Microsoft researchers think local with HereHere

Images and text descriptions on a map express moods and issues for each neighborhood, says Microsoft.Microsoft Research

Microsoft's FuSE Labs is adding a second research project to its roster that focuses on how hyper-local content can spur civic engagement.

On March 10, FuSE (Future Social Experiences) Labs took the wraps off its latest initiative, known asHereHere NYC. The site allows more than 40 New York City neighborhoods to generate opinions based on New York's 311 non-emergency data stream. New York's 311 allows New Yorkers to voice concerns (and sometimes compliments) via phone, email or text messages. HereHere distills the information and generates cartoons and text that represent a "neighborhood's characterized reactions," officials said.

Microsoft researchers demonstrated HereHere internally during the company's annual TechFest research fair in Redmond, Wash., last week. TechFest, Microsoft's science fair for its own research projects, was not open to the press this year, as it has been recently.Those interested can receive this stream of information by daily email digests, Twitter feeds, and status updates on an online map.

HereHere is FuSE's second research foray into the intersection of hyper-local content and civic engagement.

Last year, FuSE researchers went public with information about Whoo.ly, a Web service that provides neighborhood-specific information based on hyper-local Twitter posts. Results from that service are visible at Whooly.net. A Microsoft spokesperson said the Whoo.ly project was unrelated to HereHere, despite the similarities between the two.

Speaking of Twitter and Microsoft Research, it looks like Microsoft ended up publicizing the results of the Twitter hashtag research in which it was engaged last year. The FuSE Labs team was investigating how people find answers on Twitter last year, using a bot known as AskyBot. The results of that research are available in this white paper, entitled "Is Anyone Out There? Unpacking Q&A Hashtags on Twitter."

This story originally appeared as "Microsoft researchers launch new hyper-local project with a Twitter connection" on ZDNet.

EA fails to become this year's worst US company

Not even Titanfall could prevent EA from falling. Or rising.EA/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

It's hard to be the worst all the time.

Ask the Kansas City Royals, the Oakland Raiders and the "Real Housewives of Atlanta."

At some point, someone's going to have a worse day than you. Or worse year.

This is something EA has just learned, having failed in its attempt to three-peat as the Consumerist's "Worst Company in America."

In an upset that is as stunning as it's humorous, EA was defeated by (or vanquished, depending on your perspective) Time Warner Cable in the very first round.

And what had Time Warner Cable done to achieve sudden greatness? Said the Consumerist: "Time Warner Cable has always merited a spot in the WCIA brackets, the company's pending merger with former WCIA champ Comcast undoubtedly played into readers' voting decisions."The Consumerist was itself trying to catch its breath, as it reported: "Despite its cock-up of the Battlefield 4 and Titanfall releases, EA just didn't have the all-out support that it had received in the previous two tournaments."

Last year, EA positively romped home to win the crown. It defeated Bank of America in the final, with a margin of victory that was almost Putinesque.

Then, its COO Peter Moore tried to explain away the obvious injustice.

This year, perhaps EA will throw a vast costume party and invite all those who voted for Time Warner Cable to dress as their favorite gaming characters.

The tech industry is still very well represented in the Consumerist's competition. Comcast, PayPal/eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Direct TV, Yahoo, and AT&T are among those with battles to come.

I wonder which of these might prove to be worse than Abercrombie and Fitch, Walmart, and Koch Industries -- three of the more traditional companies that remain poised for greater (or worse) things

Microsoft revises privacy policy in wake of Hotmail search case

The source code behind Windows RT is among the intellectual property involved in the trade secrets theft case.Microsoft

Microsoft promised to toughen policies regarding the company's potential reading of Hotmail users' emails, after an outcry over Microsoft searching a user's Hotmail account to discover the identity of someone now charged with stealing company secrets.

John Frank, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, said that in the future, the company would meet a more rigorous standard before peeking into a non-employee's Hotmail account.

There are four parts to the new standard, Frank said:

• "We will not conduct a search of customer email and other services unless the circumstances would justify a court order, if one were available.
• "To ensure we comply with the standards applicable to obtaining a court order, we will rely in the first instance on a legal team separate from the internal investigating team to assess the evidence. We will move forward only if that team concludes there is evidence of a crime that would be sufficient to justify a court order, if one were applicable. As a new and additional step, we will then submit this evidence to an outside attorney who is a former federal judge. We will conduct such a search only if this former judge similarly concludes that there is evidence sufficient for a court order.
• "Even when such a search takes place, it is important that it be confined to the matter under investigation and not search for other information. We therefore will continue to ensure that the search itself is conducted in a proper manner, with supervision by counsel for this purpose.
• "Finally, we believe it is appropriate to ensure transparency of these types of searches, just as it is for searches that are conducted in response to governmental or court orders. We therefore will publish as part of our bi-annual transparency report the data on the number of these searches that have been conducted and the number of customer accounts that have been affected."

Frank also defended Microsoft's use of the "specific circumstances" to justify the "extraordinary actions" of searching a Hotmail user account. A March 17 court filing (PDF) by federal prosecutors states that the company had discovered that a blogger, unnamed in the document and not employed by Microsoft, was selling on eBay Microsoft property allegedly supplied by then-Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo.

Related stories:

• Microsoft defends opening Hotmail account of blogger in espionage case
• Microsoft said to beef up its Internet encryption
• Snowden breaks silence in statements blasting U.S.

Microsoft internally authorized searching the blogger's Hotmail account after an investigation that Frank said involved "law enforcement agencies in multiple countries;" the issuance of a warrant to search the home of the blogger for evidence of the alleged crimes; and the discovery of what Frank called "clear evidence" that the blogger intended to sell Microsoft's intellectual property and had done so in the past.

"Courts do not, however, issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed," Frank wrote, though legal civil liberties expert Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society said, via Twitter, that Frank's statement was "wrong...At best."

Edward Wasserman, Graduate School of Journalism dean at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times that he had "never seen a case like this."

"Microsoft essentially decided that whatever privacy expectation that its own customers supposedly had was basically a dead letter," he said. "It simply decided that in its own corporate interest, it can intrude on a person's email."

Phil Spencer on Xbox One 'always-on' debacle: 'We could have been more clear

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft Studios head Phil Spencer, who heads up the company's video game production arm, reflected on the Xbox One's controversial always-on policies rolled back last year in an interview with Gamasutra editor in chief Kris Graft on the final day of the Game Developers Conference here Friday.

"We could have been more clear and concise about what our real soul around the product was," Spencer said. Touching on the topic briefly yet apologetically, Spencer outlined how it was a learning experience, but that the blame was deserved because Microsoft fumbled the communication with consumers.

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Despite those early setbacks last year -- including the policy reversal that many gamers seemed convinced would sink theXbox One's sales fortunes -- Spencer opened up about the success of Titanfall, ironically a game that requires an Internet connection at all times to play, and the health of the console five months in. "We had our biggest [Xbox] Live week since launch. I see gamers coming to the platform. I see gamers playing a lot of Titanfall," he said.

"A new studio emerged and their first game is a knock-it-out-of-the-park game. Luckily, we had that game on Xbox at an incredibly important time for us," Spencer added.

Titanfall, however, will no longer be an Xbox exclusive as it heads toward its confirmed sequel, as publisher Electronic Arts and developer Respawn Entertainment aim to turn it into a multi-platform franchise.

Microsoft's indie game relationship

The talk, a fireside chat where the fire was provided naturally by a large Sharp television, comes at the end of the increasingly indie-focused and introspective developers conference.

GDC has always been a place for game professionals to dig deep under the skin of the games universe, but more so this year than any other -- with talks titled "Is Your Business Model Evil?" and "Misogyny, Racism and Homophobia: Where Do Video Games Stand?" -- the conference has been a platform and public space to aggressively demand discussion around the problematic nature of the industry and its social, economic, and philosophic hurdles.

While the subject matter never came close to being as deep and direct as the above-mentioned talks, Graft did follow up questions about the Xbox One's always-on policies by prodding Spencer on Microsoft's once-murky relationship with indie game developers. Not only did that mark another communication delay last year on Microsoft's part, but the act of catering to indie developers was an aspect of the next-gen console launch that Sony hammered hard to draw differences betweenPlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

"For us it was always part of our plan, but it was, when are we going to talk about it," Spencer said about Microsoft's ambiguous position on indie game developers last year. "I feel really good about the success that we're having with independent developers that look at Xbox One as a target platform. Are we behind now? I would say that independent developers I've been hearing from and talking to are really happy." Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a long-awaited list of 25 indie games for Xbox One being developed through console dev kits and the ID@Xbox publishing program.

Are we behind now? I would say that independent developers I've been hearing from and talking to are really happy."

Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Studios

Spencer didn't address the topic without his fair share of dodging. When asked whether or not Microsoft was going to update its policy on how easily and fast independent developers could update their game through Xbox Live, Spencer geared his answer more toward massive publishers of games like World of Tank and Minecraft.

"Games with a tight update cycle, what is their internal mechanism? What is their update cadence? How can we as a platform holder learn from their cycle? Is it going to be that I can update every minute or every second? Fundamentally, that's not what the developers are doing," he added.

Spencer also was mum on opening up Xbox Live to Steam-like early access like the ability to purchase an "alpha," or early development version, of a game, something Valve's platform excels at from a game development standpoint. "Today a game is a game is a game. For a parent who is letting their child on the platform, they have to think about what a game is. You need to be clear to the consumer, to the gamer, that this is in a different state. You wouldn't want to mislead anyone, forget about the UI construct abut where things live," Spencer said.

On the subject on Valve, Spencer said that the company has re-energized its focus on Windows. "Valve has been the backbone of PC gaming for the last decade when you think about the work they've done. In a lot of ways, they've focused more on PC gaming than we have," he said. "You will see more focus on us, not to go compete with what Valve has done," he added, but to "to invest in that platform."

The discussion did touch on virtual reality given Sony's big push with Project Morpheus. Microsoft has no plans, Spencer said, but could down the line enter the fray.

"We have this huge Microsoft Research organization that is pretty important to us as a platform holder in helping us think about what might be next. A bunch of stuff in our games have been birthed out of Microsoft Research," he said. "This is why GDC exists, so that people can bring out technology that they see a future for and get feedback from the community

Ballmer's Microsoft swan song might not be far away

Steve BallmerJames Martin/CNET

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be leaving the company he once called his "child" sooner than some expected.

Ballmer, who left his role as CEO earlier this year after Microsoft appointed Satya Nadella to the post, currently sits on the company's board of directors. However, in an interview published Sunday by the Wall Street Journal, Ballmer indicated that he's unsure how much longer he'll sit on the software giants board, saying that it "depends on how I see [the] rest of my life playing out."

Ballmer has been a longtime Microsoft board member and is one of the company's largest individual shareholders, meaning his opinion carries some weight. However, he told the Journal that he didn't talk much in recent board meetings because he's no longer chief executive and that the whole feel as director is "different."

That the former CEO might be looking for the door at Microsoft would signal a significant change for a man who has dedicated his life to the software giant for decades. But it's clear now that his influence is waning at Microsoft. And with Bill Gates coming back to advise Nadella, Ballmer's role at the company is unclear.

Ballmer didn't tell the Journal when he might consider leaving Microsoft's board, let alone confirm it could even happen. So while he might be tipping the move now, there's no knowing when it may actually play out.

Adios, Windows Azure. Hello, Microsoft Azure

Microsoft will rebrand its cloud platform from 'Windows Azure' to 'Microsoft Azure' as part of the company's push to emphasize its cross-platform services prowess.

Microsoft will announce its rebranding of its "Windows Azure" cloud operating system to "Microsoft Azure," this week, according to a couple of tipsters of mine.

The announcement is expected to happen tomorrow, March 25, and to take effect on April 3, the second day of Microsoft's Build conference in San Francisco, said a couple of individuals who asked not to be identified, but who are familiar with Microsoft's plans.

The rebranding makes sense, given Windows Azure isn't all about Windows. Azure customers can run Linux in virtual machines on the operating system. Azure users also can runOracle databases and middleware, and use non-Windows-specific development tools, including Java, Ruby, PHP and Python.

In 2012, there was some brief confusion when Microsoft eliminated the word "Azure" from its cloud billing portal. Microsoft officials said at that time that Microsoft had no plans to move away from the Windows Azure branding.Since 2008, when Windows Azure was still known by its codename "Red Dog," Microsoft's message was that Windows Azure was a cloud version of Windows Server. (Microsoftcombined its Server and Cloud teams into a single unit in late 2009.) This twinning of its on-premises and cloud offerings has been at the crux of Microsoft's private/public/hybrid cloud messagaging.

But these days, even though Windows is still key to Microsoft, the company is emphasizing it's not Windows-only. Microsoft officials are working to position Microsoft as a cross-platform software and services provider. Microsoft's Office on iPad suite, which the company is expected to launch this Thursday, March 27, is another example of that new corporate positioning.

I asked Microsoft officials to comment on the planned Microsoft Azure rebranding and they declined to comment.

This story originally appeared as "Microsoft to rebrand 'Windows Azure' as 'Microsoft Azure'" on ZDNet.

Saudi says world has 'betrayed' Syria rebels

Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud attends the 25th Arab League summit at Bayan palace in Kuwait City on March 25, 2014. PHOTO: AFP

KUWAIT CITY: Saudi Arabia’s crown prince said on Tuesday the international community has “betrayed” Syrian rebels by failing to arm them against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“The legitimate Syrian resistance has been betrayed by the international community and left easy prey to tyrant forces,” Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz told the Arab summit in Kuwait City.

He was referring to unkept promises by several nations to arm fighters battling to topple the Assad government, which is backed by Russia and Iran.

Saudi Arabia is one of the main backers of the rebellion against Assad that erupted three years ago and has become a full-fledged civil war after loyalists launched a crackdown against protesters seeking democratic reforms.

“Syria has become a (battle) field open to killings and destruction carried out by an iniquitous regime with the participation of foreigners and armed terrorists who come from everywhere,” said the crown prince.

He also called on the Arab League to speed up the handover of Syria’s seat in the 22-member organisation to the opposition National Coalition, in order to give it formal status that could cement its recognition by world powers.

“This must be sorted out… in order to send a strong message to the international community so that it will change its attitude towards Syria,” said the crown prince about the seat.

The seat — vacated after the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership over the conflict — was promised to the opposition at last summit in Doha.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi said the opposition must meet certain legal requirements before taking over the seat.

As a result National Coalition chief Ahmed Jarba addressed the summit in Kuwait City Monday but was not allowed to speak from the spot reserved for Syria.

Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, in his address to the gathering, accused the Syrian government of lying in “pretending to accept a political solution” but was in fact “buying time”.

Calls for ‘sophisticated’ arms

The summit kicked off with a call by Syria’s opposition for “sophisticated” arms, while Saudi Arabia stressed the need for a change in military balance to “end the impasse”.

UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, however, insisted on the need for a “political solution” to the conflict, urging an “end to the supply of arms to all parties”.

The head of the Syrian National Coalition, Ahmed Jarba, repeated calls on the international community to supply rebels with “sophisticated weapons”.

Saudi Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Abdulaziz urged support for the rebels, insisting that a solution to the conflict, in which regime forces have recently made significant advances, required a “change in the balance on the ground to end the impasse”.

The conflict in Syria, which in mid-March entered a fourth year, has killed more than 140,000 people and displaced millions.

No military solution: Brahimi

Jarba told the summit that a decision not to hand over Syria’s seat in the Arab League to the opposition sends a wrong message to Assad, telling him to continue “to kill”.

The Syria government’s brutal repression of protests which erupted in March 2011 resulted in its suspension from the Cairo-based Arab League.

Brahimi urged a revival of peace talks.

“I call upon Europe, the United Nations and the United States to take clear steps to reactivate the Geneva talks,” whose last round broke off on February 15 without setting a date for further negotiations.

“There is no military solution,” stressed Brahimi.

He had said on Monday that a further round of talks was “out of the question for the time being