The Knight Rider TV movie/pilot episode, airing a week from Sunday on NBC (2/17), will feature a 2008 Ford Mustang GT500KR as the new, upgraded KITT car. The car will boast a high-powered computer system, like in the original series, and that computer may be a Microsoft Sync system, or based on Sync. Numerous reports on the series indicate product placement for Sync, as well as internal Microsoft communications, though whether Sync will be in KITT or promoted in other cars in the series is unknown.
Download Squad has these videos of user interfaces that take the desktop metaphor we use in Windows a little further (and possibly too far). The first video shows an actual interface you can download, called Real Desktop, that turns your icons into 3D objects that can be dragged and flung around, but doesn’t seem to do a lot for increasing productivity or organization.
The second is more of a clever demonstration in which your documents, music photos, email and other programs are rendered as they would be on a desk, as a notebook, CD case, photo album, and letters, and require the users to drag a CD to the music player, photographs into letter envelopes, and so on. Looks cool, but at least forty steps away from being usable.
All this reminds me of Microsoft Bob. I’ve been trying to write an article about Bob for days now, after a discussion with a Microsoftie about the much-maligned software, but I can’t get the damn thing to install under Vista. If anyone’s had any luck, drop me a line.
Hitwise has a look at the visitor statistics for Yahoo and Microsoft’s websites, showing just how much market share in the United States the combined company would have. Total market share for all Yahoo is 13.2% of all of U.S. internet traffic, with MSN having just 2.4% and Google 7.7% Combined, they would have 15.6%, over twice as much as Google.
Thanks to the growth of Live Search over the last year, Microsoft/Yahoo would have 31.75% of the search market, fully half of Google’s position, with room for that growth to accelerate. Yahoo’s frontpage has an amazing 71.4% market share, 86.8% with MSN. Yahoo Mail has 54.6%, 80% with Hotmail, almost 84% with Yahoo Address book, leaving just 5.51% for Gmail.
Yahoo News (7.4%) plus MSNBC plus Yahoo Weather owns 13.3% of news and media. Yahoo Finance (29.15%) plus MSN Money equals 39.3%. Yahoo Maps (12.84%) plus Live Maps equals 16.59%, behind Google’s 22.64%. Yahoo Movies (8.33%) plus MSN Entertainment-Movies equals 15.44%. Yahoo Games (5.5%) plus MSN Games equal 7.68%.
And, let’s not forget Flickr, with 12.01% of the Photography market, #2 in its category, and Yahoo Music with 6.52% of Music, #1 in its category.
Microsoft has added the advertisements from this year’s Super Bowl to Internet TV, the feature available for free in Windows Vista Media Center. That means you can watch 51 ads from the big game in full-screen decent quality on your Media Center PC/TV, or streamed to your Xbox 360 or Media Center Extender.
I tried it out, and picture quality is decent standard definition with good sound, but they chose not to include HD ads (or they couldn’t), which is a shame, because seeing these ads in HD would be great. At least they aren’t too horribly compressed. If we can start counting on Internet TV for stuff like this, it’ll be a very useful feature for Media Center owners.
One great feature in Gmail is that if someone mentions a date and time in an email, you get a link to create a Google Calendar appointment based on that email. Outlook doesn’t have anything as smart as that, but it does have a quick way to create appointments from emails, one I wish I had known before. Just drag the email from your inbox to the sidebar calendar, dropping it on the date for your appointment.
The new appointment will be created, with the subject of the email becoming the subject of the appointment, and the full text of the email going in the comment area. You have the email for reference when creating the rest of the details for your appointment. It’s convenient and quick, and the best way to get it done.
If there’s a plugin for Outlook that gives it Gmail’s auto-calendar functionality, let me know in the comments.
