Apple walks away with a ruling that Samsung copied the iPhone. Samsung will appeal and look to have the decision mitigated as much as possible. And over in the corner, Microsoft and Nokia look at each other, nod their heads, and smile. This was a good court verdict for Windows Phone.
While it’s easy and popular to poke at Internet Explorer, in reality, we wouldn’t have the web as we know it today if not for its contributions. Where would the web be without
XMLHttpRequestandinnerHTML? Those were the very catalysts for the Ajax revolution of web applications, upon which a lot of the new capabilities have been built. It seems funny to look back at the browser that has become a “bad guy” of the Internet and see that we wouldn’t be where we are today without it.Yes, Internet Explorer had its flaws, but for most of the history of the Internet it was the browser that was pushing technology forward. Now that were in a period with massive browser competition and innovation, it’s easy to forget where we all came from. So the next time you run into people who work on Internet Explorer, instead of hurling insults and tomatoes, say thanks for helping to make the Internet what it is today and for making web developers one of the most important jobs in the world.
Enough said. Can't agree more.
Microsoft and its main hardware partner Nokia, at the very least, should have an easier time of it. Robert Barr, executive director of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology, said that the user interface — the icons and other features that users see and touch — of the Nokia Windows phones look distinctly different from the iPhone. Nokia, a longtime maker of phones, also has a thick portfolio of patents to protect itself. For Microsoft and Nokia, which are trying to make a comeback in smartphones, this design distinction is a clear advantage in the internecine patent wars sweeping the industry as much as it is a marketing advantage.
Things could get tougher, however, for Google, or any phone maker using its Android software. Android phones are the most common smartphones on the market today. Samsung is the world’s largest maker of smartphones and it has been quickly gaining market share. Collectively, the various Android phones from Samsung and other makers easily outsell Apple’s iPhones.
What stops Apple from suing every other Android based Phone maker now? Apple won't license it's iOS platform to OEMs, but there is this company called Microsoft which does - it's very distinct and re-imagined Windows Phone. Did Apple made things easier for Microsoft, we will know soon.
The interactive element of the hub is a live polling system. It will gather impressions from Xbox Live users as they watch live broadcasts of the three scheduled presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
According to Pinero, Microsoft believes this will be "probably the biggest real-time reaction poll on the presidential debates" in history, depending on the number of users watching.
That's right: no more post-debate call centers or email surveys. Instead, live opinions across the diverse Xbox Live user base will instantly be available to the public. And it will all take place on the Xbox 360.
Canalys, the research firm, found that in the second quarter of 2012, Microsoft’s Windows phone platform made up 3.2 percent of the global market for smartphones, compared to 1.2 percent in the year-earlier quarter. While that number is still tiny, it’s a growth of 277.3 percent. (Canalys’s market share statistics are based on shipments to retail channels, not sales to consumers.)
opportunistically taking advantage of an anti-Facebook meme to grandstand about how Google+ is somehow the shining beacon of platform goodness just feels oily. But more importantly, it deserves some proper context ... the reason Google is or isn't holding back on a write API for G+ is irrelevant ... this about taking a humble tone in the wake of a dubious track record.
Wise post on how each Platform provider has goofed up multiple times but taking a swipe at another competitor for similar mistake you have committed in your lifetime, and this coming from Vic Gundotra/Google with a dubious track record which Tim O'Brien lists eloquently, looks stupid.
One million people have signed up for a new, modern email experience at http://Outlook.com
What's great - 1 Million users in less than 6 hours.
We think the time is right to reimagine email. So today, we're introducing a preview of Outlook.com. We realized that we needed to take a bold step, break from the past and build you a brand new service from the ground up. You already know Outlook via the Outlook desktop application-for PCs and Macs-as the world's most popular application for reading email, managing a calendar, and connecting to people. And you may have used the Outlook Web App connected to Exchange Server in your organization. Now, in addition to a desktop application and a service for businesses, we're offering Outlook as a personal email service - Outlook.com.
While I liked the new interface, the name Outlook.com signals the impending death of Hotmail brand which is little uncool.
iMore has learned that Apple is planning to debut the new iPhone at a special event on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, with the release date to follow 9 days later on Friday, September 21. This information comes from sources who have proven accurate in the past.
I am not sure what it is but I see some desperation from Apple here. The iPhone launch is happening three weeks prior to the previous cycle of iPhone 4S launch.
Apple aired three new ads last night during the Olympics for the Mac and the "Genius" bar at Apple's stores.
The response to the ads has not been good. Fortune's Apple blogger Philip Elmer DeWitt wrote that only one of the three ads is enjoyable. 9 to 5 Mac's Mark Gurman tweeted, "Not a fan of this new ad."
Former Business Insider politics editor, John Ellis wrote on Twitter, "We were surprised, last night, watching the Olympic coverage, by the Apple ads. Think it's the first time Apple ads have been dreadful."
First time Apple ads are getting booed.
Apple sold 28 percent more iPhones last quarter than it did a year earlier, but the growth failed to meet the lofty expectations of analysts, leading to a rare disappointing earnings report from the company.
Don't get to see this often. Start of a trend? The culprit being the iPhone. Sales of iPhones rose 28% from the previous year but fell 26% from the second quarter.
Analysts expected Nokia to have sold 4 million Windows Phone-powered Lumia phones in Q2, roughly doubling from the first quarter, and that’s exactly what it did in reality. It only sold 600,000 phones in the US though.
4 Million is a decent number considering the stiff competition Windows Phone faces from iPhone and Android devices. What is not good is that it sold only 600K Lumia phones in US.
Apple Inc. (AAPL) was ordered by a judge to publish a notice on its U.K. website and in British newspapers alerting people to a ruling that Samsung Electronics Co. didn’t copy designs for the iPad.
The notice should outline the July 9 London court decision that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets don’t infringe Apple’s registered designs, Judge Colin Birss said yesterday. It should be posted on Apple’s U.K. home page for six months and published in several newspapers and magazines to correct any impression the South Korea-based company was copying Apple’s product, Birss said.
This doesn't get better, pass on the popcorn please.
Office at Its Best on Windows 8
Touch everywhere. Office responds to touch as naturally as it does to keyboard and mouse. Swipe your finger across the screen or pinch and zoom to read your documents and presentations. Author new content and access features with the touch of a finger.
Inking. Use a stylus to create content, take notes and access features. Handwrite email responses and convert them automatically to text. Use your stylus as a laser pointer when presenting. Color your content and erase your mistakes with ease.
New Windows 8 applications. OneNote and Lync represent the first new Windows 8 style applications for Office. These applications are designed to deliver touch-first experiences on a tablet. A new radial menu in OneNote makes it easy to access features with your finger.
Included in Windows RT. Office Home and Student 2013 RT, which contains new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, will be included on ARM-based Windows 8 devices, including Microsoft Surface.
Office Is in the Cloud
SkyDrive. Office saves documents to SkyDrive by default, so your content is always available across your tablet, PC and phone. Your documents are also available offline and sync when you reconnect.
Roaming. Once signed in to Office, your personalized settings, including your most recently used files, templates and even your custom dictionary, roam with you across virtually all of your devices. Office even remembers where you last left off and brings you right back to that spot in a single click.
Office on Demand. With a subscription, you can access Office even when you are away from your PC by streaming full-featured applications to an Internet-connected Windows-based PC.
New subscription services. The new Office is available as a cloud-based subscription service. As subscribers, consumers automatically get future upgrades in addition to exciting cloud services including Skype world minutes and extra SkyDrive storage. Subscribers receive multiple installs for everyone in the family and across their devices.
Office Is Social
Yammer. Yammer delivers a secure, private social network for businesses. You can sign up for free and begin using social networking instantly. Yammer offers integration with SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics.
Stay connected. Follow people, teams, documents and sites in SharePoint. View and embed pictures, videos and Office content in your activity feeds to stay current and update your colleagues.
People Card. Have an integrated view of your contacts everywhere in Office. The People Card includes presence information complete with pictures, status updates, contact information and activity feeds from Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Skype. The new Office comes with Skype. When you subscribe, you get 60 minutes of Skype world minutes every month. Integrate Skype contacts into Lync and call or instant message anyone on Skype.
Office Unlocks New Scenarios
Digital note-taking. Keep your notes handy in the cloud and across multiple devices with OneNote. Use what feels most natural to you — take notes with touch, pen or keyboard, or use them together and switch easily back and forth.
Reading and markup. The Read Mode in Word provides a modern and easy-to-navigate reading experience that automatically adjusts for large and small screens. Zoom in and out of content, stream videos within documents, view revision marks and use touch to turn pages.
Meetings. PowerPoint features a new Presenter View that privately shows your current and upcoming slides, presentation time, and speaker notes in a single glance. While presenting, you can zoom, mark up and navigate your slides with touch and stylus. Lync includes multiparty HD video with presentations, shared OneNote notebooks and a virtual whiteboard for collaborative brainstorming.
Eighty-two-inch touch-enabled displays. Conduct more engaging meetings, presentations and lessons, whether in person or virtually, with these multitouch and stylus-enabled displays from Perceptive Pixel.
I had to quote the whole thing above. The new Office is bold, cool and ever so more interactive. OneNote annotation and the ink with touch support is enough for me to go buy the new one.
Marissa Mayer, the long-time Google executive, has been named Yahoo CEO, the New York Times first reported.
She resigned from Google Monday and starts at Yahoo Tuesday.
Mayer had been at Google for 13 years, where she lead products such as search and local. She told the Times, “it was a reasonably easy decision” to take the Yahoo job as it’s “one of the best brands on the Internet.”
It can't get bigger and better than this for Yahoo. Just the name is inspiring enough for me to buy Yahoo stock. So there was something in Yahoo that other's could not see.
It will be interesting to see how Marissa manages the search relationship with Bing considering her Google pedigree.
The site became NBCNews.com, signifying the end of a relationship between NBC and Microsoft that dates back to the earliest days of the commercial Web. Early next year, MSNBC.com will be reborn as a stand-alone site for the cable channel MSNBC, ending the brand confusion that has plagued the site in the past.
With the changes, “we will fully own our digital businesses,” said Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. That’s because the company that controls NBC, Comcast, is acquiring Microsoft’s 50 percent stake in the joint venture that brought MSNBC.com to life in the mid-1990s — in effect, a big investment by Comcast in the news division’s future.
Microsoft is receiving roughly $300 million for the stake, according to people with knowledge of the transaction who insisted on anonymity because the total price was not being made public. A portion of the total price comes from the joint venture’s past profits.
All said and done, Microsoft now needs a strong News offering, something which rivals NBCNews and other news networks. Do we seen another acquisition?
We must go beyond our constricted awareness into an expanded awareness, and ultimately into our unbounded awareness, which has no limits in space and time, and we will have come here for the true purpose that we came: To feel, to be happy, and to serve each other,
The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said. “They are not as cool.
Yahoo! and Facebook today announced that they have entered into definitive agreements that launch a new advertising partnership, extend and expand distribution arrangements, and settle all pending patent claims between the companies.
Under the agreements, which include a patent portfolio cross-license, the parties will work together to bring consumers and advertisers premium media experiences promoted and distributed across both Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! and Facebook will also work together to bring Yahoo!’s large media event coverage to Facebook users by collaborating on social integrations on the Yahoo! site.
It's one of those scratching backs deal, no exchange of money in this case.
To me there are three phases in Steve’s leadership of Microsoft. In the first phase, while he was President and the first few years as CEO, he mostly focused on keeping the ship from sinking in the face of anti-trust and economic concerns. Efforts started during this time were heavily influenced by that environment, often with positively ugly results (e.g., Vista). Next came a couple of years of panic where it seemed Microsoft had fallen behind on all fronts and a frantic set of efforts were launched to catch up. The aQuantive acquisition was part of this. It was an era where Steve and Bill still shared leadership of the company, and where business units had lots of freedom to prioritize their individual strategy and tactics over an overall corporate strategy. Some things succeeded, like Windows 7. But others…. Now we are in the third phase where Steve has fully taken the reins and the Microsoft we are seeing is his Microsoft. It’s not all positive (particularly for employees), but for customers the 2012 product wave is probably the best in the company’s history. Microsoft is finally back. So for me the aQuantive write-down is the last major step in Steve putting the panic phase behind him. History is going to measure Steve ‘s tenure as Microsoft CEO on what happens in 2012 (FY 2013 for those into financial measures) and beyond, not what happened in the 2000s.
Three phases of Steve's Leadership.