Microsoft News Tracker

Some Microsoft news items from this week that didn’t find a post of their own:

MSN wrings the last lonely remaining viewers out of the “long tail” with “‘A Big Life With Sissy Biggers’ webisodes to air exclusively on MSN.”

Microsoft will provide search, mail, and messaging services to the customers of India’s 4th largest mobile provider, Hutchison Essar.

Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Robotics Studio which was announced in June.

Microsoft’s Live Labs And Microsoft Research launched a tech preview of Photosynth, an application that blends ordinary photos into an immersive 3D image. It uses technology developed by Seadragon Software which Microsoft acquired in January, er February. More details at the Photosynth site and from Tuan Nguyen at DailyTech.

From last week: Microsoft and a number of other leading tech companies settled the “JPEG patent case” with Forgent Networks for considerably less than Forgent had been hoping for.

Microsoft’s Benjamin Poon yesterday announced a Windows Live Mail Preview Launch in the Netherlands, but apparently it was overwhelmed at first by demand from users wanting to convert their Hotmail accounts and jump on board. Meanwhile, sneaky users have been figuring out ways to game the preview process to make an early grab for desired email addresses outside the Netherlands.

Office 2007 has RTMed, Windows Vista has RTMed, and now comes word from Peter Galli at Microsoft Watch on the release to manufacturing of Exchange Server 2007, the third product that will be launched on Nov. 30:

Exchange Server 2007 will be released to manufacturing in December and be available to customers within a number of days after that, Microsoft officials have confirmed.

The formal announcement of Exchange 2007’s RTM date was made in David Lemson’s keynote on November 7 at the Exchange Connections conference.

Lemson is the product unit manager for Exchange, and his keynote was blogged by Exchange MVP Paul Robichaux.

This means that the product will not be immediately available to Microsoft’s business customers at the company’s Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 launch event on November 30.

Robichaux says, “December or bust!” Hopefully, it’s not an end of year death march.

When Microsoft acquired Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell’s Winternals Software in July, they also got a collection of very useful free tools that had been available for download at Sysinternals.com. The good news for all the devoted users of these tools is that Microsoft is continuing to make them available for free and that they are now available on Microsoft’s TechNet site under the moniker, Windows Sysinternals. And yes, they even have the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) screen saver. Robert McMillan interviews Russinovich and has more details at PC World.

Here’s some food for thought from comScore:

More than Half of Top 25 U.S. Web Properties Generate More Traffic from Outside the U.S. than from Within

comScore Networks, a leader in measuring the digital age, today released the results of a study showing that 14 of the top 25 U.S. Web properties attract more traffic from people outside the U.S. than from within.  Among them are the Top 5 Web properties in the U.S. – Yahoo! Sites, Time Warner Network, Microsoft Sites, Google Sites and eBay.

I’m sure the major sites are intimately aware of their traffic sources, but it has interesting implications for efforts to increase traffic and ensure monetization.