As part of a carefully timed preview of the forthcoming Windows on ARM (WOA) operating system, which borrows the new "Metro-style" usage model from Windows 8, Microsoft released a video showing WOA running what were described as technical previews of four "Office 15" applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. But the key question for which Desktop application developers have been seeking an answer may have been obscured: As Microsoft adopts a new usage model with elements gleaned from the "Metro" style, will Office be moving away from the ribbon? The first clips of the new Office in action deliberately obfuscate the answer.

If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.

"The Store of the Future," as retail electronics vendors have depicted it over the past few years, features eight-foot touchscreen walls that double as mirrors, interacting with the customer as she tries on virtual clothes without sacrificing her own modesty, scanning the ID tags and profiles of items she's already selected, and giving store clerks tools to dazzle the customer with demos and make on-the-spot deals without having to rush to the back office. These are the wonders made possible by embedded technology... ah, can't you hear the voice-over announcer now!

The thing is, customers are already entering the stores right now with touchscreens, scanners, IM clients, Twitter clients, and live video displays - they're just in the customer's pocket or purse. So at the National Retail Federation's big show earlier this week in New York City, there were dueling visions of "The Store of the Future." The challenger looks more like a kind of smart Wi-Fi that communicates directly with the devices the customer already has, using hardware that could cost retailers a lot less.

The last Steve Ballmer keynote has come and gone, and even after the company's overt effort to reduce expectations about product announcements, if you listen carefully, you may still be able to hear the faint sound of a gospel choir chanting about one of the few remaining expectations that was left unmet last night: There was no word on a possible Metro-style preview of Office 15.

In fact, the company's Tami Reller lowered expectations even further by repeating a demonstration of the existing Office 2010 running in a late build of Windows 8, alongside a Metro-style newsreader app, with the two worlds divided from one another by the partition that Microsoft calls "Snap." While Reller's point was that the two worlds could co-exist, there was one world many attendees wish they could have at least peeked into.

The segment of the media delivery industry that may yet take off for consumers consists of programming and services that are delivered to newer HDTVs "over-the-top" (OTT) - meaning, outside of the cable or satellite provider's pipeline. Naturally, the Internet is the delivery medium here. In prior years, analysts have wondered how (or whether) traditional programming from multi-service operators (MSOs) like Comcast would compete.

The answer we may get from CES 2012 is that it won't have to. Semiconductor maker Broadcom is set to demonstrate a new class of system-on-a-chip (SoC) components that could be integrated into set-top boxes (STBs). This new class, numbered BCM72xx, would deliver OTT services alongside cable channels, in a format that would enable MSOs to utilize Android as the operating system, and Sling Media as the streaming provider for wireless devices. It could be the formula behind the phrase, "Goodbye, TiVo."

The notion of app stores is expanding into the world of printers and HP has made some important strides in the past year after it announced its ePrint line of printers. The apps, combined with an Internet-accessible printer, are both actually pretty neat and I will show you what is involved in getting it all to work.

The floods across Thailand earlier this month have been devastating for many people there, and our hearts go out to them. (I have visited twice and will surely go back some day.) One place that these conditions have had an immediate worldwide impact is on hard drive prices. A Western Digital factory outside of Bangkok is responsible for the components that are used in nearly 60% of their hard drives, and the factory had been sitting in a flood-created moat up to five feet deep, as can be seen from this picture care of Scan Computers and posted here.

Those of us who have used email alot, (see my email memories story here) have often wished we could know if our recipients have opened and read our messages. And while there have been read-receipts on various email services for many years, until now there hasn't been a general-purpose tool that can track when someone actually opens your messages. Enter Zendio with their plug-in for Outlook. And while it works, it is probably the creepiest solution that I've seen.

No single Web technology has survived longer on life support than the intranet - the broader goal of employee intercommunication and content management, to which enterprises still aspire. Despite an over-abundance of very capable tools over the years, including content management systems and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, the element that companies have lacked to date has been inspiration. It's as if a construction firm had dumped all the best building materials into one big pit: With that much treasure in one place, how come no one builds houses with it?

This year's version of the spark for inspiration comes from social media, and the realization that while a low percentage of employees uses the company intranet, a higher percentage uses Facebook. Coinciding with this week's Gartner Symposium/ITExpo in Orlando, Florida, where "the social organization" is a principal topic, CMS market share leader OpenText's latest Social Communities 8.1 upgrade adds a curious new feature that's sure to get businesses talking: social data mining.