Microsoft is playing catch-up against Yahoo and Google -- its chief competitors in the booming online advertising market -- with a new program called adCenter Excellence introduced today.
Microsoft's announcement comes just about two months after Yahoo's acquisition of BlueLithium, producers of an extensive ad toolkit, and not much more than a year after Yahoo's acquisition of the Right Media advertising network.
Yahoo's earlier attempts to add better analytics to its services date back to the acquisition of Overture in 2003, through which it obtained a package called Keylime. In 2005, Google was seen to play catch-up through its acquisition of Urchin.
Microsoft has talked a ton about why Unified Communications -- the melding of telephony, e-mail, and perhaps most importantly, "presence" -- can be a big value to users.
Now it's starting to get down to brass tacks around tool deliverables, building a developer portal on MSDN and an API roadmap.
The centerpiece of this whole UC effort is Office Communications Server. New tooling deliverables include such downloadable goodies as a Communications Server 2007 SDK, Speech Server documentation, Live Meeting 2007 API Reference Guide, Unified Communications AJAX SDK and more.
Microsoft has purchased Seattle startup WebFives, which provides a Web-based file-sharing service for Internet and mobile
video, photos, audio, and blogs, according to a message posted on the startup's Web site.
WebFives, previously called Vizrea, was founded by former Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Michael Toutonghi, who helped pioneer
the Media Center version of the Windows OS, many of the features of which found their way into Windows Vista.
On the WebFives Web site, a message attributed to Toutonghi said Microsoft agreed to purchase the company in November, and
WebFives will close and shut down its service on Dec. 31. The service gives users a hosted Web site to which they can automatically
upload multimedia content from mobile devices as well as other features.
Microsoft on Thursday reported U.S. sales of 310,000 Xbox 360 game consoles for the Thanksgiving week, trailing Nintendo's Wii console but leading Sony's PlayStation 3 at the start of holiday shopping.
The release of the numbers also brought some controversy.
In a statement distributed to the media, Microsoft claimed that Xbox 360 sales were twice those of the PlayStation 3 for the week, which included the key "Black Friday" shopping day after Thanksgiving. Sony didn't disagree that the PlayStation 3 came in third, but said it wasn't by the margin Microsoft cited.
'Tis the season to be litigious and for Microsoft, Santa is apparently coming down the chimney dressed in judge's robes this year.
Like a gift that keeps on giving, the latest legal hassle for the company began on Thursday, when z4 Technologies, whose giant damage award against Microsoft for patent infringement was just upheld on appeal earlier this month, sued Microsoft yet again. Microsoft continues to infringe its patents, z4 claims. However, this time the infringement lies in its latest consumer products -- Windows Vista and Office 2007.
Microsoft's C# language is moving to Second Life.
On Dec. 8, Microsoft will hold a Microsoft C# Day on the Second Life virtual world platform to introduce C# to developers that are new to the language.
"We are finally having our first big event in Second Life," Zain Naboulsi, an MSDN developer evangelist, wrote in a blog post on Nov. 30. "C# Day promises to be a great experience for those who are new to the C# Language and want to learn more about it."
Users of Second Life can go to the Microsoft Visual Studio Island and register at the kiosk. Those who are new to Second Life or who want to know more can find information on the event at the C# Day info page.
Microsoft's introduction Nov. 30 of its new United Communications Developer Portal is the next step in fulfilling Chairman Bill Gates' promise in October that the software giant was readying a major push into the unified communications space.
At the Oct. 15 event, Microsoft launched unified communications and VOIP software, including Microsoft OCS 2007, which delivers VOIP, video, instant messaging, conferencing and presence within applications such as Microsoft Office system applications and upcoming versions of Microsoft Dynamics ERP products; Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, which is client software for phone, instant messaging and video communications; and Microsoft Office Live Meeting, the next version of Microsoft's advanced conferencing service.
Microsoft is releasing an early preview of new technology designed to help developers address the issue of programming for parallel environments.
Microsoft on Nov. 29 released an early preview of the Parallel Extensions to the .Net Framework, known as ParallelFX, according to S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division. The technology will be available for download on the Microsoft Developer Network. The release contains new APIs to make programming on the .Net Framework simpler, as well as supporting documentation and samples.
With Microsoft's long-awaited CRM 4.0 release, better known as Titan, expected in December, Salesforce.com may finally end its designation as a party of one in the on-demand development platform category.
The question is, How long will it take Microsoft, a slow-moving technology behemoth if previous releases are any indication, to catch up with Salesforce.com in a market Salesforce created?
While Microsoft has based its Titan marketing campaign on the software's multitenant capabilities, CEO Steve Ballmer said in July at the company's Worldwide Partner conference that Titan will also be used as a platform for on-demand application development.
Microsoft quietly introduced on Wednesday an upgrade to Office Mobile that lets mobile users work with documents created in
Office 2007.
The upgrade solves an issue that prevented users of Windows Mobile 6.0 devices, which began hitting the market in the middle
of this year, from reading documents created by users of Office 2007, which was released in January.
The upgrade lets Windows Mobile phone users view and edit Word documents and Excel workbooks and view PowerPoint slideshows created in
Office 2007, which is based on the Open XML format.