Articles about Cloud

There is more Windows Phone news coming from Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference today, and this time, instead of focusing on developers, it is focused on the consumer experience. Microsoft's Senior Vice President of Mobile Communications Andy Lees introduced a couple of major consumer-facing enhancements to Windows Phone today that extend functionality off of the phone's various "hubs" and into other connected services.

First, there will be a new addition to the Windows Live suite of Web services dedicated strictly to Windows Phone, appropriately named Windows Live Phone. Integration with Windows Live services has always been a strong aspect of Microsoft's mobile strategy, and was executed well even with the much derided Windows Mobile 6.5.

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Popular Social/Messaging/VoIP application Fring made serious waves last week when it launched a new version that supported two-way video calling over 3G for the iPhone 4. Apple's FaceTime iPhone 4 video chat, by comparison, only works while the device is connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Very shortly after launching, however, support for the face-2-face video chat was halted. Fring said the feature's unavailability was the result of a blockage by Skype.

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Reacting to the success of its launch in April, Microsoft on Monday said it would allow 10,000 more testers into its Intune computer management service. The offering gives small and midsize companies without a vast IT department the capability to manage their computers via a web-based connection.

When the Intune beta was first made available in April, the initial 1,500 beta slots were filled within 30 hours. The company decided to hold off until this weeks Worldwide Partner Conference to open up the beta again due to the gathering's planned focus on cloud computing.

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For anyone with an Android phone and a great idea for an app but no experience with writing code, Google has announced the ultimate solution.

Today, Google began the beta phase of App Inventor, a graphical tool in Google Labs for designing custom Android applications. Users of the tool do not need to know anything about programming to be able to create an app, package it, and upload it to their USB-connected Android phone.

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Android's unabated growth has been a hot topic recently, and comScore's smartphone market share breakdown released today shows that from February to May 2010, it was actually the ONLY major mobile platform to experience positive growth.

Among this growth, a complaint about the Android platform has persisted: it has no good games. While this may be a bit of an overstatement, users frequently compare the Android platform with Apple's iOS in terms of functionality, features, and apps; and iOS simply has more high quality games.

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Back in March, YouTube gave users the ability to run an automated closed captioning feature which uses speech-to-text technology to convert a video's audio track into live subtitles. This feature was in development for more than two years, and was in private beta testing since November 2009.

The Auto-captioning feature combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search, and automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, correct the mistakes, and then upload the corrected version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages.

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Facebook realizes that its photo application is sometimes cumbersome to use, and promised late Thursday that it is working to make things better.

The impetus behind making one of the most commonly-used features of Facebook better seems to be Facebook's acquisition of photo sharing site Divvyshot in April. In fact, the social networking site turned to Divvyshot co-founder Sam Odio -- now a product manager at Facebook -- to introduce the first enhancement: facial recognition.

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When a new piece of software is released, companies frequently include a video of someone walking through the features of the software, explaining how it works. Unfortunately, videos like this lack the basic interaction of a step-by-step tutorial.

Now, a Web app called iorad has opened in beta, which lets developers create interactive instructions for their software completely within the browser.

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True to last week's rumors, Hulu today unveiled a new subscription tier called Hulu Plus which allows users access to Hulu across a broader spectrum of devices, not just limiting consumption to PC screens.

Select Samsung Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players can download a Hulu Plus application from the Samsung app store and start streaming Hulu Plus today, and iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch, and iPad users can download the Hulu Plus app to stream content over 3G or Wi-Fi as well.

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Google Voice, the popular and often controversial VoIP, voicemail, and messaging service from Mountain View search giant Google is now open for anyone in the U.S. to use.

Previously, you could only open a Google Voice account if you received an invitation from a user already participating in the program.

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Google has announced the upcoming availability of the Chrome Web Store, an open marketplace similar to the Android Market or iTunes App Store that deals exclusively in Web Apps.

This store doesn't exist yet, but will open both to developers and to users "later this year."

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Google today began pushing its Wave collaboration tool again, hoping to attract both users and developers with new features.

Firstly, for users, Google is dropping the "invitation-only" velvet rope from the collaboration tool, and now anybody can sign up just by going to wave.google.com and logging in with their gmail or Google account.

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I'm constantly reminded how slow email actually is.

On the homescreen of one of my smartphones, I've got the official Twitter widget and the official Facebook widget which are pretty much constantly refreshing. Likewise, my email inbox is set to refresh just as frequently. Every day, when someone sends me a message in Facebook or replies to a Tweet, the widgets tell me first, and then five minutes later I get the email alerting me again. Because of this, I have an email account just for social network updates that is overflowing with unread messages.

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On its five year anniversary, popular video streaming site YouTube announced it streams two billion videos every day.

"What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries," it said in the official YouTube Blog on Sunday. "We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world."

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In an astonishing statistic released this morning, Web analytics service Experian Hitwise reported that of all the Web searches performed in the United States on the top three search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing during the first four weeks of March, about two percent on average are for the word facebook. For Yahoo and Bing, Another one percent is for facebook.com, and just less than one percent is for facebook login.

Coupled with statistics for the same month from analytics service comScore, Experian's findings suggest that, from March 1 through March 27, searches for a way to get to Facebook other than through typing the address or clicking on a bookmark, accounted for as many as 175.84 million Google searches in the US, over 78.9 million Yahoo searches, and over 80 million Bing searches.

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