As the American government continues its internal adoption of cloud computing services, Google and Microsoft have been scrambling for contracts – what with their being lucrative and influential and such. Sucks to be Google, then, because the FAA just awarded $91 million to Microsoft to have their platform transition to the Microsoft Office 360 cloud service.
American tech companies are increasingly wary of a growing movement to hand control of the Internet over to the United Nations, led by China, Russia and Arab states. They are worried that this could empower foreign governments to restrict free speech and civil rights, not to mention negatively affecting the bottom line for Silicon Valley giants including Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft announced today that they are preparing to roll out a revamped version of their net-based search engine Bing, after spending nearly US$6 billion on the service over its three year existence. They’re attempting to increase Bing’s market share of search engine revenues globally. But how is Facebook involved? Before you all go Google what a “Bing” is, read on…
In another great instance of American judges believing that their jurisdiction has no limits, a U.S. judge has ruled that Motorola cannot enforce an injunction that would prevent Microsoft from selling Windows products in Germany, should a German court issue such an injunction next week.
Microsoft wants you to notice them too – which is why they’ve rolled out a Ford Mustang fitted with Kinect sensors, two Windows 8 tablets, projection screens, and a couple of other neat toys as a proof-of concept to inspire developers to build applications and automotive technologies with Microsoft in mind.
Microsoft has been on a fancy-user-interface-technology kick this week, between the fancy touch-screen projectors and electronic fabric announcements – but the Holodesk sort of wins at the moment, at least for those of us who think 3D environments you can manipulate with your hands are cool.
The nice thing about initiatives like Microsoft Research is that you get to have an early gander at the things that you’re going to be spending stupid amounts of money on next year. Like the OmniTouch, for instance, which projects “touchscreen” interfaces onto pretty much whatever surface you want – desk, paper, or the back of your hand.
At long last, Microsoft has taken their iPod-but-worse MP3 player, the Zune, out behind the shed with a shotgun. Microsoft announced that they would stop making new versions of the music/video player due to “tepid demand.”
I guess this is the future’s MacBook photobooth? Using a 3-D printer and a Microsoft Kinect, folks can get small, low-resolution 3-D sculptures of themselves printed, as displayed at the snappily titled Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference last week.
Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, and holder of the title of “worst teeth for a rich person” also happens to own the world’s second largest yacht – The Octopus. One of the logistical tentacles of the Octopus is a helicopter used to ferry crew and guests to and from the vessel. It crashed into the ocean. Click for the pic.