Microsoft plans to launch its Live Mesh offering next week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco but so far is not revealing
details of the service.
On Friday night, Microsoft sent out e-mail invitations to a "Mesh it up" event on April 24 featuring demos by Microsoft "experts."
The invitation includes a reference to the mesh.com Web site, which currently requires visitors to sign in with a Windows
Live ID and then displays an error message.
Microsoft declined to offer any more details about Live Mesh except to say that it will launch next week and further information
will become available on Tuesday evening, April 22.
Microsoft unveiled on Monday new content partners for its Silverlight technology and provided details of a forthcoming DRM
technology for its multimedia platform.
The company made these announcements to promote the use of its Silverlight multimedia development and deployment technology
to broadcasters at the annual NAB Show 2008 in Las Vegas.
Among the companies that now have projects based on Silverlight are MSG Interactive, Tencent, Abertis
Telecom, Terra Networks Operations, SBSi, MNet, and Yahoo Japan, Microsoft said.
Microsoft has proposed a tiered approach to protecting the privacy of people targeted by online advertising, saying advertisers
should get permission before using sensitive, personally identifiable information to deliver ads.
Microsoft filed comments on Friday in response to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) request for comments on its
proposed privacy principles that would be self-administered by the online advertising industry. Microsoft's proposal operates under the idea that the
greater the risk to privacy, the greater the protection data should receive, Microsoft officials said.
The capacity of Microsoft's free Connector regional bus system for employees will more than double under an expansion announced Wednesday. The service, which began in September, will add new routes and expand to a capacity of 4,600 seats a day from the existing 1,800, a company spokesman said in an e-mail.
Microsoft says it's adding seven routes; three Eastside routes begin April 21 and four Seattle routes May 5.The bus system is one of the amenities the company is using to help recruiting and retention in the face of stiff competition for engineering talent from Google and others.
When you combine two overextended online giants (Microsoft's MSN/Windows Live and basically all of Yahoo!), you get ... a mess. So how in the heck will Microsoft combine all these pieces into a cohesive whole with no overlap? Maybe they won't have to: One of the more interesting things that's developed this week is that both Time Warner/AOL and News Corp. have emerged as unexpected dance partners, offering different outcomes than a pure Microsoft/Yahoo! deal. Consider the following possibility: Microsoft and News Corp. combine to acquire Yahoo! and then spin off MSN/Windows Live, News Corp.'s MySpace, and most of Yahoo! into a separate company.
Microsoft today released the first community technology preview of Robotics Developer Studio 2008 at the RoboBusiness conference in Pittsburgh. The product is the third version of the robotics programming platform, which previously had been called the Microsoft Robotics Studio.
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 significantly improves runtime performance, from 150 percent to 300 percent, according to Microsoft General Manager of the Robotics Group Tandy Trower. "It's not the monolithic, single-threaded model that people have normally used for robots. Instead this is a more asynchronous, distributed approach to programming," Trower said.
Microsoft on Tuesday began publicly beta testing its family of next-generation security tools.
Codenamed "Stirling," the package will include upcoming versions of the company's Forefront-branded Client Security, Server Security, Edge Security, and Access products along with a unified management console. The company also said that Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server will be renamed to Forefront Threat Management Gateway.
The bundle entered private beta testing last year, after being introduced at Microsoft's Tech Ed 2008 conference in early June. The finished commercial release of Stirling is slated for sometime in the first half of 2009.
A beta release of Windows Live OneCare 2.5, Microsoft's automated security suite for home users and small businesses, is available for testing from the Microsoft Connect Web site. Microsoft stated through its blog that there is little apparent difference between the beta and standard versions.
Windows Live OneCare delivers a service that includes overall security, antivirus and firewall protection, roughly priced at $49.95 per year. It can run on as many as three computers per license, according to Microsoft's FAQ. It's not meant for the enterprise as Microsoft has a whole suite of security solutions under its Forefront brand for that, including the recently released Stirling beta.
Microsoft said on Tuesday it would lock down other vendors' software using Windows Update-delivered fixes if those companies
ask Microsoft to help stymie attacks. The company explained its efforts after being asked about a security update that disabled
a vulnerable ActiveX control used by Yahoo Inc.'s music player program.
"If an independent software vendor discovers that they have shipped a vulnerable [ActiveX] control, they should e-mail secure@microsoft.com
to work with Microsoft to issue a kill bit, disabling that control," Tim Rains, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response
Center, said.
Microsoft is now offering its Amalga health-care software in Europe, the company announced at the CohnIT heath-care show on
Wednesday in Berlin.
Amalga -- which represents one of Microsoft's new thrusts into other software fields -- has many components, covering everything
from handling patient care records to tracking research projects and finance department tasks.
The software is for use in the clinic, designed to draw data out of other health-care systems and software used by hospitals
into a database and then present it in an intelligible way for medical professionals.