Microsoft is working with the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children and the international police force
Interpol to help fight online child abuse in India.
The organizations are helping Indian law enforcement agencies, such as the Central Bureau of Investigation, in how to
use technologies, tools, and procedures for countering online child pornography and other cybercrimes against children.
Indian police came under fire recently after it emerged that two alleged pedophiles had kidnapped, sexually abused, and murdered
more than 20 children of laborers in Noida, in Uttar Pradesh. Parents say the state police did not register complaints when
their children went missing.
Microsoft announced Thursday that will build a $550 million data center in San Antonio to house its growing online services.
The 400,000-square-foot facility will be the software giant's first major data center in Texas.
The data center will house tens of thousands of computers to host Internet services like Microsoft's Windows Live offerings, which include everything from instant messaging to e-mail, said Mike Manos, Microsoft senior director of data centers.
Microsoft is expected to announce a drop in quarterly earnings next week, largely because it is deferring $1.5 billion in revenue related to delays of its Vista and Office products, analysts say.
For the fiscal second quarter, the software giant is expected on Thursday to report earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $12.9 billion, according to analysts' estimates compiled by Thomson Financial. Microsoft posted earnings of 34 cents a share on revenue of $11.84 billion for the same period a year ago.
Forest Key is leading Microsoft into uncharted territory for the software giant: the land of professional design tools. After years of continual leadership in the developer tools space, Microsoft is marching in with a set of tools for designers, having announced its Expression suite last month.
Key, who is director of product management for Microsoft's design tools, is indicative of the new breed of Microsoft employee. He is steeped in the designer world and has worked as both a creator and a user of the technology. Key previously worked at Macromedia which has since been acquired by Adobe Systems, one of the primary companies Microsoft will be competing with in its new pushon the Flash platform.
Within its first year of shipment, Windows Vista is expected to make 4.7 million computers its home, drive 21,000 new IT jobs and generate $9.5 billion in New York and New Jersey, according to an IDC report commissioned by Microsoft, released Jan. 16.
Vista's impact on the market will reach far beyond Microsoft, the study asserts, driving growth and revenue for the 1 million companies worldwide that sell hardware, write software, provide IT services or serve as distribution channels.
As many as 16,000 IT companies in New York and 8,000 in New Jersey are expected to produce, sell or distribute products containing Windows Vista, according to the study, employing more than 45,000 and 20,000 people respectively.
Microsoft is tweaking the pricing of its new Vista operating system before the product even hits the market. When the company drops Vista to the retail and consumer market on Jan. 30, it might encounter a very different selling environment than it did five years ago, when it made its last major consumer release.
So the company announced three initiatives that it hopes will encourage consumers to pay for Vista Premium or higher, as well as encourage households with more than one PC to upgrade their equipment to Vista.
Today, Microsoft announced that its Zune MP3 player was the number two selling device in the hard drive-based MP3 player market for the month of December, the first full month of Zune's availability. Microsoft says that Zune accounted for 10.2 percent of all hard drive-based MP3 player retail sales in December, behind Apple's dominant iPod.
"We're happy to report that we achieved our goal of establishing Zune as the clear number two seller this holiday behind an entrenched competitor," a Microsoft representative told me Wednesday evening. "No other single device has been able to achieve these kinds of results in a six week launch period and we remain on track to exceed one million units in sales by ... June 30, 2007."
Engineers at Microsoft have developed a prototype advertising system that uses a small video camera and facial-recognition software to try to determine a viewer's gender and select an appropriate ad to display.
The system is intended for use with large video screens in public places, such as shopping malls. It's one of the projects being pursued inside Microsoft's adCenter Labs -- part of the company's effort to come from behind in online ads and other forms of digital marketing.
Microsoft says adCenter Labs has doubled in size during the past year, to more than 120 people, in Redmond and Beijing. Researchers and engineers from the group showed their latest work at an event Wednesday on the Microsoft campus.
Answering widespread and long-time pleas for a family pricing option for Windows Vista, Microsoft today announced its Windows Vista Family Discount program, which allows Vista customers to inexpensively upgrade two other PCs in their home to the new OS. The program comes with a number of restrictions, however, and is limited only to Windows Vista Ultimate.
When I was first briefed about this offering in November 2006, Microsoft told me that its family pricing program would have to be somewhat restrictive and might therefore not meet the needs of all users. The problem, apparently, is that the family pricing program can't be seen as a lower-cost offering than the company's business-oriented volume licensing programs.
Microsoft has released its Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment 2007 (BDD 2007), a set of tools and guidance on how to use them to enable IT shops to deploy desktops running Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows XP, 2007 Microsoft Office system, or Microsoft Office 2003.
The Solution Accelerator for BDD 2007 provides guidance, sample templates, and technology files such as scripts and configuration files, according to company statements.