VentureBeat

LinkedIn lands in your Microsoft Outlook inbox

LinkedIn became the second of Silicon Valley’s biggest social networks to make a compelling distribution move this week. It’s landed in your inbox — quite literally if you have Microsoft Outlook.

They’ve partnered with Microsoft to launch the Outlook Social Connector, which will deliver LinkedIn updates directly to your inbox and give you better social context when you reach out to business contacts. When you write an e-mail, you’ll be able to tell what the other… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Moving into a networked era, Tumblr envy, Open Web

Watch out Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw! Google’s coming: You can now read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts with Google Scholar. Expect an oligopoly (as in the legal research industry) to feel some pressure as Google rolls out another free and disruptive service. You can search by cases, topics or specific phrases. You can also explore how different rulings are cited by other judges and later opinions.

Google also experiments… Continue Reading

Hohm vs. Powermeter: A side-by-side rundown

Much has been written about how the bitter rivalry between Google and Microsoft has extended to their respective home energy management systems, Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm. But most of these stories make it sound like the tools render the same service: reporting how much energy people are using and how much it is costing them. Few have sussed out their subtler differences.

With so many smaller players in the home energy monitoring field (think OpenPeak,… Continue Reading

Microsoft Hohm launches for Xcel Energy customers

Microsoft Hohm, the software giant’s new home energy management system, is now available for the 3.4 million households served by utility Xcel Energy. This is the second time the tool, which makes energy use and pricing data available via a web interface, has been tested with a mass audience. It went live with Seattle City Light last month.

Xcel provides power to a diverse geographic customer base — spanning Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota,… Continue Reading

Microsoft: Windows 7 makes us cool again

Microsoft’s launch of its new Windows 7 operating system today caps a comeback year for the software giant, where it started to beat back the perception that it’s becoming stodgy and out-of-date. So said Microsoft’s Brian Hall when I interviewed him about the launch yesterday.

To be clear, Hall, who is the general manager of the Windows Live suite of online services, never used the words “stodgy” or “obsolete.” But he acknowledged that Microsoft’s public perception… Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Testing out Bing’s Twitter-juiced search

Bing’s Twitter search just went live this morning. Here’s a side-by-side comparison against some of the more prominent start-ups in the real-time space.

A few notes – Bing’s results seem about two to six minutes behind other search engines. Like Tweetmeme and OneRiot, they put a bit more emphasis on the content being shared rather than the tweets themselves.

1) Trending Topics — Most major Twitter search engines incorporate “trending topics,” showing the top ten new things people… Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Microsoft details its new Bing-with-Twitter search engine

Qi Lu, who left Yahoo after a decade to run Microsoft’s Online Services Division, is talking on-stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today about Bing’s just-announced Twitter-search capability.

Here’s the core news:

Microsoft has a non-exclusive deal with Twitter to incorporate all the public information in the Twitter stream into search results in real-time. It’s going live shortly. They’re calling it “Bing Wave 2.” Financial terms are not disclosed.
Microsoft also has a deal… Continue Reading

What makes a Bing homepage?

I asked Bing homepage editorial director Stephanie Horstmanshof to explain it to me: What is the recognizable quality of a Bing homepage photo that makes it Bing-worthy?

“There are three things we look for,” she told me over the phone. “A sense of exploration, a sense of discovery, and a sense of delight. It should make you want to know more about it.”

Portions of each page are interactive, so that you can roll over the photo… Continue Reading

Star Trek Online game gives Cryptic Studios a chance at a mass audience

[Editor's note: check out our awesome video of Star Trek Online. Photos courtesy of Cryptic, Alexa Lee].

Cryptic Studios is one of the few companies that has made a living at making massively multiplayer online games and lived to tell about it. Since 2000, the company has created three successful MMOs: City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Champions Online.

But now it has a chance for the big time with Star Trek Online, a new MMO… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Sidekickers saved, e-books slashed, PCmover revisited

Microsoft recovers T-Mobile customers from the Sidekick Apocalypse – A blog post from Roz Ho at Microsoft, head of the company’s Premium Mobile Experiences group, promises that “we have recovered most, if not all, customer data” that had disappeared last week in an embarrassingly public failure of Microsoft’s backup system for Sidekick customers’ data.

But it’s too late to undo a lot of the reputational damage. T-Mobile has stopped selling the phones, and lawsuits have already been… Continue Reading

How Fourth Wall Studios hid an artistic radio drama inside Halo 3:ODST

Microsoft’s Halo 3: ODST is flying off the shelves as hardcore gamers play the first-person shooter video game on the Xbox 360. Sales have topped 2.5 million units, or $125 million, in the first two weeks of sales. Those gamers would do well to pay attention to the hidden game within the game.

Created through a collaboration of startup Fourth Wall Studios and Halo franchise developer Bungie, Sadie’s Story is a self-contained tale. It is a… Continue Reading

Windows Mobile reaches out to developers prior to 6.5 launch

Windows Mobile 6.5 will be launched to phone buyers on Tuesday. Microsoft is revving up the Valley’s software developers by hosting a Windows Mobile Developers Camp, or WinMoDevCamp, in San Francisco today through the weekend. There are about 30 WinMo camps happening around the world. The gatherings are BarCamp style collaborative sessions, rather than people speaking on panels. Everything’s informal, a bunch of nerds with laptops creating birds-of-a-feather sessions on the fly rather than running… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Kleiner expands $100M iFund, Intel kills Classmate, AOL prepares for fire sale

Kleiner Perkins to add money to its iFund for apps — Matt Murphy, who manages the $100 million fund, told Bloomberg reporter Connie Guglielmo, “It’s pretty clear we’ll go beyond” the $100M mark. There are 85,000-plus applications in Apple’s store created by companies of all sizes. App development projects range in size from solo students to BMW.

Be warned: Murphy isn’t poking through the App Store for people to fund. “I’m looking to find companies that… Continue Reading

Google on the hunt for utility, device partners for PowerMeter

Earlier today, we spotlit an excellent blog post co-authored by Google CEO Eric Schmidt about how energy efficiency policies and enterprises will infuse the economy. The opportunity is so great that the search engine has staked out its own claim with the launch of its home energy management system, PowerMeter, a tool that allows you to view your energy consumption and what it’s costing you right in your internet browser. As omnipotent as Google sometime… Continue Reading

WebsiteSpark continues Microsoft’s love of software giveaways

I guess giving software away is working out for Microsoft. The company just announced its third “Spark” program, providing free software and services: WebsiteSpark, a program for small web design companies.

WebsiteSpark looks like it’s modeled pretty closely on BizSpark, its program for startups (which sponsors VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner), and DreamSpark, its program for students. Participants must have less than 10 employees and build websites on behalf of others. If approved, they’ll receive copies of design… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Pre fails Palm, Pogue pities Zune, Microsoft battles Google Apps

Palm’s losses mount as Pre fails to catch fire – The Wall Street Journal’s most trusted analysts estimate Palm sold only 500,000 Pres in its quarter that ended on August 28th. Cutting the phone’s price from $200 to $150 through Sprint didn’t help enough. Palm won’t give out its own count, but the Pre clearly isn’t the iPhone killer, Android killer or Windows Mobile killer Palm had hoped for. I bought another BlackBerry. Sorry, guys. Palm… Continue Reading

TC50: Microsoft’s next attack on Google: Bing gets visual search

Microsoft continues its attempt to unseat Google as the king of search. Today, someone from the team behind its Bing search engine took the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to announce the latest feature: Visual search.

The most obvious way to use visual search is when you’re shopping for products. So if you want to buy a new handbag, you could look at images of thousands of handbags in Bing, scroll through them… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Bartz would’ve taken Microsoft buyout, Peter Kafka trumps Yoko Ono

New Yahoo CEO Bartz says she would have accepted Microsoft’s 2008 offer to buy the company – “Do you think I’m stupid?” Carol Bartz blurted out in that sassy way bored journalists love on CBNC’s Squawk Box Thursday. Now that Yahoo has rebuffed Microsoft and installed Bartz, her plan is to build out Yahoo’s content products rather than try to beat Google at search.

Nokia acquires obscure social network startup Plum Ventures — None of the usual… Continue Reading