The first day I used the HTC HD7 running Windows Phone 7, the new mobile operating system from Microsoft, I couldn't log into Foursquare. A friend on Twitter told me the issue had been going on for almost a week. The Foursquare support Twitter account had tweeted to those who asked that the issue was "being worked on." No ETA on a fix was given. There were few complaints. No one, except for Microsoft employees and a handful of brave early adopters, probably even noticed. After several more days, the login function began to work again. There was no blog post from Foursquare about the issue or its resolution.
Is this what it's like to be a second-class citizen in a world dominated by iPhones and Androids? As I transition over to this new handset, that's a key question I want to answer.
Microsoft is adding support for NFC (near field communication) to its Windows Phone mobile operating system, according to a report citing unnamed sources over on Bloomberg Businessweek. NFC technology, which allows for short-range wireless communication between two devices for the purpose of data exchange, is a key component to the upcoming mobile payment and mobile wallet systems now reportedly under development at Google, RIM and Apple as well as the new carrier-led initiative Isis, a coalition of three of the four major cellular providers here in the U.S.
Support for NFC technology in Windows Phone 7 will be released via an update to Microsoft's mobile operating system, sources told Bloomberg reporters. Those updates may arrive sometime this year.
Whenever I'm checking my email, one of two things can happen. I get an email, click on a link, and 20 minutes later I'm not sure how I ended up on Facebook but yes, I would love to attend a dinner party next Thursday. If I'm truly task-focused, however, I'll at the very least end up with a screen full of so many new tabs that I forget which tab I'm on in the first place. Either way, email can set me off on a confusing and messy adventure and Microsoft has an answer I'd love to see become a standard.
Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft is announcing a new type of interactive email that keeps you focused on getting through your email while still being able to look at pictures, watch videos, accept friend requests and more.
Microsoft Bing, the number two search engine on the Web, announced this morning that it has begun including Tweets within news results and and a tighter Facebook integration in its search results.
According to the Bing Team, the inclusion of social media in these search results will help users "make more informed decisions in search by surfacing the kind of information you can only get from your friends, often in real-time."
Times are changing: while corporate management all around the world worries about the distractibility and entitlement of the next generation of workers, Microsoft appears set to embrace the future warmly. The next version of Microsoft Word and the rest of the Office 15 suite will include some features very familiar to the kids these days.
"For Office 15 we're building new products to deliver integration of instant messaging/presence with social networks such as Facebook," the company wrote in a job posting put online today. Stephen Chapman first reported on the news at ZDNet and said he found it bewildering. Not everyone feels that way, though; to some observers it makes perfect sense.
Boosting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education has become a priority for the government, for schools, and for tech companies. In emphasizing the importance of doing so, many point to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor that note that while there will be more than 2 million job openings in STEM-related fields by 2014, fewer than 15% of U.S. college undergraduates now pursue degrees in science or engineering.
It isn't enough to convince college students to major in science - or rather, by the time students hit college, it may be too late to pique their interest in the field. So many STEM efforts are aimed at encouraging the scientific and technical minds of younger students.
One way to ignite that interest is to give kids the skills so they can build and play their own video games. That's the idea behind Microsoft's Kodu, a visual programming language and game development tool. A product of Microsoft FUSE Labs, Kodu Game Lab enables children as young as five to design, build, and play their own games on the PC and Xbox.
Web developers, designers and users rejoice: Internet Explorer 6 use is quickly on the decline. Even Microsoft, the company that released Internet Explorer 6 more than a decade ago, has joined in on the celebration.
"Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we're in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it's time to say goodbye," writes the company on a website it launched today to track the browser's demise.
Microsoft has today announced that its Bing search engine has added a new partner, the popular travel search site Kayak. Going forward, Kayak will provide its flight search and pricing data to Microsoft which will be then integrated into Bing's search results. What that means for Bing users is that they will now have access to flight search data for more cities, more airports and more airlines, in more locations around the world thanks to Kayak, says Microsoft.
This is the second travel-focused update to Bing in less than two weeks, and is notable in light of Google's attempted acquisition of ITA Software, the system powering travel pricing for dozens of airlines and flight tracking sites. If that deal went through, it would strike a direct blow to Microsoft's attempt to innovate within the travel search vertical.
Microsoft is joining the coupon craze popularized by sites like Groupon and LivingSocial with the launch of a new service called Bing Deals. The program is not an in-house creation built from scratch, but is being made available through a partnership between Microsoft and The Dealmap, a deal-tracking service that aggregates local deals, coupons and discounts from over 300 different sources and daily deal websites.
Bing Deals will work both on the desktop and mobile (via m.bing.com) and is also heavily integrated into Bing's search engine itself.
According to analytics firm StatCounter, the Bing search engine has just overtaken Yahoo for the first time worldwide during the month of February 2011. From StatCounter Global Stats, Bing closed out the month with a 4.37% search share compared with Yahoo's 3.93%. However, both still fall far behind Google's search share of 89.94% of the global market.
