In something of a surprise move, Microsoft has renamed its daily deals product and shifted the brand to MSN. It was "Bing Deals." Now it's MSN Offers. Apparently the change was the result of an effort to clear up perceived confusion. A press release went out but I discovered this through my in-box. Bing.com's deals site aggregates retail and e-commerce sales information from many sources across the US. Microsoft apparently wants to separate that content from local daily deals. However the local daily deals are still accessible from the Bing/deals site (see upper left tile in screenshot [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Entertainment | Microsoft: Other | Top News

Microsoft's search/social hybrid project is alive and well and, if current reports are to be believed, may be headed toward some kind of private beta test in the near future. If you were with us back in July, you might recall the small firestorm that burned for a couple days after news spread about Socl.com. At the time, it was called Tulalip and, when Microsoft published a very early version of the site, the home page promised a way to "Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever." At the time, Microsoft described it as an "internal project" and said publishing it was an [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing Social Search | Microsoft: Other | Microsoft: Other Search

It appears that Microsoft is planning a new project called Tulalip and could be positioning it as a hybrid search/social networking service. First reported by Fusible, Tulalip currently sits on the SOCL.com domain, which is owned by Microsoft. You can see the socl.com WHOIS record on DomainTools to confirm. Tulalip currently only offers a "welcome" message that explains itself this way: With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever. There's a non-functioning search box at the top of the page, preceded (mysteriously) by the word "OPEN." There ar [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing Social Search | Microsoft: Other | Microsoft: Other Search

One of the most interesting things out of Microsoft's demo of Windows 8 yesterday that future tablets could easily be turned into fully functional Windows computers, since the OS is the same. But how about Windows 8 phones? Could you do that too? Would you interpret a smile from Windows president Steven Sinofsky to be a yes? Sinofsky, along with corporate vice president Julie Larson-Green, opened the Windows 8 kimono at the D9 Conference yesterday. You'll find plenty of coverage over at Techmeme about the news. Perhaps most interesting was the idea that Windows 8 would work on tablets and l [...]

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Greenpeace has issued a report warning of the ballooning energy needs of data centers feeding cloud computing. It is intended to encourage cloud providers to choose cleaner energy sources, and it does not beat up overly on Google, Amazon, Salesforce, MicroSoft, Facebook, and Yahoo!. But, it is a mixed report card, may indicate an important trend.

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