Microsoft’s top search guy took to the Web Thursday to show off a refreshed interface for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, that he said better incorporates the user’s social media contacts in a new sidebar which brings in their Facebook and Twitter contacts input. Read More »
Just as the older members of my family are finally getting used to Skype and FaceTime, along comes a 3-D hologram concept project! Dubbed the TeleHuman, the system uses six Microsoft Kinect sensors and a 3-D projector inside a 1.8 meter tall acrylic cylinder. Read More »
The big news out of ROFLCon is that this is the last ROFLCon. So if you want to catch your favorite “Famous on the Internet” stars — Tron Guy, Double Rainbow Guy, the Nyancats — you better get to MIT Building 26 in the next few … Read More »
Microsoft”s $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook business gives it a piece of an ebook reader also-ran. But this is far from the first time Microsoft enlisted a B list ally to attack a recalcitrant market. Read More »
Microsoft and Barnes & Noble are teaming up to take on Amazon and Apple. The $300 million investment in the Nook subsidiary of Barnes & Noble gives Microsoft about 17.6% ownership of this business unit and values it at about about $1.7 billion, more than … Read More »
Critics say that a bill called CISPA, which has been passed by the House of Representatives and is on its way to the Senate, is just as bad as SOPA — but others, including Facebook, support the legislation. Should you be concerned about it? Read More »
UPDATED: Angry Birds Space is another huge hit for Rovio who said Thursday is won’t be building a version for Windows Phone, according to Peter Vesterbacka, the chief marketing officer of Rovio. Rovio, however, reversed course Friday and said they would develop a WP7 app. Read More »
As Salesforce.com trots out the integration of its social networking-oriented HR tools into CRM and Chatter, Microsoft is touting new research about why companies need to have workplace-oriented social tools. One problem: Some of these tools are more annoying than useful. Read More »
Microsoft made it easier to create robots on Thursday by launching the final release of its Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4, which moves out of beta status. Using the Xbox Kinect accessory, the free software can power moving robots that can “see” and understand their surroundings. Read More »
The rise of the app economy and new platforms has triggered a sharp increase in startups. For the new startups, the world needs a new kind of a VC model, argues Tero Ojanpera, a former Nokia executive and the man behind a new investment fund, Vision+. Read More »
With Google and European officials clashing again, this time over the company’s new, simplified privacy policy, is it simply a one-off moment of friction — or part of an inevitable slide towards all-out conflict? Read More »
Years have gone by since Microsoft launched a version of Windows that made the general public stand up and take notice. On Wednesday, the company will allow tech enthusiasts to start poking around Windows 8, a product that could help Microsoft get its groove back. Read More »
More Must Reads
Rapid adoption of OS X Mountain Lion would clearly threaten Microsoft. But after digging into Apple’s new operating system, Edward Aten of Swift.fm thinks it poses a threat to another, less obvious, company — the current leader in the consumer cloud, Facebook. Read More »
European Union’s decision to approve the Microsoft & Skype merger without any objection isn’t sitting well with Cisco, the unified communications giant who is worried that Microsoft will use Skype to dominate the video calling industry. Sour grapes for a company caught in it own business-model. Read More »
Microsoft’s patent licensing machine is back in action, lining up another Android maker: this time, LG. The Korean manufacturer signed a patent agreement providing coverage for tablets, phones and other devices running the Android or Chrome OS. The terms were not disclosed. Read More »
One day after the International Trade Commission approved a formal ban on certain HTC products that infringe on an Apple patent, an ITC administrative law judge has issued an initial determination that Motorola has infringed on four claims of a Microsoft patent with its Android products. … Read More »
Nokia’s Lumia 710 is leading the phone maker’s Windows Phone 7 charge in the U.S. and is set to go on sale January 11 with T-Mobile. T-Mobile announced that the 710 will sell for $50 with a two year contract and will ride atop its 4G … Read More »
Xamarin, the company born earlier this year when Novell laid off the entire workforce dedicated to maintaining Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET development framework, was up against big odds. But at just seven months old, Xamarin is now profitable without VC backing. Read More »
Microsoft added fuel to speculations about its consumer-business prowess on Tuesday with the preview of its forthcoming Windows Store that will accompany Windows 8, but there’s a more fundamental issue facing Microsoft than whether consumers will buy Windows 8 devices. Will it have developers? Read More »
The tough times for Nokia even stretch to its home territory in Finland — where the company’s traditional dominance of the smartphone market has been massively eroded in the past year, according to new figures from IDC. Read More »
Silicon Valley is abuzz with rumors of Yahoo and its private equity buyers. And there are many. Whatever comes of these moves, the questions are, can Yahoo be saved? What is the value that can be retrieved? And will it become Waterloo for the P/E folks? Read More »
When will we stop talking about the cloud? If history is any guide, eventually the idea of the cloud as something that is separate from the web will disappear as more people get used to it — although when that will happen is anyone’s guess. Read More »
Three-and-a-half years after Microsoft proposed a $44 billion takeover of Yahoo, the software giant will take another look at Yahoo’s financials. Since then, Yahoo’s stock price has been cut in half. But does a cheaper Yahoo mean a better value for Microsoft? Read More »
Apple and Microsoft are reportedly poised to support NFC next year in their handsets, according to a report from Digitimes. Apple’s support of NFC could be especially helpful for the nascent technology, helping expose it to a mainstream audience. Read More »
One in every two smartphones sold in the world is an Android device, according to Gartner, which said that Google’s mobile platform has doubled its share in the past year and surged to a 52.5 percent smartphone market share worldwide in the third quarter. Read More »
Microsoft is launching Bing for Mobile Hybrid Apps this week that are built on HTML5 and take the best of native apps and blend with them with a robust mobile web experience, providing faster updates, more consistency between platforms and added search functions. Read More »
The enterprise is where the big bucks used to be, but home is where the heart and consumers are. As the web becomes more integrated in people’s lives, the home will become the battleground for the coming generation of startups and big-name companies. Read More »
Exclusive: There are lots of great summer internships at Silicon Valley startups. But top engineering students often pass them up for the money and name recognition companies like Google can provide. So Kleiner Perkins has partnered with InternMatch to attract top-flight students to its portfolio companies. … Read More »
After throwing its lot in with Microsoft, Nokia is finally starting to ship its first Windows Phone handsets — the Lumia, a new range launched in London today. But while Stephen Elop knows everything’s at stake for the Finnish company, has he delivered? Read More »
Virginia Rometty may be the new face of IBM when she takes the helm as CEO in January, but she is expected to keep pushing her predecessor’s vision of cloud-computing related services — hard. It is these services, increasingly, that drive IBM’s global business. Read More »
After I wrote my recent article about Bluetooth integration with car audio, Ford contacted me about the Microsoft SYNC system. I took it for a test drive (literally). A new Ford may just be about the best (and probably most expensive) iPhone accessory out there. Read More »
Long a big force in online media, Yahoo and its once-successful online portal business model is struggling. So we decided to ask GigaOM readers what they thought Yahoo should do, and we published the results in a flash analysis on GigaOM Pro. Read More »
A new biography of Steve Jobs quotes Bill Gates as saying that the Apple co-founder “never really understood much about technology.” While the Microsoft billionaire likely saw that as a put-down, technology is arguably the least important thing about Apple’s most successful products. Read More »
Just how will Microsoft make money off Skype? It’s too early to say since the deal closed just last week, said Microsoft CFO Peter Klein. But he gave some broad-brush hints about plans for the VoIP fan favorite on Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings call Thursday night. Read More »
Nokia eked out a decent third quarter based on strong feature phone sales, helping the company beat analyst expectations. But the real challenge awaits next week, when Nokia unveils its first Windows Phone 7 device, which will show how its bet on WP7 is faring. Read More »
Most of the entrepreneurial pitches this week at MIT’s Emtech 2011 focused on elevating high-tech for markets that are already pretty tech saturated. Folks talked about smart vehicular networks that will allow cars to share information. Two entrepreneurs went the other way. Read More »
Juniper Research of the U.K. released a report that shows that by 2016 nearly four-fifths of 640 million mobile VoIP users will be making calls through apps downloaded on their smartphones, while the rest of the calls could be over phone company networks. Read More »
The government’s case against Google will have to grapple with some fundamental questions. What does the word “monopoly” mean when applied to a web-based entity like Google? And are network effects a barrier to entry, or are online monopolies inherently more fragile than their real-world cousins? Read More »
Microsoft sees the torrent of email newsletters and daily deal updates as an opportunity to differentiate its Hotmail service by providing a host of new tools to help manage this “gray mail,” part of an ongoing attempt to make Hotmail more competitive against Gmail. Read More »
Samsung on Wednesday became the latest and most high-profile Android licensee to agree to pay royalties to Redmond. But the deal may not be so much “extortion” — as Google quickly labeled it — as Samsung’s lack of trust and confidence in Google. Read More »
The Mango software update will roll out to existing Windows Phone 7 devices starting today and should get to all devices within a matter of weeks. It sets up Microsoft to finally get into the smartphone game in its second year with WP7. Read More »
What do Belichick defensive schemes, Tom Clancy novels, Google+ and Facebook have in common? The answer is that all are so byzantine that they leave people scratching their heads to figure them out. Somewhere along the way social media lost sight of keeping things simple. Read More »
Being a monopoly may be irritating to competitors, but it’s not illegal. The problem with applying antitrust law to Google is that even if you assume it has a monopoly and is being anticompetitive, it’s not at all clear how that is bad for consumers. Read More »
Adchemy, the six-year-old online ad technology company, has raised $61 million in a Series E funding round led by Microsoft. This round brings the total venture capital invested in Adchemy to $116 million, Adchemy CEO Murthy Nukala told me in an interview on Tuesday. Read More »
Windows Phone 7 is increasingly catching the eye of smartphone buyers but awareness is still a major hurdle. The NPD Group reported that while Android is the top choice of smartphone owners, 44 percent of current and upcoming smartphone owners are considering purchasing a WP7 device. Read More »
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