Microsoft Courier Details Leaked, iPad Looks on in Envy

We briefly mentioned Microsoft's Courier tablet concept back in September, but more details about the would-be iPad-killer have finally leaked. While the design seem to have moved into a less "pie-in-the-sky" direction, the demo videos and mock-ups are still quite impressive.

We now know that the dual-screened electronic journal will be less than an inch thick, and that each screen will be roughly five inches by seven inches. By way of a stylus and multi-touch capacity, Courier will allow users to scribble notes, manipulate clipped photos and text, and sketch images. Courier will be built around NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chipset and run Windows CE 6, the same system powering the Zune HD and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series handsets.

In addition to serving as an e-reader, the Courier will have a camera for snapping photos and a headphone jack for media playback. Clearly, though, the Courier is meant to be used as a notepad and journal. It will have a built-in calendar, contacts organizer and to-do list, but its real value lies in its ability to clip, organize, and annotate information. There will also be a dedicated Web site for sharing your journals and allowing others to collaborate on them.

Pricing and release date are still not known, but if Microsoft can keep costs down, the Courier could spell trouble for a certain tablet device to be released in April.

Check out the videos below to see the Courier in action. [From: Engadget]

Microsoft Will Continue Chinese Strategy In Search, Cloud

Microsoft executives have indicated repeatedly throughout 2010 that the company intends to stay in China and compete aggressively for the search and cloud-computing markets, despite some controversy between the Chinese government and Google earlier in the year that saw the search-engine giant briefly threatening to pull its operations from the country. Both Microsoft and Google lag behind homegrown Chinese search engine Baidu in that market, considered one of the world's fastest-growing. Both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Google CEO Eric Schmidt have reaffirmed their commitment to human rights within the context of doing business in China.

A Microsoft executive indicated that the company plans to stay the course in China, despite the recent dispute between Google and the Chinese Government that saw the search-engine giant threatening to pull its operations out of the country.

"Regardless of whether or not Google stays, we will aggressively promote our search and cloud computing (in China)," Zhang Yaqin, Microsoft’s chairperson of its Asia-Pacific R&D Group, told Reuters on March 5. "We hope to achieve a relatively important place in the China search market…but we must be very patient, we need a lot of time."

Google threatened to pull out of China on Jan. 12, after a widespread cyber-attack which the company claimed targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Chinese government has repudiated accusations that it was involved in the cyber-attacks, which additionally struck over 30 companies and supposedly originated from the Chinese mainland.

One of the pieces of malware involved in the attack, according to a Jan. 14 analysis by McAfee Labs, utilized a zero-day vulnerability present in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft would later pinpoint that vulnerability as an invalid pointer reference affecting Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8.

"Accusation that the Chinese government participated in the cyber-attack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China," a spokesperson of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told the Chinese newspaper Xinhua in January. "We [are] firmly opposed to that."

During Google’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Jan. 21, CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to retreat from Google’s more belligerent position from earlier in the month, saying that: "We have made a strong statement we wish to remain in China. We like the Chinese people. We like our Chinese employees. We like the business opportunities there and we would like to do that on somewhat different terms than we have. But we remain quite committed to being there."

On Jan. 29, Schmidt emphasized a similar line of argument at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "We love what China is doing as a country and its growth. We just don’t like the censorship. We hope to apply some negotiation or pressure to make things better for the Chinese people."

But whether Microsoft sees the potential for some sort of opening in the aftermath of Google’s conflict, or whether CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives merely want to re-emphasize for the media that they intend to keep cordial relations with the Chinese government, is a line of thought likely to be closely retained by the strategists in Redmond.

"Engagement in China and around the world is very important to us, in part because we believe it accelerates access to 21st century technology and services and helps provide the widest possible range of ideas and information," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a Jan. 27 posting on the Official Microsoft Blog. "We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to stay engaged, which means our business must respect the laws of China."

However, Ballmer added in that posting, "Microsoft is opposed to restrictions on peaceful political expression, and we have conversations with governments to make our views known. In every country in which we operate, including China, Microsoft requires proper legal authority before we remove any Internet content; and if we remove content, we give users notice."

Within China, Google and Microsoft lag behind homegrown search engine Baidu, which commanded 56 percent of that market at the end of 2009, compared to Google’s 43 percent. According to analytics firm StatCounter, Yahoo and Bing’s combined share of the Chinese search market stood at around 1.18 percent through 2009.

Google Buys DocVerse In Latest Shot At Microsoft

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. has acquired a company called DocVerse to help the Internet search leader round out its online software programs and provide more ammunition in its duel with Microsoft Corp.
Financial terms of the deal announced Friday weren't disclosed.
DocVerse provides tools that make its possible for people to use the Internet to work together on documents formatted in one of Microsoft's word processing, spreadsheet or presentation programs. The startup was founded in 2007 by former Microsoft employees Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui.
Google offers programs that are similar to the Microsoft software but are hosted on Web sites. The approach, sometimes dubbed "cloud computing," is part of Google's attempt to weaken Microsoft, which makes much of its money by selling software that's installed on individual computer drives.
By adding DocVerse's tools, Google appears to preparing to pitch people who feel more comfortable working with Microsoft Office applications. DocVerse estimates more than 600 million people rely on Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs.
In a blog posting, Google said DocVerse would stop accepting new users until it's ready to announce its next move. Current DocVerse users will still have their usual access, Google said.
DocVerse is at least the ninth acquisition of a small technology company Google has made in the past seven months. Google hopes to add to that list by buying AdMob, a mobile advertising service, for $750 million. It still needs regulators' approval before it can complete that deal.

Google to insert captions on YouTube

The Hindu Google uses the speech recognition technology to transcribe audio voice mails through its Google Voice service, and to provide spoken Web searches from smart phones. Photo: K. Pichumani 

 

Google is to add automatic captions to the tens of millions of English language videos it hosts on YouTube, the web search giant said Friday. The move will make the videos more accessible to deaf viewers but will also help Google index the content and supply relevant ads alongside it, analysts said.

Google has been experimenting with the automated captions for several months with a handful of high profile partners like the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University and National Geographic. All other captions on YouTube videos were provided by the videos’ producers.

Google has been working on speech recognition technology for some five years, and uses the technology to transcribe audio voice mails through its Google Voice service, and to provide spoken Web searches from smart phones.

However, engineers warned that the technology is far from perfect and that the machine translations are sure to contain mistakes. “We know it’s not perfect, and sometimes it will be funny,” said Google engineer Ken Harrenstien, who is deaf. “But it’s better than nothing.”

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Android – Finally Gets a Competitor

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Android is now not only the micro Google mobile phone available in the market. The Innocomm Android mobile phone is its new competitor in the market. The company recently announced that this phone will soon be launched sometime during the summer and also there will be more number of android mobile phones which will follow this model in the future.
There are several videos on YouTube where a person can witness the features that will be provided by the new Innocomm Android mobile phone. The mobile has a 3.2 inch wide screen so that the person would not have any difficulty in browsing, watching movies and taking pictures and recording videos. It also contains an eight megapixel camera so that the user can take pictures in high quality and upload them directly from his mobile phone.

Bing blocks online sex searches in Middle East: study

	Attendees look at the Bing display at the Microsoft exhibit at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

SAN FRANCISCO - The Open Net Initiative (ONI) on Friday said Microsoft's search engine Bing is more prudish than government censors when it comes to sex-related online queries.

A January test of a Bing version tailored for users in Arab countries showed that it filtered Arabic and English words for sexually explicit content along with queries related to gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender material.

Attempts to use filtered keywords prompted a message reading "Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content," according to ONI.

The message seemed at odds with the fact that while political censorship is widespread in the Middle East, not all countries there mandate filtering of sex, nudity, homosexuality and other such "social content," ONI reported.

"A more targeted approach - either country-based or preferably, defined by the user - is more generally consistent with minimizing the impact on freedom of speech," ONI study authors concluded.

"Microsoft has signalled its willingness to be at the forefront in protecting freedom of expression around the world. It is difficult to reconcile this position with Bing's current filtering standards."

The report noted that Bing didn't impose search settings based on IP addresses indicating where computers are located, so users can get around filters by choosing versions of the engine crafted for other countries.

China says no request yet from Google for talks

	Chinese flag flying over the company logo outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing

BEIJING - China said Saturday it had not received any request for talks from Google, as the Internet giant insists it remains firm in its plan to end censorship on search results in the communist state.

In January Google threatened to leave China over what it said were cyber attacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

But Vice Minister Miao Wei told state run news agency Xinhua that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had not received any word from Google on the matter.

The company had "never informed the ministry that it was planning to withdraw from China," he said, speaking on the sidelines of China's annual session of the National People's Congress, the country's top legislature.

Google "had never filed reports over alleged Internet regulation and cyber attacks to the ministry or requests for negotiations," he added.

Meanwhile, Google has continued to filter search engine results in China, which has the world's largest number of online users at 384 million.

Earlier this week, a top Google executive said in Washington that the Internet giant has set no timetable for its operations in China but remains firm in its plan to end censorship of Web search results there.

"We are reviewing our business operations (in China) now," Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told a congressional hearing on "Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law."

The company, however, last month posted ads for dozens of positions in China, suggesting it may be rethinking its threat to leave the country.

The company is seeking to hire 40 staff, including engineers, sales managers and research scientists in Beijing, Shanghai and the southern city of Guangzhou, according to advertisements seen on its website.