TWI Interactive is working with Microsoft and Vidiator Technology to offer mobile phone operators a hosted method of delivering video streaming services to customers.
Although mobile phone operators are scrambling to offer video streaming services, they know that there won't be a large revenue stream from the services for up to 18 months, TWIi's Senior International Vice President Max Haot said Thursday.
Microsoft and three other Internet giants opened a new front in the war against unwanted commercial e-mail yesterday, launching a coordinated legal assault under the provisions of a new federal law.
In an uncommon display of cooperation, competitors Microsoft, EarthLink, Yahoo! and America Online filed six lawsuits against hundreds of people and companies that they identified as notorious spammers responsible for sending hundreds of millions of messages.
"What we're trying to do is hit the biggest, the baddest, the most notorious," said Randall Boe, AOL's general counsel, at a Washington, D.C., news conference at which the companies announced the litigation.
Microsoft claimed 11 percent of the business-management software market less than five years after beginning to sell the products, figures compiled by market leader SAP AG show.
Microsoft is gaining on Oracle and PeopleSoft in software used for customer service and accounting, according to SAP. Walldorf, Germany-based SAP says it has a 54 percent share. Oracle has 13 percent, and PeopleSoft has 12 percent.
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Microsoft has confirmed that a beta version of its delayed Longhorn operating system will be available before the end of the year. The successor to Windows XP, originally scheduled for release late this year, will now only be available in beta version during 2004 - with Microsoft unwilling to commit to a commercial rollout date.
In 2001, Microsoft spoke about releasing Longhorn in late 2004, but then said it was likely to delay the release until the second half of 2005, according to Gartner.
But at Microsoft's developer conference in October 2003, the implication was that Longhorn would be more likely to ship in 2006, the analyst said. The delay may be longer, with Longhorn not shipping until 2007, it predicted.
Are mobile software rivals Nokia and Microsoft calling a truce?
The two companies became competitors in 1999, when Microsoft introduced a cell phone version of Windows to take on Nokia's operating system. But the companies' participation in an effort to set up a mobile Internet, announced Wednesday, is a sign that those once-icy feelings are thawing.
As previously reported, Nokia and Microsoft are among nine companies that want to create a for-profit registry for mobile Web addresses. The as-yet unnamed business is the first time the world's largest handset maker and the PC software king have been willing to take prominent roles in the same venture, according to sources.
InternetNews
Developers hungry for the latest information on how Microsoft's future will affect their own products and projects are getting their fill this week. More than 300 Microsoft developers and partners converged in San Francisco for DevDay 2004 Wednesday, a code fest and sneak preview of upcoming Microsoft products. The road show is also an opportunity for developers to see demonstrations of specific techniques and learn best practices.
Comp. World
Microsoft's real goals were many and ambitious. At the core of .Net, the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and its associated Framework (class library) would usher Microsoft developers into the world of managed code, of which the benefits were already well-known to their Java counterparts. In parallel, Web services would become the pivotal integration technology, and XML the lingua franca of data representation.
These were, and still are, the central themes. Don Box, architect of Longhorn's Indigo communication subsystem, put it plainly on his Weblog: "We're betting that the future is managed code and XML."
New ways to organize information, protect your computer, and improve electronic and visual communication were among the highlights of projects shown at Microsoft's annual TechFest last week in Redmond, Washington.
TechFest is Microsoft Research's yearly gathering of its researchers from around the world. The company now has researchers in Redmond, Silicon Valley in California, Cambridge, England, and Beijing. This event gives the researchers a chance to show their work to the various product teams at Microsoft, and as such, it's an indication of work that may someday move beyond the research stage and into the hands of businesses and consumers.
Microsoft Director of Product Management for SQL Server Tom Rizzo confirmed that Microsoft expects to ship both Yukon -- Microsoft's code name for the next major update of its SQL Server database -- and Whidbey -- the coming update of Visual Studio -- in the first half of 2005. In the meantime, a third beta has been added to the current beta schedule of Yukon, with 15 beta customers from across all major vertical industries signing up to run Yukon Beta 3 live in production settings before giving the thumbs up for Microsoft to make the product generally available.
RealNetworks is loosing its mind!
Seattle's RealNetworks yesterday filed a federal lawsuit here against Major League Baseball, alleging that the sports organization has breached its recent contract to webcast baseball games in RealNetworks' electronic format.
The suit, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, apparently revolves around the definition of the phrase "baseball season."