Tag: MICROSOFT

The Bing team has just delivered a major update to its mobile search. m.bing.com now utilizes HTML5 tech to deliver better image and iOS app search, as well as realtime directions and transit info to Android and iOS users. It gets better, too. If the update situation for Windows Phone 7 wasn't bad enough, the official blog post offers this sad-trombone style news for WP7 users: "If you have a ...

The much-anticipated and repeatedly delayed Windows Phone 7 "NoDo" update has finally been released by Microsoft. A number of ROMs for various devices had already been leaked to the Internet, so it's thought that Microsoft may have stepped in to stem the tide of unofficial updating. So what all does NoDo bring to WP7 phones? First and foremost, copy and paste functionality has been added -- ...

Internet Explorer 9 was officially released exactly one week ago. Even if the download numbers for its first 24 hours of existence weren't bad at 2.3 million, they were nowhere near Firefox 3's record-breaking 8 million. During the week that has passed since its launch, IE 9 has managed to secure about 1% of the browser market according to Clicky Web Analytics. However, starting tonight, ...

Microsoft's Kinect, the fastest-selling gadget ever, has now been hacked to work with the PlayStation 3. The Kinect isn't directly plugged into a PS3, though (that would be too awesome). Instead, it's plugged into a conventional PC laptop, where PrimeSense's first-party drivers are used to interface with Kinect. The data from Kinect is then converted into a format that the PS3 can ...

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%. Rustock was taken down, piece ...

A couple of months after Microsoft started testing it, the new Microsoft.com design is now live for everyone. You can see it simply by going to Microsoft.com, whereas until now you had to use a special URL to access it. The new design is clearly inspired by the Metro UI, and as such makes the website look a lot like the Zune media player, Windows Media Center, and, perhaps most strikingly, ...

Firefox 4 RC1 has survived the rigors of public beta testing and, come March 22 -- just five days away! -- it will drop its Release Candidate tag and become Firefox 4 final. This isn't to say that Firefox 4 RC is bug-free, but it does mean that there are no significant issues that would warrant an RC2. The only real issue that the Mozilla Dev mailing list has been dealing with is Vietnamese ...

Internet Explorer 9, in its first 24 hours of availability, has racked up a grand total of 2.3 million downloads. An impressive number, until you compare it to the latest major releases from Mozilla: Firefox 3.5 was downloaded 5 million times in 24 hours -- and Firefox 3, back in 2008, holds the world record for any piece of software with over 8 million downloads in one day. Of course it isn't ...

In a bit of Microsoft/Hulu cross-promotion, Hulu is offering a free month of its premium Hulu Plus streaming video service to users of Internet Explorer 9. To qualify, you just have to download IE9 and use the new taskbar pinning feature to pin Hulu.com to your Windows Taskbar. If you pin Hulu, you'll see the free Hulu Plus offer appear in your IE9 jump list starting on March 28th. Hulu is ...

March Madness pools have always been popular in the workplace. And since a lot of those workplaces are using Microsoft as the default email application, it makes sense for Microsoft to post a shared Outlook calendar which lists all the NCAA tournament action. Just head over to the Office add-ons site and download the March Madness calendar for Outlook, click the Subscribe button, and click ...

Moments ago, kicked off by a hipstertastic soiree at the SXSW convention, the final build of Internet Explorer 9 was made publicly available. You can now download it from the Beauty of the Web site. There are no significant changes between the RC and the final build; it's more of a spit-and-polish than anything else. Microsoft tells us that performance has been improved on low-end machines ...

Over the weekend, large corporations have been scrambling to offer support to the devastated north east of Japan, where a tsunami destroyed towns and farmsteads and looks set to claim over 10,000 lives. Google, as always, was the first to respond with a Google Person Finder for Japan. There is now a full Google Crisis Response page for the earthquake and tsunami, which is full of extensive ...

Microsoft's fledgling smartphone operating system, Windows Phone 7, has just hit an important milestone: over 10,000 apps are now available from the Marketplace. Microsoft has managed to reach this impressive target in just four and a half months, faster than both Apple's iOS App Store and Google's Android Market managed, adding about 1,000 apps a week to its armory since the New Year. While ...

If there's anything Windows Phone 7 doesn't need, it's yet another botched update. And as much as the company would like to push the NoDo update, which will add copy and paste functionality to WP7 phones, it has been temporarily put on hold. In an official blog post, Microsoft's Eric Hautala explains that while the February pre-update was largely a success, the failures were a great source of ...

Pwn2Own, the annual three-day browser hackathon, has already claimed its first two victims: IE8 on Windows 7 64-bit, and Safari 5 on Mac OS X. Google Chrome looks set to survive for its third year in a row. Internet Explorer 8 was thoroughly destroyed by independent researcher Stephen Fewer. "He used three vulnerabilities to bypass ASLR and DEP, but also escape Protected Mode. That's ...