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Rumours fly of Microsoft making $15 billion bid for Facebook8th May 2008 1:00 pm Microsoft The internet news feeds are resounding with the latest rumour in the Microsoft takeover mill. This time it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook that’s attracting their attention. Whether this is a genuine bid or merely a stalking horse for the seemingly dead in the water takeover of Yahoo! it remains to be seen. Interesting times however. According to The Times : Microsoft is believed to have approached Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, over a possible acquisition of the social networking site. It is believed that Microsoft has sought to gauge Facebook’s level of interest about a potential bid after $47.5 billion (£24.3 billion) takeover talks with Yahoo!, the online search engine, failed on Saturday. It is not thought that there are any active talks between Microsoft and Facebook. In October, Microsoft took a $240 million stake in Facebook, which valued the site at about $15 billion. Although Mr Zuckerberg has resisted selling the entire company, indicating instead that he would prefer to float the group, it is not known what his response to Microsoft has been. Read the whole article here : Microsoft looks at $15bn takeover of Facebook Would you like to know more about Social Networking? If so, contact Hit Search, SEMPO accredited Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click specialists, on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world out there, make sure you become visible. Microsoft takes Geotagging search mainstream2nd May 2008 11:36 am Microsoft Microsoft. today introduced two new products to help photographers manage their digital photos in a new way using location data, a process known as geotagging. Geotagging is an exciting new way to organise digital photos that was previously available only to those with technical expertise. Today, Microsoft also released Expression Media 2, a new version of its digital asset management software, which is part of the Expression family of products for creative professionals. Expression Media 2 is designed to help reduce the amount of time required by photographers to manage and organize large collections of photos and other digital media, and it includes geotagging functionality.
“These two products really simplify the process of geotagging and organizing digital photos by location, even without a GPS device,” said Josh Weisberg, director of the Rich Media Group at Microsoft. “We’ll continue to look for ways to simplify features like geotagging that help keep photographers organized.” As digital photography has gained popularity, so has the demand for geotagging tools. Photographers, both professionals and enthusiasts, want the ability to quickly identify the location of their images. With the Pro Photo Tools, photographers have a lot of flexibility in how they tag their photos, including RAW formats. They can gather location information from a “Geotagging is a hot new area in digital photography, and like other popular digital photo features, I expect photographers will be asking themselves how they ever lived without it,” said Ron Glaz, analyst at IDC. “Until now geotagging has been hard to do, requiring special expertise and tools. The time has come for an application that even the weekend photographer can use. Microsoft’s initiative of leading the way and making geotagging accessible to pros and enthusiasts alike is a step in the right direction.” The Pro Photo Tools and Expression Media 2 are designed to work together to help photographers better manage their digital image collections with new comprehensive digital asset management functionality including geotagging. Expression Media 2 has an open architecture, supports multiple file formats including RAW, and can be used either on Windows or Macintosh operating systems, giving photographers more control over images and greater flexibility. It also allows quick export of photos into multiple formats to produce slide shows, video, and interactive Microsoft Silverlight-powered Web galleries. Expression Media 2 will be available for purchase in mid-May, and a trial version is available at the following link http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/overview.aspx?key=media. Would you like to know more about this subject? If so, contact Hit Search, SEMPO accredited Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click specialists, on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world out there, make sure you become visible. Microsoft’s Bill Gates ‘Second Digital Decade’17th March 2008 10:41 am Microsoft At yesterday morning’s NVTC Titans Breakfast, hosted by the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the largest technology council in the nation, Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation, said the next 10 years will mark a “second digital decade” involving pragmatic advances in technology innovation. The incredible advances of the past decade, in terms of software development and the growth of the Internet laid the foundation for these profound changes that will dramatically impact the way individuals work, live and learn and will empower the end user like never before, Gates said. Before the audience of 1,100 technology executives, Gates also addressed a range of topics, including the future of technology in the workplace and issues facing U.S. education, immigration and workforce challenges. Businesses will operate in a “hybrid” technology environment- some operations will remain local while others will transition to the Internet or “be in the cloud,” through a combination of software plus services, according to Gates. Moving data operations to an Internet-based architecture will decrease IT costs as less onsite expertise will be required. The way businesses will view data will change as “software will do 90 percent of what we do manually today,” he said. Important to this evolution, Gates noted, is that organizations will likely require a mixed environment that offers the best blend of local computing power while also taking advantage of the flexibility offered by Internet-based architectures. Some of the revolutionary workforce technologies-for instance intelligent surfaces-also will have applicability in home and business environments, Gates said. Microsoft is currently testing a new product, Microsoft Surface, that once launched will not require expensive new hardware-only “software and a camera,” and, one day, “will be a standard in the home and in businesses.” Gates said Microsoft looks forward to its business partners taking this idea and “running with it” to create new and bigger applications than currently envisioned, including, to just begin with, those in the retail and hospitality industries. In the classroom, technology will allow for a more interactive learning experience, Gates said, with Tablet PCs replacing text books. The “magic threshold” at which Tablet PCs will be available to students in a cost-effective manner is only two to three years away, and this will revolutionize the way students learn, he continued. According to Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, who briefly joined Gates onstage for the Q&A session, students’ lives inside and out of the classroom are dramatically different today. Unfortunately, there is a “disparity between traditional academic and what life [outside of school] looks like,” Mundie said. Gates also noted that providing high-quality education experiences in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is more important than ever for the United States to grow a skilled workforce in today’s global knowledge economy. Students enrolled in educational institutions where STEM is emphasized are more enthusiastic about these topics of study and more Another important issue related to U.S. competitiveness, and the focus of Gates’ testimony yesterday on Capitol Hill, is the fact that “talented, smart people” who want to live and work in the United States cannot because of issues with the current H1-B visa program, Gates said. Many of the best and brightest foreign students who are educated in the United States have only one choice: to take their talents elsewhere. The nation needs to better embrace free trade policies and research development activities to allow the “smartest people” to work here to ensure future competitiveness in the highly competitive global technology market. View the Bill Gates’ speech on the ‘Second Digital Decade’ below Miscrosoft’s answer to Google Sky : World Wide Telescope10th March 2008 10:36 am Microsoft Microsoft are soon to lauch World Wide Telescope (WWT) allowing users to explore the universe using images from telescopes around the earth and those in orbit. The company says : The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.” and dedicate the applicationto the memory of Turing Award winner Jim Gray. It will be available in Spring. Microsoft DreamSpark aims at plugging the global skills gap.19th February 2008 10:46 am Microsoft Microsoft have announced an initiative to give free developer software tools to sutdents in order to addressing what the company sees as a growing IT skills shortage in the global workforce. They make a pretty interesting point that that the self-built nature of people’s blogs, social networking site and internet presence in genernal means that “Yesterday’s ‘user’ is today’s ‘creator’” Joe Wilson, Senior Director of Academic Initiatives (for Developer and Platform Evangelism) at Microsoft outlined details of the scheme in an interview with the corporation’s PressPass news service : Microsoft DreamSpark is a community-based program to provide students with free access to Microsoft’s industry-leading software development, gaming and design tools. Working with schools, governments, partners and student organizations worldwide, we will be making this available starting today in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Other countries will come online over the next year, as well as expanding the program to include high school students. The program is open to all students at education institutions worldwide, though those studying science, technology, engineering and math disciplines (STEM-D) are expected to be the first to jump on it. All eligible students need is access to a computer with an internet connection to download the products, as well as free access keys at http://channel8.msdn.com. We call it DreamSpark because every great technology breakthrough starts life as someone’s dream or idea. We want to make sure that students have the tools to spark their own dreams plus the power to turn them into reality. We believe students can do amazing things with technology if given access to the right tools. This is a way to make sure that they have what they need to test the boundaries of what today’s technology can do and also prepare for a great career at the same time. The added benefit to industry is that we’re addressing one of the toughest challenges confronting employers today: attracting and developing qualified IT professionals. We’re trying to help close this gap by giving students globally the opportunity to get the tools they’ll need after they graduate and jump-start their careers to land that first job. Making sure there is a strong pipeline of technically skilled students is key to the future of the global economy. The ability to create new software and services will be an essential part of the skill set of the next generation of workers. Technology is one of the chief drivers pushing worldwide economic development and job creation. As well as giving students important exposure to the tools they can expect to use in the workplace, DreamSpark is about putting professional-level tools in the hands of students to amplify the impact of their studies and fire up their imaginations about the power of technology. Also featured is this interview Channel8 did with Bill Gates :
The tools they are propose making available are : Microsoft developer tools.
Microsoft designer tools.
Microsoft platform resources.
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