Weekend Reading: Jan. 14th Edition

It’s going to be a soggy weekend in Seattle, according to this MSN weather forecast, so here’s a little Weekend Reading for those who choose not to brave the elements.

Big year for patents at Microsoft. According to this TechFlash story, Microsoft was granted 3,094 patents in 2010 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. As TechFlash Managing Editor Todd Bishop noted in his piece, the 3,094 patents by Microsoft continued “the steady acceleration displayed by the company in recent years.”

Personalized news service now on Windows Phone 7. In his Jan. 10th post on the Next at Microsoft Blog, Microsoft Storyteller Steve Clayton writes about Project Emporia. Project Emporia is a personalized news service now available on Windows Phone 7 smartphones that, according to Clayton, provides readers with “a lineup of news stories based on categories you choose and then you vote them up or down with a  plus or minus icon. Those votes help influence what you see in future.”

Electric cars and the cloud. In this Jan. 11th Software Enabled Earth post, blogger Tim McDowd tells readers about how Germany-based carmaker Daimler uses the Windows Azure cloud platform and Bing Maps “to create an Internet service for the smart fortwo [a battery-electric car] that allows customers to access electricity charging data from any browser on an Internet-connected device, such as their home computer or mobile phone.”

Avatar Kinect. This is for all you Trekkies out there. In this Jan. 10th post on the Next at Microsoft Blog, blogger Steve Clayton muses on whether Avatar Kinect is “the Star Trek holodeck in beta.” Avatar Kinect will be coming soon for all Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers.

Silverlight. It was a big year for the Silverlight team, including the launch of Silverlight 4, the Silverlight client for Facebook and the announcement that by the end of 2010, the community of Silverlight designers and developers grew to 1 million. Check out this post on the Silverlight Blog for the other highlights.

That’s it for this edition of Weekend Reading. See you next Friday!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Senior Manager, Corporate Blogs

Tags: , , , ,