Facebook's newly announced messaging platform will deeply integrate Microsoft's Office Web Apps so that Facebook users can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments without having to leave the site. Rumors about this integration started to make the rounds on the Internet last week. Oddly, though, Facebook didn't mention this integration during today's press conference and makes no mention of it in the official announcement on its corporate blog.
Over 16 million people watered their FarmVille crops yesterday. While AppData's Facebook app top 10 is mostly populated by games like Zynga's popular farming game, Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille and Café World, Microsoft's instant messenger app Windows Live Messenger is the second most popular app in this list with over 9 million daily active users.
By default, Windows Phone 7 uses Bing as its search engine and Microsoft doesn't currently give users the option to switch to another search provider. Just like Bing launched multiple iPhone apps, though, Google is also bringing its own mobile apps to Windows Phone 7. Just in time for the U.S. launch of Windows Phone 7, you can now download Google Search from the Marketplace.
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 made its debut in the U.S. today. We got a chance to give the company's new mobile operating system a spin over the last few days. Even though we have a few minor issues with it, Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is a welcome and much-needed reboot of Microsoft's mobile platform. The new mobile OS introduces quite a few innovative design ideas and should give the company a good shot at once again becoming a major player in the mobile business. Here are some of the things we enjoyed while using the phone, as well as some of the negatives we discovered during the time we spent with it.
The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first tests to ascertain browsers' conformity to HTML5.
And in a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 7, Firefox 4 beta 6, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0, the tests found that the most compliant browser currently available is IE9.
Google has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior for requiring that messaging technologies must be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite in order to be considered for procurement. The well-respected blog TechDirt reported first on the suit and says it "seems like they've got a decent argument there."
The Department of Interior justified its preference for Microsoft in part because of the company's "enhanced security," but it was Google's first version of Google Apps for Government that became this summer the first cloud solution to win the Federal government's Federal Information Security Management Act certification.
Earlier this morning, Microsoft announced a new developer preview of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) during its PDC keynote. This new version is very similar to the first developer preview the company launched earlier this year, as it does not feature the full Chrome-like user interface Microsoft introduced with the first public beta of IE9. Instead, it is meant to give developers the ability to test their Web apps against the improved rendering engine's new capabilities like CSS3 2D transforms.
Even though the user interface is disabled by default, though, a small hack makes it possible to use the preview with a full user interface.
Microsoft is holding its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on its Redmond, WA campus this week. The event kicks off with a two-hour keynote hosted by the company's CEO Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia, Microsoft's president of its server and tools division. Microsoft generally holds these events when it wants to tell its developer community about major platform developments, so we expect to hear a lot about Microsoft's new mobile platform Windows Phone 7 and its cloud computing initiatives. We have also heard some rumors that we could hear something about Windows 8 today.
The keynote is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Pacific/12 p.m. Eastern and you will be able to see our play-by-play account of the event right here, or head over to the conference website for the live video stream.
The Microsoft Kinect is two weeks away from commercial availability and the company is expected to spend up to $500 million advertising this new touch-free body-as-controller interface for the XBox. Motion control of a computer interface is likely to spread far and wide and today we see the first TV commercials that will aim to bring this kind of technology into the lives of everyday people.
The videos below are compelling. The consequences of a big splash by this $150 peripheral device could go far beyond the XBox, though.
Next week (October 28 and 29) Microsoft will host its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on its sprawling Redmond, WA campus. Typically, PDC - which the company only organizes when it wants to talk about major platform developments - is held at a larger venue, but Microsoft decided to hold it on its own campus this year. While this makes for a more intimate setting, it also means that fewer developers will be able to attend in person. To make up for this, Microsoft is putting the technology it developed for streaming live video from live events like the Vancouver Olympics and NBC Sunday Night Football to use in covering its own developer conference.
