Weekend Reading: March 4th Edition. Bing, Bing, the Cloud and Imagine Cup

Here at Microsoft we definitely do not have tiger blood and Adonis DNA. Instead we aspire to technology blood and innovation DNA. More seriously, if you need a break from celebrity and want a dose of something a little more solid, here is what happened around Microsoft this week.

Bing stretches its wings. Bing had a host of announcements this week, from a new feature to autosuggest the best fares, to the launch of Bing in France, to passing Yahoo to be the second largest search engine worldwide. But Bing still wasn’t done. It also launched a new deals feature and finally, to round out the week, a new partnership with Kayak to provide even better travel results.

Making rain with blue-sky ideas. Or, in other words, using cloud computing to drive business success. This feature on the News Center talks about 3M and the City of Miami’s success in using Azure to build new applications and cut costs.

The consumer cloud. On the consumer front, the cloud is just as important. What does that mean? Things like syncing across multiple devices and backing up automatically to online storage somewhere on the web. Windows Live Mesh has now connected 5 million devices, with over 3 million users syncing 2.2 petabytes of data. You can find out more at the Windows Live blog.  

In a Flickr. This post on the Windows Phone Blog takes a deep dive intothe new Windows Phone 7 Flickr app – built to make the most of the Windows Phone.

Changing the world. The Imagine Cup is a truly global technology competition for students run by Microsoft. Over 100,000 teams from countries all over the globe enter competitions to use technology and innovation to find ways to solve real problems. And there is still time to enter in some categories. This blog post tells you how.

36 million downloads. That’s how many times the brand new Internet Explorer 9 already has been downloaded. You can read more about it on the IE blog or just go get it for yourself at beautyoftheweb.com.

Black History Month. We know it is now over, but the Crabby Office Lady on the Office blog took a great look at a couple of computer science pioneers who deserve some recognition.

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