Hot on the heels of its soon-to-be-revolutionary table, Microsoft is aiming squarely at the rest of your kitchen, and is set to roll out enough cooking gizmos to make your proverbial ass swim.
The idea is called “Kitchen Client.” No, really. The devices in your kitchen will be aware and will interact with Windows Live. You’ll also have a terminal for recipes, calendars, and familial bulletins. With luck, and a little Windex, this tech will make making dinner a little less troublesome.
Of course, the PC in the Kitchen of the Future will be different, just as desktops have morphed to attain other functions, like Media Centers, and Microsoft has hardware partners already. In time, it hopes to have clients in every room in your house. Cue Big Brother music and a cackling Ballmer.
Look at what shows up on the screen - it’s advertising… yes, exactly what I wanted to look at in my own kitchen! Screw cooking, let’s look at a monitor pushing Nextel stuff (?????).
Jon
It would be handy to use it for VOIP.
There’s no doubt that the online kitchen-food-recipes market is yet to be explored.
Lately when I’m going to cook, I disconnect the laptop from my desk and hook it all up on the kitchen table - I need a google window, pandora/slacker radio, and something to watch when i’m done cooking and ready to eat. This seems like a good concept, but I really just need a computer than can run a web browser and doesnt take up much table space. And this one will probably cost too much. And hey, it runs frigtarded windows anyway….
The kitchen is the next obvious step in the integration of computing into our daily lives. My worry is with the advancements of malware, phishing scams, and viruses these devices may be at risk being on the same network as your home computer. Just imagine your home network being hit by a worm and it spreads to you kitchen appliances!
I want to call your attention to Cozi Central, which is already delivering on what MSFT says it wants to do! Cozi.com already has thousands of happy families using Cozi Central to organize their family’s schedule through a color-coded-by-person calendar that syncs with Outlook, a shopping list feature that can be text’d to your cell phone, or read to you on cell while you’re standing in the freezer section at the grocery store, and enables you to send notes and reminders via SMS to tell your spouse that Johnny is at baseball practice and needs to be picked up.
BigOven (http://www.bigoven.com) is a social network about food, plus meal planning software to organize all your recipes. Enter a few ingredients to see how to use up what’s in your fridge tonight. Drag and drop recipe cards onto a grocery list or meal calendar. Get nutrition facts — calories, carbohydrates, fat, etc. — for any recipe. Post recipes, ratings, and photos to the shared Internet archive, and fetch any ones you’d like with a single click. Publish them to your PDA; create a “Try Soon” list of recipes; share recipes via RSS and much more. Stop by http://www.bigoven.com for more info…