For more details:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/oct11/10-13SkypePR.mspx?WT.mc_id=MSCOM_EN_US_HP_FEATURE_122LSUS011889

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates couldn’t be more pleased to see his company acquire Skype.

“I think it’s a great, great deal for Skype,” he told the BBC in an interview published yesterday. “I think it’s a great deal for Microsoft.”

Microsoft announced its intentions to acquire Skype last week in a deal valued at $8.5 billion. If and when the deal closes later this year, the VoIP provider will become the Microsoft Skype Division under the leadership of its current CEO, Tony Bates.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20063885-17.html

By Daniel Ionescu (Feb 11, 2011)

Microsoft and Nokia on Friday announced an alliance that pairs the world’s largest phone maker with the software giant in a marriage of convenience as the two combine forces to compete more effectively again Apple and Google in the fight for smartphone dominance. Nokia says it will build high-end smartphones based on the new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system from Microsoft.

The news comes just days after Nokia’s CEO admitted defeat in the face of Apple iOS and Google Android in a leaked memo to employees, the struggling world leader in mobile phones unveiled a new strategy to bring Nokia to its former smartphone glory.

Nokia Goes Windows Mobile

In a press release Nokia said it would adopt Windows Phone as its “principal smartphone strategy”, hoping bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies. Nokia and Microsoft would also collaborate in marketing the new devices, while Microsoft’s search engine Bing would power Nokia’s search services.

Nokia will also integrate its Maps software with Microsoft’s mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter advertising platform. Nokia would leverage its vast operator billing agreements to allow purchase of Nokia Windows Phone services in countries where credit-card use is low. Nokia’s app store would also be merged with Microsoft’s app store, the company said.

Nokia did not give specific dates of when its first Windows Phone 7 smartphones would arrive, only saying that there will be more news in the “next weeks and months.” Meanwhile,HTC, Samsung, LG and Dell have available devices running Windows Phone 7 software.

MeeGo Goes, Jobs Go Too

Nokia also said that its OS collaboration with Intel called MeeGo would become a long-term open-source project, or, in other words, will take a back seat (perhaps a tablet version), along with Symbian, which would be used on mid-range Nokia phones.

In another big shake-up, Nokia will also reshuffle its divisions, in a new company structure, which features two distinct business units: Smart Devices and Mobile Phones. Smart Devices will include Windows Phone, Symbian and MeeGo devices, while Mobile Phones will concentrate on Nokia’s feature and lower-end phones. Unsurprisingly, Reuters also reports that Nokia will cut a “substantial” number of jobs in its homeland Finland and elsewhere.

October 11, 2010

Microsoft on Monday unveiled the final version of its long-awaited Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, which it hoped would give it a greater presence in the rapidly expanding market for smartphones.

The software was introduced at a news conference in New York City led by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. He said the new operating system would be available on nine handsets next month from a variety of hardware manufacturers — LG, Samsung, HTC and Dell. Some of these phones would have keyboards, Mr. Ballmer said, and others would be exclusively touch screen.

The new phones would be available on AT&T’s network starting Nov. 8, he said, and later in the year on T-Mobile. Verizon and Sprint will offer the phones in 2011. AT& T will offer three phones, at $200 apiece.

Microsoft has a lot at stake with the new phone software. Over the last several years, the smartphone market has grown exponentially. The Apple iPhone, Google Android and RIM’s Blackberry have taken the lead in customer sales.

Microsoft, which does not have a quality competing  smartphone, has lagged behind. With the new operating system, it hopes to become competitive.

In his remarks, Mr. Ballmer stressed the features on the new phones that will allow people to customize their devices. “We focused in on how real people really want to use their phones when they are on the go,” he said, adding that the ability to customize the phone was what he thought distinguishes his company’s product from others.

The AT&T phones will have its U-verse TVservice, allowing users to download television shows to their devices, said Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive of AT&T’s mobility and consumer market unit, who also spoke at the news conference.

Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and program manager of the Windows Phone 7 platform, demonstrated the new operating system at the news conference. He showed a home screen that could be customized to each user, integrating social networks, messaging and integration with the Microsoft Xbox.

Mr. Belfiore also showed other unique features, including Microsoft’s Power Point slide presentation software and in-depth search integration.

Another feature is Office Hub, which offers a free integration with Microsoft’s One Note software, making it easy to share and edit documents between a Windows phone and a Web-enabled version of the software.

Consumers can also link their phones to other Microsoft products, including Xbox LIVE for gaming, Zune music and video content and the Bing search engine.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Source: CNET

Google attached a slightly finer launch window to its Chrome OS software this week, according to reports out of Computex.

Google’s Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management and leader of the Chrome OS project, told reporters gathered at the annual hardware industry blowout in Taiwan that the Netbooks or other devices running the operating system would launch in “late fall” of this year. Previously Google had said it planned to launch Chrome OS in the second half of 2010 in time for the holiday season, so late fall isn’t that surprising a time frame.

That would presumably allow Google and its hardware partners to get the devices out in late November or early December as the rush of the holiday shopping season gets under way. Given that Netbook momentum appears to have stalled a bit as tablet mania takes hold, it will be interesting to see if Google’s approach gains any traction.

One organization that will definitely snap up Chrome OS devices is Google itself. CEO Eric Schmidt has said that the company plans to aggressively adopt those devices for both product-development improvements and security concerns, part of the reason Google is also said to be ditching Windows devices.

Source: CNET

IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ARM, and others have formed a company to streamline development of products, such as tablets, on ARM processors.

Typically, companies wanting to develop for ARM processors–one of the most prolific chip designs in the world–need to wade through a morass of different operating systems and versions of those operating systems. Those include Google’s Android and Chrome OSes, Ubuntu Linux, Palm’s WebOS, and MeeGo from Intel and Nokia.

The new company, Linaro, is a non-profit software engineering outfit that intends to simplify the development process and is backed to the tune of “tens of millions of dollars” by its founding members, Tom Lantzsch, an executive officer at Linaro, said in a phone interview.

ARM’s chief rival, Intel, has an advantage because it doesn’t face as unwieldy a ecosystem as ARM does. In short, Intel is one chip company with one chip architecture.

ARM chips–used widely in cell phones, smartphones, and expected to populate a raft of upcoming tablets–are designed and manufactured by range of companies including Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Freescale, ST-Ericsson, and Samsung.

“On the one side you have many chips, and on the other side you have many distributions (software versions),” said Lantzsch. Linaro’s goal is to make sure the latest software version can be readily “ported” to the latest silicon.

“Imagine two tablet makers going to the same silicon vendor. Let’s say Texas Instruments in this case. And both want to get a tablet into the market and both want to do that, for example, on Android. What you’ll find is there are differences in the versions (of Android). And then you’ll have other tablet makers wanting to do a tablet on Chrome or MeeGo,” Lantzsch said. The resources of TI and its customers will be strained to meet all these competing demands, he said. Linaro aims to streamline and optimize this process.

“Linaro will provide a stable and optimized base for distributions and developers by creating new releases of optimized tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a wide range of (chips), every six months,” the company said in a statement.

Linaro’s first software and tools release is due out in November and will provide optimizations for the latest range of ARM CortexTM-A family of processors, the company said.

Moreover, they’re providing the same high-quality and engaging content found in those third-party publications and broadcast outlets, offering it to mainstream audiences for free and, in essence, competing with those very outlets that used to serve their advertising needs.

Of course, as new media channels continue to emerge, audiences become more dispersed, creating an urgent need for brands to spread their efforts across channels to capture the attention of their target audiences. That fact alone negates the logic once used to rationalize huge ad spends on single outlets or mediums. Knowing that marketers must find revolutionary methods of enticing customers and prospects to engage with their brands, what better method is there than for brands to simply become the media?

People are more comfortable getting their news from multiple sources—a perfect environment for any business thinking about stepping in and becoming a trusted source of information. And that’s the general logic: When any company educates its current and prospective clients on its field of expertise instead of pitching them products or services, it effectively becomes a reliable source of information and entertainment.

Here’s the bottom line: When a company or brand becomes the media, it effectively creates a direct dialogue with customers that leads to a predetermined behavior and increased sales. Creating your own media channel also increases accountability and measurability, which is critical in today’s economic environment.

Black Friday, while itself the product of marketing, is a logical time for stores to launch sales. Consumers generally have the day off and feel like a stroll about the mall to work off some of the massive dinner they ate the prior night. Cyber Monday, by contrast, comes after the holiday, when everyone’s usually back at work, bloated and tired from driving eight hours home from grandma’s house and already stressing the backlog of unanswered e-mail at work.

For years, Cyber Monday has been controversial, numbers-wise, too. In 2005, when the term was coined by the Shop.org Web site as a promotion, Business Week wrote: “Cyber Monday isn’t nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It’s not even the first big day of the season.”

But last year ComScore’s figures showed it ranked in third place for the year’s biggest sales day. This year e-retailers are once again updating their online stores with discounts to try to attract another wave of consumer spending. And as the light glimmers at the end of Recession Tunnel and retailer report a successful Black Friday, we may well expect ComScore’s figures to move Cyber Monday even higher up the list.

So at what point does an entirely made-up marketing event become something real (for whatever definition of real you choose to accept in this Internet world)? Well, surely Black Friday’s sales events started off, informally, in the same way. And here’s a bit of a left-field piece of news to set you thinking: Britons are expected to spend a whopping £300 million today. Yup–that’s British consumers, living in a nation which doesn’t even celebrate Thanksgiving.

By: Patrick Goss (TechRadar Specialist)

Google has shown off its Chrome OS operating system for the first time, with the internet giant ‘open sourcing’ the code for its latest venture, and billing it as the ideal OS for a complimentary device rather than a main computer.

Showing off an early build of Chrome OS for the first time, Google’s press conference confirmed that much of what you would expect from a Google product is present and accounted for, with the phrase “Speed, simplicity and security” used throughout the presentation.

The OS is pretty much a browser with much greater functionality rather than a traditional OS, and will only work with solid state memory rather than a hard drive.

1. What exactly is Chrome OS?

Google Chrome OS is the company’s first attempt at designing an operating system for more powerful computers. The Google partnered Android has done well for mobile platforms, and it now wants to take the work it has done there, tie it up with the work it is doing on its still-fresh Chrome browser and make the first ‘OS for the cloud’ – with most of the work being done on the net rather than on the computer.

2. When will we able to use Chrome OS?

Google has ‘open sourced’ the code so it is available to developers later this year and predicts that we will be buying the first Chrome OS powered netbooks by the second half of next year.

“Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010,” said Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director on the Google blog.

3. So Microsoft need not worry about competition for Windows 7 then?

On first look probably not - with Google insisting that Chrome is for ‘complimentary devices’ and not for a primary machine.

That’s because memory intensive programs, like Photoshop for instance, are not built to work in the web. As Google put it at the first unveiling of Chrome OS: “If you’re a lawyer shuttling backwards and forwards between long briefs then Chrome OS is probably not for you.”

However, with people increasingly used to having their information and tools online, from webmail to docs, from calendars to chat, Google appears to be asking if we really need an OS that deals with our desktop, and not simply an interface for the web.

4. Will it run on my computer?

In a word: No. Google Chrome OS will only be available to consumers on specially made Chrome OS devices. “As a consumer, you can’t go download Chrome OS,” said Google’s Pichai “You will have to go and buy a Chrome OS device.” However, those devices will be made with both ARM and X86 architecture, and from several manufacturers.

“Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year,” says Google.

5. If it’s so heavily web integrated, will it be secure enough?

Google certainly thinks so. Security is what many would term a ‘hygiene’ problem. You expect your computer to be secure and you notice, and notice hard, when it isn’t.

“…as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work,” says Google.

6. So is this being done entirely in-house by Google?

No. Google has already appealed to the open source community to get behind the project – which is built on the open Linux kernel. ”We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision.” By making the browser the central component to the OS, Google is extending an already huge platform – the web – meaning that anyone designing for web standards will be well catered for.

7. So how will this make my computing experience better?

Google is hoping that ‘it just works’ which is probably the mantra being rolled out at Apple and Microsoft HQs about their operating systems as well. Chrome OS is heavily web based. It’s perhaps the most focused on bringing the web into the mix and offering a ‘cloud’ operating system from the ground up.

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” says Google. “We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.”

8. What does this mean for Android?

Android is the Google backed mobile phone platform, whereas Chrome OS is designed specifically for more traditional computers. Although Android netbooks are appearing, Chrome OS may well shunt Android back to the mobile phone when it arrives next year, although Google is hedging its bets somewhat. ”Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android.” explains Google. ”Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks.

“Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

9. Will this sound the death knell for Ubuntu and Fedora?

Google making its own Linux based OS will certainly be a major ‘competitor’ for other flavours of Linux, like Ubantu, with the powerful company likely to attract a big swathe of developers into the Chrome OS camp.

10. How much will it cost?

It’s Linux based, it’s open-source; it will be free. Of course Google may make money with corporate support, should it become competitive for enterprise. And, remember, Google makes its money from online advertising and Chrome OS is all about being and staying online.

Microsoft shared some information about what’s coming in Internet Explorer 9 and Silverlight 4 during its November 18 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) keynotes. If you want to see a real example of the difference in disclosure policies between Microsoft’s Windows unit and its Developer Division, the level of information provided by execs with each division today made that quite clear.

As expected, Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky shared a few tidbits about Internet Explorer (IE) 9. Sinofsky emphasized that Microsoft will continue to play up privacy, user choice and responsible development with the next IE release. But he offered no information on when the team is planning to release a test build or the final version of the browser.

Sinofsky said during the Wednesday morning keynote that the IE team is about three weeks into the IE 9 project. (I’ve been getting tips that there already is a build of the product out there that is being used inside Microsoft, but it’s not available to external testers yet.)

Sinofsky noted that Microsoft is fully aware that it needs to keep pushing on the standards front. He noted that IE 9 is currently passing 32 of 100 Acid3 tests (compared to Firefox at more than 70 and Opera at 100). He also made it clear that Microsoft is aware it needs to continue to do work to improve JavaScript performance with IE.

Sinofsky said IE 9 will support hardware-accelerated rendering and rounded borders, but didn’t say a whole lot more about it. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for .Net, had lots more to say about Silverlight 4, the next version of Microsoft’s browser plug-in that competes with Adobe Flash.

Microsoft is making a public beta of silverlight 4 available for download today, November 18. A single, near-final Release Candidate will follow and then the final version of Silverlight 4 will be out in the first half of 2010, according to Guthrie. Guthrie said Silverlight 4 will be a major new release of the plug-in. He said the upcoming version will incorporate nine of the ten most requested features by developers.

Guthrie itemized and demonstrated some of the new features of Silverlight 4 — which include everything from its support for webcam and microphone access, to the ability to run Silverlight inside the Google Chrome browser. Silverlight 4 also will include full support for Visual Studio 2010, native multicast support and improved printing, networking and reporting capabilities, company officials said.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who manages to download Silverlight 4 (servers are crawling, I hear) about what you think of the new beta of the product. Feel free to chime in in the talkbacks….