Microsoft, owner of the MSN Internet site, will broadcast concerts by such artists as Rod Stewart and John Mayer as part of a push to lure more users to its online video service.
The exclusive agreement with Control Room, a closely held company in Los Angeles, is for 36 concerts over several years, said Rob Bennett, a general manager at Microsoft. Control Room produced the Live 8 charity concerts last year.
Microsoft is adding more video to its MSN Web sites to keep up with the growth of video sites including YouTube Inc. The company is investing more than $1 billion on Internet services and sites this fiscal year, which ends in June.
Microsoft Tuesday announced the broad public release of a beta developer kit for the .NET Micro Framework at the Embedded Systems Conference being held in Boston.
The .NET Micro Framework provides a managed code development environment for small devices like smart watches that are typically constrained by cost, memory, processor and/or power consumption, according to company statements. Microsoft's intent is to extend the advantages of .NET and Visual Studio to the smallest classes of devices.
The framework currently provides the software platform for all Smart Watches for MSN Direct. Additionally, the company plans to include it in Windows Vista SideShow displays and in an upcoming version of Microsoft TV Foundation Edition, the statements say.
Movie producer Peter Jackson has agreed to work with Microsoft's Bungie Studios on a future installment in its blockbuster "Halo" video-game franchise.
The deal, announced Wednesday morning, expands upon an existing relationship between Microsoft and the producer of "King Kong" and "Lord of the Rings." Jackson, previously named executive producer of an upcoming "Halo" movie, also will form a new studio, Wingnut Interactive, with Microsoft and his partner, screenwriter Fran Walsh.
Additionally, Jackson and Walsh will create "an entirely original property" for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox Live online system, Microsoft said in a news release.
Microsoft is well-known for many things, but data storage and replication are not among them. But it is beginning to make a move in that market.
The world's largest software company, based in Redmond, Wash., introduced on Sept. 27 the public beta of its System Center Data Protection Manager version 2 at the Storage Decisions conference in New York.
Built upon Microsoft's DPM 2006the company's first storage software released only last Octoberversion 2 now will enable customers to back up and protect their Microsoft applications.
Microsoft, trailing in the Internet advertising market, is stepping up efforts to take market share from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.
The Microsoft division that sells advertising for company Web sites will begin offering ads on products from video games to online business services, too, Vice President Joanne Bradford said. Microsoft hopes to quadruple ad sales in the next three years, said Bradford, who will unveil the strategy this week at the annual Advertising Week show in New York.
The move is part of Microsoft's plan to add clients to a list that includes DaimlerChrysler AG and Visa International Inc. Behind in an Internet search ad market with annual revenue of $6.5 billion, the company is trying to compensate with more sophisticated and customized ad campaigns.
Wallop, the social-network startup spun out of Microsoft Research Labs earlier this year, has landed $10 million in venture capital funding it will use to compete with Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace.
The company launched the site Tuesday at the DEMOfall 2006 conference in San Diego with a handful of investors. Backing the project are Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Consor Capital. Microsoft also retains an equity stake in the company, which is led by former Microsoft employees Karl Jacob and Sean Kelly.
Microsoft released the beta version of the upgrade to its developer tools platform, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, on its Microsoft Connect Web site on Sept. 26.
In a blog post on the same day, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, said the Service Pack is in direct response to customer feedback and addresses issues that were found through a combination of internal testing, customer reports and results from the MSDN Product Feedback Center.
Meanwhile, Somasegar addressed the issue of the service pack being released later than many developers might have expected or desired.
The reason Microsoft Research exists is so that Microsoft will still be here in 15 years time, Rick Rashid, the senior vice president of research, said here on Sept. 26.
"I hope that fifteen years from now there will still be the same vibrant environment we have now, where we have been able to build a stable research environment. If we can do this for the next 15 years the sky is the limit. I get surprised every morning by the research that is taking place," he said, talking at an event to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Microsoft Research at the Redmond campus.
Windows CE 6.0, the latest version of Microsoft's embedded device operating system, has been released to manufacturing -- "RTM" in Microsoft lingo.
The new version sports updates to the architecture, including the ability to support up to 32K processes with 2 GB of virtual memory per process. That compares to a limit of 32 processes with 32 MG of virtual memory per process in version 5, according to statements on a Microsoft blog.
In addition, CE version 6 also supports both a kernel mode, as well as a user mode, driver model ? with "strict partioning" of modes. As for modes, kernel mode driver support is included to enhance performance, while user mode drivers provide stability, according to the blog post.
Microsoft on Friday not only issued a Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 update to the usual select testers, but also posted the build on its Web site for public download.
The update, which Microsoft tagged as build 5728 and carries the moniker "External Developer Workstation," or EDW, wrote Vista product manager Nick White on the team's blog, can be downloaded by anyone. "We are making this release available for a limited time only in order to get broad distribution and testing in a variety of PC configurations."
"This build has a number of improvements and updates from RC1, but has not been put through the same internal testing process as RC1," warned White.