The Midweek Download: March 9th Edition: Internet Explorer, Women’s History, Hackathons and Patent Reform

Moving on! With Internet Explorer 9 at the release candidate stage and ready for release to manufacturing, it’s a perfect time to commit to get rid of Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 is now ten years old and the Internet Explorer team has created a site called the Internet Explorer 6 Countdown to help you move on to a modern browser experience.

Trailblazers in Technology. It is Women’s History Month and the Crabby Office Lady on the Microsoft Office blog has a great post celebrating a few of the many pioneering women in technology.

The TechFest Experience
. Microsoft hosts a mostly internal event, called TechFest, every year to highlight some of the great research work being done within Microsoft Research and to bring it to the attention of the rest of the company. And every year we also try to highlight a few of the great things being done that we CAN show the public. Here’s a great video of the highlights in 131 seconds.



A Hackathon for Good.
The Bing and Hotmail teams collaborated recently on a ‘social hackathon’ to advance the social good. This post on the Bing Search Blog highlights the event and tells you how to get a free ebook called ‘The Goodness Engine: Driving Greater Social Impact in the Digital World‘ that distills the results.

The lively subject of patent reform.
The Senate just passed a bill called S.23, the ‘America Invents Act’ that is intended to help drive patent reform. This post by Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel takes a quick look at the bill and why it’s passage is important.