The EntityCube listing for Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid.
(Credit: CNET)Think of Microsoft's latest labs effort as the software maker's attempt to give everyone their own Wikipedia entry.
Dubbed EntityCube and now live to try out, the research project pulls together biographical information on anyone found on the Web.
Similar in some ways to other people-search projects that have been around for some time, EntityCube tries to cull the Web to build a dossier on whomever you can think of. Among the interesting features is the social graph that EntityCube builds, as well as its effort to automatically sort out information about different people with the same name. Particularly of note is the "Quanxi map" it can generate, although this feature seems to run particularly slow.
Although Web users can find information on just about anyone using search engines, they typically have to do so manually by going to many different sites. The goal of EntityCube, Microsoft researchers say, is to pull together all of that information.
"Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity," Microsoft said on a page describing the project. "EntityCube is an entity search and summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web entities from billions of crawled Web pages."
Although Microsoft's site makes reference to enitites, not people, the public EntityCube site at this point seems focused mainly on people. The EntityCube site went public late last week.
The project is coming out of Microsoft's research arm, but it would seem to be highly relevant to where the company's Bing efforts are headed. Last week, Microsoft announced an effort called "entity cards," in which Bing tries to put automatically generated summary information at the top of certain search queries, including notable people.
Something like EntityCube could conceivably allow Microsoft to expand that beyond the types of well-known people, such as musicians, for whom it currently offers summaries.
Even in cases where people do have a Wikipedia listing, they may only have a small entry, known as a stub. Such is actually the case with Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid, whose considerably more detailed EntityCube page is show above.
Microsoft gave an early look at EntityCube at this year's TechFest internal science fair back in February.
Navteq announced a partnership Monday under which it will supply 3D map data for Microsoft's newly expanded mapping online services.
Last week, Microsoft took its first steps building 3D imagery into Bing Maps with data from about 100 cities to start with in the Streetside feature that gives a driver's-eye view of the world. But slogging down innumerable streets the world over is an arduous process--Google has been doing it for years with Street View and still has a ways to go to add its first data, not to mention the challenge of keeping views up to date.
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Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's network of sites, the companies announced Friday.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first approved a search deal in July, but the matter took a little extra time to complete.
(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft)The deal, first reached in July, still needs to be approved by the U.S. government before it becomes final. But the companies said in October that they needed more time to complete the deal due to the "complex nature of this transaction," and Friday's announcement is likely the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking review from expensive lawyers.
At least company executives didn't have to rack up the frequent-flier miles to finalize this year; they signed it virtually, with Microsoft's Qi Lu and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz representing their respective companies on the licensing agreement and Ballmer and Bartz inking the definitive agreement, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to Yahoo for up to 10 years, also gaining access to Yahoo's search technology assets and several hundred employees. It will then pay Yahoo a significant portion of the ad revenue generated alongside those searches.
A Yahoo representative declined to comment on the specifics of what held up the final approval of the deal. Both parties said they still expect the deal to become final in early 2010, although the government is sure to take a long hard look.
Ina Fried contributed to this report.
When Microsoft announced the Windows 7 Family Pack option, it said that the three-user bundle of Windows 7 Home Premium would be available only for a limited time.
That time, it appears, is drawing to a close. As noted by WindowsITPro, supplies are drying up fast.
(Credit:
Amazon.com)
"The Windows 7 Family Pack was introduced as a limited time offer while supplies last in select geographies," Microsoft said in a statement. "Response has been very positive and in some cases, the offer has sold out. "
The company wouldn't say how many copies have sold or how many it allocated for the family pack option. It also said it has no current plans to extend the offer.
Microsoft's own online store appears to be sold out, though those in Orange County, Calif. or Scottsdale, Ariz. could check out the retail spots.
Amazon itself is sold out, although some other sellers are offering it on Amazon's site, but at prices well above its suggested price.
Computer users had been asking Microsoft since the days of Vista and longer to offer a discount to those trying to outfit more than one PC with the latest version of Windows. Microsoft finally confirmed in July that it would have a family pack option.
When it announced full details later that month, though, Microsoft said that the $149 package would be available "while supplies last." At the time I pressed them for more details and the company would not say how many copies it planned to sell nor how long the offer would last.
Apple, by contrast, has offered its Mac OS X family pack since 2002. That version covers up to five computers in a household.
Microsoft says a change that was being tested was inadvertently moved onto the live Bing.com site, causing a half-hour outage on Thursday.
(Credit: CNET)Microsoft said that a configuration change that was mistakenly moved from testing onto the live Bing.com site was to blame for an outage Thursday that left Microsoft's search engine completely inaccessible for more than half an hour.
A Microsoft representative told CNET on Friday that the problem appears to have come when something being tested was moved onto the live site.
"A configuration change was mistakenly propagated to production from staging," the representative said. "It was supposed to stay in the test environment--it was a mistake."
In a blog posting that went up late on Thursday night, Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella said that a change made during testing had "unfortunate and unintended consequences."
"As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior," Nadella said. "Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com."
And here I thought Microsoft was just trying to be energy efficient by running Bing only 23 hours a day.
Nadella said that Microsoft is exploring what went wrong to make sure it doesn't happen again. The outage came just a day after Microsoft announced a variety of changes to Bing, including added detail for some results and improved mapping tricks.
On the plus side, though, as ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan pointed out, at least people noticed there was an outage. It's all about mindshare, right?
SAN FRANCISCO--Although Microsoft would rather everyone ran out and bought a Windows Mobile phone, the software maker is aware of reality. And, since it wants people to use Bing on their phones, it knows it needs to have software that works on other devices.
"Everyone understands the popularity and the pervasiveness of the platform," said Microsoft principal group program manager David Raissipour, following a Bing event Wednesday. "We are actively working on it."
Raissipour confirmed Microsoft is working on a mobile Bing application that will combine a number of features--more than just mapping and search. However, he declined to say what all of those features are or when the software will be ready.
I probed as to whether some of the cool mapping technology Microsoft showed on Wednesday might make it onto phones. Raissipour said such mapping requires a rich platform, but could potentially be done without Silverlight, if necessary. So, what about the iPhone?
"It's certainly possible," Raissipour said. "That's a rich platform."
Microsoft already has native mobile applications for many Windows Mobile phones, BlackBerry devices, and a number of Verizon feature phones. The company is also exploring what it might be able to do on Android, particularly on non-Google branded Android devices. In the meantime, the company has its mobile m.bing.com Web site.
I also had a chance to catch up with overall search engineering chief Satya Nadella to ask some overall Bing questions.
In particular, I wanted to see just how many people are actively choosing to go to Bing.com, as opposed to just searching via MSN or a browser tool bar. With Bing's predecessor, Live Search, very few people actually went to the Live.com page.
"It's still a small percentage," Nadella said, but noted that it has succeeded in getting a fan base, which was a key early goal of the product.
When it comes to the data that Microsoft is including at the top of some search results, in general, Nadella said Microsoft is not paying for the content, nor are companies paying to get their information included.
The benefit to Microsoft is that it displays more useful results while content providers get a link high up in the results page. "It's kind of like SEO [Search Engine Optimization] for structured data," Nadella said. As for those new mapping abilities, I encourage you to check them out for yourself and read . In addition, though, here's a video I did with Microsoft's Blaise Aguera y Arcas, where he walks through the new features.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it is selling off its Folio and NXT businesses to Massachusetts-based Rocket Software.
Folio, which now goes by the name of Rocket Folio, is a suite of four publishing tools, while NXT (now Rocket NXT) handles publishing Intranet documents. The two businesses came as part of Microsoft's acquisition of Fast Search and Transfer in 2008, a deal that was valued at $1.2 billion. Terms of Wednesday's deal have not yet been disclosed.
As part of the acquisition, Rocket Software will be taking over customer service duties, along with billing. An FAQ page about the change in hands has also been made available both on Microsoft's and Rocket Software's pages. Additionally, Rocket Software will be hosting a Webinar/town hall next week to talk about the transition.
Microsoft's new street-level imagery in Bing Maps takes advantage of Silverlight to do things Web applications can't, according to the company.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)Microsoft is kicking Bing Maps into a higher gear, announcing a beta version of Bing Maps that uses Silverlight to display 3D images and its own version of street-level images.
The company announced the new beta Wednesday amid a discussion of other improvements to Bing Thursday at its San Francisco offices in a presentation for the media. Bing Maps Beta is rolling out Thursday along with several other new features in the main Bing search results.
Bing Maps Beta requires Microsoft Silverlight to deliver very smooth three-dimensional transitions between satellite and street-view imagery. Like Google Street View, Microsoft has driven the streets of major cities such as San Francisco and assembled its own library of map-related images.
The new beta service can also find images of items inside popular destinations, such as art exhibits inside museums and other geotagged images available on the Internet through Microsoft Photosynth. Developers can also create Web applications to run inside the Bing Maps Beta, such as an application that works with Newseum to index local papers inside maps and let Bing users see the front pages of newspapers across the country.
In addition, Bing Maps Beta users will be able to see local tweets through a partnership with Twitter demonstrated during the event. Twitter recently rolled out a geolocation service.
Updated 11:29 a.m. PST: Microsoft has street-level imagery for around 100 U.S. cities, it said, and is adding more imagery on a constant basis.
Updated 12:28 p.m. PST: Microsoft also talked about new enhancements to Bing called "entity cards," which are sections on the top of a search results page that contain a mix of structured and crawled data on a given topic. For example, searching on "Coldplay" will bring up an official photo of the band with a link to their Web page, tour dates, additional photos, and other information all displayed before your eyes scroll down to the search results themselves.
Similar enhancements will appear on searches for specific cities, with photos and weather information, as well as searches for companies, where financial information and news will appear. At some point in the future, Microsoft also plans to let searches hook up with their Facebook accounts to search for photos, upcoming birthdays, and status updates.
Although Microsoft and Yahoo have only just inked their final search deal and still need regulatory approval, Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi talked on Tuesday about the economics that the deal will bring.
Speaking at a Credit Suisse technology investor conference in Arizona, Mehdi said that both Microsoft and Yahoo should see a double-digit increase in revenue per search, once the two companies have a single paid search system.
Mehdi
(Credit: Microsoft)Putting their two separate paid search systems together will take longer than just setting up Yahoo to use Bing's algorithmic search.
"That is going to take some time," Mehdi said in the speech, which was Webcast on Microsoft's investor site. Just closing the deal has taken quite awhile. There was the months of talks of an outright acquisition, then the eventual search deal announced in July, and then several more months spent ironing out the final details.
Now Microsoft is waiting on regulatory approval on the deal, but Mehdi said he remains optimistic that it will get the nods it needs in time to close the deal early next calendar year.
The integration is also going to be expensive Mehdi acknowledged, reiterating a past estimate that Microsoft will spend $100 million to $200 million in transition costs during the first year. Mehdi said the company has not said how much it expects to spend in the second year, but said that after that, the deal should be a boon to Microsoft's financial results.
As for Bing, Mehdi said executives are pleased with the results for its first six months, citing ComScore U.S. search query market share figures that show Microsoft growing from 8.4 percent to 9.9 percent over that period. That said, Mehdi acknowledged that "we have a very long ways to go against a tough competitor."
Several Microsoft executives will be in San Francisco on Wednesday to talk about some new moves in search, including some developments in mobile and mapping. Google, meanwhile, is planning a search event of its own on Monday.
Microsoft said Tuesday that its investigation has turned up no evidence that anything in its November security updates should be causing users to encounter a so-called "black screen of death."
"Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that that are resulting in system issues for some customers," Microsoft security response communications lead Christopher Budd said in a statement. "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports."
Microsoft said it was not contacted by British security firm Prevx before that company went public with its claims. Microsoft said it has reached out to them to let them know the results of its investigation.
The company said on Monday that it would look into the matter, but issued an update later in the day saying it could not verify any issues.
"Our support organization is also not seeing this as an issue," Budd said on Tuesday. "The claims also do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or (knowledge base) articles.
Update, 3:15 p.m. PT: Prevx posted an updated blog saying that it has done additional testing.
"Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we've done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches," the comapny said. "Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor."
The company also offered up a mea culpa to Redmond and said it also recommends users keep patching their systems promptly. "We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused."
