How much of an effect did Microsofts decision to award prizes for search-based games drive up its search marketshare for the month of June?
If you put your stock in numbers released last week by Compete, it would seem like Microsofts Live Search Club was a huge driver of a substantial surge in Microsoft search traffic. If you rely on newly released data from ComScore, Microsofts gain is a lot more modest although still impressive. Whichever set of data you believe, Microsofts search share definitely rose in a noticeable way last month.
Microsoft researchers are working on a variety of location-based tools, some of which could turn into interesting commercial applications.
In one project, the researchers lent out cheap GPS devices to drivers and asked them to leave the devices on the dashboards of their cars for a couple of weeks, said John Krumm, a researcher at Microsoft Research. He discussed the results of his work at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington, on Monday.
Krumm's group examined the data they collected from the GPS units for a number of different factors, including what time of day people were most often in their cars and where they most commonly were going at what times, such as to commercial or residential areas.
Microsoft expects to deliver the near-final test release of its Silverlight alternative to Flash before July is over, according to a blog posting from a Microsoft technical evangelist.
Microsoft officially unveiled the beta of Silverlight 1.0 at its Mix 07 conference in April. The company also announced at that time the availability of an alpha of Silverlight 1.1, which adds a built-in Common Language Runtime engine, plus support for ASP.Net Ajax, Language-Integrated Query, JavaScript, Visual Basic, C#, Python and Ruby. (No update so far on the status of Silverlight 1.1.)
Microsoft released Windows Home Server to manufacturing today, hitting the final milestone for software that will power several turnkey home servers that OEMs will put on the market in late September and early October.
The move to RTM means that Microsoft has wrapped up WHS and handed it off to its internal distribution teams and hardware partners, said Joel Sider, senior product manager. Those OEM partners grew by two today, as Iomega and Fujitsu-Siemens Computers were added to a list that already included Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, LaCie, and Medion. Details on the Fujitsu-Siemens and Iomega systems were scanty today, but the former will be a 500GB product with gigabit Ethernet, while the latter will contain up to four hot-swappable drives.
Microsoft Research workers showed off some of their projects, including several that find new uses for mobile phones, on Monday at a summit in Redmond, Wash.
Eric Chang, director of incubation at Microsoft's Advanced Technology Center in Beijing, described Fone+, a product that lets users connect their mobile phones to a TV, a keyboard, and a mouse. Fone+ would let users take advantage of the growing processing power in mobile phones that enables more computing functions but would allow them to use phones to access the Internet with a full keyboard and on a larger screen.
The cat-and-mouse game continues between Microsoft and a group of hackers intent on breaking the copy protection technology on its Windows Media files. This time, an individual has cracked the latest DRM scheme employed by Microsoft.
The back and forth began last August when a Doom9 forum user by the name of "viodentia" released a program called FairUse4WM. The application was able to strip the copyright protection from both audio and video files, removing restrictions of where and when they could be played. Windows Media files could also then be converted into other formats as well.
Microsoft's share of U.S. Internet search queries rose nearly 3 percentage points in June, according to data from ComScore Networks -- giving the company a rare bright spot in an area where it has struggled to compete with Google and Yahoo.
However, Microsoft acknowledged that much of the increase from May to June came not from traditional users but from people lured by prizes to an unusual promotional site that the company launched to get more people conducting queries through its Live Search service.
Microsoft released the second version of its Windows Live Mobile Search application on Friday, including some new features for both the standalone and Web-based versions of the client.Versions of the software are available for Windows Mobile, J2ME, and in beta for BlackBerry devices. Unsupported phones will be able to access the new Web-based version. The iPhone can use the Web-based app, but a bug prevents the search button from working properly.
"When you do a search, hit "Go" on the soft-keyboard after entering your search terms as the normal search button is not active," Microsoft said.
Microsoft on Thursday released an add-on to the previously released CTP of Astoria, a nascent project based around the way data is consumed and exposed on the Web.
The CTP, which was released in May, contained a client library for accessing Astoria services from .NET-based apps. The add-on released Thursday provides a client library compatible with the Silverlight 1.1 alpha environment, as well as an API extension for executing asynchronous queries, according to Microsoft.
The company says developers can use Astoria to access and publish data across the Web more easily and directly than through SOAP-based programming.
Although Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is part of a February 2008 multiproduct launch, the company intends to ship it by the end of 2007, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog.
The company earlier this week announced that a launch event on February 27, 2008, would feature Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. This revelation, made at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, came after Microsoft had said Visual Studio 2008 was targeted to ship later this year.