Tudo para meter o Bing como motor de busca do AOL... Enfim, o Bing já é motor de busca de quantas empresas? Twitter, Apple, AOL, Facebook... a lista continua...
Microsoft Ups Your Comedic Game In Online Chats With CAHOOTS
Five Microsoft researchers and a Carnegie Mellon University student joined forces this year to answer one of life’s most pressing questions: Can a computer be funny? To find the answer, researchers developed as computerized funnyman, CAHOOTS, to make jokes based on what researchers know about online humor.
As the researchers note in a paper titled, “OMG UR Funny! Computer-Aided Humor with an Application to Chat,” computer-generated humor (CGH) has proved elusive to computer scientists. Software can be designed to create puns and other jokes, but creating humor that really makes people laugh has generally been the province of, well, people. So, the researchers proposed a new strategy.
“Rather than pursuing humor solely through a CGH strategy, we propose providing computational support for humorous interactions between people using what we call Computer-Aided Humor (CAH),” the researchers wrote. “We show that by allowing the computer and human to work together, CAH systems can help people be funny and express their own sense of humor.
The newly designed CAH (which the researchers refer to at one point as a “creativity support tool”), turns out to be a pretty decent engine for helping people find relevant jokes and memes that they can work into their posts. It can supply text, memes, and pictures, much of which it finds with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. The researchers concluded that people generally liked the help CAHOOTS provides when creating funny posts online.
Will CAHOOTS ever be implemented? Microsoft hasn’t said, but we doubt that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is getting daily briefings on it. All we’re going to say is that Windows 10 had better be killer.
Microsoft unveils the Minecraft in Education initiative
Microsoft hopes teachers use Minecraft to help stimulate students in the classroom, allowing them to think creatively - and have fun while doing it.
After the game originally launched in 2011, some teachers found unique ways to embrace Minecraft. It has been used to help teach students about Japanese-American internment camps, DNA extraction, architecture, all while helping grow leadership and digital citizenship.
"Many of the most fun parts of Minecraft, including the collaborative nature of play, the need to experiment, the open world, the earning of achievements, and the growth of players' in-game characters as well as their personal skill sets, are also key to excellent learning environments," according to a recent blog post on the Minecraft Education website.
Microsoft wants to help connect teachers and educators trying to find ways to implement Minecraft - and technology overall - to help their students learn.
Not just that, but the total sales of Minecraft across all platforms, has passed over 70 million - quite the achievement. In the last 24 hours alone, Mojang has sold over 10,000 copies, proving the game is an unstoppable success. Most people were worried when Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to buy Mojang not too long ago, but with Minecraft being shown off in HoloLens, we can see how big this game is going to be going into the future.
Microsoft + Allseen: IOT momentum is starting to build
Sometimes the signs of change are more obvious than others.
When a spokesperson for the Linux Foundation calls to talk about an open source contribution from Microsoft into the Qualcomm-driven AllSeen Alliance that’s about bridging older industrial automation standards into the sexy new world of IOT, you know something must be happening.
And so it is.
This week, these interesting bedfellows are announcing the release of the AllJoyn Device System Bridge (DSB), a Microsoft-created open source addition to AllJoyn that incorporates an overall framework for bridging specialized and/or proprietary protocols into AllJoyn, and specifically includes two example “bridges.” One is designed to communicate with older building automation systems using BACnet, and the other is for connecting to existing ZWave-based smart lighting and other home automation products. This work extends Microsoft’s previously announced intention to build AllJoyn support into Windows 10.
As I’ve written about in the past (here and here), it’s a lot easier to talk in theory about making everything connect to everything than it is to actually do it. Then again, there is the question of whether or not that ought to be the right goal. The truth is, to make IOT really start to happen, all we need is to get enough of the right things to talk to enough of the other right things (albeit, in a secure manner). So, I’m encouraged by efforts that—in theory, at least—look to make it possible to try and connect more devices together.
Within the enterprise world—where I continue to believe there’s a significantly larger real money opportunity for IOT—there are hundreds of different verticals that have essentially been engaging in IOT-like applications for some time. In the past, this was called embedded computing or industrial computing or command-and-control systems or a whole host of other unsexy-sounding names. But now, they’ve been sprinkled with the pixie dust of IOT and, suddenly, they’re a hot, cool topic.
The problem is that, because they tended to be industry or solution-specific, most people didn’t worry about whether one type of system could talk to another. Now, however, there’s interest in making that happen—partially because of the fact that analytics tools are becoming available that might be able to convert the output from some of these systems into actionable information (though it’s not always the case). So, again, developments that can help bridge these different worlds could prove to be very beneficial.
The optimist in me hopes that developments like AllJoyn DSB can help overcome the technical and political challenges of IOT, but the realist in me thinks that’s probably too idealistic.
In the smart home and consumer world, the challenge of interconnecting across different companies’ products and standards also exists, but it takes a slightly different form. Frankly, the challenges for the consumer IOT market are tougher, in that any solution has to be made incredibly easy. For commercial applications, you can count on experienced programmers to help make the various devices work together, whereas that’s obviously unacceptable in the consumer market.
Speaking of programmers, in case you were wondering the motivation behind Microsoft’s effort, it turns out this DSB extension for AllJoyn will enable Microsoft’s faithful Visual Studio customers to extend their skill sets beyond Windows applications into building apps for the red-hot world of IOT. Smart.
The optimist in me hopes that developments like AllJoyn DSB can help overcome not only the technical challenges of interconnecting the currently separated islands of IOT activity, but also some of the many political challenges from intra-industry battles that have kept IOT from moving forward at a faster pace. The realist in me thinks that’s probably too idealistic. Nevertheless, the creation of physical and “metaphysical” bridges across the IOT archipelago has got to be seen as movement in the right direction.
Bob O’Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and market research firm. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech. This article was originally published on Tech.pinions.
Microsoft's new augmented reality project, "SemanticPaint," lets you digitize your environment
Some of the coolest things in augmented reality are coming out of Microsoft Research, and their newest project "SemanticPaint" is no exception. This project lets you scan objects, or whole rooms, in 3D using a Kinect and then separate and define individual objects in the scene. This kind of accurate visualization of the world bodes great possibilities for things like self-driving cars and robots.
After the initial scan which produces a singular object (below), a person can touch a chair with their hand or foot, say "Label: chair" and continue with the rest of the environment until each object is logged in the computer as singular items. The computer then separates the items into classes.
The project is fully online, to provide continuous feedback and create a personalized experience, and it can be processed using a laptop's CPU for better interactivity. Microsoft claims that their software has the ability to learn, remember and differentiate between labels so it can operate faster in the future.
Microsoft's ideal set-up is for the user to wear a depth camera and as the person moves within a space, "the dense 3D geometry of the room is automatically scanned in real-time."
Microsoft wants this to be more than just another cool augmented reality project. They see it as a way of recreating the world around us and then using the semantic models in a variety of ways, such as aiding partially sighted people and creating and navigating maps.
"Our system also hopefully moves us closer to the vision of lifelong learning: where semantic models adapt and extend to new object classes online, as users continuously interact with the world," Microsoft says.
Microsoft culls a huge 7,800 jobs globally, mostly from phone business
Microsoft has just announced that it is cutting a huge 7,800 jobs from its phone business, while it also writes off $7.6 billion in relation to its acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services Division. Considering Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's phone business last year, this is quite the check to write.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, explains: "We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem including our first-party device family. In the near-term, we'll run a more effective and focused phone portfolio while retaining capability for long-term reinvention in mobility".
Keep in mind Nadella said back in April that there would be 18,000 job cuts in the next 12 months, these additional 7,800 job losses will add up to over 25,000 employees laid off by Microsoft in just over a 12-month period.
De facto despedimentos nunca são um bom sinal mas neste caso eram necessários assim como a restruturação. Agora sim talvez tenhamos uma Microsoft competitiva, vão passar a lançar 5 ou 6 modelos por ano e não a carrada que vinha sendo lançada. Finalmente! Vamos a ver como será feito isto. Parece-me que isto acontece logo após a saída do Elop e não é por acaso, penso que a estratégia de inundar o mercado com smartphones low-end fosse dele e agora a coisa vai mudar, logo após ele ser demitido.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Lays Out Vision To Reinvigorate Wayward Smartphone Division
Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services division has been a disaster of epic proportions. Microsoft brought over most of Nokia’s employees into the Microsoft fold, only to jettison many of them over the past year. The culmination of this Nokia culling occurred this morning with the announcement that Microsoft is axing 7,800 employees, primarily from its smartphone division.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft is taking a $7.6 billion impairment charge on its $7.2 billion Nokia purchase. Youch! There’s just no way to sugarcoat this unfortunate turn of events, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is at least trying to give the employees still standing in the smartphone division, its OEM partners, and Windows Phone fans some insight as to where the company goes from here.
“I am committed to our first-party devices including phones,” said Nadella. “However, we need to focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving reinvention. In the near term, we will run a more effective phone portfolio, with better products and speed to market given the recently formed Windows and Devices Group.”
Instead of the steady stream of budget-minded smartphones that have been crammed down out throats for the past year, Microsoft is taking a more balanced approach by targeting three distinct sectors. Microsoft of course isn’t abandoning the low-end market, and indicates that it will continue to provide “Value” phones to price conscious customers. However, it will also look to embrace new markets with phones targeted specifically at business customers with security enhancements and robust management tools (perhaps we’ll see a Surface Phone come to the market). As for the third category, Microsoft says that it will return to producing top-notch flagship phones for devoted Windows Phone fans (or at least those that haven’t already defected to Android).
“In the longer term, Microsoft devices will spark innovation, create new categories and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly,” added. “Our reinvention will be centered on creating mobility of experiences across the entire device family including phones.”
What do you guys think; can Microsoft right the ship and make its upcoming Windows 10 Mobile platform and its future smartphone hardware appealing enough to take on the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Google?
A MS pode fazer as mudanças que entender, mas nos proximos anos a guerra está perdida, muito terá de mudar para a MS conseguir ganhar mercado á Google e Apple. Pode ganhar a um deles, mas aos dois, nos proximos anos, tenho muitas duvidas disso.
Ballmer's Nokia obsession turns sour for Microsoft
Time to move on
Software King of the World Microsoft has indicated that its turbulent love affair and then marriage to Nokia is over.
Vole said it would cut 7,800 jobs, or nearly 7 percent of its workforce, and write down about $7.6 billion related to its Nokia phone business.
It draws to an end the shy and retired Steve Ballmer's efforts to make money on smartphones. Now it is clear that the deal was a multibillion-dollar strategic blunder by Ballmer, who had envisioned it as a way to make Microsoft more competitive in the mobile market dominated by Apple, Google and Samsung.
Most of the job cuts will be in the phone hardware business, underscoring the company's shift in focus to software and cloud from hardware.
About a third of the layoffs will be in Finland, where Microsoft will shut down a product development unit.
This is the second round of job cuts since Satya Nadella took over as chief executive in February 2014. Microsoft said last July it would slash up to 18,000 jobs.
Nadella has played up Microsoft's cloud and enterprise software capabilities, but investors have been concerned that the transition to cloud was not offsetting weakening sales of Windows and Office and a bleeding phone business.
Microsoft was widely expected to write off all or part of the $7.2 billion it paid for Nokia's handset unit in 2014, a deal that left the company with a struggling business and only 3 percent of the smartphone market.
Last month we pointed out that Stephen Elop, the former top boss at Nokia was leaving Microsoft for a second time.
While Microsoft will not stop making smartphones but it would no longer focus on the growth of that business, instead emphasizing the expansion of the broad "ecosystem" of products, including mobile phones that run its Windows software. Yeah we can't work out what that means either.
Nadella has increased the development of apps and services for Google's Android and Apple's iOS devices, many of which have been popular with the public.
Microsoft security tool fails malware detection test
There are many great choices out there for malware protection and detection. Unfortunately, Microsoft's offering isn't one of them. In recent tests by AV Test, the German lab that is pretty much the de facto standard in malware testing, Microsoft came in a distant last place. See also: Microsoft outlines Internet of Things plan for Windows 10
AV Test's most recent experiment pitted 30,000 known samples of malware against Windows 7 AV programs. It focused on Windows 7 due to its ubiquity; it has about 60% global market share, as XP withers away and Windows 8 fails to gain ground. AV TestThis was not a test of commercial antivirus products you find in stores. It was a test of enterprise endpoint security products used in businesses.
Overall, 11 products were tested, and six of them – Bitdefender, F-Secure, Trend Micro, Symantec, and two offerings from Kaspersky – achieved a 100% detection rate. The rest did no worse than 95%, with one exception: Microsoft Security Essentials detected only 73% on the real-world testing and 87% of the malware on the real-time test. AV TestTop security tools in the fight against cybercrime
There’s no silver bullet, so load up with as many of these as you can. Read Now
You get what you pay for. As Erik Heyland, director of the AV Test Testing Labs, noted, "An economical option for protecting a corporate network is the use of the endpoint module, bundled in the Microsoft Management Suite System Center 2012. The test revealed, however, that this is not to be recommended. The solution was awarded 0 points by the testers in terms of its protection function, and it achieved only 11 out of 18 possible points."
His final conclusion: "The freeware Microsoft module is much too feeble in the detection of malware."
Microsoft has three products: Windows Defender, which comes with Windows 7 and 8; Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), which you can download; and the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), which is focused on specific and common forms of malware. Defender and MSE have never had a good reputation or track record for malware detection because they use the same malware definitions.
Defender was just anti-spyware until Windows 8, when it was expanded to offer antivirus protection as well. MSRT is only updated once per month, during Patch Tuesday, which is going away with the release of Windows 10.
For whatever reason, Microsoft just has not been able to get its antimalware products going. These tests are nothing new. Defender/MSE have always brought up the rear in AV tests. The company has objected to the testing methodology of AV Test, but you would too if you came in so far behind the rest of the pack.
I've got a lot of respect for Microsoft's efforts to take down botnets and the criminal organizations behind them, but they just can't seem to make anti-malware software work. If the company can't get this unit going, in terms of detection rate and responding to zero-days like the numerous AV firms do, then perhaps it's time to end the product. Having it out there creates a false sense of security for users. They will think they are protected because they have Defender and MSRT, when both pale compared to Kaspersky, Trend, Panda and Malwarebytes.
Microsoft researchers dramatically increase battery life of wearables
Wearable tech may start staying on longer. As part of Microsoft's WearDrive project, researchers have found a way to increase the battery life of wearable technology, such as fitness trackers, using a RAM-based system that doesn't rely on a new battery.
The improved battery life is made possible by pairing the wearable with a smartphone via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The wearable's more energy intensive operations are subsequently processed on the smartphone, prolonging the its battery life.
The WearDrive energy saving system was tested on an Android phone, with the researchers noting a "negligible" impact on the smartphone's battery life and an improvement of over three times in energy conservation for the wearable. The paired wearable also experienced more than eight times faster than normal application runtimes.
The WearDrive system conveniently deactivates when it's not in reach of a paired smartphone. So you're more than welcome to go on a workout without taking your phone.
Ranveer Chandra, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, said many of the current wearable battery designs are based on the battery-saving tricks that were developed for smart phones. WearDrive takes a completely different approach by offloading operations to the smartphone.
Anirudh Badam, a Microsoft researcher, also points out that wearables -- unlike smartphones -- don't have the luxury of being equipped with heavy batteries and that's an inherent issue with wearable computing where the lightest possible device is ideal.
Microsoft's in-house wearable, the Microsoft Band, has already been praised for its advertised two-day battery life. However Band's developers have no immediate plans to incorporate WearDrive on this generation's device.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Speaks About Company’s Future Involving Mobile, Windows 10, HoloLens And Much More
Software giant Microsoft might have achieved its goal of securing its dominance in the desktop and laptop operating system market share, but the company still has a long way to go in other categories, particularly mobile, and advancement in other tech. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently gave an interview in which he spoke on how the company is going to focus on mobile, Windows 10, HoloLens and several other categories. Microsoft Executive Speaks About How It Plans To Change The Mobile Landscape Of Windows Phones
According to ZDNet, Nadella was speaking about how the software behemoth was going to change its approach for mobile platforms. The executive acknowledges that the company believed that PCs were thought to be the machines of tomorrow, but looking at that decision, we have to say that the firm has suffered thoroughly through the proliferation of smartphone sales running operating systems other than Windows. In order to change this approach, the CEO stated the following:
“If anything, one big mistake we made in our past was to think of the PC as the hub for everything for all time to come. And today, of course, the high volume device is the six-inch phone. I acknowledge that. But to think that that’s what the future is for all time to come would be to make the same mistake we made in the past without even having the share position of the past. So that would be madness.
So when I think about our Windows Phone, I want it to stand for something like Continuum. When I say, wow, that’s an interesting approach where you can have a phone and that same phone, because of our universal platform with Continuum, and can, in fact, be a desktop. That is not something any other phone operating system or device can do. And that’s what I want our devices and device innovation to stand for.”
In short, the CEO of Microsoft is attempting to deliver the exact same experience on mobile devices as users experience on desktop machines.
“That’s why whenever I talk about Windows 10, I talk about mobility broadly across all of those devices. For sure there is a form factor today which is the below six or seven inches, which is powered by a very specific operating system instance of Windows 10, which is Windows Mobile. But what do you call that (device) when you use Continuum and then you’re using applications on a big screen with a mouse and keyboard? It’s Windows 10.”
Microsoft Might Be In Talks With Google Over Strengthening The Windows Phone Platform
When Nadella was asked if he believes that Google will be ready to start developing applications for Windows 10, the executive replies that:
“Would love to. It’s for them to decide. I would love for them to have YouTube on Windows Phones. I would love for them to do their best work like they have with Chrome on Windows.”
While Android holds the largest mobile operating system market share, Microsoft has made its apps available on Google Play, so as part of a mutual business relationship being reciprocated by Google, we are sure that somewhere down the line, the advertising tech giant will most likely be returning the favor and start developing applications for Windows. Additionally, Nadella also wants developers to come to side of HoloLens. We will have to see who this pans out in the future.
Rumor has it that the CEO of Microsoft might be using Lumia Talkman, since the interview asked a question stating that he might be using that particular phone very soon. While Nadella denied saying that, it appears that we are close to seeing a flagship Windows Phone very soon. Windows Mobile has been under severe criticism for not hosting a large number of applications like Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store. Nadella stated that he plans to change all that by looking to recruit as many developers as possible for not just Windows Phone, but HoloLens, and Xbox as well.
Right now, the company’s primary focus is to release its ‘unified interface’ operating system Windows 10, which is going to be officially launched for tablets and PCs on July 29. For smartphones however, the release date will most likely be taking place during the month of September. Like always, we will be keeping you updated with the latest news that so stay tuned for more details.
Os infelizes proprietários de dispositivos com o Windows RT vão receber em Setembro um update, o chamado Update 3 (depois do Update 1 ser o RT 8.1 e o Update 2 ser o Update 1 ao RT 8.1), que deverá trazer algumas das funcionalidades do Windows 10, mas não todas.
Neste momento o Windows RT e os seus dispositivos (Surface 1, Surface 2, Nokia Lumia 2520) são um problema para a Microsoft, devido ao serem dispositivos ARM não compatíveis com a maioria do software produzido para o Windows "normal" que corre em processadores x86, sendo que estes dispositivos ARM ficam restritos ao conteúdo presente na Windows Store, que ainda é francamente pouco.
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