Microsoft Produces Limited Edition GTA IV Xbox 360 Microsoft has released a very limited stock of Grand Theft Auto IV Xbox 360 Elite consoles, 500 to be exact, complete with a GTA IV design on the side panel and a briefcase full of peripherals. The consoles are individually numbered, so you know how limited of an edition it is, and the briefcase has wireless controller, ChatPad, headset, camera, remote, and charge kit.
Vista Service Pack 1 Released Microsoft has finalized the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, putting the major update to Vista in the hands of users. Some users are getting it pushed to them via Windows Update, and if you don’t have it yet, just go here to download the standalone 434 megabyte installer for 32-bit versions of Vista. This link will get you the 64-bit version.
If you aren’t getting Vista SP1 through Automatic Updates, and are not even getting it offered as an option, it is likely because your computer is failing a number of prerequisites. One of them is driver compatibility, and since Sigmatel audio drivers aren’t worth crap on Vista, practically anyone with one of those chips in their systems won’t get SP1 without installing it manually. Read more here.
Microsoft Launches AdCenter Community Microsoft has launched AdCenterCommunity.com, a website for its growing AdCenter advertiser base to to learn about ways to run better ad campaigns, with niche-specific blogs, user forums, and other community features. The community offers advice on the AdCenter API, Analytics, and represents an effort by Microsoft to distinguish itself from Google AdWords, which has notoriously poor communication with with its advertisers.
Mac Office 2008 Gets Updated Microsoft released a patch for Office 2008, fixing problems that could cause Office programs to crash or otherwise stop responding. It also improves security, keeps restricted users from having unauthorized access to Office program files, fixes a blank page printing problem, fixes font substitution issues, adds support for secondary displays, and many other fixes and improvements.
Microsoft’s List of Potential Yahoo Board Members
If Microsoft winds up completing its effort to buy Yahoo through a hostile takeover, they’ll need to nominate a full new board of directors. A part of that list has leaked out, naming four of the ten executives Microsoft may place on the board. They are:
Edward H. Meyer - former CEO, Grey Advertising
John Chapple - CEO, Nextel Partners
Tom Freston - former President, Viacom
Jaynie Studenmund - Former CEO of eHarmony
Yahoo is reportedly finally holding talks with Microsoft, having a meeting to let Microsoft explain its offer and put some of its vision forward. Even if Yahoo doesn’t want to give in and except Microsoft’s offer, the offer may be impossible to ignore, especially if Microsoft raises the amount it is willing to pay. With other potential buyers dropping out, it’s certainly something they should consider.
Virtual Earth Implemented in Flash
Like Windows Live Maps? Like the compatibility and ease of Flash applications? Then you’ll like that AFC Components has added the Virtual Earth API to its UMAP control. You can see Virtual Earth embedded right here:
Sony PS3 for $100 Off
If you are looking to go with a Sony PlayStation 3, you might be glad to know that the SonyStyle store is offering $100 off the purchase of a 40gb PS3 with a new Sony card, making it just $300. That’s a good enough deal even if you find Sony as evil as many do, just to get a good Blu-Ray player and a small number of decent exclusive games.
Live Maps released a nice update last week, adding a good number of 3D cities and a ton of new or updated bird’s eye view cities. The new or enhanced 3D cities:
France
Vannes
Great Britain
Southampton
Colorado
Pueblo
Connecticut
Bridgeport
Stamford
Maine
Portland
Michigan
Battle Creek
Grand Rapids
Warren
Missouri
Springfield
Montana
Billings
New Jersey
Trenton
Nevada
Henderson
Sunrise Manor
New York
Rochester
Syracuse
Pennsylvania
Allentown
Washington
Olympia
Yakima
Wisconsin
La Crosse
Madison
And the new/updated bird’s eye cities, first in the U.S., then Europe:
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the company that runs the New York City mass transit system, released an improved version of their Trip Planner site that includes Microsoft’s Windows Live Maps. The site lets straphangers enter where they are going and when they want to get there, and receive bus, subway and walking directions, and now, they can see where they need to go on an embedded Windows Live Map.
The MTA has created an overlay of the familiar subway map for its Live Map, placing the subway and bus routes on top of Microsoft’s maps. This overlay even works in 3D mode, though the 3D buildings makes it nearly impossible to see the subway stations. For some reason, it only links to the map for the walking directions, but the subway routes are still there for reference.
Do you really have any idea how big Yahoo is, or hell, how big MSN is? There’s a lot of overlap between the two, and Long Zheng & Josh Philips have been kind enough to generate a nice chart to show the two. The chart is reproduced below, with some notes added by me regarding what I think about which service will be rolled into the other.
Both sides have some great, well-developed portal sites. There’s no need for both, so the only way sites like Yahoo Autos and MSN Autos survive is if the companies waffle and keep both Yahoo and MSN alive, competing with each other.
Here’s part of the beauty of the acquisition. Yahoo and MSN have many international portals. In some countries, Yahoo is king, in others, MSN. Together, they combine to have #1 market share in almost every single market.
Account Management
Yahoo ID
Live ID
Yahoo’s ID system, while good, is nowhere near as powerful or versatile as Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s multi-account switching and Windows Live Sign-In assistant would win anyday. Either way, Microsoft sticks with its own technology, so Yahoo IDs are dead.
MyYahoo is bigger and has more users, and a big history. The technology developed for Live.com will likely be rolled into MyYahoo, or exist as a more advanced option for MyYahoo users, but MyYahoo is king here.
Both are big dogs, and both are struggling to catch Google. Both will survive, at least for a while, with Microsoft trying to find a way to combine the market share of the two eventually. Most likely, the search engine will fall under the Yahoo brand, but itcould go either way.
Not even a question. Microsoft loves Live Maps, and has invested heavily in it. Yahoo Maps is dead, but its engineers and some of its code may work for Live in the future.
Yahoo Messenger and Live Messenger already work together, making the path for the future easier. Live Messenger is more popular, and will almost definitely be the only client in the future, with added support for the Yahoo services and features it can take over from the Yahoo client.
Live Hotmail is one of Microsoft’s most important, strongest projects. Microsoft will avoid killing Yahoo at first, but development on Yahoo Mail will cease. Microsoft will offer Yahoo users the option to migrate their accounts to the ever-improving Hotmail, and eventually Yahoo Mail will phase out and die.
Yahoo Answers is the amazing success story of 2007, while Live QnA never got enough traction. Live QnA is dead, and there’s even a chance Microsoft will not bother to integrate.
Flickr will become tied to Live Spaces, with the millions of Live Spaces photos becoming part of Flickr. The two will thrive on each other and grow exponentially more successful. This will be the immediate crown jewel of the acquisition.
Yahoo Widgets is strong and has a nice library of Gadgets. The first post-acquisition release of Sidebar will add support for Yahoo Widgets, which will live side-by-side in Windows Vista.
The hardest part of the acquisition. It took Yahoo years to integrate Overture into its own ad systems, and if that happens to Microsoft, this entire acquisition will have been a waste. Luckily, Microsoft is very talented at integrating, at least when compared to Yahoo. Expect hundreds of employees to work on combining the two products, with a deadline of under 12 months, maybe even six months.
Live Mobile isn’t fully developed, but an important part of Microsoft’s mobile strategy. Yahoo Go for Mobile is a great piece of software. There will be a fight inside Microsoft, but if the company is smart, it will continue to develop Yahoo Go as the iPhone-killer content browser.
Yahoo’s offering is dead. Office Live is much better, and important to Microsoft’s Office division. Yahoo’s customers will hopefully like Microsoft’s technology, which has been well invested in and is cheaper (or free).
Tough call. Live Events is really knew, and we don’t know how important it is to Microsoft. If they aren’t desperately attached to it, Upcoming could win.
Microsoft killed MSN Music for Zune, and it will kill Yahoo Music, too. Microsoft will integrate or transition, and kill it off. Hopefully, Launchcast will survive, but don’t count on it.
With Super Bowl Sunday just three days away, preparations are in full swing. My job for today: Get a new, better HDTV antenna. Whatever you’re doing, if you’re rooting for the Giants and would like to look back at their road to the playoffs, the Virtual Earth blog presents a 3D tour in Windows Live Maps that takes you through the Giants eleven previous road games, plus their upcoming road game in Arizona against the Patriots.
I’d recommend checking out the collection, even if you don’t care about the game. I had no idea Live Maps produced such cool animations in its 3D tours, and the 3D models of the football stadiums are pretty sweet looking, too. Live Maps predicts a 38-31 victory for the Giants. I’ll predict a Giants victory, too, 18-16.
The Live Maps traffic Gadget for the Windows Vista Sidebar has returned to Windows Live Gallery. Microsoft had to take it down a few months ago due to security concerns, which was a shame, since it was a pretty good Gadget. The security issue has dissapeared under some nice, safe code, and the Gadget is now back for you to download and provide you with live traffic reports for your area.
Njection has created a mashup that shows you on Windows Live Maps where the cops have set up speed traps, so you can know ahead of time when to slow down as they try to balance the budget. Users add the location of known speed traps to the database (including the type of detection used and how often they are there), and you can browse the map and know where to be careful.
Finally, 6000 sqaure miles of 3D textured cities were added, including San Bernandino, Calafornia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Fargo; Cleveland; Hartford, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; Salt Lake City; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Woorcheshessterr*, Massachussets; St. Louis; and Liverpool, U.K.. Also added: 44 new aerial cities, 36 new bird’s eye cities, 26 new European bird’s eye cities, and more.
* - Yeah, I know it’s Worcester, and that it’s pronounced Wooster for some damned reason, but that’s one of the worst place names in the U.S.. Change it.
Microsoft has improved the browser-based mobile version of Live Maps, adding better detailed and navigatable maps, one-click directions for businesses and street addresses, details/photos/reviews of businesses you search for, as well as movie show times, traffic and maps in Search. Take a look at these screenshots from the Virtual Earth blog, or point your phone at m.live.com:
Microsoft’s Live Maps has added China to its Virtual Earth mapping system, covering 114 new cities complete with millions of points of interest and public transit bus and train locations. The road map data comes from AutoNavi, a Chinese company (since obtaining such data, especially at this level of detail, is difficult).
Interestingly, the Chinese maps are only available on a special seperate maps site, ditu.live.com. Legally, the maps of China are not allowed to leave the border of the country, though there doesn’t seem to be any blocking of the site outside China. The China-only site does not feature maps outside of China, like those of the U.S. or U.K., because the road and place names have not been translated into Chinese. The entire interface is in Chinese, and lacks satellite or aerial imagery, as well as Live Maps 3D.
LiveSide has the details on the Windows Live Admin Center, which replaces the old Live Custom Domains and lets you do more than just use a hosted Live Hotmail domain name. You can now customize all sorts of subdomains to Windows Live services, such as setting a blog.yoursite.com URL to a WIndows Live Space, or setting a maps.yoursite.com URL to a custom Live Maps Collection mashup.
Windows Live Maps continues to do amazing things with its 3D view, adding an experience that in many ways matches or surpasses Google Earth, all while running in nothing more than your regular web browser. The latest new feature is the ability to add 3D models to the map, a feature Google Earth accomplishes with Google SketchUp, and Live Maps now manages with the 3DVIA Technology Preview, a new, free online application developed by Dassault Systèmes.
Getting started is as easy as navigating on the map in 3D and clicking Collections, then “Add a 3D model” (alternatively, you could just go here). The software will prompt you to install 3DVIA, which takes a while, but after that you can right-click on the map at any time to add a 3D model, which will launch the software.
Users can create a quick and easy 3D model of their house or other buildings they know, including adding textures and colors, then upload them back to Live Maps and see the model on the map. User-created 3D models can be shared as collections to show friends, but presumably Microsoft will start adding the best ones to the main Live Maps, increasing their stable of detailed 3D models.
I’m amazed that there are buildings in my neighborhood that have 3D models already. Somehow, Queens College, apartment buildings, even largish synagogues in my little slice of Queens have detailed 3D models, with an amazing amount of intricacy. Even my wife’s old apartment in Brooklyn is modeled. I don’t believe for a second that someone modeled these by hand, not with the curved surfaces and detailed diagonal roofs, which means Microsoft’s automated building tech has gotten really advanced. Good for them.
I haven’t been able to get 3DVIA working, in order to compare it with Google SketchUp, but as soon as I get a chance we’ll see which is easier to use. Either way, its another great step towards making Live Maps the most impressive mapping product on or off the internet.
(via LiveSide)
The Virtual Earth blog lists ten cool things about the new Windows Live Maps. They include buildings in the 3D mode that turn see-through when you get to close (and send vibration to your Xbox 360 controller if you’re using it).
Also: When you search an area, it gives you a list of popular business categories in that area, sort of letting you just browse the stores.
Also: “Ghost node editing”, which lets you re-drag line segments to reshape polygons you draw on the map (a feature they admit was inspired by Google Maps).
Also: Traffic conditions now show green for good roads, yellow and red for progressively worse traffic, and a new black color for severe conditions under which the cars aren’t moving at all.
Also: Business details that are category specific, like the number of patients seen by a doctor, the price range and class of a hotel, and the average meal price at a restaurant.
Also: KML files are now available for subscribing to Live Maps Collections. KML is the Google Earth format for impormatting map data, so Live Maps is letting you get your data out and bring it to Google Earth, while Google Maps/Earth is keeping everything inside.
There’s so much interesting stuff going on at the Live Maps blog, I had to subscribe to it.
(via LiveSide)
Windows Live Search has released a new version of their first class Windows Mobile application, adding some killer new features.
The big one: Voice recognition. When you need to select a location on the map, instead of typing it in or browsing to it on the map, you can hit a Speak button and just tell it where to go. That means that when you need driving directions, when you want to find movie showtimes, or if you just need to browse the map, you can just say the name of the neighborhood you are in and get it, just like that.
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I went to the Nightmare: Ghost Stories haunted house in Manhattan yesterday, and afterwards we needed to drop off a friend at the subway. I told my phone where I was, and it brought up the satellite map, complete with local subway locations. Then I clicked the Movies button, and we got showtimes for Saw IV in the area. When we decided to see the movie back in Queens, I just told the phone to look there, and it did.
Honestly, nothing compares to how good this is. If you’re using Google Maps on your phone and you can switch to this, you’d be crazy not to. The voice control is so easy, and accurate enough on a Manhattan street, that there’s no reason to use anything else.
The other new feature: Gas prices.
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Hit the Gas Prices button on the home screen, and it’ll search for all the local gas prices, then list them according to the lowest prices. You can get more details, or hit a Map All button to see all the gas stations on a map, so you aren’t driving for forty minutes to save three cents a gallon.
If you have a Blackberry, there’s a new Blackberry Live Search application. It doesn’t have the voice search or gas prices, but it does have all the regular local search, mapping, movie showtimes, and traffic information. It’s also available at wls.live.com.
They’ve also improved the browser-based Live Maps, available at m.live.com. It now includes better, more readable maps, traffic conditions (that are taken into account in the driving directions).
There are two videos about the new Live Search mobile application, the first being a two-minute rundown, the other an eight-minute more detailed overview, both available at Rob Chambers’ blog. I’d embed them here, but Soapbox doesn’t work in my regular browser, and IE seems convinced that Flash player isn’t installed.
Microsoft shipped a new version of Windows Live Search Maps, one that comes with an all new, all better interface. The new interface takes all the controls, for panning the map, switching between 2D and 3D, zooming in and out, switching between road, aerial, hybrid and bird’s eye views, and switching on traffic data, all in a simple, minimalist bar in the corner. You can, with a single click, contract that bar into nothingness:
Besides the improved interface, there’s a new version of Virtual Earth 3D for you to install. It adds these features:
Add bird’s eye view to 3D maps.
Put your own modeling creations on the map.
Turn your collections into tours and movies to show and share.
Here’s the new 3D interface, with a bird’s eye image taking up the center of the screen, and a ton of 3D buildings on either side:
LiveSide lists other improvements here and here, including the ability to abbreviate the beginning or end of driving directions. If you already know plenty about the end or the beginning (because one of them is your house or office), you can tell it to shorten that section and not waste your time telling you how to leave your own neighborhood.
Another new feature: traffic redirection. If there’s bad traffic, it’ll re-route you around it, though you’ll have the option to see the directions without that. Another one: One-click directions. Choose a destination, and it’ll give you a page with a map and seperate directions from the North, South, East and West.
This Windows Live Maps mashup, found at the Via Windows Live website, shows you scary places located all over the country, including houses haunted by ghosts, places where scary legends got their start, and spooky graveyards. Perfect for planning a Halloween vacation.
There’s a new Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget that brings Windows Live Maps to your desktop. Unlike the previous one, which did a great job of tracking traffic conditions in your area, this one is used to search Live Maps, even planning a route and getting directions right from the Gadget. Read more at Mike Ormond’s blog where he explains the Gadget (he wrote it, after all).
(via Ian Moulster)
Microsoft introduced this new “Art Of Office” website, a place for people to submit artistic documents created using the Mac versions of Microsoft Office. The idea is to show off how Office can be used by creative types to create stunning documents.
Some Mac users are angry that Microsoft took the time to develop this site at the same time Mac Office 2008 was being delayed.
Google Maps, Windows Live Maps & Others In Flash
Flash Earth now lets you use a Flash interface to get around Google Maps, Windows Live Maps (aerial and labeled), Yahoo Maps, Ask Maps (aerial and physical), OpenLayers and NASA Terra daily satellite imagery.
(via, via, via)
I Beat Halo 2!
Just thought I’d mention that I finally finished the damn game. First game I played till the end in a while.
Halo 3 Goes Gold
Don’t worry about Halo 3 or some sort of unexpected delay. Microsoft announced the team at Bungie finished the game, certified the code, and sent it off to that big factory that prints shiny plastic disks for your gaming pleasure. Huzzah!
Halo 3 Countdown Gadget
Can’t stand having to wait three more weeks for Halo 3? Download this Gadget for Windows Vista’s Sidebar and stare as the clock ticks ever so slowly.
Family Guy Comes To Xbox Live
Xbox Live now offers downloads of episodes of the hit cartoon Family Guy, with all the episodes from the first two seasons as well as the straight-to-DVD “movie” for $2 worth of Microsoft Points. No other TV download store, including iTunes, currently has Family Guy.
Check out Vision 20/20’s POM Offender Locator, a Windows Live mashup that shows you registered sex offenders in your area. Apparently there are 650,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S., an obscenely high number*, so keeping aware of who is on the list in your area is kind of a good idea.
POM’s also got an alert system that warns you if there’s danger, like your child entering a certain area, exceeding the speed limit, possible terrorist attacks or national disasters, FDA alerts, when a new sex offender moves into your neighborhood, or your child is approached online. The perfect system for the paranoid parent! They’re also selling (I swear to god, you can’t make this up) a “POM Pilot” GPS tracker that lets you know where your kids or valuables are.
(via Blorge > Bink)
* - At first, I though that number had to be a ridiculous and inaccurate stat, but then I remembered how many girls I knew back when I was dating that had stories of when a guy tried to rape them. Now that I think about it, the number would probably be twice as high if all those unreported sex crimes had actually been prosecuted.
