2008

Thanks Bill

Today is Bill Gates’ last full day at Microsoft, as he transitions from Microsoft to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  I’ve had a good time this past week or so watching some of the retrospectives, and thinking about how …

Microsoft launches new Windows Mobile homepage – $200m Free The People project starts

Today Microsoft has launched an updated version of the Windows Mobile homepage over on Microsoft.com, powered by Silverlight. While not big news in itself, this launch is part of Microsoft’s new project to better promote its consumer offerings, which under …

Microsoft plans acquisition of MobiComp: Portugese Mobile services company

MobiComp Microsoft has just announced that it plans to acquire MobiComp.  MobiComp is, according to the press release:

…a company that helped pioneer technologies allowing the backup and restoration of mobile data and mobile posting of social content to Web

Don’t like the 20TB of new data in Virtual Earth? Submit your own!

Another big data update over at Virtual Earth, over 20 TB, including Microsoft UltraCam images of Iowa City in drier times:

IowaCityVE

(a more recent picture from the Des Moines Register, below)…

IowaCityFlood

…and other non-Ultra-cam imagery of lots of …

Back up and running

Apologies for the downtime, we’ve been down the last 17 hours or so, due to problems at our webhost.  Pretty frustrating, really, and we’re exploring our options (know a good web host? – leave a comment).  Glad to be back …

PhotoZoom and SLS get Silverlight 2 update

Emil Protalinski just caught the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 update to Silverlight Streaming, which also effects the PhotoZoom service.

For those of you who haven’t tried PhotoZoom yet, the service allows you to implement the Silverlight DeepZoom technology on your …

Ozzie working on another secret cloud project – Bill Gates gets silenced

As this is the week that Bill Gates retires from his day to day duties at Microsoft, there’s a whole bunch of coverage out there looking at his impact over the last few decades and how he’s shaped the digital …

New i’m Initiative campaign to begin: 30 days of non-stop email and IM

Microsoft has been having some good success with the (US only) i’m Initiative, having raised $1.5 million for charities, and at the same time pushing new downloads of Windows Live Messenger (and more recently, Hotmail sign-ups):

New customer acquisition

Mashed08 – Are You Going?

Last month we noted that the BBC and Microsoft will be running a UK Developer event taking place on June 21-22nd. Well, that time is upon us and I will be heading up to London tonight ready for it tomorrow …

Microsoft to roll-out Live Search Cashback to UK, then EMEA

At the Cannes International Advertising Festival today, Microsoft has announced it plans to extend the new Live Search Cashback program to the UK.

Launched at the Advance08 advertising summit held in Redmond, Live Search Cashback has been in testing during …