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"Of the 30 brands that have signed on thus far, only five will be running campaigns in the U.S. Twentieth Century Fox, one of two global launch advertisers, will promote its upcoming film Life of Pi with ads in the Xbox Video app, Xbox companion mobile and tablet app SmartGlass app and the Casual Games app, which spans Xbox and Microsoft's desktop and mobile operating systems. And next month the other global launch advertiser, Nissan, will run ads in the Bing and Xbox Music apps. Though it seems the in-app ads are initially only slated to run within Microsoft's own apps, the company said several publishers-such as The Associated Press, Bonnier Corporation, Photobucket, Slacker Radio and The Tribune Company-have agreed to run the units. In announcing the roster of initial advertisers, Microsoft also put out some stats regarding consumer perception of the ad units. The most encouraging stat found that the ads scored a 92 percent in ad recall, but the other numbers suggest brands may prefer consumers forget their ads. Only 39 percent of respondents said they're happy to see advertising within Windows 8, and only 33 percent agreed that advertising on Windows 8 improved their opinion of a brand."

New social network by Microsoft targeted towards students. 

no more free microsoft office 

microsoft buys yammer

NBC & Microsoft split up. 

"So Microsoft has two options: Buy Spotify or make Xbox Music workable. It appears to have chosen the latter."

microsoft accounts now permit Sina Weibo connectivity. allows chinese users of the platform to see Weibo contacts in WP's People hub or share direct links to cloud-stored files.

Microsoft has hitched up with Bazaarvoice to inject consumer reviews and ratings into its display ads. It's the first of several socialish capabilities the company will offer advertisers in the coming months. Over time, Microsoft's new "people powered stories" will let media buyers incorporate user-generated videos, expert blogs, and even discussion forum content into their display ads. But not yet. When the PPS product launches next month, it'll be strictly a ratings game.

Now that it has hooked up with Nokia phones, Microsoft hopes to connect its phone software to the Xbox this year too.

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft will cease development of its family of Zune-branded music players due to weak demand and a desire to focus on its smartphone platform.

Microsoft Research has revealed a technology that allows for any surface to be turned into a 'touchscreen,' including the human body. Referred to as the OmniTouch, the gadget was presented during the UIST 2012 symposium in Santa Barbara, USA. The OmniTouch combines a laser-based pico projector and a depth-sensing camera.

"To accomplish the 5.9 percent error rate, which beats a 6.3 percent record set just last month, the Microsoft team leveraged neural language models resembling associative word clouds. That is, a word like "fast" resides much closer to "fast" than it does to "slow". This allowed the speech recognition engine to generalize between words and better recognize them in context. "

Microsoft will roll out the new music streaming service to many customers on Tuesday as part of an update to the Xbox gaming console he service will let users stream more than 30 million tracks worldwide across Microsoft's ecosystem of Windows 8 mobile devices and PCs, as well as the Xbox. Think of it as Microsoft's in-house version of Spotify.

Big news of the day.

Microsoft Research Cambridge team built an augmented reality system to help brain surgeons visualize 3D brain scans.

""The ultimate computer for me is a mixed reality world, where your field of view becomes an infinite display, where you see virtual objects and holograms," Nadella said."