Microsoft is moving ahead with plans to add some of its new Windows Azure services to Windows Server 2012, announcing the beta release of those services on October 8. In server and Cloud Blog post officials said that their plan is to deliver the final versions of these services, which include virtual machine hosting and Web-site hosting for Windows Server, by early 2013.
Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has been quite a hit, but there can be little doubt that the average quality of Android tablet apps still ranks behind iOS. Google is clearly aware of this and yesterday, the company is making a new push to get developers to ensure that their apps run well on tablets. To do this, Google just launched a Tablet App Quality Checklist that walks developers through the process of getting their apps tablet-ready.
YouTube is cranking up its original programming effort with an international push that includes new channels in Europe. The video-sharing site announced it was adding 50 channels on top of the 100 it has introduced in the past year, along with the launch of country-specific channels in France, Germany, and Britain. Robert Kyncl, YouTube's global head of content, said in a company blog that from local cuisine, health and wellness and parenting to sports, music, comedy, animation and news, this new lineup of original channels would have something for everyone.
When small businesses need to make investments in IT or other operations, it’s often the companies selling them the goods that help with financing solutions. Now it looks like Google is using that model to help drive more dollars to AdWords search advertising. Google is launching a new service in the UK, AdWords Business Credit, which offers credit to companies specifically in the SMB sector to boost their online ad spend with the company.
With the official launch of Windows 8 just around the corner, Mozilla unveiled its first preview release of Firefox Metro. The Metro version of Firefox, was “designed from the ground up for Windows 8 and already includes many of the usual Firefox tools and features. Despite the fact that this version is called “Firefox Metro,” this version runs in both the old-school Windows desktop environment and the Metro/Windows 8-style environment.
Microsoft will officially launch Windows Phone 8 on October 29. The launch venue will be somewhere in San Francsico, according to this invitation which Microsoft mailed to us media types on October 4. It's important to keep in mind what launch means in this case. October 29 is not the day that Windows Phone 8 devices will be in stores. It isn't the date that all carriers will be opening up for pre-orders. (That pre-order date will likely be sooner for most.)
Oracle has finally answered a big question hovering over its emerging family of cloud services: What do they cost? While not giving a public price for every one of its cloud products, Oracle's website now has pricing for its on-demand database and Java development service, as well as for some applications. Pricing for the database service, which uses version 11g R2, starts at US$175 per month for one schema, 5GB of disk storage and 30GB of data transfer. A midtier option costs $900 per month with one schema, 20GB of storage and 120GB of data transfer.
Micropayments, a long-discussed way of supporting content on the Web that has yet to catch fire with users, is about to get a big boost from Google. The company confirmed that users will soon be able to pay for Web content using Google Wallet, buying individual articles for an average of $0.25 to $0.99 each. Once users buy the page, they will own it forever.
On October 1, Microsoft took the wraps off TypeScript, a new programming language that is aimed at making JavaScript development scale beyond the client. Microsoft has made available to those interested via its CodePlex site a preview of the TypeScript bits; the TypeScript language specification; and the source code for the TypeScript compiler. TypeScript is available under an Apache 2.0 open-source license.
Microsoft plans to make a touch-optimized version of its MSN portal available to users running Windows 8/Windows RT and Internet Explorer 10 as of October 26. Microsoft officials are showing off a near-final preview of that portal in New York during Advertising Week, which kicks off this week on October 1. They also will be showing off new touch-centric Windows 8/Windows RT ads that will be available on MSN and on select Windows Store apps during this week's advertising confab.