Microsoft is introducing an initiative on Monday to promote emerging music acts across its entire digital footprint, Billboard has learned.
Called Ignition, the program is designed to expose new artists and their music to consumers for an entire month by featuring exclusive content through Microsoft's multiple servicesincluding MSN, Xbox Live and Zune.
The first participating act is U.K. band Maximo Park (Warp Records/Caroline Distribution). Microsoft is providing the group's first single as a free exclusive download via the Zune Marketplace, making the music video available as a free download from the Xbox Live Marketplace and streaming the video on MSN.
IT admins are justifiably excited by the idea of a "server core" in Windows Server 2008, formerly code-named Longhorn Server. The technology, which strips out extraneous functionality to allow just the services needed to run a server in a specific role, promises easier installation and a smaller footprint once set up. It even has implications for security.
Jeff Jones, a Strategy Director in the Microsoft Security Technology Unit, recently matched hard data to the small footprint theory, and came up with some interesting observations and conclusions.
Microsoft continues to test updates to its Windows Live online services, including a service launched last year that allows users to submit blog posts simultaneously to more than one blogging platform.
A new beta of that service, called Windows Live Writer, is now available from an internal blog. Windows Live Writer is a tool to compose blog posts and publish them on some of the Web's most popular blogging platforms, such as Windows Live Spaces, Community Server, WordPress, and TypePad. Microsoft released the first test version of the service last August but hadn't updated the product since November 2006, according to the Liveside blog.
In a highly anticipated encounter, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple took the stage Wednesday evening to relive old battles and alliances and speculate about the future of digital culture and technology.
Rivals for three decades, the two executives have rarely appeared in public together and have generally been viewed as bitter rivals, despite occasional partnerships.
In front of about 600 technology executives at the D: All Things Digital conference, which was sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, the two executives attracted the attention usually reserved for rock singers and Hollywood stars.
In Bill Gates' mind, Microsoft's tabletop computer is just the beginning of where the touch-based technology can go. Dubbed "Milan," the first such computer is manufactured by Microsoft, has a horizontal surface and is targeted at businesses. But Microsoft's chairman said none of those things needs to define the product over time and we're likely to see big changes.
In a brief interview on the sidelines of the D5 conference here on Wednesday night, Gates told CNET News.com about the technology, which Microsoft has been cooking up over the past six years or so, how Microsoft hopes to eventually make the computers far cheaper and how the company will work with others to make the hardware.
Today Microsoft released the first beta version of Windows Live Mail, a free download that will replace Outlook Express in Windows XP and Windows Mail in Windows Vista. While the application looks interesting and polished, it's still a true beta, with a number of bugs and missing features.
Microsoft says the new program brings in features from both of the previous Windows mail applications. I spent a few hours with Live Mail today and got a first look at its new design, its ability to pull messages from Web mail and other accounts, its photo e-mail composition option, and other new features. It comes hot on the heels of the new Hotmail, which launched earlier this month.
Microsoft announced the cancellation of its semi-annual Professional Developer's Conference last week, leading to lots of Internet speculation on the reason. But conspiracy theorists should take a breath: The reason may well be as mundane as the fact that it just isn't necessary this year.
"I was surprised but not shocked" at the PDC's cancellation, said Billy Hollis, a well-known developer, Microsoft MVP in Visual Basic, and author who has been a PDC speaker in the past. "The last 18 months or so have seen biggest rollout of new technologies at Microsoft maybe in their history -- new versions of Office, the .NET framework, new OSes."
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has received government certification for its ability to meet regulatory compliance standards.
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it received U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2 certification, which is concerned with record and document management.
To meet the certification requirements, Microsoft incorporated Exchange Server 2007, and will be releasing a free, add-on pack "later this year" that will extend SharePoint 2007's record management capabilities, according to a press release.
Microsoft on Wednesday is taking the wraps off "Milan," five years in the making and the first in what the company hopes will be a long line of "surface computers." The Microsoft Surface tabletop PC, for which the company has created both the hardware and software, offers shades of the technology seen in the sci-fi thriller Minority Report. The whole unit is controlled entirely through touch; there's no mouse or keyboard.
To paint, people can pick up a paint brush or just dip their fingers in virtual paint cups. Sharing photos is similarly intuitive. A stack of pictures can be easily sorted through and shared. To resize a photo, just stretch two fingers apart. Pivot the fingers and the image rotates. More than one person can be interacting with the computer at a time.
Microsoft can argue that it should be the owner of a patent that was the subject of a $521 million jury trial it lost, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has ruled.
Microsoft is challenging the University of California and researcher Michael Doyle's claim that they invented software technology used for the interactive components of Web pages. The patent office said Friday that it will decide whether Microsoft or Doyle were the first to invent the feature and thus entitled to the patent.