Tag: MICROSOFT

A group of grad students has come up with a way to instantly diagnose malaria, using only a smartphone and some fancy software. The team, comprised of students from around the nation, developed the prototype using a Samsung Focus smartphone, running Windows 7. After adding a microscopic camera lens to the phone, the students developed software capable of analyzing and scanning blood for ...

Microsoft and Hulu are offering a pretty sweet deal: Visit Hulu.com/Plus with Internet Explorer 9, and you'll be offered a free, one-month trial of Hulu Plus simply for pinning the site to your taskbar. It's a significant improvement over the normal one-week trial, and all you have to do is stare at an extra icon for a little while. ...

A decade after fighting a major antitrust lawsuit, Microsoft has filed exactly the same charges against Google. Today, the company will file a formal antitrust complaint with the European Union, joining a collection of small companies that have already made similar charges against the search giant. Microsoft is hoping that the E.U. will take some action against Google, and perhaps convince ...

Microsoft researchers have whipped up an impressive new cell phone app that turns camera-phone snapshots into 3-D models. The app is similar to Microsoft's Photosynth, which stitches together images to recreate 3-D environments. But Photosynth simply created the illusion of 3-D; this new project actually analyzes images, and maps depth by comparing how objects appear in different photos. ...

Microsoft may not be worth as much money as Apple, but according to a new think-tank report, it's way more ethically sound. This year, the corporation earned a spot on Ethisphere's list of the 'World's Most Ethical Companies,' beating out Apple, Facebook, and Google. It's certainly a far cry from the late '90s, when Microsoft faced antitrust trials and accusations of corporate tyranny. But the ...

Sad news for the Zune guy and the three other people who care about Microsoft's long-embattled MP3 player: The company has halted production. Less than five years after rolling out its intended iPod killer, Microsoft has said that they will not be making any new Zune players. Since its release in 2006, the Zune struggled to reach any sort of market share when it turned out that appearing five ...

Did we learn nothing from Kenneth Cole's tasteless Twitter gaffe? Or is Microsoft just employing the same marketing brain trusts? Japan is on everyone's mind --at least, we hope -- and the tech giant's flacks haven't ignored that. Saturday morning, a message of hope callow douchebaggery came out of the official Bing Twitter account: "How you can #SupportJapan -For every retweet, bing will ...

An ingenious idea: Let those with "incongruous" dating appetites admit their kinks and quirks quietly, and, when no one is looking, have a match service pair them with potentially like-minded weirdos mates. Microsoft filed a patent in 2009 -- but made public last week -- for its own online dating service, with an algorithm into which users can secretly enter "private affinities," thus matching up ...

InPrivate, Incognito, Private Browsing -- whatever they want to brand it -- all modern browsers offer a special mode designed to keep what you do online a secret from prying eyes. Despite different names and origins at different companies, they all work in basically similar ways: A new browser session is created that operates separately from your existing one, with its own history and cookies ...

With rescue workers continuing to search for survivors among the rubble from last week's devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of engineers from the U.K. have constructed a robot that could make their jobs a little easier -- thanks to Microsoft's Xbox Kinect. The Kinect's motion-detection sensors can instantly model the robot's surroundings and scan them for survivors, ...

Bing now displays your Facebook friends who have "liked" a link in its search results. If you're searching for a restaurant in New Orleans, for example, and a friend has publicly "liked" one, then you'll see his or her photo and name below the link. Even those of us with the most extensive friends lists won't find "liked" links in every search result, though. Still, this new feature should give ...

Looks like some Nokia employees -- specifically those that work specifically on the now-dead Symbian platform -- are not particularly happy about the switch to Windows Phone 7. Over 1,000 employees at the company's Tampere and Oulu offices in Finland decided to use their flextime to leave work early today in protest of the move. Maybe they'll use the time to bone up on their Windows Phone ...

It's no secret that Nokia has been in trouble for some time -- especially in the U.S. market, where Symbian (its smartphone OS of choice) just didn't enjoy the same success that it did in Europe. The problem has only gotten worse with the advent of Android and iOS, truly modern smartphone operating systems that make Symbian look like a quaint mess from a bygone era. MeeGo, a project that saw ...

In 2010, sales and rentals of feature-length films online climbed a stunning 38-percent, with U.S. consumers spending a grand total of $385 million on downloadable and streaming movies. By contrast, only $366 million was spent to purchase or rent television shows online, marking the first time that movie downloads have surpassed that of TV. As the market has grown, Apple's dominance has started ...

Water levels in video games have been terrible since Mario's first attempt at swimming in level 2-2, and things haven't improved much over the years as Ecco, Link and countless others have waded into the sea. Games that approximate the sport of swimming itself, often hastily tacked onto the year's Summer Olympics package, have been universally bad, marked by mindless controls, poor animation, and ...