Apple, Google, LG, and Samsung are all reportedly working on wrist-worn computing devices behind closed doors, and it seems like that little club of big companies may soon get another member. If a new report from the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Microsoft has been in touch with an undisclosed number of suppliers who have apparently been tasked with delivering components for a… → Read More
After a very public defense of rumors about the next Xbox’s always-on Internet requirements, a new report claims that Microsoft creative director Adam Orth is no longer with the company. In a series of Twitter posts, Orth defended the move by countering that “every device” is now constantly connected, and then delivered a low-blow when someone responded suggesting always-on connectivity might not… → Read More
Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play. Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy. In the two videos below, Microsoft uses… → Read More
Docstoc, the online store for high-quality professional and business documents that made its debut at the TechCrunch40 conference back in 2007, today announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to sell its content directly to Microsoft Office users from within the Office applications. When Office users search for templates, they will now encounter Docstoc as a provider and can start the… → Read More
Microsoft has opened its Active Directory (AD) to general availability on Windows Azure, giving developers access to the single-sign-on service for access to the suite of Microsoft services, third-party apps and SaaS providers. Active Directory is the long-time single point of access to Microsoft Windows technologies. The Windows Azure AD compatibility means customers can provide similar controls… → Read More
If you are still using Windows XP – or you know somebody who does – Microsoft would like you to remember that you only have 365 more days before the company will end all support for the operating system it launched in New York on October 25, 2001. Both Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 will go out of support on April 8, 2014, and XP users will stop receiving any new security updates… → Read More
Facebook had its big coming-out party for mobile on Wednesday, and its Home launcher will soon start shipping exclusively on an HTC device. This is the social network’s first crack at being the default experience on any device. Until now, using Facebook has been a completely optional and background experience, meaning you’d have to visit its website or download one of its apps. After… → Read More
Microsoft is maybe a little jealous of the spotlight shone on Facebook yesterday for its Facebook Home announcement. In a new blog post today, Frank X. Shaw, Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft used some mild snark and mostly gentle prodding to complain about how his company had already done what Facebook was trying to do on smartphones, which sadly only reinforces… → Read More
Microsoft just launched SkyDrive 3.0 for iOS, and it took the company quite a while to get the upgrade into the App Store. Rumor has it that there was a bit of back and forth between the two companies over the 30 percent revenue cut that Apple would take when users buy additional storage for their accounts through the app. It’s not clear how the two companies finally resolved this issue… → Read More
Microsoft’s web-based Outlook.com calendar is getting a visual refresh and a few new features today. With this update, the calendar now looks more like the rest of Microsoft’s online productivity tools and features the same “content over chrome” flat design that the company now uses across its product line-up. The new calendar, Microsoft says, “is faster than ever… → Read More
Earlier this year, Microsoft launched modern.IE to help developers ensure that their sites work well with old and new versions of Internet Explorer. The company is adding a few more features to the service today, including a new code scanning tool for sites behind a firewall and virtual machines for IE 10 on Windows 7 and IE8 on Windows XP. The highlight of this release, however, is that for a $25… → Read More
The Microsoft Research team is building an epic map of the universe using data and photographs collected from the many telescopes around the world, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. They call it The WorldWide Telescope. → Read More
Microsoft will be releasing an initial public preview release of Windows Blue, its next-generation desktop operating system, at its annual Build developer conference in late June, according to a new report from The Verge’s Tom Warren. Warren says that “sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans” said work began on the preview version this month, and will be made available for download the way past… → Read More
Barnes & Noble content and tablet subsidiary Nook Media, part-owned by Microsoft specifically to help boost content for its new Windows 8 platform, today put some of that strategy into action: it has announced that people who download the Nook app for Windows 8 will get five books and five magazines free of charge. → Read More
Build is Microsoft’s developer conference for its Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server and Azure platforms, and the company just announced that Build 2013 will take place June 26-28 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Registration will open Tuesday, April 2, at 9am PT, and early-bird pricing for the first 500 registrants starts at $1,595. As Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s… → Read More
I’m a little embarrassed to admit how reliant I’ve become on Uber when I’m traveling — most regular cab drivers seem to find me terribly repellant — but now the service is now is working to expand its reach even further. The folks behind the on-demand car service announced earlier today that Windows Phone users now have a native app of their own, albeit one that doesn’t look quite as pretty as… → Read More
Spotify and Rdio have already made their mark (for better or worse) on Windows Phone 8, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room in the Windows Phone Store for another claimant to the streaming music throne. Nearly five months after it was publicly announced, Pandora has just officially pushed its native Windows Phone 8 app out into the wild. → Read More
Skype released an update today for Windows Phone, which restores the “People Hub” integration (Windows Phone’s fancy address book) that had been disabled in January due to bugginess and performance issues. Though today’s blog post from Skype doesn’t directly address the Hub’s former problems, it does hint at them by saying that the new release focuses on “increasing quality and reliability.” → Read More
Microsoft launched its flagship online store in China today on Tmall.com, in a move that could help bolster the market share of its hardware, including tablets and smartphones in that country. → Read More
Windows Azure has added new support for a number of services including PhoneGap, Dropbox and Hadoop.
According to a blog post by Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president in the Microsoft Tools and Servers group, developers can connect both HTML5 web-client apps, Apache Cordova/PhoneGap and Windows Phone 7.5 clients to use Windows Azure Mobile Services as a backend. → Read More
Aviary, the company that provides a fully customizable SDKs for applications that want to include photo editing, has announced the launch of its Windows 8 SDK in collaboration with AMD and Microsoft. This means that apps for any Windows 8 PCs and tablets can start including photo editing immediately, not just ones with AMD processors. The company has already gotten serious traction by being… → Read More
Microsoft has published a support document on its website that indicates both Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 7.8 will stop being supported in the second half of 2014, in July for Windows Phone 8 and September for 7.8. The timelines reveal that Microsoft seems pretty committed to an 18-month support cycle for mobile software releases, but it is interesting to see this information made official… → Read More
A routine sever firmware update resulted in an anything but routine outage for Microsoft’s Outlook and Hotmail. On March 12, Outlook.com and Hotmail were unavailable to some users, and as Microsoft details in a blog post, a firmware update caused servers to overheat and go offline for 16 hours. Apparently similar firmware updates had been successfully deployed in the past but something went… → Read More
Vyclone, a service for creating collaborative videos of events and locations launched its iOS app for last summer. Just about a week ago, the company launched its Android app and today, it is also launching a web-based experience that focuses less on taking videos than on editing them in the browser. To do so, the service partnered with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, though the editor… → Read More
As we reported last month, Microsoft decided to start migrating its old-school Hotmail users over to its shiny new Outlook service. That migration process might not be going so well, as users have flooded sites like Twitter with reports of downtime to the tune of three hours. Its migration approach was to be a slow one, with the move being optional at first. Regardless of the reason, three hours… → Read More
Today, Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8′s Metro/Modern UI mode and on Windows RT blocks Flash by default and only allows sites on Microsoft’s curated Compatibility View (CV) lists to play Flash content. Tomorrow, that’s changing: all Flash content will run by default and the CV list will now be used to block sites from playing Flash content. Windows 8 users previously had to… → Read More
With Office 365 out of the door, Microsoft has now set its sights on getting more college students to give it a try. The company, which already makes a heavily discounted $80/4 years version of Office 365 University available to students, just announced a new offer that gives college students three months of free Office 365 access, plus another three months when they also share the offer on… → Read More
Microsoft and Google are currently involved in a patent lawsuit in Germany that could, according to FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller and a number of German reports, lead to an outright ban of Google Maps in the country. Microsoft’s EP0845124 patent in Europe is for a “computer system for identifying local resources and method therefor” and was issued in 1996. The issue was… → Read More
The Kinect is arguably Microsoft’s most important innovation of the past decade, and has done more for changing the nature of computer interaction than pretty much any other recently created input devices. Today, Microsoft Research has demoed how it’s about to get even better, with the addition of hand recognition complete with refined gesture support. → Read More
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