Jewish & World News

Microsoft is working on designs for a touch-enabled smart watch, joining a number of other large competitors like Samsung Electronics and Apple who are said to be working on similar devices, a newspaper reported. Executives at suppliers to Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal that the company was sourcing components for the prototype of what could potentially be a "watch-style device."

Microsoft's Windows 8 took another knock Wednesday as research firm IDC laid much of the blame for the first quarter's historically-horrible PC numbers at the feet of the beleaguered operating system. Yesterday, IDC and rival Gartner released their estimates for 2013's first-quarter PC shipments. The former painted a gloomy picture of the industry, saying that the 14% decline, year over year, was the largest ever in its nearly two decades of tracking. Gartner pegged the global downturn at 11%.

Google is hanging onto its dominant share of the search market, while its competitors inch up and down. Google edged a bit further ahead in January, going from 66.7% of the search market in December to 67%, industry tracker comScore said.

Microsoft announced Friday that SkyDrive has hit a major milestone: there are now more than 1 billion Office documents stored on the cloud service. SkyDrive has been around since 2007, but it really gained traction at the end of 2011 when Microsoft started rolling out SkyDrive apps for iPhone, Android and Windows phones. The service is also integrated more seamlessly into the latest version of Microsoft Office, which was released at the end of last month.

Microsoft today announced that it would open five new retail stores by summer, including one it's transmuting from a "pop-up" outlet created last year to drive holiday sales. The new stores will be in Honolulu (Ala Moana Center); Natick, Mass. (Natick Mall); Portland, Ore. (Pioneer Place); Schaumburg, Ill. (Woodfield Mall); and Troy, Mich. (The Somerset Collection).

Microsoft unveiled a new logo Thursday, but maybe it's not so new. A Neowin.net user pointed out that the supposedly new logo, which you can see here, showed up on two Microsoft commercials when the company was promoting Windows 95.

Apple is the world's most valuable company, ever. On Monday, its surging stock propelled the company's value to $623 billion, beating the record for market capitalization set by Microsoft Corp. in the heady days of the Internet boom.

Microsoft has kicked off a new marketing campaign for Internet Explorer 9 that urges users of rival browsers to run it, even if only sparingly for "a few sites that you go to every day." The unusual approach, which Microsoft launched last week on BrowserYouLovedToHate.com, a domain it registered last month, is part of Microsoft's continued campaign to convince Windows users to stick with IE9, or if they've switched browsers, to give it another try.

Microsoft wants to be known as the people's smartphone company. The software giant said today that it had lowered the minimum requirements to build a Windows Phone, a move that allows vendors to construct less-expensive devices that can appeal to more budget-conscious customers and first-time smartphone buyers. The shift represents an attempt to expand Microsoft's addressable market, vital to the company's bid to regain a measure of relevancy in the smartphone business. The company had previously maintained a strict list of specifications that vendors had to follow, which at the time made the devices fairly high-end. The move comes as Android's momentum in a variety of markets, high and low, continues to gain ground. "Our strategy over time was to expand the range of price points," said Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Microsoft, in an interview with CNET. Microsoft's move follows a similar tack Google took with Android. The Internet search g...

Say goodbye to the Windows start button. Microsoft has gotten rid of it from the latest build of Windows 8. Hitting the Web over the weekend, screenshots of the new Windows 8 build display the "super bar," but without the start button orb on the left, according to The Verge . Build 8220 will be the final version released before the beta, now known as the Consumer Preview, debuts before the end of the month.

Sales of Android-based tablets more than tripled during the fourth quarter of 2011. But Apple still dominates, even as its market share dropped, according to Strategy Analytics. Global tablet shipments reached 26.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 150% increase from 10.7 million during the same period in 2010.

After a one-month pause, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) resumed its usage share slide in December, dropping to a new low and setting the stage for a fall below 50% as early as March. IE lost eight-tenths of a percentage point last month to end with a share of 51.9%, according to California-based metrics company Net Applications. IE dropped more than seven points during 2011.

Microsoft has quietly launched a support website where experts charge $99 for one- or two-hour sessions designed to rid PCs of malware, speed up a machine or solve problems with Windows or Office. Answer Desk debuted with no fanfare from Microsoft, which has not deigned to mention the new service in a press release or promote it on the front page of its domain, or even, surprisingly, on its consumer-slanted Windows website.

Microsoft is launching a new version of its Windows Defender antivirus tool that will run before Windows even boots up. Making its debut as a publicly-available beta, the new Windows Defender is designed to run directly off a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive to scan your PC outside of Windows. As such, its aim is to detect rootkit viruses and other malware that can infect your computer during the boot process.

Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 contain an unpatched bug that could be used to infect PCs by duping users into visiting rigged Web sites or opening attack e-mail.

Although Microsoft  has said it will not officially comment on the changes to Google's home page, which now sees a background picture appear behind the search box, some senior executives have referred to the new design on social networking sites.

San Francisco - Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

Atlanta, Georgia - In Chris Harrison's ideal world, mobile phones would be the size of matchbooks. They'd have full-size keyboards. They'd browse the Web. They'd play videos. And, most importantly, you'd never have to touch them. Sound like too much to ask? Maybe not. Harrison, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and a former intern at Microsoft Research, has developed a working prototype of a system called Skinput that does just that, essentially by turning a person's hand and forearm into a keyboard and screen. "People don't love the iPhone keyboard. They use them. But they don't love them," Harrison said in a interview at the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference. "If you could make the iPhone keyboard as big as an arm -- that would be huge." Using Skinput, a person could tap their thumb and middle finger together to answer a call; touch their forearm to go to the next track on a music player; or flick th...