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Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of a free technology preview of Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure. Using a set of tools for working with big data based on Google's MapReduce paper, it provides an alternative to Apache Hadoop.

Daytona was created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research. It's designed to help scientists take advantage of Azure for working with large, unstructured data sets. Daytona is also being used to power a data-analytics-as-a-service offering the team calls Excel DataScope.

ETH Zurich open-sourced an experimental operating system called BarrelFish, which it built in conjunction with Microsoft Research. The purpose of BarrelFish is to explore the best ways to structure OSes for multicore systems.

BarrelFish is a completely new OS "built from scratch," so it doesn't depend on any proprietary Microsoft components. The source code is available under an MIT license.

Bing has unveiled some changes to Bing Maps today that give users a much better view of the street. The newly improved Streetside feature in Bing Maps doesn't just show you the street, but lets you pan up and down it with a seamless, panoramic view of the surrounding location.

Two Microsoft researchers, Erik Meijer and Gavin Bierman, argue in a paper in the April issue of Communications that the growing number of non-relational databases (or more specifically, key/value databases) need a standardized data manipulation language like SQL in order to grow the market for NoSQL databases. It may seem run counter to the spirit of NoSQL - the creation of new databases for specific uses - but the idea is welcomed by some in the NoSQL community. Couchbase co-founder and VP of products James Phillips told PC World "There is little to disagree with in this paper."

Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the technology allows users to zoom out from the fish-eye pannable photos you see on standard street view options and instead see a series of flat panoramic photos stitched together like a timeline.

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

Like to sing in the shower or in the car? Want to subject others to your incoherent warblings as if they were a real song? Microsoft Songsmith may be for you. And if you're a professional lyricist, musician, or someone with real musical talent? Songsmith may be incredibly helpful for you, too.