Recent Highlights – Kinect, Office Mac, Bing, Hotmail, NCME

Despite the quiet and sleepy dog days of August, there has still been a lot going on here at Microsoft. Much of the big news has been about products like Halo Reach and Kinect and Windows Phone 7. But hidden away there have been lots of other really interesting bits of news.

Tim Cranton, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit posted on the Microsoft on The Issues blog about a donation of software worth more than $1.9 million to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an organization that Microsoft has been working with for years.

The Hotmail team announced that Hotmail now supports push email and calendaring via Exchange ActiveSync – a great development for mobile users that want to stay in touch via Hotmail and Exchange.

In other mobile news, the Bing team continued its amazing series of rollouts by launching the Bing for Android app. It includes the signature clickable hotspots exploration feature of Bing on other platforms.

Want to win a customized ‘Office for the Mac’ themed MacBook along with a copy of Office for the Mac 2011?  The Mac Mojo blog is having a giveaway…

Finally, there’s an intriguing blog post over at the Education Insights blog taking a look at the educational possibilities of Kinect.