Five things Microsoft may do with Skype

1. Integrate it with the Xbox
Roughly 10 million Microsoft users already have cameras attached to their devices. That's the number of Xbox Kinect systems sold since the motion-sensing game system was released last year.
It seems like a no-brainer that Microsoft would integrate Skype's advanced chat technologies with that, as well as with its Xbox LIVE service.
The Xbox 360 already has a chat function. But gamers have largely been unimpressed, opting for other consoles like the PlayStation for multiplayer games that require real-time communication.
Similarly, Skype already has TV-compatible webcams and software, but it's hardly been a high-profile feature.
Putting Skype on the Xbox could push both products forward.
2. Improve the Windows Phone
Let's be honest: Windows Mobile phones aren't selling like the iPhone or the growing cascade of phones running Google's Android system.
The Windows Phone 7 system really hasn't had an answer for the iPhone's FaceTime app or Google Talk's newly added video. Now it will, with the best-in-breed video and voice chat app at its disposal.
"It's pretty obvious today that not everyone is doing video, particularly from their phone," Ballmer said. "That's an opportunity where there are a lot of things that could be done."
Of course, Apple and Android products can already run Skype apps. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out. (Ballmer assured current Skype customers that those platforms will still be supported.)
"Given that Skype has been in use for more than a half-dozen years and has a growing user base, it would be difficult for Microsoft to begin eliminating Skype support for other mobile platforms," Kevin C. Tofel wrote for tech blog GigaOM.
"But future features and other value-add services could be offered exclusively or first on Windows Phone 7 devices going forward, giving consumers a 'killer app' to consider when making a smartphone purchase."
3. Show up at your office meeting
One of the reasons Microsoft was considered to be high on Skype was so Google and Cisco Systems, both rumored to be interested, wouldn't get their hands on it.
In terms of workplace communication, the latter may be more important than the former. Cisco is the first name people think of when office video conferencing and teleconferencing are mentioned.
But Microsoft has made inroads with its Lync system, and adding Skype's software would move it one step further.
Oh yeah ... and it just so happens that Skype CEO Tony Bates is a former Cisco executive, as are other members of the Skype team.
Microsoft's Office 365, which will include an online-only option, is expected to be released later this year. The suite of workplace tools will include Lync.
4. Appear on Facebook
Yes, Facebook was rumored to be one of the tech titans in the running to buy Skype. The social media giant's interest seems a clear indication that Mark Zuckerberg and Co. would like to beef up Facebook Chat with video.
It was just a passing reference. But on Tuesday, Ballmer mentioned "social" as one of the possible uses for a Microsoft-owned Skype.
Microsoft actually owns a piece of Facebook, having bought in for $240 million in 2007. And the two have worked together on projects since then. (Skype now also lets users integrate their news feeds and friends lists.)
Getting a product in front of Facebook's 600 million or so users would be huge.
5. Bring some juice back to Hotmail
By virtue of its ties to Microsoft, Hotmail still has tons of users worldwide. But do you know anybody who's excited about it?
For the past year or two, Microsoft has been punching up Hotmail, an e-mail service that has lost considerable cool points in the wake of Gmail's rise.


http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/05/10/microsoft.skype.users/index.html

Everybody hates Cisco

Shares of the once-mighty networking equipment titan have fallen 12% so far in 2011. That makes it by far the worst performer in the Dow.

Adding insult to injury, Cisco's woes have come during what's been a great year for the market. The Dow is up nearly 10% and only three other Dow components are even in the red this year.

Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) will report its latest quarterly results after the closing bell on Wednesday afternoon, and investors are eager to hear if CEO John Chambers has a plan to get the company back on track.

Cisco has underwhelmed investors for awhile now. The stock fell more than 15% last year. Chambers has been super cautious during conference calls about the economic environment.
And it looks like the major cutbacks in government spending (especially at the local level) is one reason why Cisco has struggled as of late.
But many investors also feel that Cisco is now an unfocused, unwieldy mess.
In addition to its bread-and-butter business of making switches and routers for large corporate customers, it owns a big cable set-top box maker (Scientific-Atlanta), several online video conferencing businesses (WebEx, Tandberg) and divisions that make networking gear for consumers.
Some think Cisco got big for bigness' sake and it's time to slim down.
To Cisco's credit, the company has taken some baby steps to try and please restless investors.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/10/technology/thebuzz/index.htm

Google sets aside $500 million for mysterious ad probe

Google is no stranger to federal investigations of its ever-expanding empire. Here's a new one to add to the list: Google has set aside $500 million for a potential settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the company's advertising practices.
The news, slipped Tuesday into a regulatory filing, caught many by surprise. The filing appears to be the first time Google has disclosed the DOJ probe. It offered few details, saying only that the DOJ has been investigating "the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers."

The company has not yet settled, and declined to comment further on the nature of the investigation or the timing of any potential settlement.

At Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) annual I/O developers conference in San Francisco, co-founder Sergey Brin dodged questions about the filing.

"Luckily, since we changed roles a few months ago, I don't have to deal with filings, and the DOJ, the SEC or other acronyms," Brin said.
When Larry Page took the reins as CEO from Eric Schmidt last month, Brin lost his "Google president" title and now focuses exclusively on engineering.

After setting aside the $500 million, Google said it revised its profit down for the past quarter, which ended March 31, 2011. It said it earned $1.8 billion, or $5.51 per share, down from the $2.3 billion, or $7.04 per share that it initially reported last month. The net income that Google initially reported already fell short of Wall Street's estimates.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/11/technology/google_doj_settlement/index.htm

Ultra-thin handheld microscope could sniff out skin cancer, forged documents

It may not look like it, but that sleek black thing pictured above is actually a microscope. Designed by engineers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF, this little guy boasts a 5.3mm optical length, rendering it slim enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to deliver images at a scanner-like resolution of five micrometers, over a wide surface area. Fraunhofer's researchers achieved this balance by essentially tossing out the manual on traditional microscope design. Whereas most devices slowly scan areas and construct images on a piecemeal basis, this handheld uses several small imaging channels and a collection of tiny lenses to record equal sized fragments of a given surface. Unlike conventional scanner microscopes, all of these 300 x 300 square micrometer imaging channels are captured at the same time. With a single swipe, then, users can record 36 x 24 square mm shots of matchbox-sized objects, without even worrying about blurring the images with their shaky hands. The prototype is still two years away from going into production, but once it does, engineers say it could help doctors scan patients for skin cancer more easily, while also allowing bureaucrats to quickly confirm the authenticity of official documents. 

 

 http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/05/ultra-thin-handheld-microscope-could-sniff-out-skin-cancer-forg/

Covert hard drive fragmentation embeds a spy's secrets

GOOD news for spies. There is now a way to hide data on a hard drive without using encryption. Instead of using a cipher to scramble text, the method involves manipulating the location of data fragments.

The inventors say their method makes it possible to encode a 20-megabyte message on a 160-gigabyte portable hard drive. It hides data so well that its existence would be "unreasonably complex" to detect, they say.

Encryption should sometimes be avoided, says Hassan Khan at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, because the gobbledegook it creates is a dead giveaway: it shows someone might have something to hide. That could spell disaster for someone trying to smuggle information out of a repressive country.

So "steganography", hiding data in plain sight, is coming to the fore. Normally, data intended to be secret is added to the pixels in digital images, or used to change the transmission timing of internet packets. But these techniques are well known and easily detected, says Khan. So, with colleagues at the National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan, he has developed an alternative.

Their technique exploits the way hard drives store file data in numerous small chunks, called clusters. The operating system stores these clusters all over the disc, wherever there is free space between fragments of other files.

Khan and his colleagues have written software that ensures clusters of a file, rather than being positioned at the whim of the disc drive controller chip, as is usually the case, are positioned according to a code. All the person at the other end needs to know is which file's cluster positions have been encoded.

The code depends on whether sequential clusters in a file are situated adjacent to each other on the hard disc or not. If they are adjacent, this corresponds to a binary 1 in the secret message. If sequential clusters are stored in different places on the disc, this encodes a binary 0 (Computers and Security, DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2010.10.005). The recipient then uses the same software to tell them the file's cluster positions, and hence the message. The researchers intend to make their software open source.

reference:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.200-covert-hard-drive-fragmentation-embeds-a-spys-secrets.html

The making of the World's Biggest Pac-Man game

In about a week, Pac-Man fans have built more than 13,500 levels for the World's Biggest Pac-Man game. This Space Invaders-themed maze is just one of them.

(Credit: Namco-Bandai)

When we think of Pac-Man, we think of a single screen, and a series of new mazes that become available only after players finish the one they're on.
But that's not how Ashley Ringrose and his colleagues at Sydney, Australia-based Soap Creative agency thought of the mega-hit 30-year-old video game. So when they were given a chance to design a promotion for the game that was both innovative and social, the lightbulb that went off over their heads was all about big.
Big, as in the World's Biggest Pac-Man game, in which fans are able to design their own levels, all of which are connected with the others, and all of which can be shared with the world.
The new version of the game, unveiled to the world during a keynote address at Microsoft's Mix 11 event in Las Vegas, is a fan's view of what Pac-Man is. With 13,500 user-designed mazes created as of this writing, and nearly 300 million dots eaten, this is truly a worldwide phenomenon.
Ringrose and his colleagues came up with the idea in a flash--but they still had to get buy-in from Pac-Man publisher Namco-Bandai. And that came quickly, Ringrose said. Still, Namco had to weigh in with its perspectives on how its hit game would come across in this format.
Yesterday, I invited both Ringrose and Carlson Choi, vice president of marketing for Namco Bandai Games America, to have a discussion about the creation of the game as part of my 45 Minutes on IM interview series. The two spoke passionately about Pac-Man, and about what it takes to give a classic character a whole new way of interacting with the world.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20055884-52.html#ixzz1KAS3OlQN




reference:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20055884-52.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks

Photoshop Touch SDK brings first wave of more powerful iPad apps from Adobe

In a series of late-night press releases, Adobe pulled the veil off of Creative Suite 5.5, the latest update to its family of applications that of course includes top-shelf image editing program Photoshop. While the company previously made its own entry into the mobile space with Photoshop Express, the sorry little features-light editing app can’t compare to more powerful tools like Photogene or PhotoStudio HD. Today’s announcement still doesn’t bring full Photoshop functionality to mobile platforms, but it seems that we’re getting there with the three new, soon-to–be-released iPad apps that have been announced.
While none of them bring additional image editing functionality to Apple‘s tablet, the trio of announced apps are described in the press release as Adobe’s “initial Photoshop CS5 companion apps.” Initial. Meaning there’s more to come.
First is Adobe Color Lava, a color-mixing app that allows you to combine various colors using the iPad’s touchscreen. Sort of like a virtual painters’ palette. Next up is Adobe Eazel, a finger painting app which can effectively render the interaction between “wet” and “dry” paints. Creations can then be sent to Photoshop CS5 for additional editing. The press release offers no indication, but it stands to reason that some level of cross-app connectivity exists between the paint palettes created in Color Lava and the application of those paints in Eazel




reference:http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110411/tc_digitaltrends/photoshoptouchsdkbringsfirstwaveofmorepowerfulipadappsfromadobe