Microsoft Invests $300M in Nook. Steven Sinofsky Is The Heir Apparent of Microsoft. What Google+ Should Have Been: Bing's Linked Pages. Bing launched Bing+ last week, it just skipped all the unnecessary stuff. (It's not really called Bing+.) There's a new feature called Linked Pages that allows Bing users (U.S. only, for now) to connect their various websites and profiles to their Bing identities, using Facebook for authentication. You can also link your Facebook friends to their pages. Thanks to its relationship with Facebook, Microsoft has the advantage of not needing to build its own identity provider or social network. Everyone's already on Facebook. To build good results for people, Bing will use the same technique Facebook Groups use: get friends to draw their own graph. Social Network Overkill The interesting thing is, this is exactly what Google+ is for, but the product isn't being pitched that way.
It's a shame, because some of these features are absolutely wonderful. Couldn't Hangouts have just been a Gmail feature? Social Search Is All We Needed Bing is just being honest about that. Google could have done that. Microsoft Surface 2.0: From 'Minority Report' to Reality. The Designer Tech Series is supported by the exquisitely crafted, new 2013 Lincoln MKS with Lincoln Drive Control. Now it gets interesting. The idea of surface computing — interacting with gestures, movements and objects, is quickly moving from the big screen (a la Minority Report) and into reality.
From smartphones to tablets to thermostats, touch is becoming the computing input mechanism of choice. With Surface 2.0, Microsoft is actively taking surface computing to the next level. First released in 2008, the Microsoft Surface was a tabletop touch computer with support for multi-touch and multi-gestures. At CES 2011, Microsoft unveiled the Surface 2.0. Last month, Samsung started accepting pre-orders for the Microsoft Surface 2.0 SUR40 in 23 countries. How It Works For the Surface 2.0, Microsoft employs a number of different technologies to make the product really sing.
The iPad (and leading Android tablets) can support up to ten simultaneous points of interaction. This is how it works: How Picture Password Works in Windows 8. Microsoft is talking a lot about passwords lately. Earlier this week the company posted on its Building Windows 8 blog a lengthy post detailing the problems with current passwords, and how Windows 8 will solve them. Then Microsoft published another lengthy post Friday outlining why one of those solutions, Picture Password, is so great. It's a fairly convincing argument, even if it's laced with many assumptions.
The essence of Picture Password is to use one of your own personal photos as a key to the device. It'll only work for a touchscreen device — a smartphone, tablet or touchscreen PC — since it involves tracking finger gestures on the screen. Once you pick a photo to use, Picture Password records three gestures that you "draw" on the screen. Why just the three gestures instead of free-form movements, which would probably be more secure? It turns out that taps, circles and lines are secure enough, and Microsoft presents the math to prove it.
Windows Azure Adds Node.js Support, Hadoop Preview - ReadWriteCloud. When Windows Azure was launched in 2008, it was with the intention, Microsoft said, of running .NET Framework applications from the cloud. What ended up happening was that the PaaS market matured much faster than anyone in 2008 could have anticipated, so any cloud apps platform that needs to stay competitive must run with the languages the development world is using. Hosted JavaScript certainly was in Microsoft's original plans, but JavaScript that runs as a host, was not. For a company that has historically been incapable of turning on a dime, though, it's executing a pretty impressive course change with Azure. Last June, the company helped the Joyent open source team to port its Node.js stand-alone JavaScript server to Windows. And yesterday, Microsoft announced it has completed its addition of Node.js support to Azure, meaning that any developer can launch a server-based JavaScript app from Microsoft's cloud in minutes.
Windows 8 Will Bring Personal Cloud to Billions, Says Microsoft. The next version of Microsoft's still dominant PC operating system, Windows 8, "represents an incredible opportunity to bring the benefits of the personal cloud to billions of PC users. " That's according to a blog post written by the Group Program Managers for SkyDrive, Microsoft's consumer cloud product. When it was launched back in August 2007, SkyDrive was described as "a personal 'harddrive' on the internet".
It's now a major player in the consumer cloud market, competing with other big guns like Apple's iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive. Also SkyDrive competes with innovative startups like Dropbox and SugarSync. The Microsoft blog post presents some statistics about the consumer cloud market, along with big claims for its future. To help define the market, Microsoft's Omar Shahine and Mike Torres outlined three distinct categories of personal cloud solutions: File clouds; using the traditional file and folder structure. How Does SkyDrive Compare to Other Offerings? Windows 8: The Top 4 Things You Should Know. Microsoft says it is "reinventing the OS" with Windows 8, the company's next-generation operating system.
Microsoft fired off dozens of announcements and showed off countless features of the new OS at its Build conference in Anaheim, California. Features such as the Metro interface, support for touchscreens, improved performance and a Windows Store for apps are making headlines. But which Windows 8 features are the most important ones? We've scoured the Windows 8 feature list, played with Windows 8 devices (our first impressions coming soon), and come up with a list of features that we believe define Microsoft's next-generation OS. Without further ado, here are the top four things you need to know about Windows 8: Windows 8: Photos & Screenshots 1) Windows 8 Works on Tablets, Laptops & Desktops Perhaps the biggest difference between Windows 8 and its predecessors is that this OS is designed to work on not just laptops and desktops, but on tablets as well. 2) Everything Is Faster on Windows 8. What a Windows 7 User Needs to Know About Windows 8. Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [REVIEW]
I'm writing this article on a Windows 8 tablet. Thankfully, I've got a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as a dock to help the Samsung developer tablet act more like a regular PC. Microsoft made the Windows 8 Consumer Preview available this morning to everyone who wants to check it out. It was also kind enough to give Mashable a sneak peek. What exactly is a consumer preview? I can tell you this: It definitely means it's not ready for general release. It's been a challenge trying to separate issues that are due to the inherent bugginess of a pre-release, changes that I'm just not used to, and things that are real problems.
But here goes. First, a little background: Windows 8 is a complete re-imagining of Windows. That's really just scratching the surface of Metro, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. My first impression: Almost, but not quite. Metro With a Mouse & Keyboard Microsoft has a vision, a dream even. Microsoft knows this, so Windows 8 is highly adaptable.
Sharing. 5 Ways Windows 8 Is Better Than iOS and Android | Gadget Lab. When Microsoft revealed the “consumer preview” of Windows 8 on Wednesday, it didn’t just give the world a glimpse at a new OS — it also showed us that it can be a leader in touch-based user interface design. Yes, Microsoft’s new tablet UI isn’t merely utilitarian. It’s actually innovative, and even cool. And in some ways it trumps the best that Apple and Google currently have to offer in iOS and Android, respectively. Here are five of our favorite new Windows 8 features. Picture Password You can choose both the photo and its related gestures for your picture password. We’ve known about Microsoft’s picture password feature in Windows 8 since its developer preview was unleashed in mid-September. When Microsoft first detailed picture password, some were skeptical: Won’t evil hackers be able to figure out your gesture-based password based on the smudges you leave on the display?
Of course, character-based passwords and number-based PINs are an old standby. Easy Gesture-Based App Switching.