Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) first created Encarta in 1993 when they purchased the non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. Microsoft initially approached Encyclopædia Britannica when they first started but that company believed providing print media sales would be hurt through the partnership.
Microsoft usually had on average between 50,000-70,000 encyclopedia entries within their Encarta software. Since then Microsoft integrated the service into Windows Live Messenger and Live.com. But now it is the end of the Encarta era. Microsoft announced that they will cease development for the product in October. Encarta Japan will run until the end of the year.
“Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years,” wrote Microsoft in a statement. “However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.”
Many people prefer online encyclopedia resources such as Wikipedia and Dictionary.com.
Bit.ly has been growing rapidly with the help of Twitter. People are constantly using Bit.ly to shorten URLs of stories, images, and videos that people want to share with their Twitter followers. Bit.ly was created under Betaworks, an incubation firm that helped sell Summize to Twitter last year. Betaworks has taken Bit.ly and is spinning it out as a separate, well-funded company.
O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several other investors plugged $2 million into the URL shortening service. Other investors include Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly will join the Board of Directors at Bit.ly.
Just last week alone, about 20 million URLs have been shortened using Bit.ly. That number is increasing by 10% every week. The only source of revenue Bit.ly has is Google Ads that are scattered around their homepage. This is a similar approach to their biggest competitor TinyURL.com. TinyURL depends mainly on donations and Google Ads too.
The above dishes were customly designed for your dogs to join you at the dinner table. It comes with a dinner plate in the shape of a bowl which dogs are used to eating from and a wine glass designed for licking out the drink. If you have a male and a female dog, I highly recommend putting spaghetti in this thing and seeing if they can pull off the same action as the characters in The Lady and the Tramp.
By the way, you make want to have the dog skip on the chocolate fondue dessert. Price available upon request at Alice-Wang.com.
Twitter is becoming mainstream with celebrities now more than ever. Its been proven that Shaq uses Twitter to write where he is eating, Jennifer Aniston broke up with John Mayer because he used Twitter too much, and Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore became the first celebrity couple to use the service.
With all this star power, Twitter wants to make sure to keep this traction going. This is why they are hiring a VIP Concierge for Twitter celebrities “to make sure they’re happy, using the product effectively, etc. This person is probably pretty junior (it won’t pay a lot) but hopefully familiar with working with “Hollywood types.” They should be tech savvy enough to answer questions and solve basic problems,” according to the job description.
The job is recommended for people that live in L.A. but are willing to visit the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco often. The VIP Concierge will also be responsible for getting new celebrities to sign up.
Microsoft Corporation and GPS device company TomTom have settled the patent lawsuits that they have filed against each other. Microsoft sued TomTom in late February and TomTom sued them back earlier this month. Both companies were expected to just settle with each other rather than spend too much money on litigation battling each other.
As part of the agreement, TomTom will pay Microsoft for patent protection where related to mapping patents and file management patents. Microsoft claimed that TomTom was infringing on the software giant’s use of the Linux kernel. Microsoft will also receive access to TomTom’s patents that were referred to in the lawsuit against them. Microsoft won’t make any payments to TomTom for using their patents.
This settlement has a five year term and TomTom will remove functionality related to Microsoft’s two file management system patents from their products over the next couple of years. “We are pleased TomTom has chosen to resolve the litigation amicably by entering into a patent agreement,” stated Microsoft’s deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez.
Om Malik spoke with Skype CEO Josh Silverman if the company was planning to launch an iPhone application with their VoIP service. Skype has been downloaded over 405 million times. But now its been confirmed. Skype is almost ready to launch on the iPhone possibly next week at the CTIA Wireless mobile event in Las Vegas. Skype already has a Windows Mobile supported version of their service.
Lora and Clay Wolph of Ohio bought an Acer notebook from Wal-Mart in April 2008. The notebook had 1GB of memory and claimed that this was enough memory to run Microsoft’s Windows Vista and still be fast enough to use. The Wolphs filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco.
In the lawsuit, the couple claimed that the Aspire notebook “would not run properly” since they bought it. It would constantly freeze or crash when they tried to run the Vista Home Premium operating system. The Wolphs bought the Aspire 4520-5458 notebook for $586 and it included the 1GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce 610M graphics chip set.
To make the computer usable, the Wolphs had to spend another $157 to upgrade the RAM to 2GB. Acer technical support dismissed their problems earlier. Since the 1GB RAM was shared with the graphic chip set, that left less than 800MB of RAM to run Vista which is insufficient.
This was the first time I’ve heard of someone suing over slow Windows Vista performance. Earlier this month I wrote about how Damone Dickerson was suing Microsoft competitor Apple Inc. for slow 3G speeds on the iPhone.
The Mintpass Mintpad is one of the most amazing PMP devices I’ve seen so far. It has a built in scheduler, camera, chat software, a web browser with Flash support, a voice recorder, and a video player. Although its only available in South Korea right now, it will be making its way to the U.S. sometime soon. In South Korea, the price runs at about $150. The video demo below may convince you to buy it as soon as it hits American soil.
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