Blog

Manu Cornet has created charts of major tech companies, such as Amazon with its top-down structure and Google with its slightly less structured structure.

See more

Microsoft have taken a very bold, and now it seems strategic, move of acquiring Internet Telephony pioneer Skype. Skype has over 170 million connected users and over 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010 alone. Microsoft confirm this move on their website (click here)

Microsoft hope for this move to “increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities. The combination will extend Skype’s world-class brand and the reach of its networked platform, while enhancing Microsoft’s existing portfolio of real-time communications products and services.”

Microsoft said they will continue the development of the application for both their native OS (Windows) and third party operating such as Apple.

During the period of Acquisition a With that query in mind, Qriously, a service that measures public sentiment in real-time on smartphones, went out to get the data. The company asked 1500 smartphone users if buying Skype is a ‘win,’ or a ‘fail’ for Microsoft:

See more

Happy with your shiny new copy of Internet Explorer 9? It’s already out of date — Microsoft just announced Internet Explorer 10 at its MIX developer conference in Las Vegas, and if you’re running Windows you can grab a spoon right now and sample an early taste. You can download the new Platform Preview right now at Microsoft’s Test Drive ...

See more

Google Street View eat your heart out: An MIT-built quadrocopter uses Microsoft Kinect, and some smart odometry algorithms, to fly around a room and spit out a 3D map of the environment. The drone itself is a lightweight UAV with four rotors, an antenna, protective and stabilising shielding and the guts of a Kinect sensor. It communicates with a nearby ...

See more

As Kinect hacks go, this one’s not going to bowl you over with its technical complexity, but the effect of what it does is quite dramatic. One of Microsoft’s sensor-rich, camera-laden Xbox accessories has been repurposed to communicate with a Pufferfish spherical projection display — via the magic of WPF and openni — with its motion tracking algorithms serving to control the image on the giant ball. Naturally, the first thing the tweakers behind this mod thought up was a Tolkien-inspired eye that follows people around the room. Sadly, the single Kinect box isn’t enough to provide 360-degree coverage, but it’s probably just a matter of time until they splice an array of them together and creep us out completely. Video after the break.

See more

We’ve been reporting on the drama over Google’s WebM ever since Microsoft compared the video format to Esperanto earlier this year, but despite a war of words, Google and Microsoft seem to be playing nice as of late. What originally appeared to be a mere WebM plug-in for IE9, has turned out to be a full set of components for the Microsoft Media Foundation (MF) API, which means even more compatibility within Windows. Because the components are installed directly to the operating system, you’ll be able to watch WebM videos in other programs that support MF, such as Windows Media Player 12 for Windows 7. We suppose this could be the signal for some sort of a truce over disputed video formats, but, really, what’s the fun in that?

Source IEBlog, WebM

See more

Apple and Microsoft are locking horns over the trademark of the term “App Store”, with the Cupertino Mac-maker fighting back against Microsoft’s complaint that the term is too generic to be owned. In January, Microsoft filed an objection to Apple’s US application for the App Store trademark, on the grounds that “‘app store’ is generic for retail store services featuring ...

See more