Microsoft announced today that it has bought PhoneFactor, a provider of multi-factor authentication.

PhoneFactor offers organizations different ways for their employees to access key software and services without relying just on passwords or security tokens. The company's specialty is phone authentication, but it also provides authentication through text messages.

Timothy Sutton, PhoneFactor CEO, described the concept in a blog, saying that "when we initially launched PhoneFactor, we had a vision to deliver strong authentication as a seamless part of almost every process where an individual needs to access confidential or proprietary data." He added that "phones … Read more

Microsoft will indeed open its 30-plus holiday pop-up brick-and-mortar stores on October 26, the day that Windows 8 and the Surface RT tablets go on sale.

It seems obvious this would be the case, doesn't it? But back in early September, when Microsoft announced the list of pop-up stores it will be opening "this fall," officials refused to confirm they'd be open by October 26.

Luckily, eagle-eyed Microsoft watcher @steveymacjr spotted a mention of the New York store opening on October 26 on Microsoft's own Microsoft Stores web site.

I checked some of the 31 … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--When Salesforce.com CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff took the stage at the giant Moscone Center here today, 14,000 people, mostly customers, packed the auditorium to hear his two-hour keynote as he preached the social enterprise gospel and announced a bevy of new products and upgrades. He was speaking at the 13-year-old company's 10th Dreamforce conference, a four-day event that attracted an estimated 90,000 people.

Legendary rapper MC Hammer, who is also a tech angel investor, preceded Benioff on stage with a signature performance, surrounded by more than a dozen gyrating dancers. Benioff bounded on stage … Read more

Box, the cloud storage company that serves companies including LinkedIn, McAfee, and DirectTV, launched a service today that is suppose to make file transfers from the cloud up to 10 times faster.

The Box service lets businesses and individual consumers store their files in the cloud, much like competitors Dropbox and Google Drive. But Whitney Bouck, Box's general manager of enterprise, said that Box's new feature puts it ahead of other cloud offerings.

"We basically have the fastest cloud on the market," she said.

The new feature, called Box Accelerator, is a home-grown method for easing … Read more

For Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, business is more than creating disruptive technologies and changing business models. It's also about helping other people. He has been true to his word in donating $100 million to build a children's hospital in San Francisco, and the company's philanthropic arm has given more than $40 million in grants over the last 13 years.

But Benioff isn't all about helping other people. In a panel discussion prior to his interview at TechCrunch Disrupt with angel investor and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, the CEOs from Asana, Box … Read more

Microsoft and partner Attachments.me are trying to simplify the way Gmail users can use Microsoft's SkyDrive personal cloud-storage service.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced details of the partnership -- via which Google Gmail users can access SkyDrive files directly from their in-box, save e-mail attachments directly to SkyDrive, and share files directly from their SkyDrive. The new capabilities are provided via Attachment.me's Chrome extension.

What's happening behind the scenes enabling this scenario is an update to the SkyDrive software development kit (SDK). The SDK includes an application programming interface (API) that is similar to the file picker for Windows 8 apps … Read more

The federal judge in Oracle v. Google has given up on trying to find any more paid journalists, bloggers, and similar commentators in the case while also ordering Oracle to hand some money over to Google.

In a new order issued yesterday, Judge William Alsup said that the U.S. District Court of Northern California would "take no further action regarding the subject of payments by the litigants to commentators and journalists and reassures both sides that no commentary has in any way influenced the Court’s orders and ruling herein save and except for any treatise or article … Read more

Microsoft and Intel dominance will see serious erosion over the next few years in the era of the tablet and smartphone, market researcher IHS iSuppli said.

The Microsoft-Intel "Wintel" alliance will get slammed by the rise of the "new computer market," a category made up of PCs, smartphones, and media tablet segments, Craig Stice, an analyst at iSuppli, said in a research note today.

Waning Wintel influence is a common theme among analysts these days, as PC growth flattens and the popularity of PC proxies, like the iPad, surges.

Microsoft's share of the operating system … Read more

Microsoft and its partners have found an opening against Apple. That's rare these days.

The Windows 8 touch screen is the first real change that has come to Windows laptops in a long time.

I would put it right up there with the trackpad and, more recently, the MacBook Pro Retina display.

And it's made more significant by the fact that Apple has rejected the idea of a hybrid device via Tim Cook's refrigerator-toaster analogy. Which gives Apple's less-nimble Silicon Valley neighbor, Hewlett-Packard, a rare leg up.

Just check out HP's Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook. … Read more