msoftnews

Tweet Microsoft may not have officially announced the U.S. sales numbers for Xbox One consoles for January, but clues offered by both Microsoft and NPD may have revealed the numbers from last month. Read more…      Neowin

Tweet Which social media company just bought a whopping 85 petabytes of object-based storage? That’s the question on our minds after Jason Capitel, EMC’s COO for the EMEA region, referred to the sale onstage at our Structure:Europe conference in London. A petabyte (PB) is a quadrillion bytes. To give you a sense of the scale we’re talking about here, Facebook’s photo-filled data warehouse, built up over many years, stood at…

Tweet Plenty of startups — from massive open online course (MOOC) providers like Coursera and Udacity to adaptive learning companies like Knewton to the “online Ivy” Minerva Project — want to rethink it means to get an education. But bigwig Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman wants entrepreneurs to go one step further and upend the college degree. In a post on Linkedin and The New Republic, the prominent investor and…

Tweet If all the connectivity efforts of today did in fact become successful, a decade from now, we are looking at connected traffic lights, sensor-laden parking lots and roads, connected everything at home, locks that can be locked and unlocked digitally, pills with digestible silicon, smart tattoos and washable sensors in fabrics. Many of these are commercial or nearly commercial today and will likely attain reasonable to massive scale over…

Tweet Those familiar with desktop operating systems are already familiar with file associations to programs. Click a .DOC file and Microsoft Word opens, for example. Open an .MP3 file on OS X and the operating system knows to play it back in iTunes. How then might that work in Google’s new world of Chrome Apps? A concept called “web intents” is the likely answer. In our GigaOM Chrome Show podcast…