According to a reports via BGR and DigiTimes, the next versions for the Windows Phone operating system following the "Mango" release are code-named "Tango" and "Apollo." There is almost no information on what those operating system updates will contain, outside of this sneaky photo of a unwiped whiteboard at Microsoft Research. Here, there are hints about protocols, input methods and something called an "inspiration engine." What the heck is that?
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This photo, courtesy of WMPowerUser.com, shows a whiteboard behind Dr. Victor Bahl, Director of Mobile Computing Research at Microsoft Research (MSR), the R&D group behind many of Microsoft's most innovative projects and services like Bing's social search, Kinect, StreetSide, portions of Windows Phone, plus other Microsoft operating systems and even Microsoft hardware.
Future WP Features?
So what's MSR doing with Windows Phone?
According to the transcription of the whiteboard:
TIPC/S (Mango)
Localization (Apollo)
Inspiration Engine (Apollo)
One-handed input and next generation software keyboard (Apollo)
Voice Typing
Context Engine (Beyond Apollo)
TIPC is a network communication protocol, and the alternative input systems sound great - especially that one-handed software keyboard! But what really piqued our interest is this "inspiration engine" concept. What on earth could that be?
Inspiration Engine?
One of the commenters on WMPoweruser's post found that inspirationengine.com leads to a company website that gathers feedback using emotional cues and facial expressions to determine how users' feel in order to predict their behavior. One of their products, known as "e.mote," lets customers share feedback with companies.
Is this the "inspiration engine" MSR is referring to though, or just a happy coincidence? Let the speculation begin!
Keep in mind that none of this is any confirmation of officially planned Windows Phone features - MSR works on a lot of projects, only some of which are later transferred to commercial products.
Thereviewsarein. Windows Phone "Mango" is a hit with gadget bloggers. "Mango," the code-name for Microsoft's upcoming release of its mobile operating system Windows Phone, is a big leap forward with a total of around 500 new features. Many of those are addressing real pain points for current users. With Mango, Windows Phone finally gets long sought after features like multi-tasking, conversation views, voice integration, plus several unique tweaks involving Bing, better live tiles, Twitter integration, Facebook Chat and more.
But some of the updates in "Mango" are even more forward-thinking. Windows Phone is pushing users to move beyond apps for some of the core use cases involving smartphones. Meanwhile, it's introducing a new paradigm for recommending applications to the phone's end users.
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What's New in Mango?
"Mango" is the update that makes Windows Phone a more complete product. Unlike updates to Apple's iOS or Google's Android, which are often about adding features and tweaks these days, a good bit of "Mango" is about adding core functionality consumers have come to expect from smartphones. Apps that run in the background. The ability for developers to build apps with access to the camera and accelerometer, or the phone's contacts and calendar. Voice integration. Angry Birds. (OK, that last one isn't a Mango feature, but it's a notable addition, nonetheless.)
While those were the necessary leaps, Microsoft is also delivering a number of Windows Phone-specific features, like a unified messaging center where all communication with a single contact is combined, including texts, IMs, emails, Facebook updates and phone calls. It has improved the Web browser by shipping a version of IE 9 that shares the same code base as the desktop version, along with support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration. It has more deeply integrated Bing into the phone, and added computer vision capabilities, Shazam-like music search and voice search. It has updated and improved the "hubs," Windows Phone's centralized starting points for interacting with "People," "Games," "Music" and more.
You Don't Need "An App for That" - You Just Need a Phone
But maybe the most interesting part of Windows Phone is its push to decrease our dependency on apps. Although the platform has a respectable number of apps: over 19,000, according to app store tracker Distimo, it's planning for a future where the phone itself can replace the functionality of a number apps.
With Bing, consumers can get restaurant recommendations, find nearby businesses, new places to shop, activities or other local information. Bing can identify the music you hear and provide the lyrics. It can "see" objects in the real-world using the phone's camera and perform searches based on what it identifies is in the frame. And with unified messaging and Windows Phone's "People" hub concept, users no longer have to turn to an app to find the latest updates from their friends. They can even "like" and "comment" and tweet outside of the apps themselves.
When tasks like these become commonplace phone features, it pushes developers to build apps that do more. Why build another social networking client, when the phone handles social networking? Why build a "local reviews" app, when Bing is users' first stop?
Pushing the Right Apps to the Right People
But it's not all a case of Microsoft trying to eat developers' lunch, by turning the phone's OS into one giant app. A new feature called "Quick Cards" returns related apps, in addition to the summary provided, when users search for a product, movie, event, place or other information. In other words, it marries traditional Web search with app suggestions. For users who perform certain types of search regularly, they'll be presented again and again with similar apps that might offer an improved experience or more features. For example, someone searching for celebrities or movie trailers might be shown a link to the IMDb app.
Instead of searching for apps, a task which many first-time smartphone users are overwhelmed by due to the sheer quantities available, users just search and the apps find them. This might be the most overlooked of all of Mango's updates, but it's the one that could have the biggest impact on the mobile application economy going forward.
That is, if Microsoft can ever sell enough of these phones for it to matter.
Web developers who want see how their sites will look on the new version of IE 9 Mobile, which will soon ship along with Windows Phone "Mango," the next-generation update to the Windows Phone mobile OS, now have a new tool to do so. Today, Microsoft has launched Mobile Test Drive, a companion to the Internet Explorer Test Drive site for the desktop. The new site features a number of HTML5 and performance demos highlighting IE 9 Mobile's capabilities.
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The mobile site is organized much like its desktop counterpart and includes may of the same samples in addition to several mobile-specific ones.
Over the next few months, even more samples will be added as we get closer to Mango's commercial release, says Microsoft. Mango is expected later this fall.
Currently, the first 15 samples on the new site include the following:
As promised back in April, Microsoft has today released an Android to Windows Phone API mapping tool for developers which will help developers port existing Android applications to the Windows Phone platform. Like its iPhone counterpart, the tool doesn't actually port your code for you automatically. Instead, what it provides is a list of API mappings that acts like a translation dictionary from one platform to the next.
As before, Microsoft reminds developers that not all API's can be mapped because the platforms have different architectures and user interfaces. But to aid developers in the transition, it has hired an "App Guy" who will crawl developer forums, aggregating discussions from different locations to answer questions related to porting from iOS or Android to Windows Phone. App Guy has no name, so we're not sure if this a real person, a team of people or a bot, but, for what it's worth, Microsoft refers to him as "just one guy," implying that there will be more "app guys" in the future, perhaps.
The next step Microsoft has planned for help with porting is to update both the iPhone and Android API mapping tools to include the Mango features. This is planned for this summer, the company says.
A new report from Citigroup out today says that it's not too late for Microsoft to have a "meaningful share" of the tablet market, even though its first tablet computer won't ship until mid-2012 at the earliest. Citi estimates that around 75 million tablets will ship in 2013, but there's still plenty of room for a Microsoft tablet to gain a foothold, even if it's not "a raving success."
Has Citi gone mad? Or is it right on target? Let us know what you think in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.
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"Microsoft can have a meaningful share of the market in 2013 and beyond. Of course this is dependent upon the company's ability to deliver a competitive operating system on partner hardware that is priced competitively," the group said in a note to clients.
It also said that Microsoft would have the enterprise market in its favor, but the user interface would the "make or break" element for the company.
Business Insider, reporting on Citi's estimates, seemed to agree, and cited a number of reasons for doing so. These included the expense of the current tablet computers out today, the fact that "Android tablets are not very good," (their words, not ours), the legal challenges facing Android, Microsoft's huge army of .NET developers, and, as noted above, access to the enterprise market. More on those reasons can be found here.
This isn't the first time we asked this question, mind you. But we're curious if opinion has changed over the past several months, especially now that we know Microsoft is planning to port Windows to ARM-based chips and is ready to demo its tablet OS for the first time. Earlier this year, 295 of you told us that yes, it's way too late for a Microsoft tablet, but 131 said "no" it was not. (53 were undecided).
Let's see what you think now!
Do you agree with Citi? Share your thoughts about the Microsoft tablet's chances in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.
Microsoft announced new features today to Docs.com, a Facebook app in closed beta that lets users create multi-author Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations for free.
The new features themselves are not earth-shattering, but they show how the team behind Docs.com continues to improve and innovate. The question is, how far will Microsoft go to make Docs.com better before it starts to undermine its flagship Office products?
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Docs.com is part of Microsoft's response to Google Docs, the Web app that revolutionized collaborative editing and introduced people to the idea of letting documents live in the cloud, for free.
Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, outlook and OneNote, costs $279.99 - which seems staggering in the age of so many free Web-based productivity tools.
Microsoft seems to be hoping that Docs.com will convert free users into paid users of Microsoft Office. The company never misses a chance to mention that Docs.com is "built on Microsoft Office 2010" and has "full compatibility with Microsoft Office:"
"The fact that we've been able to adapt the Office 2010 'Web Apps' technology to work directly with Facebook truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system's rich 'contextual collaboration' capabilities."
Docs.com is just one front in the Microsoft-Google battle over office products. Docs.com seems to be combining the large, engaged (and young!) user base of Facebook with the technology of Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Workspace is a collection of web apps for sharing and collaborating on docs saved on the Web, available for personal use for free.
The features announced today include the ability to tag a document with keywords, search for documents by keywords and authors, and a few tweaks to the interface. The changes are evidence of Microsoft's genuine push to give users a free, Web-based alternative to Google Docs - without making it into an alternative to Microsoft Office 2010.
Docs.com is still in closed beta. To get an idea of how it works, check out the video tutorial.
As of today a federal appeals court is upholding the judgement to bar Microsoft from selling current versions of Word and Office. The question is, what does the patent actually entail? The original patent can be summarized as covering a "method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other." With this broad an abstract, it appears that the patent could affect a lot more than simple word processing. But, as with all patents, the devil is in the details.
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As of Jan. 11, 2010, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft will no longer sell its flagship word processing products in their current format. In August, a Texas jury filed in favor of i4i Inc. finding that Word infringes on the Canadian company's software patent.
Microsoft announced that it is already taking steps to remove the "little-used" infringing software feature from Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007.
The removal would make these versions of Word unable to open XML files for editing. An additional workaround may already be planned. In early August ZDNet UK's Rupert Goodwins covered Microsoft's patent for an SML Schema Document - a way of creating rich XML files so that word-processing applications recognize the file as a native document. Microsoft is also taking this opportunity to direct users to the beta versions of Word and Office 2010.
It'll be interesting to see if this patent resurfaces to block additional consumer products or if the Word trial will be an isolated incident.
This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service Plurk.
Now, we're seeing reports - and seeing for ourselves on the Microsoft website - that the knockoff site has been unceremoniously ganked from the tubes. Did a major corporation get caught red-handed stealing intellectual property from a startup? Say it ain't so! More interestingly, is the removal of the site an admission of guilt? And are these side-by-side source code screenshots incriminating or what?
Currently, the Microsoft microblog site reads something along the lines of "We regret to inform you that the service is temporarily not available due to system maintenance. Please visit the site again later. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Perhaps they ought to be apologizing to Plurk for the inconvenience.
"We were absolutely shocked and outraged," wrote Plurk rep Dave Thompson, "when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering had with Plurk...
"We're still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart's work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms."
Microsoft has issued this press release that passes the buck on to an unnamed third-party contractor. Is it likely that the Microsoft executives in charge of producing the microblog were a) unaware of Plurk's existence and design to the extent that they wouldn't recognize a clone as such, and b) that they didn't simply point at Plurk and tell their vendors to "make us one of those"?
Having had some experience in both startup development processes and corporate application deployment, I personally know very well that a criminal amount of IP theft goes on every day in Silicon Valley and around the world. Most of the time, the offending parties are operating under the belief that they won't get caught. And a great deal of the time, they're not caught.
We must, however, applaud Microsoft's taking the site down to investigate the matter rather than being defensive or litigious. Still, the software giant should be accepting more accountability for the attempted theft that was conducted in its name and under the auspices of its brand.
What do you think? Who is to blame in this situation? Cast your vote below, and tell us what you really think in the comments.
When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers.
As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls "negative cashback." How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.
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The problem may lie with Bing's ability to accurately track website changes or with Bing's relationships with retailers or with the basic values of the retailers themselves, but one way or another, the system seems to be gamed.
Essentially, certain products from certain websites appear through a Cashback-enabled browser to be a certain price. Yet, if the same user visits the same site at the same time from a non-Cashback browser or machine (or if he deletes his cookies), the price is sometimes drastically different in a way that benefits the end user not a bit.
As one user very succinctly put it, "If I go directly to butterflyphoto.com, I pay $699 with 0% cashback. If I use Bing Cashback, I pay $758 with 2% cashback, or $742.84. Using Bing cashback has actually cost me $43.84, giving an effective cashback rate of -6.27%."
We did the same search, and we saw the same results. Here's our Bing Cashback screenshot from an Internet Explorer window:
And here's the same product on the same website in a Chrome tab:
As a side note, the blogger that alerted us to this issue had previously received a nastygram from Microsoft about his post on Bing Cashback technical issues.
So, what do we make of this issue? Is it a potentially scammy technical glitch? More importantly, how soon can it be fixed so innocent online shoppers aren't quietly swindled out of cash throughout the holiday season? Let us know what you think should be done in the comments - particularly if you've noticed this bug yourself.
In my coaching practice, I am increasingly looking for ways to work with my clients on shared documents and projects online. Pretty simple right? You’d think so. I went to the first two places that I knew offered some or all of these services: Google & Microsoft. Big disappointment.
According to a reports via BGR and DigiTimes, the next versions for the Windows Phone operating system following the "Mango" release are code-named "Tango" and "Apollo." There is almost no information on what those operating system updates will contain, outside of this sneaky photo of a unwiped whiteboard at Microsoft Research. Here, there are hints about protocols, input methods and something called an "inspiration engine." What the heck is that?
This photo, courtesy of WMPowerUser.com, shows a whiteboard behind Dr. Victor Bahl, Director of Mobile Computing Research at Microsoft Research (MSR), the R&D group behind many of Microsoft's most innovative projects and services like Bing's social search, Kinect, StreetSide, portions of Windows Phone, plus other Microsoft operating systems and even Microsoft hardware.
Web developers who want see how their sites will look on the new version of IE 9 Mobile, which will soon ship along with Windows Phone "Mango," the next-generation update to the Windows Phone mobile OS, now have a new tool to do so. Today, Microsoft has launched 
A new report from Citigroup 
Microsoft announced new features today to 
This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service 
When Bing debuted a feature called 
