Microsoft is currently on a streak of increasing cloud storage capacity for its customers. Earlier this week, Microsoft more than tripled the storage capacity for SkyDrive Pro users from 7 GB to 25 GB. The latest cloud mailboxes to receive a storage boost are for Exchange Online and Office 365, which will increase from 25 GB to 50 GB starting this Friday. Customers should see their storage capacity double sometime between now and November. According to the Office 356 blog, the following services plans will receive the upgrade: Exchange Online Plan 1, Office 365 Small Business, Midsize Business, Enterprise E1, Government G1, and Education A1. Shared mailboxes and Resources mailboxes will grow to 10 GB as well. A chart of the new plans follows below. More →
Email was destroying my life, so I destroyed email. I crushed everything about it that I hated, leaving only what I absolutely needed. I tore apart my entire workflow and upended the way I deal with digital communications. On my computers, on my phones, everywhere. What remains shouldn’t even be called email; it’s something entirely new and significantly less painful. I used to do things the old way — flags, folders, leaving things marked as unread, reminders, alarms and worst of all, hundreds of thousands of emails sitting in my inboxes, never to be looked at again. It had to stop, so I stopped it. More →
Last February, Amazon had 28 million unique viewers for its video content, far behind Yahoo’s 43 million unique viewers. But according to fresh comScore numbers, Amazon had vaulted to nearly 38 million uniques by July, while Yahoo had dropped to 42 million. The video distribution landscape is now changing at an amazing clip. What is even more jaw-dropping than Amazon’s unique viewer growth is the number of minutes spent by an average viewer; it doubled from 13 minutes to 26 minutes in just six months. Yahoo’s average viewing time also grew substantially, from 53 minutes to 77 minutes. More →
Unfazed by a Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation, Google has started integrating Waze into Google Maps. The company announced on Tuesday that “users of Google Maps for Mobile will now benefit from real-time incident reports from Waze users,” meaning that “when Wazers report accidents, construction, road closures and more on Waze, the updates will also appear on the Google Maps app for Android and iOS” in several countries including the United States. Google paid just under $1 billion to acquire Waze earlier this summer with the intention of using the company’s crowd-sourced mapping information with its own Maps application. The FTC has said it may at some point stop Google from integrating Waze data into Google Maps to stop the company from having a monopoly on mobile mapping applications.
When it comes to gaming, Microsoft’s Kinect sensor is clearly one of the biggest developments in recent history — and the best is yet to come when Microsoft debuts its all new sensor alongside the Xbox One. But the Kinect is much more than just a gaming accessory, and Microsoft researchers have shown time and time again that the possibilities with Kinect are nearly endless. In what might be the Kinect’s most impressive feat yet, researchers from Microsoft’s labs have teamed up with the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences to begin developing technology that allows the Kinect to recognize sign language and translate it into text. Development of this hugely important tech is still in the early stages but Microsoft says results so far have been “encouraging in enabling people whose primary language is sign language to interact more naturally with their computers.” A video demo can be seen below. More →
Google ends up shutting down more than one out of every three services it offers, and the serial killer’s next victim has been identified. As of August 9th, Google Latitude will be no more. “Google Latitude will be retired on August 9th, 2013,” Google said in a post on its support website. “Products being retired include Google Latitude in Google Maps for Android, Latitude for iPhone, the Latitude API, the public badge, the iGoogle Gadget, and the Latitude website at maps.google.com/latitude.” The news comes just a week after Google shuttered its widely used Google Reader RSS feed reading service. What should people who still use the Latitude social network to share their location with friends and family do? Shockingly, Google suggests using Google+ instead. “You can share your location with your friends on Google+ using the Google+ Android app,” the company noted on its site. “The ability to share your location on Google+ on iOS will be coming soon.”
It looks like Google at last appears ready to integrate its Google Now personal assistant app into both its Chrome browser and Chrome operating system. CNET reports that “Google is making steady progress” in its quest to bring Google Now to more desktop users and has now added a flag to Chrome and Chrome OS “that lets people enable Google Now,” although the publication notes that the service isn’t connected to any of Google’s servers just yet. Google first debuted Google Now last year as an application that uses search history and location history to figure out what information users might need before they even ask for it. Examples include being able to tell users how long their typical commutes will be given current traffic conditions, and being able to figure out how long in advance users will have to leave for them to make appointments on time.
As has been the case for more than one out of every three Google services that have ever existed, Google Reader will be shut down in less than a week. Google’s feed reader has been the go-to option for RSS-based news consumption for years, and now users who have relied on Google Reader will have to look elsewhere to stay on top of new content from their favorite websites. BGR published our list of the five best Google Reader alternatives last week, and most of the chatter we’ve seen revolves around just a few of the five we mentioned. AOL’s new reader is getting some buzz as well, as is a forthcoming option called Digg Reader from Digg-owner Betaworks. There are certainly plenty of great services out there to choose from and we want to know which one is your new RSS reader of choice. Vote in the poll below and if your new feed reader isn’t listed among the options, let us know the name of the service you picked in the comments section. More →
Google has shown that it most certainly isn’t afraid to pull the plug on services that aren’t making money. More than one out of every three Google products ends up being shuttered, and the company’s popular Google Reader RSS reader will be added to the list of dearly departed Google services in less than two weeks. Now that we have all had some time to get the panic and despair out of our systems, the rebuilding process can begin. There are plenty of options out there when it comes to finding a solid service to replace Google Reader, and it can get overwhelming. As such, we’ve narrowed it down to our five favorites and here they are in no particular order: More →
Microsoft Office is by far the most comprehensive suite of productivity services around, but what if you own a small business with bare-bones requirements for word processing and spread sheets? AllThingsD reports that HP is teaming up with Google to promote Google Apps as a free alternative for companies that don’t want to pay Microsoft fees to use Office. HP “will package [Google's] management tools with its PCs, printers and other IT gear” while helping companies ease into using Google Apps with an assist from its own management software, AllThingsD says. The move toward Google Apps comes at a time when HP has been inching away from Microsoft a bit, as this year the company has launched new devices based on Google’s Chrome and Android operating systems.
Rumors surrounding Apple’s streaming music service had been swirling for years — not months, but years — and now we can finally put them all to bed. The company on Monday took the wraps off of iTunes Radio during this year’s WWDC keynote, and the new service definitely sports a solid feature set. iTunes Radio is integrated into Apple’s Music app, providing curated streaming radio stations and custom stations that improve as you listen and download new music. And now that the service is finally official and we know all there is to know, it’s finally time to start your Google Play Music All Access trial. More →
Apple has reportedly secured a key licensing deal for its upcoming new “iRadio” streaming music service just one week ahead of its annual WWDC conference in San Francisco. Warner Music, which had been holding out for better terms according to earlier reports, has reportedly now agreed to license its catalog to Apple for use with its subscription music service. CNET broke the news on Sunday and it was later confirmed in a brief report from AllThingsD. More →