In this edition of Weekend Reading, we’ve got stories on when Windows 8 will be available, Microsoft welcoming Yammer into the Office Division, four great Windows Phone apps for the London Olympics and more.
Windows 8 will be available on Oct. 26…
In this edition of Weekend Reading, we’ve got stories on Kinect PlayFit, the new Bing Fund and a final look at the Worldwide Partner Conference.
Burn calories on Kinect, track them With Kinect PlayFit. At last, a high score your doctor will appla…
The news just keeps on coming! This edition of The Midweek Download has stories on Microsoft acquiring Yammer, TechEd Europe and Windows Phone 8.
Microsoft acquires Yammer. Microsoft and Yammer announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive …
Well, we had quite a week here at Microsoft, as you may have heard. And here’s the latest edition of Weekend Reading to catch up everyone who might have missed the news. Check it out!
Announcing Windows Phone 8. It’s time to start telling y…
In this edition of Weekend Reading, we’ve got stories on Bing teaming up with Yelp, a Skype advertising update and a great slideshow to help last-minute shoppers pick the right gift for Father’s Day.
Bing and Yelp help you do more with loca…
Craig Mundie
In 2008, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, the non-profit corporation charged with coordinating the Internet’s naming system and ensuring the stability and security of the Internet), approved a pla…
It only comes once a year, but here is your Weekend Reading: The E3 Edition – bringing you all the highlights from the Los Angeles entertainment expo. We’ve also got stories on the limited edition Nokia Lumia 900 “Batphone”, the…
This edition of Weekend Reading is chock full of major news nuggets, including the launch of the new Bing, the availability of Windows 8 Release Preview, an E3 teaser and the debut of a beautiful new camera app for Windows Phone called Photosynth.
New Bing, available today, takes you from searching to doing. Do you ever feel like you’re spending too much time searching and not enough time doing? If so, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey conducted by Bing and Impulse Research, nearly 75 percent of people spend more time than they would like searching for information online. Time wasted searching is a thing of the past with the new Bing design, which brings together information from the Web, experts and enthusiasts, and your friends to help you do more — available today at http://www.bing.com. You can find out more about the new Bing over on the Microsoft News Center. Also, don’t miss this Bing Search Blog post about Bing’s new Snapshot feature, and be sure to watch the video below with Online Services Division President Qi Lu. Finally, check out today’s blog post on the Bing Summer of Doing.
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Microsoft announces availability of Windows 8 Release Preview. Microsoft announced on Thursday the availability of the Windows 8 Release Preview, the next milestone of the highly anticipated Windows 8 operating system. Now available for download in 14 languages at http://preview.windows.com, the Windows 8 Release Preview delivers a fast and fluid experience, along with a new user interface that responds equally well to touch as it does to keyboard and mouse. Since the February release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which was downloaded more than 1 million times in the first 24 hours, Windows 8 has become the most tested Microsoft operating system of all time, and with Thursday’s release, it enters its final phase of development before it releases to manufacturing. Head on over to the Microsoft News Center and a post from Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky on Building Windows 8 for the rest of the story. Below is a screenshot of the Windows Store in the Windows 8 Release Preview:
Xbox beyond the box. As you probably know, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) starts next week in Los Angeles. Just in case you missed it, check out this Tuesday post on The Official Microsoft Blog from Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing officer of the Interactive Entertainment Division, which raises the curtain on some of the news Microsoft will announce at E3. We kick things off on Monday, June 4 at 9:30 a.m. PT. You can watch us on live TV though our partnership with Spike TV, on the Web (Xbox.com), and for the first time ever – on Xbox LIVE.
Photosynth arrives on Windows Phone. Your phone’s camera just got a lot more exciting. Capping an impressive month for Marketplace, the free and much-anticipated Photosynth app for Windows Phone has arrived. Download it now. What’s Photosynth? Simply put, it’s a Microsoft technology for creating majestic 3D panoramas from plain old 2D shots. Although that summary doesn’t quite do justice to how magical Photosynth is. Marketplace is already home to several solid panorama apps. But as the Photosynth team notes on its blog today, there’s nothing out there quite like this: It’s the only mobile app that can piece together a full panoramic sphere (that’s 360 degrees horizontally and vertically.) For more on this story, read this Wednesday post on the Windows Phone Blog and this Wednesday post on Next at Microsoft. Below is an image taken using the Photosynth app:
Announcing Office 365 for Government. We’re pleased to announce some great news for government customers in the United States. First, we’re introducing Office 365 for Government. Office 365 for Government is a new multi-tenant service that stores U.S. government data in a segregated community cloud. Like other Office 365 offerings, it includes productivity and collaboration services including Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online and Office Professional Plus. Check out this Wednesday post on the Office 365 Blog for more detail.
Updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows and Mac. We recently rolled out an update to the SkyDrive app for Windows Phone that fixed a few minor bugs, and we have a small bug-fix-only update to our iOS app on the way as well. We’re also starting to push updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows desktop and for Mac, which will appear automatically on your PC or Mac over the course of the next week or so. You don’t need to do anything, as the updates occur automatically in the background. Mosey on over to the Inside Windows Live Blog to find out more about the update.
Microsoft strengthens commitment to addressing youth unemployment in Latin America and the Caribbean. At its annual Government Leaders Forum – Americas this week, Microsoft strengthened its commitment to creating opportunities for young people in Latin America and the Caribbean in an effort to reduce youth unemployment in the region. The company detailed its participation in the recent launch of a new initiative, New Employment Opportunities (NEO), which aims to train 1 million youth throughout the Latin American and Caribbean region and place at least 50 percent of those youth in jobs during the next 10 years. You can find out more about the forum over on the Microsoft News Center and in this post and this post on Microsoft on the Issues.
Thanks for checking out the latest edition of Weekend Reading! Have a great weekend!
Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft
In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got stories on the release of Kinect for Windows 1.5, Microsoft Research, some gorgeous ultra-thin laptops from HP and Lenovo and more.
Kinect for Windows 1.5 released with face tracking SDK and more…
In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got stories on big updates for Bing, some new apps for Windows Phone and some previews of what you’ll see from Windows 8 and IE10.
Bing Updates Available for Test Drive. You may have heard last week about some big updates coming to Bing that we think will provide you a new and exciting way to search. The new features began to roll-out Tuesday here in the U.S. You can check out some of the new features at http://www.bing.com/new.
You can also learn more about the updates from the video below, which provides a nice overview of what you’ll find in the new Bing some and background on the new features. With a refreshed design, the new snapshot feature for instant access to action-oriented information, or get advice and recommendations from friends and experts with the new social sidebar, it’s a big release for the Bing team, and we hope you like it.
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Aviary SDK available for Windows Phone … Steve Clayton reported some interesting news for developers, as the folks from Aviary have issued an SDK for Windows Phone, making it easy for a developer to integrate Aviary’s impressive photo editing tools into mobile apps.The editor itself can be integrated into a web site or app with a few lines of code, so well worth checking out.
… and LinkedIn too… Another exciting piece of news for Windows Phone customers. LinkedIn has released a really nice new app for Windows 7 phones. It’s one a lot of us have been looking forward to, and early reviews of the design and functionality are positive.
You can read more about the app from the LinkedIn blog, or download it today.
Security Advantages Emerge in Cloud Computing. While at first blush, many companies may see a move to cloud-based systems as creating potential security issues, a new study commissioned by Microsoft shows that many companies are finding the opposite to be true. For many small and mid-sized companies, cloud services can offer a great deal of security benefits and expetise that can be difficult and costly to achieve otherwise. Survey respondents report spending nearly one-third less time managing security issues than those not using cloud services.
Windows 8 Utilities and Disk Health. In a recent post on the Building Windows 8 Blog, Kiran Bangalore, a program manager on the Windows team, reviews in detail some of the changes being made to the chkdsk utility, used for detecting and repairing issues of disk corruption. While such issues occur rarely, the time it takes to run can be a source of frustration to Windows users. The changes are designed to make this process more transparent and less intrusive. It’s one of the many behind-the-scenes improvements the Windows team is making that promises to save Windows users and IT Administrators a good deal of time and trouble when issues come up.
Windows 8: Sharing Works like a Charm. One more from Windows 8 – and IE10 – but on the features side. The IE blog has a nice post explaining how the team has made sharing links faster and easier. Today, sharing a link from a Web site you like involves copying the link, opening or toggling over to another app, and then pasting it in to share or email that link.
With the share charm, you can share links to Web sites in a much more useful and visually-appealing way. Rather than use cryptic URLs, Windows 8 and IE10 create a rich link preview, using Web page titles, descriptions and thumbnail images to display and share, much as you share items with many social media sites. And Windows 8 and IE10 both support the OpenGraph protocol, so site owners can control how their web sites and pages show up in Windows 8 as well.
That’s all for this week … thanks for stopping by!
