ReadWriteWeb

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.

This is the ninth year for the Imagine Cup, Microsoft's student technology competition. Teams from all over the world, representing 70 countries, have gathered this week in New York City for the Imagine Cup finals. It's down to the final round today with those making it to the very last round of the finals presenting the projects they've designed and built.

These projects do not simply highlight new technologies or innovative applications. As part of the Imagine Cup mandate, the students' projects must tackle some of the world's most pressing issues, as outlined by the United Nations' Millennium Goals. These include combating disease, ending hunger and reducing childhood mortality, to name a few.

With Citrix escalating its fight against VMware, and VMware expanding its arsenal, it's worth taking a look at the current state of the virtualization market. Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report.

The MQ puts all the major players in one of of two quadrants: leaders or niche players. The other quadrants are completely empty.

Windows 8 may be released as soon as April 2012, according to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. Foley writes that according to a "trusted source" Microsoft is on track to release all versions of the OS, including Server and ARM versions, to manufacturing ahead of the originally reported Q2/Q3 2012 schedule (Foley also explains her policy for vetting rumors).

The same source reports that Microsoft may release a beta version at the company Build conference in September. It was originally thought that this would be a pre-beta preview.

Microsoft is already ditching is much criticized "native HTML5" term. "I don't know that you'll see us refer to native HTML in the future," the company's new Internet Explorer Evangelist Ari Bixhorn told The Register today.

Other than a change in terminology, nothing else is changing. And Microsoft is sticking to its guns regarding WebGL, so I still fear that fragmentation will continue.

Microsoft has admitted that it will hand over data to the U.S. government, if properly requested, even if that data is stored somewhere other than the U.S.

The issue, according to ZDNet's Zack Whittaker, is that because Microsoft is a U.S. company it has to comply with the Patriot Act, and that means handing over data that may be offshore. The same rules would apply to Amazon Web Services and any other U.S. based cloud provider that has servers overseas.

LinkedIn announced today its LinkedIn Groups API, available in JavaScript or REST flavors. The new API will enable developers to embed functionality from Groups into other applications.

As an example, Microsoft used the API to embed discussions from LinkedIn on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 event website.

Microsoft's next-gen Windows Phone mobile operating system, code-named "Mango" is out today, but only for developers. According to a post on the official Windows Phone blog, Microsoft's Director for Windows Phone Brandon Watson revealed that the early access program is now open for developer access, allowing all to get their hands on Mango at last.

According to a reports via BGR and DigiTimes, the next versions for the Windows Phone operating system following the "Mango" release are code-named "Tango" and "Apollo." There is almost no information on what those operating system updates will contain, outside of this sneaky photo of a unwiped whiteboard at Microsoft Research. Here, there are hints about protocols, input methods and something called an "inspiration engine." What the heck is that?

Today, as expected Office 365 came out of beta. Office 365 is Microsoft's consolidated cloud-services system that combines hosted versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync Server.

So how does it hold up to two older offers, Google Apps and Zoho?