MarthaStewartCooking.com and her daughter’s Pintrest of her garden tips.

JuniorHe picks games and music quick links as well as a couple sites for his favorite sports players and fantasy teams.

Visual Story: PAGE 1 Toast News

Select

Hot Topics

Trending

Music

Tech

Business

Games

Search

Movies

Weather

Enter any site, any app, any source at all here and it will provide the link for the data. Popular “toasts topics”

will bubble to the top and be displayed pre-search.

Grandma

She selects low frequency for weather and the Martha Stewart site only giving her the big changes that happen. She also has to enter her zip code for the weather or just turn on the location service. For her daughter she has high frequency getting everything that changes on the page.

Junior

He enters his favorite games and artists and asks to be updated whenever news on them is released. He also enters in his different fantasy sports accounts to tell him when to sub injured players and his scores for the week.

Visual Story: PAGE 2 Toast News

ConfigureThe site/app/source name and link for the data.

Extra customizable elements to edit on your updates (varies per site)

Frequency

www.Microsoft.com

Warm Crispy Burnt

Store Data? Off On

Send to email? Off On

GrandmaShe has them all in the lower right hand corner and picks pretty flowers on all of her toasts.

Junior

He picks sports all on the left side and relatively large, while his games and music are all smaller and in the top right side with a guitar strum as a noise whenever receiving the toast.

Visual Story: PAGE 3 Toast News

Toast!Select where you want the toast on your screen.

Clickable buttons for choices of your personal style for the toast.

Where do you want it?

Type of Toast

Change the Color

Change the Style

Change the Size

Go! Make another

Display

And that’s it! Put your toast in action in just three easy steps.

YOU’RE IN CONTROLAny update you want, anyway you want it

This idea appeals to all demographics, bringing each person’s individual interests to Microsoft to give them the best user experience possible.

Business Value to MicrosoftMicrosoft owns the OS with Windows, but when people get their updates they go to another company’s site/page/app and WE LOSE! Let’s bring people back into Windows by giving their news directly through us. TOAST leverages Microsoft OS as a service for customers Helps maintain MS platforms over competitors Ties together MS products in a cohesive platformDirect Revenue Projection through potential advertisements Careful ads implemented tastefully Leads to an enormous market tap with PERSONAL content related ads

(heard of Google?)

Potential multibillion dollar new market!

Thanks to▪ Todd Rawlings for giving outside-the-box thinking on alerts and to Yoav for

Social Den – a previous TW paper for assembling news info in the cloud.▪ Evelyn Carlson and Debbie Hinck for Toast News exposure.▪ Manager Anand Raman and Mentor Ashley Lessard for encouragement to

write a TW paper.

▪Further Q/A: bid5098@psu.edu