Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that its Snapdragon processor will be joining Microsoft Corp.'s Windows on ARM developer seeding program. Qualcomm is working with Microsoft to provide test PCs to select developers in order to test and optimize apps for forthcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM PCs and tablets. This invitation-only program will combine a pre-release version of Windows on ARM with next-generation, high performance Snapdragon S4 test PCs. These test PCs are not representative of commercial form factors or the final Windows on ARM experience; they are designed to give developers early access to building and testing Windows Metro style apps on Qualcomm's latest technology.

The Windows on ARM developer seeding program will help ensure that Windows Metro style apps available in the Windows Store work great on all Windows 8-based PCs, including those with Qualcomm's ARM-compliant Snapdragon processors.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview - the next milestone of the Windows operating system. This latest preview will be made available for download starting today at preview.windows.com. The Windows 8 Consumer Preview offers a more robust experience for testing the world's most popular operating system and is available to the widest range of people yet following the initial release of the Windows 8 Developer Preview late last year. The Developer Preview received more than 3 million downloads.

"With Windows 8, we reimagined the different ways people interact with their PC and how to make everything feel like a natural extension of the device, whether using a Windows 8 tablet, laptop or all-in-one," said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft. "The Windows 8 Consumer Preview brings a no-compromises approach to using your PC."

Microsoft started shipping a special-edition white Xbox 360 4 GB Kinect, which is a return to the console's original colors, but on its new chassis design. The bundle includes a white colored Kinect, and white colored controllers that aren't completely lifted from the classic Xbox 360 design (the back side is white instead of gray). The bundle also includes copies of Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports, and a 3-month subscription to Xbox Live Gold. The bundle is priced at US $299.99.

Even as there's quite some buzz around Microsoft's next major version of Windows, there are reports such as one from Bright Side of News citing "multiple sources close to Microsoft, or inside [it]," revealing the tentative launch schedule of the two main branches of Windows: for x86 platforms (client and enterprise), and ARM (for tablets and compact computing devices). Windows 8 for clients and enterprise (x86 architecture), will get up to 5 months' head-start over the much hyped ARM version for tablets. It is expected to be launched some time in Q4 2012, while the ARM version, some time in Q2 2013.

Intel and AMD can rub their hands as they both have extremely compact x86 processors fit for the tablet form-factor planned, and can woo tablet designers to opt for their solutions and get Windows 8 tablets instead of waiting for the ARM version of the operating system. Tablet vendors with mature ARM-based designs can always opt for Google's Android operating system, which will see no major competition for the greater part of this year.

Microsoft is reportedly killing off two of its service brands, Windows Live and Zune. The two will be restructured and amalgamated with Windows 8 and its store. Windows Live has been a collection of optional services bound to the MSN/Live ID for Windows 7 that provides communication (Windows Live Messenger), calendar/planner (Windows Live Calendar), contacts, photo-organizer; Zune Music and Video player join them on the chopping block. These services will be instead come to be known as:

• Microsoft Account (Windows Live ID)
• Mail (Windows Live Mail)
• Calendar (Windows Live Calendar)
• People (Windows Live Contacts)
• Photos (Windows Live Photo Gallery)
• Music (Zune Music Player)
• Video (Zune Video Player)

Sony has begun working on its next-generation gaming console under the Playstation brand, and Forbes learned that it's none other than AMD designing its graphics processing unit (GPU). AMD is far from new to the game console GPU business, as its GPUs already drive graphics processing in Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii consoles. If launched anytime soon, the next-gen Playstation will create a rare moment where GPUs of all three major game console makers would be AMD-made. The current Playstation 3 console uses an NVIDIA GPU.

AOpen being a valued partner of Microsoft is working closely with the Windows Embedded team to show the benefits of the AOpen Digital Engine combined with WES 7.

At Embedded World, AOpen will demonstrate the latest AOpen Digital Engine DE67-HA that includes support for the Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Family i3, i5 and i7. It is the strongest and most powerful AOpen Digital Engine to date. The system supports Intel Active Management Technology 7.0 to enable remote system management from a single location. AMT technology enables the system to be managed from for instance the UK while the systems are located at several locations in Europe. The system also allows to be connected to multiple displays while maintaining quality performance, thus eliminating the need to buy more media players than necessary and reducing implementation costs.

Redmond-based software giant Microsoft Corp. has recently updated its support policy for both Windows Vista and Windows 7 and will be offering extended support to the consumer versions of the two operating systems.

Previously, Microsoft provided 5 years worth of 'mainstream support' for consumers while only businesses got an extra 5 years of extended support. Now, all Windows users will be able to get security updates for 10 years after the operating system's release.

As a result of the policy change, Windows Vista's consumer support was extended to April 11th, 2017. Windows 7 support will end on January 14, 2020.

Cisco expressed concerns with the EU over Microsoft's takeover of Skype. In 2011, Microsoft clinched a deal which saw it takeover Skype for a staggering US $8.5 billion. Perhaps we're now getting to see just how valuable the acquisition was, as Microsoft is now sitting on some key telecommunication over IP intellectual property that has Cisco concerned that Microsoft could restrict video-conferencing technologies to other companies and impede competition. Interestingly, the European Commission gave a go-ahead to Microsoft during its acquisition, judging that the takeover wouldn't impede competition.

In a blog post by video conferencing head Martin De Beer, Cisco stated that it "does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability." Cisco called for making Microsoft's freshly-acquired IP "open-standards", stating that otherwise, Microsoft could control "the future of video communications". "Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialling a phone number," De Beer argued. It's "intellectual-property" when convenient, "open-standard" when not, in the funny world of tech-patents.

Microsoft's next-generation Xbox game console, which has been unofficially referred to as "Xbox 720", has been reportedly given a codename by Microsoft so industry partners could use it, instead. It is now codenamed "Durango". The working-name "Xbox 720" has been received negatively by some quarters, that felt it implied 720p (1280 x 720) display resolution, which is not a big departure from the present-generation. 1080p (1920 x 1080) is expected of this console, as it's also reported to feature Blu-ray disc support. Durango will focus on improving human-interface, by creating a combination of Kinect and a newer gamepad with a touchscreen.

The waving flag logo of Microsoft's Windows trademark has reportedly undergone a facelift to keep up with the radically new user interface called "Metro". The new logo will take effect with the next major version of Windows. Metro is Microsoft's most drastic user interface change since Windows 95, and consists of organizing interactive information (smart application shortcuts, gadgets, images, and slideshows), in rectangular slices of the screen-space. The Windows flag logo is redesigned to reflect this change, it's now flat, angled, with all four rectangles in the same plane. CNBeta scored a 1-color version of the logo, and made mock-ups of what it could look like on devices (such as tablets and keyboards).

Today Fox Business is reporting U.S. and European regulators approved Google Inc's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility on Monday and said they would keep a sharp eye on the web search giant to ensure patents critical to the telecom industry would be licensed at fair prices. The U.S. Justice Department also approved an Apple Inc -led consortium's purchase of a trove of patents from bankrupt Canadian company Nortel Networks.Both the Justice Department and European antitrust authorities said that they would monitor how patents are used to ensure they comply with antitrust rules. Antitrust enforcers on both sides of the Atlantic are concerned that patents essential to ensuring communications devices sold by different companies work together are licensed for a reasonable fee.

Microsoft Store's Indian site was compromised, by a hacker group that calls itself "Evil Shadow Team". The site's landing page was briefly taken over by the group, which gained access to the user database. The group then replaced the front-page with its signature, that warned that an "unsafe system will be baptized." The outrageous part of this episode is that the group claimed Microsoft was storing the user database in plain text, which contains usernames, email addresses, and passwords. The site is now offline, the company is probably back in control. Microsoft Store was started in India to discourage piracy and offer genuine copies of Windows, Office, Visual Studio, at the lowest possible prices; Xbox consoles and accessories; and Microsoft hardware (peripherals).

An article in the latest issue of print magazine Xbox World claims that the controller of next-generation Xbox console will be similar to that of Nintendo's WiiU, in that it will feature a high-resolution touchscreen as an added layer of interaction. The article states that the new console "will be a matt-black media hub with a mission to bring games to life in your living room with augmented reality, directional sound, and a four-player, finger-tracking Kinect."

The article goes on to describe the controller as having "an HD screen surrounded by the traditional 360 buttons and sticks." It continues, "That touchcreen will be second only to Kinect in how you operate your console, it could be a remote control when you're watching TV, a browser when you're on the internet, extra buttons and information when you're playing a game or a portable display when you want to take your game with you."

According to comScore, the month of January has seen all major players in the US Internet search market keep the positions held at the end of 2012. Still, there have been small changes as Google increased its share to 66.2% (66.1% in the previous month) while Yahoo dropped a little, from 16.2% in December to 16.0%.

Following Google and Yahoo was Microsoft with a 13.8% market share, while on the fourth and fifth places in January's top we have Ask and AOL with 2.6% and 1.4%, respectively. Almost 20 billion core search queries were conducted in the US in January.

February's Patch Tuesday is closing in fast and, according to Microsoft, it's going to see the arrival of no less than nine updates - four rated 'Critical' and nine 'Important', that will crush 21 vulnerabilities.

The incoming patches tackle bugs that could lead to remote code execution and privilege elevation. As (almost) always, Microsoft didn't go into specifics but it did say the vulnerabilities affect Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and .NET/Silverlight. All the updates will be made available on Valentine's Day (February 14th) at about 10 am PST (6 pm GMT).

With Windows 8, Microsoft is introducing a new OS feature that works to improve performance and battery-life, called App Suspension. Simply put, it is a kernel optimization that "suspends" applications that are running in the background without much activity. This is done by freezing the machine to them, when suspended, an application no longer uses any CPU cycles, freeing up the CPU for other applications, and potentially reducing power consumption due to lower CPU activity.

The Windows NTOS kernel is a client-server type kernel, where processes and services function in a hierarchy as clients to the "server", which dispenses system resources to them. One would imagine a suspended process to be that which has no CPU time allocated by the kernel, which is probably told that the system is sleeping. This feature will be particularly handy for Metro applets, which in typical usage scenarios, will be running in the background most of the time. The feature could also come handy in scenarios such as gaming, where the OS could freeze supply of resources to useless processes.

On the sidelines of mobile computing's biggest annual international event, the Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in the end of February, Microsoft will hold a special event, titled Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The company sent out invites to the event, to its industry partners. The event will be held on the 29th of this month, and will be a two hour event in late-afternoon (3 PM - 5 PM). The synchrony of this event with MWC speaks volumes about the direction in which Microsoft is steering its OS business. Microsoft clearly wants to go big on operating systems for portable computing devices, and as such is converging this kind of OS with those for more powerful PCs. The convergence will at first be functional (similar UI, some inter-compatibility), and later structural (Windows-on-Windows ARM)?

Microsoft is ready with a new limited edition Xbox 360 Kinect system bundle for all you Star Wars fans out there. The bundle includes a copy of Star Wars Kinect, which lets you take advantage of Kinect to slash your lightsaber away. The hardware itself is themed around two of the most lovable characters of the franchise, the console is R2-D2 themed, and the main controller C-3P0. The Kinect module is white colored. The system packs 320 GB of local storage. The special bundle is listed on Amazon for US $449, and is up for pre-orders. It will start shipping on April 3.

Back in the 1990's, when the software industry knew the 32-bit x86 address-space limitation was closing in, they geared up for transition to another machine architecture, then came AMD64 and EM64T, which allowed an x86 processor to perform in both 64-bit and 32-bit modes. Microsoft didn't want users of its 64-bit Windows to be deprived of using software coded for 32-bit Windows, which was infinitely more in number than 64-bit software. Hence it developed what is known as Windows-on-Windows 64 (WOW64), a translation layer that interfaces 32-bit software and drivers to the 64-bit OS and drivers. With its next major Windows version, Windows 8, Microsoft wants to give the ARM architecture a big push, with a Windows 8 version for ARM computing devices (such as tablets and netbooks). Guess what?

A latest bulletin at MSDN hints at the possibility of Microsoft working on a x86-to-ARM translation layer, which allows you to run desktop windows (Win32) software on Windows 8 ARM, effectively "Windows-on-Windows ARM". Without specifically pointing out the ability to run Win32 software on ARM, the bulletin mentions the ability to run non-metro applications (native Windows) on SoC (system-on-a-chip) architectures. It could also just be a reference to Intel's single-chip SoCs such as Medfield, which are x86-based. If Microsoft pulls off a "WOWARM", it could spell terrible news to Intel, because something such as the hypothetical WOWARM is all that stands between ARM and high-performance desktop PCs. In a market that only has two other competitors (AMD and VIA), dozens more could join in overnight, including NVIDIA's karmic entry after being shunned off an x86 license.

Later this year, Google will adopt a single privacy-policy system for all its services. Some of Google's most popular services, as some might recall, are built from acquisitions of other equally genius start-ups as itself (eg: YouTube), many of these services were allowed to retain the essential part of their old privacy policies. The unified policy, effective March 1, 2012, allows sharing of usage statistics between services, to provide a user experience that's consistent between all its services. It doesn't sound harmful enough, yet it has generated public paranoia that it would, in some way, make Google more invasive on people's privacy than it already is, by, you know...owning YouTube?

Microsoft was quick put on an angel's robe and cash in on this paranoia. In a newspaper ad (first image below is down-scaled, the second is original), Microsoft talked about how Google's One Policy, One Google, One Experience is designed to be invasive to people's privacy, and how it allows Google to connect the dots between everything you do or say, across Google's various services. Fair enough, but what should have concluded as a PSA by Microsoft, ended up in being an advertisement for its own portfolio of services that are "better for users", as they're not as invasive as Google's.A video detailing Google's One Policy update (by Google), follows.

As announced by PJ Hough, CVP of Development at Microsoft's Office Division, the next version of the Office suite (codenamed Office 15) has now entered 'Technical Preview' mode, meaning it's being shared with a 'select group of customers under non-disclosure agreements'.

"At this early point in our development cycle, I'm not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division," says Hough. "With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before."

People who didn't get in the Technical Preview Program will be able to try out Office 15 this summer when a public beta version is released. The RTM (Release to Manufacturing) build of Office 15 is reportedly planned for the end of this year.

It's no secret that Microsoft's proprietary gesture-recognition technology it originally launched on the Xbox platform, is making its way to PCs, as software developers have access to Kinect for Windows SDK. What's interesting, though, is that soon people won't need a creepy-looking three-eyed device facing them to recognize their gestures. They will, instead, be embedded into notebook display bezels the way web-cameras are.

The Daily reports that it has seen a pair of notebook prototypes that appeared to have been "ASUS notebooks running Windows 8," with their web-cam replaced by a row of optical sensors on top of the screen, and a row of LEDs said to be at the bottom. Some might think that this is ASUS' very own Kinect-alternative WAVI Xtion, but The Daily also confirmed with a source at Microsoft that these prototypes are indeed of notebooks that are Kinect-enabled.

We've got a good news and a bad news. The good news first: Microsoft will finally embrace the capacious Blu-ray disc format as its media of choice with its next-generation Xbox console. A double-layer Blu-ray disc provides 50 GB of space, letting developers load higher-resolution elements (such as textures), and more importantly, load entire games into a single disc. The 8 GB DVD9 used with Xbox 360 is posing limitations with some titles, forcing publishers to ship games in multiple discs. The new console should also double up as a nice Blu-ray home-video player, complete with multi-channel lossless audio and 1080p playback.

Now on to the bad news: Remember the good old days when you could share your game cartridges and discs with your friends, or resell them? Those are about to be numbered, at least in the case of the Xbox platform. Microsoft is designing its next-generation Xbox console in a way that restricts people from playing "used" games. We would imagine Microsoft doing this by binding each purchased game's activation to a Xbox Live account à la Steam, Origin, and G4WL. This is terrible news to services such as GameStop, which deal in used games and consoles.

Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $20.89 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, a 5% increase from the prior year period. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $7.99 billion, $6.62 billion, and $0.78 per share, compared with $8.17 billion, $6.63 billion and $0.77 per share, respectively, in the prior year period. Prior year results include recognition of $224 million of deferred revenue related to the Office 2010 technology guarantee program.

"We delivered solid financial results, even as we prepare for a launch year that will accelerate many of our key products and services," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft. "Coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show, we're seeing very positive reviews for our new phones and PCs, and a strong response to our new Metro style design that will unify consumer experiences across our phones, PCs, tablets, and television in 2012."