Zillow.com, a real estate research site, said Friday it now provides 45-degree, low-altitude aerial views of property through integration with Microsoft's Virtual Earth service.
The "bird's eye views" let home shoppers look at property from four directions. As a result, they can get a reasonable idea of the surrounding area.
"For the first time on the site, people can see what the home looks like on all sides," Amy Bohutinsky, spokeswoman for Zillow.com, said. "(The views) really allow you to see it up close. It's really the difference between black and white TV and switching to high-definition TV."
For Microsoft, China represents a large opportunity that has so far been unfulfilled because of the extraordinarily high rate of software piracy in the country -- more than 90 percent.
That's not the only challenge Microsoft faces in China. Along with other U.S. Internet service providers, the company has been criticized for complying with online censorship by the Chinese government.
And in a court case last year, former Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee said the company bungled its China strategy by focusing on quick profits, rather than on building the relationships needed to succeed. But others point to Microsoft's creation of a Beijing research lab and its patience on the piracy front as signs that it's taking the right approach.
Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a minor refresh of its anti-spyware Microsoft Defender software with improvements to the user interface and signature updating.
Other changes include a tweak that modifies alerts according to the severity of a threat to make them less, improvements in the real-time protection to better watch key parts of the OS for potential infection, and support for 64-bit systems.
Still officially in beta, Windows Defender Beta 2 is an add-on to Windows XP, 2000, and Server 2003, but will be integrated into Windows Vista when it releases to consumers in January 2007 and businesses in November of this year.
Microsoft this week revealed that it is at work on a way to search the Internet using photos captured by cell phone cameras.
So rather than typing in an Internet search query, someone can e-mail Microsoft a photo of what they're searching for. Photo2Search, as Microsoft calls the nascent feature, returns Web pages either with information about the objects in the photo, or sites that contain similar images.
Microsoft is the latest example of how search engines continuously try to expand Internet search's utility, whether by using cell phone text messages to make inquiries as most search engines now allow, or using photos as is the case at Microsoft.
Microsoft has seen more than a 50 percent spike in the number of users of Office Live beta in the last week, and at least one analyst said Thursday that's bad news for domain registrars.
Despite the name, Office Live has nothing to do with Microsoft's popular Office productivity suite. Instead, it's a Web site hosting service for small businesses that at its basic level is free and provides a domain name, design tools for building a site, five email accounts and traffic reports.
Since the waiting list for the service was dropped April 5, the number of domain names had jumped to 43,169 on April 12 from 28,623, according to Ipwalk.com, a statistical service for the Web operated by the Swedish company Ipwalk AB.
Microsoft could help PC vendors sell an additional million machines if it intentionally delayed releasing Windows Vista until July 2007, a Gartner analyst claimed this week.
But that ain't gonna happen.
The already-announced delay of Vista, which is now scheduled for general release in January 2007, won't materially affect the number of PCs sold during 2006 and 2007, said Charles Smulders, a Gartner vice president. Along with two other analysts -- George Shiffler and Mikako Kitagawa -- Smulders recently published a research briefing on Vista's push-back and the impact on PC sales.
If the World Cyber Games is the Olympics of gaming, expect to hear Microsoft's anthem frequently through 2008.
The WCG announced Thursday that the software giant has signed on to become the premier sponsor of the annual gaming competition for the next three years.
The deal gives Microsoft a firm grip on the games featured in the tournament. All PC games will be played under the Windows operating system, and all console games will be played on the Xbox 360. Though the deal sounds like a coup for Microsoft, nothing much will change with the WCG; featured games in past years have all fallen under the same guidelines.
Microsoft on Thursday named former Dow Chemical controller Frank H. Brod as its chief accounting officer and corporate controller. Brod replaces Scott DiValerio, who was named in November to head the Microsoft unit that sells software to, and manages relations with, computer makers. "Frank brings to Microsoft great talent and skills both in finance and business leadership," said CFO Chris Liddell, who joined Microsoft a year ago.
According to documents filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Brod will get a salary of $411,000, a $300,000 signing bonus, a $450,000 relocation allowance and will be eligible for a bonus of up to 120 percent of his salary. In addition, Brod will get a grant of 35,000 shares of Microsoft stock that will vest over five years.
Google may be the latest entry in the increasingly crowded calendaring services field. Microsoft is working on both AJAX Web-based and Vista-PC-based calendaring offerings.
With its just-fielded Google Calendar service, Google is going head-to-head with a number of other companies with lengthier histories in this space, including archrival Microsoft.
Microsoft has offered calendaring as part of Outlook and Hotmail for years. Recently, Microsoft added more calendaring offerings to its stable. It introduced a new calendaring facility that it is baking into the beta and final releases of Windows Vista, as well as new calendaring functionality as part of Windows Live Mail, the successor to Hotmail known by the code name "Kahuna."
Microsoft's next-generation browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is rounding the corner and getting the "spit and polish" it needs as it heads into the stretch run of its final release.
According to one Microsoft developer, IE 7 is now actually considered to be "layout complete."
In an online chat hosted by Microsoft's IE development team today, users of the IE7 Beta lobbed a long list of questions on a variety of topics at Microsoft developers.