WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--Though best known as host of "American Idol" and "American Top 40," Ryan Seacrest is also a big techie.

In between spinning songs on the radio, Seacrest is nearly always checking his BlackBerry, reading the latest tweets and e-mail from his staff. He's also a former CNET Central host and one of the handful of people that Bill Gates follows on Twitter. But the most important thing about technology, Seacrest said, is the way it allows him to have a closer relationship with his audience.

"'The amount of information [you get … Read more

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--Although the focus of Bing's latest update is on entertainment, Microsoft insists it is more substance than fluff.

"Entertainment has turned out to be a very high-volume, high-query scenario," Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said in an interview with CNET on Tuesday. "About 10 percent of all queries are entertainment-related, so that's a big opportunity."

As part of the seasonal update, Bing is adding the ability to play tens of thousands of full-length TV episodes, more than 100 games, and more than 5 million full-length songs from directly within the … Read more

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--While entertainment is as old as cave paintings and singing around a fire, technology is radically changing the day-to-day lives of filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other entertainers as well as those who consume their work.

That was the takeaway from a panel of entertainers, speaking Tuesday night at the SoHo Lounge here. The panel was part of a Bing event, where Microsoft announced a bunch of new entertainment features for its search engine, including the ability to watch more TV shows and listen to full-length songs from within Bing.

Some participants were clearly more on their host'… Read more

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--Microsoft is hosting a celebrity-laden event here on Tuesday, announcing a variety of new entertainment features it hopes will give Bing a little more star power.

In truly LA fashion, the event started late as reporters battled the southland traffic to get to the Soho House on Sunset Boulevard. However, Microsoft's blog post with the news posted promptly at the 6 p.m. starting time.

According to that, Microsoft is adding casual games, more TV content as well as Zune music and lyrics to the service. Each of several million songs can now be played once … Read more

Salesforce.com hopes its new Chatter product will give businesses something to talk about.

After beta testing the collaboration service since February, the company says the product is ready for mainstream use. Although it is designed to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint or IBM's Lotus Notes, Salesforce.com aptly describes Chatter as sort of a Facebook for businesses.

Instead of following old high school classmates, though, Chatter allows workers to follow co-workers, specific business documents, or pieces of data. A sales rep, for example, could follow a pending deal and get updates whenever details on the transaction are updated, … Read more

The technology icon stands before a crowd, holding in his hands a prototype that embodies his vision for the future of computing. It's a touch-screen tablet that is thinner than a magazine, has all-day battery life, and sells for less than $800.

But the icon wasn't Steve Jobs and the tablet wasn't the iPad. It was Bill Gates, speaking in 2005 to a crowd of Windows hardware makers in Seattle. The technology enabling such a device was still a few years off, Gates said, but it was time to start working toward that vision.

A year later, … Read more

Now, it's no secret that I am a Settlers of Catan enthusiast. Just ask the kind folks at TechFlash who made the mistake of letting me play in their tournament.

So I, like many devotees of the German board game have been hoping to see it make its way to Microsoft's Surface tabletop. Well, the good news is that it is indeed happening.

Enthusiasts at this week's Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, will be the first to see Catan running on the Microsoft tabletop computer, although the game is still in development. The final version is … Read more

If Microsoft is hurting for mobile customers, it's certainly not because it has a lack of different mobile operating systems.

The company already has Windows Embedded Compact (formerly Windows CE), Windows Mobile 6.5, and the forthcoming Windows Phone 7. The new Windows Phone is based, like previous versions of Windows Mobile, on the Windows CE core, but Phone 7 won't be able to run programs written for earlier Windows Phones. There's also the Kin, which runs its own flavor of the Windows Phone software.

Now, Microsoft is putting another brand in the mix, adding something called Windows Embedded Handheld. … Read more

So far, developers wanting to write programs for Windows Phone 7 have had to rely on a software emulator to see how their programs will run. Starting next month, though, the first group of developers will get their hands on actual devices.

While Microsoft says it won't have enough phones for all developers, it is working to make sure that the devices aren't limited to just the big software developers.

Microsoft is putting the final touches on Windows Phone 7, a major overhaul of its phone operating system. (Check out our behind-the-scenes story on that effort). The company … Read more