Microsoft is constantly evolving the products and services under the Windows Live brand umbrella, and one of the main focuses of the company is, of course, Live Search. Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager Live Search User Experience team, revealed that the redesigned Live Search homepage would from now on feature background images. The Redmond company will ensure that the Live Search “wallpapers” will alternate frequently, but this process won’t be random, and it won’t happen on every refresh. Additionally, the Live Search backgrounds will have hotspots implemented, offering users a search item in accordance with elements contained in the image. Read the rest of this entry »
On its official website, Opera describes the latest version of its browser as “beautifully engineered”. However, it looks like Opera 9.50 was made available to end users before the cooking process was ready. After the release of the gold version of Opera 9.50 on June 12, 2008, the feedback starting pouring in, and it was not a pretty sight. As a direct consequence of the user input, Opera is now scrambling to make available version 9.51, designed to resolve all the issues introduced with Opera 9.50.
“Discover the new standard in Web browsing. Download Opera today to get the fastest and most powerful Web browser available and make the most of your time online,” is a message on the official Opera welcoming page. And while the evolution of version 9.5 over its predecessor is indisputable, the fact is that so are the many problems plaguing the browser. June 25, 2008 saw the offering of Opera 9.51 Build 10074 Release Candidate 1, and as of June 30 users can also grab Opera 9.51 RC2 Build 10080. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft continues to hammer away at its Zune digital media player and the services built around the device, but the evolution is largely a case of going where Apple has already taken the iPod and iTunes. On May 5, 2008, Microsoft introduced the latest update to Zune, not only adding new features and enhancements to the device itself but also evolving the Zune software, Zune Social and the Zune Marketplace. The focus of the update is to build on top of what the company started with “Zune Social” in November 2007, namely to extend the social networking community created around the device.
“Zune owners are pretty passionate, and they had a lot of great ideas for making the community more valuable to music fans. And I definitely fall into that category myself - the main reason we’re all here is we love the music,” stated Brian Seitz, a Group Marketing Manager for Zune. Zune Social offers users the possibility to interact in terms of music discovery, comments, playlist browsing, with the update bringing to the table additional capabilities including the ability to send messages to friends, explore their music collections and even drag-and-drop Zune Cards. Read the rest of this entry »
Hollywood has picked a winner in its competition to develop an effective but unobtrusive system for fingerprinting digital movies.
The contest, organised by Movie Labs, the R&D arm of the MPAA, asked each fingerprinting system to identify 1,000 movie files by their “fingerprints”, patterns of data unique to each movie.
The files varied in quality, from HD through internet downloads to bootlegs recorded on camcorders. Three of the 12 systems managed to identify more than 90% of the files with no false positives. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft is constantly evolving the products and services under the Windows Live brand umbrella, and one of the main focuses of the company is, of course, Live Search. Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager Live Search User Experience team, revealed that the redesigned Live Search homepage would from now on feature background images. The Redmond company will ensure that the Live Search “wallpapers” will alternate frequently, but this process won’t be random, and it won’t happen on every refresh. Additionally, the Live Search backgrounds will have hotspots implemented, offering users a search item in accordance with elements contained in the image. Read the rest of this entry »
