The great speculative sport that has attended Twitter's quest for a business model has taken a new turn, with an unconfirmed report that the white-hot microblogging service is in talks with tech heavyweights Microsoft and Google to broker separate data-mining agreements.
The idea is essentially a search tie-up. Under the proposed deals, Twitter would license the contents of its tweets to one or both of the firms to inform their search results, the blog AllThingsD reported, citing "sources familiar with the situation."
If true, the deals would find an alternative revenue source for Twitter from what analysts and the company itself have been projecting.
Today, we finally welcome Windows Mobile 6.5 and the "Windows Phone" platform from Microsoft. As a part of today's Windows Mobile 6.5 debut, the new Windows Mobile Marketplace app store has opened for business, the new Bing for Mobile app has been unveiled, the My Phone sync and security service has been launched, the first Windows Mobile 6.5 devices have been announced, and the list of Windows Mobile 6.1 devices that can be upgraded to 6.5 has been published.
When Microsoft released Windows Vista nearly three years ago, it seemed only natural that the other half of the "Wintel" duopoly -- Intel -- would become an early adopter within a matter of months.
However, Microsoft Vista was buggy, sluggish, a resource hog, and initially many hardware peripherals wouldn't work with it due to lack of device drivers. A majority of corporate IT departments decided to stay with Windows XP to this day.
Microsoft's partner Intel was one of them. It eventually admitted it would not deploy Vista internally to its own employees.
You can't stumble around the Internet these days without bumping into it. News, rumor, speculation, and hot gossip about -- no, not David Letterman's love life (who knew he had one?) or the Jon and Kate Gosselin train wreck -- tablet PCs.
Yes, over the last year the PC's buck-toothed, developmentally challenged second cousin from the sticks has become an Internet darling.
As the New York Times' Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance so aptly summarize:
"Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failure.
Windows Mobile 6.5 is starting to hit the streets and AT&T announced that the HTC Pure, AT&T's rebranded version of the HTC Touch Diamond2, will be available soon. At $150 (after rebate, with a 2-year contract), the Pure is the most affordable Windows Mobile 6.5 device yet and it delivers some innovative capabilities.
Unlike most of the Windows Mobile-based smart phones available from AT&T, the HTC Pure does not have a physical keyboard. Similar to the LG Incite, the HTC Pure aspires to be more iPhone-like with a pure touch-screen interface.
Microsoft doesn't expect to make acquisitions to help the company challenge Google's dominance in the Internet search market, CEO Steve Ballmer said on Monday.
"No, I wouldn't expect it," he said when asked whether acquisitions would be part of the strategy. Microsoft recently agreed a search partnership with Yahoo after a long and unsuccessful struggle to buy the company.
"You'll continue to see us work hard and invest in the marketing and the like, and of course we're trying to get the Yahoo deal through regulatory," he said after a lecture to Britain's CBI business lobby organization.
Microsoft this week is celebrating the formal "grand opening" of its mammoth Chicago-area datacenter, a key component in the company's effort to embrace services in the cloud.
>The news came in a post on the MS Datacenter blog.
"At more than 700,000 square feet, this facility significantly expands our ability to meet the demand generated from our Live, Online, and Cloud Computing services offerings for our customers," Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services for Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, said in the post.
Microsoft's free Security Essentials antivirus software identified 98% of over half a million malware samples, an accuracy rating an independent testing company called "very good" today.
Germany-based AV-Test.org tested Security Essentials, the free software Microsoft shipped Tuesday, on Windows XP Service Pack 3, Vista SP2 and the final code of Windows 7, against two different collections of malware, said Andreas Marx, one of the firm's two managers.
The first test put Security Essentials in the ring against more than 3,700 viruses, Trojans and worms culled from the most recent WildList, a collection of threats actively attacking computers.
Eager to avert the incompatibility debacle that marred the Windows Vista launch, when many products did not work properly with Vista if at all, Microsoft has been working for months to make sure that hardware peripherals and software makers sport "Compatible with Windows 7" stickers -- and mean it.
The point is to ensure that as of the first day of consumer availability -- October 22 -- there will be plenty of hardware and software products that work with Windows 7.
To date, according to a post on the Windows 7 Team Blog on Wednesday, Microsoft has already certified more than 6000 products to work with Windows 7.
An Associated Press story drifting around the Intertubes today suggests that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's personal earnings from the company fell around 6 percent in fiscal 2009. Even with that dip, the article estimated his total pay package at somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.28 million, so if nothing else Ballmer can cry himself to sleep on a soft, soft mountain of $100 bills.
Ballmer's salary actually rose by 4 percent, to $665,833, even as his bonus was cut by 14 percent to $600,000. The bonus is tied to a compensation committee's evaluation of the CEO's performance, and could have paid him "up to 200 percent of his base salary, or about $1.3 million," according to AP.