Microsoft to shut Encarta
Microsoft Corp. has, on Tuesday, announced its plans to shut its online encyclopedia, Encarta, the largest competitor of the communally-crafted free Internet online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The software giant’s online encyclopedia would be closed on October 31.
Beyond the 31st of October, Encarta websites would be available only in Japan, where the services would be terminated on the last day of the current year.
in an online message at its Encarta website, the US software giant has said, “The category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”
Microsoft launched Encarta in 1993 in competition to the traditional reference books, like the ones offered by Encyclopedia Britannica.
When launched, Encarta was available for purchase as a multimedia computer resource in DVD-ROM or CD-ROM formats. It gradually became available online on a subscription basis. However, its popularity reduced with the launch of Wikipedia, which still continues to be the most favored online reference source for many across the globe as it lets users continually update or refine entries.
Skype coming to iPhone, BlackBerry
The internet telephone unit from eBay Inc., Skype, is now coming soon to your iPhones and Blackberry! Skype has announced its plans on Monday to launch its service for iPhone users on Tuesday and for BlackBerry in a couple of months, till May.
For Apple’s iPhone, Skype plans to launch the service on Tuesday at the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas.
With an aim to multiply its users, Skype is trying to make a move forward by offering its services on the smart phones. They currently have more than 400 million users. The company has been offering schemes like cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application.
The Chief Operating Officer of Skype, Scott Durchslag, expects that their application will mange to gain popularity on Apple’s popular iPhone. He is pinning hopes on Skype’s most feature-rich mobile offering to appeal to both their new and existing customers.
“The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There’s a pent-up demand,” Durchslag stated in a prior interview
Skype will launch its services for Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry devices. The company has already announced its services for Nokia phones and for Google’s Android based and Microsoft’s phones Windows Mobile smart phones.
Google to expand TV ad service to online video
Google Inc. is reportedly testing a new service that would help it in expanding its television-ad brokering business to YouTube and videos on other websites.
Google’s ad business makes a major contribution to the company’s yearly revenues and profits too. Google has recently dropped its Print advertising business.
However, Google’s this move comes in the wake of the ever multiplying numbers of people who are watching television online.
Google’s director of television ads, Michael Steib, has told The Wall Street Journal that the internet giant is presently working on a technology that would enable the advertisers to buy ads across Google TV, YouTube and other websites using the same interface.
According to Steib, Google is testing the service with a small group of advertisers. This has been titled as Google TV Ads Online. The official introduction is expected in the following months.
Google is currently earning staggering 97 per cent of its revenue from its online advertising. The company is optimistically expecting that this new service would make it easier for bigger brand advertisers to spend across both traditional and online media.
Google dumps 200
Recession has claimed another 200 jobs and this time it’s Google. Search engine giant, Google Inc. is discarding almost 200 staffers. These lay offs are rather the largest round of layoffs, clearly showing how badly has the economic slump in the markets affected even the top shots.
The search giant announced this statement about the job cuts on Thursday. This has affected less than 1 percent of the 20,200 employees of Google. However, this figure is almost insignificant when compared to the no. of job cuts in various other sectors including newspaper, retailing, automobile and financial services industries during the past year.
In an attempt to avoid a further fall of its stock prices and protect its profit margins, Google is executing various cost cutting programmes to trim its expenses.
The search giant has already reduced some employee perquisites, dumped outside contractors and closed services that aren’t paying off.
Google hasn’t seen a slump in its performance even during the bad times of recession, however going by the predictions of various analysts; the Mountain View based company can soon see its first quarterly loss.
Google search gets semantic
It’s absolutely true! The very own Google search has undergone transformation and has now turned to be semantic.
Google Inc. has confirmed on Tuesday that the search engine giant has modified its popular search engine to understand semantic relationships between words. This modification comes as a part of Google’s efforts to better understand its users’ searches. Google searchs from Tuesday will produce results based on semantic search in as may as 37 differnet languages.
The newly deployed technology would now attempt to understand the association between the words entered by the user in the search engine.
In the words of Google search quality team technical lead Ori Allon and snippets team engineer Ken Wilder, “We’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search. We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know.”
Software giant, Microsoft Inc. late last month announced the compoany’s plan to roll out its sematics based search engine kumo.com.
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IE8 gets flak for being ‘still slow’
Microsoft’s newly launched web browser Internet Explorer 8, IE8, has received mixed response from users across the globe. The software giant released the newer version of the Internet explorer on the 16th of this month. The newer version has been highly appreciated for its wider range of navigational and security features. On the other hand the users have also criticized its compatibility and still slow speed.
According to the results of The Web Standards Project’s Acid Test 3, IE8 users are encountering its compatibility problems with Web standards such as CSS, HTML4 and XHTML. The Acid 3 test has revealed that IE8 is not up to the standards delivered by other browser software from Google and Mozilla.
This inconsistency could further pose problems for developers who rely heavily on these standards for ensuring that it can run across many different browsers and on different other OSes as well.
Another problem faced by the users is regarding the speed of the new web browser. Microsoft might have claimed it to be the fastest web browser; however the fact remains that IE8 remains the slowest amongst the top five in the market.
According to the test findings, Google’s Chrome led all browsers and is tested to be more than four times faster than IE8. Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0.7 came second, followed by Apple’s Safari 3.2.2 for Windows and Opera Software’s Opera 9.63.
The technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg, also criticized IE 8’s performance in an All Things Digital post. He wrote, “Microsoft claims IE 8 is very fast, but in my tests, speed and performance were its worst attributes. Using two computers, one running Windows XP and one running Windows Vista, I timed the loading of a half-dozen popular Web sites, plus two folders containing numerous news and sports sites. I repeated the test in IE 8, and in Firefox, Safari 4, and Chrome. In every case, IE 8 loaded the pages and folders more slowly than most of the other browsers, and in most cases, it came in dead last.”
Also Microsoft has not confirmed any dates as to when will the company make available the final version of IE8 for Windows 7, but it is expected in the next public release for Windows 7.
The newly introduced navigation and security features do get the wider applause.
Sony e-book reader to get 500,000 books from Google
Google Inc. will be making around 50,000 unprotected by copyright books, available for free on Sony Corp’s electronic book-reading device. this would be the first time that the search engine giant, Google, has made a gigantic collection of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device.
This will make the Sony Reader as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books, even more than Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle.
All of the scanned books were published before 1923. the books include the impressive works of Charles Dickens’ including, “A Tale of Two Cities”; nonfiction classics like Herodotus’ “The Histories.”
The free downloads of the Portable Document Format (PDF) formats of the books are already available. However these do not work on any e-reading devices. Google will be providing the EPUB (electronic publication) format of the books to the Sony Reader. This format allows the lines to flow differently to fit a smaller screen.
Jennie Johnson, Google’s spokeswoman said, “Really our vision is: any book, anywhere, any time and on any device,” she said. “We want to partner with anybody who shares our vision of making them more accessible.”
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