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Microsoft has announced that the Office 2010 suite, the latest in the long line of the popular word processing bundle, is now available online and in stores.

New to the 2010 version is the addition of Office Web apps, which are free for consumers to use online, allowing for saved files in the cloud as well as collaboration and sharing.

Says Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division: "Along with Office 2010, Microsoft also released the SharePoint 2010 collaboration suite. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 define the future of productivity. With the 2010 set of products, organizations will save, innovate, and grow as their people benefit from working across the PC, phone, and browser."

Additionally to the Web apps are new broadcast capabilities for PowerPoint, auto-preview for Word and "Sparklines" for Excel which can "generate trend visualization graphics."

Microsoft has been actively promoting the Web apps as it competes with Google for cloud-based word processing. Google Docs is actively used by millions of users.

AndroidPolice has posted a full report on the performance of the Google Nexus One running the upcoming Android 2.2, which has yet to be released to the public but has been tested by a developer from the site, Ian Douglas.

All the features of 2.2 will be revealed at the May 19th I/O conference, but so far all we know is that it will have Flash 10.1 built-in. Additionally, we know it has a new home screen.

To test the performance of the device running 2.2, Police is using a tool called Linpack. As the authors of the program could explain it better than I ever could, here is their description of the tool: "The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system’s floating point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense N by N system of linear equations Ax = b, which is a common task in engineering. The solution is obtained by Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting, with 2/3*N3 + 2*N2 floating point operations. The result is reported in Millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second (MFLOP/s, sometimes simply called FLOPS).

Film streaming service Blinkbox has announced the release of a PS3 platform that will use the console's browser and optimizes the system's controllers.

Gamers in the UK can download the films for 99p each, and TV episodes can be downloaded for 39p. To purchase the films for keeps costs £2.99.

"The PS3 is the first of a number of devices to which we will be bringing Blinkbox, enabling customers to use our service on their TVs for instant streaming of new blockbuster movies - available on the same day as their release on DVD - as well as a growing library of free ad-supported titles," adds CEO Michael Comish. "As a console owner myself, I knew that fellow gamers wanted access to the very largest selection of movies for instant viewing, and did not want to lose valuable hard-drive space or have to wait for their downloads."

The Blinkbox webpage automatically resizes for all TV sizes.

Blinkbox has some very new films available currently, such as Avatar, the Hangover and Sherlock Holmes. You can check the site here: http://www.blinkbox.com/

Rumored in the past, the Xbox 360 Project Natal motion-sensing camera has been confirmed for an October release, this time by Microsoft Saudi marketing manager Syed Bilal Tariq.

The official release date was expected to be unveiled at the E3 event next month.

GamertagRadio was interviewing the manager and asked when the device would hit Saudi Arabia. He responded that it would be available on the same day as the North American and EU launches.

Says Tariq: "It is going to be somewhere in October and we will be in a position to confirm the date at E3, which is in June, but definitely it is going to be October 2010."

Microsoft has always said an "autumn launch" was the time frame for the release but strayed away from an actual date.

Natal is still the codename for the device which is expected to have its final consumer name revealed at E3.

Google has announced new features added to Google Maps for Android today, with the latest update adding biking directions, a Navigation shortcut right from the homescreen and the ability to share places with friends instantly.

The update, version 4.2, is available now through the Android Market.

Biking Directions:


Biking directions give users the ability to see bike-only trails, roads with lanes, or roads that are at least accessible to bikers. There is also a terrain layer, so you can see when that huge hill is coming.

Google Navigation shortcut


Pretty straight forward, but the Navigation shortcut gives users the ability to get right into the Navigation feature of Maps. Hit the icon, speak or type your destination (or pick one from your contacts) and voila! you are ready to go.

Sharing

From the Navigation search results page, "share this place" is the last feature. You can share the info of where you are going with one tap to anyone you want. If you want to bring people to you, you can take a snapshot of your current location using the "My Location" dot or "Latitude." You can even tweet it.

Kaleidescape has announced the launch of its new M500 and M300 Blu-ray players.

The more expensive player gives users the ability to rip Blu-ray discs (as well as DVDs and CDs) to your home server, which "can then be played back instantly by M500 and M300 Players, creating the world's first multi-zone movie server for Blu-ray."

Because the studios would not have ever signed off on it otherwise, the original Blu-ray disc must remain in the drive to playback the ripped content from the server, but it will save your drive's laser.

The company says it is "developing a disc loader which will keep a large number of discs present within the Kaleidescape system. It will also provide bulk import, and make it easy to find and retrieve a disc."

Adds Michael Malcolm, Kaleidescape's founder, chairman and CEO: "We have invested a great amount of time and resources in developing the M-Class architecture, which is our platform for future innovation. We now have the tools to improve our world-renowned user experience and offer an even greater variety of content."

Yesterday, we reported that the latest NPD figures showed the Android operating system had finally overtaken the iPhone for the number two spot in the U.S. smartphone market share, taking 28 percent in the latest quarter.

RIM's BlackBerry OS remains the clear leader at 36 percent, with the iPhone OS in third place at 21 percent for the Q1 2010.

Today, Apple has responded, saying that the NPD figures are limited and not important anyways, as Apple leads in global market share.

Says spokesperson Natalie Harrison: "This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide...IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis. We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon."

According to ComputerWorld, an advertising firm called Landor Associates is currently working on an ad campaign for the upcoming iPhone HD, except not for AT&T, but instead for Verizon.

For the last three years, the iPhone in the United States has been exclusively on AT&T and it was reported this week that Apple had signed a 5-year pact originally in 2007 that would keep the two companies exclusive until 2012.

Landor has done all of Verizon's branding since 2007, and the new rumor is that the latest big ad campaign will be to promote the iPhone HD, set for a June launch.

The campaign will likely go side-by-side with a TV campaign from Apple's current iPhone agency TBWA.

The rumored phone will add a front-facing camera for video conferencing, a better standard camera (including larger lens and flash), a Micro-SIM slot (just like the iPad), 960x640 resolution, a second mic, metallic exterior (not plastic) and split side buttons for volume as well as a completely new form factor.

Thanks to a picture posted on Flickr (originally in Korean here), it appears that 3D gaming is headed to the Xbox 360 sometime in the near future, with Microsoft and LG entering into a "strategic" partnership.

The companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for Marketing (MOU) and will jointly market the upcoming product.

Buyers of the LED 3D HDTV models 55LX9500 and 47LX9500 will get a couple of Xbox 360 3D games, although it is unclear what those games may be.

Says Microsoft America of the new partnership: "3D games are available today on Xbox 360 and will continue to evolve. Today, you can buy a 3DTV and wear glasses to play games like Avatar and "Batman: Arkham Asylum." The promotional partnership with LG announced in South Korea today is specific to the South Korean market, but is further evidence that as 3D adoption grows, Xbox 360 will support 3D games and entertainment."

According to the latest Business Software Alliance (BSA) report, pirates cost software companies over $50 billion USD in 2009, with Asian nations accounting for a large amount of those losses.

Despite increases in anti-piracy efforts, 43 percent of all software being used on computers right now is pirated, up from 41 percent in 2008, reads the report.

Globally, losses mounted to $51.4 billion, with a whopping $16.5 billion coming from the Asia-Pacific region.

Overall, the BSA says the increase in piracy is thanks to the strong growth of PC owners in India, China and Brazil.

Victor Lim, a VP at IDC (which jointly carried out the study with the BSA) says that despite pirates software rates falling in 54 nations, it rose or stayed neutral in 57. Piracy rate in the Asia-Pacific territories was 59 percent, meaning that of of the 900 million pieces of commercial software installed in 2009, 530 million were unlicensed.

"This study makes clear that while efforts to bring down piracy levels in the Asia-Pacific are enjoying some success, dollar losses at over 16.5 billion (dollars) remain the highest in the world," adds Jeffrey Hardee, BSA's vice president and regional director. "This is unacceptable and there is still much to be done to engage governments, businesses and consumers on the risks and impact of software piracy."

NEC has announced today that its video content identification technology will be supported in the upcoming MPEG-7 video standard, meaning content owners that release videos with the standard can "detect illegal copies" uploaded to the Internet almost instantly.

The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video.

NEC says "these developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment."

Among the features of the video content identification technology are:

Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.

The creator of the extremely popular show American Idol, Simon Fuller, has seen his roster of artists hit a new iTunes milestone, 160 million songs downloaded.

Fuller's artist management company 19 Entertainment said some of the more famous artists in the group are idol winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and former and present British singers The Spice Girls and Annie Lennox.

"He is without question the biggest manager of the digital age," says Fred Bronson, author of "The Billboard Book of Number One Hits."

Fuller had teamed up with iTunes right at the start, in 2003 when legal digital music was still in its infancy. "I felt there was a real synergy with what I do, which is launching new artists and TV shows, and what iTunes does, which is to sell music in an immediate and interactive way," Fuller added via Reuters.

Engadget has reported today that Apple and AT&T originally signed a five-year exclusivity pact in 2007 with the launch of the original iPhone, although it is unclear whether that deal is still in effect, just three years later.

The site found the official details out after reading a 2008 court filing by Apple, although a USAToday report made it clear in 2007 that AT&T was the exclusive distributor of the phone in the United States. Verizon also passed on the original deal.

The filing was necessary because Apple and AT&T were the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2007, which claimed that the carrier had a monopoly over iPhone customers, since after their contract expired, they could not jump to another carrier, as the handset was locked down.

Nilay Patel of Engadget says the real question may be whether the deal is still in effect, or been reworked since 2008: "Contracts can be canceled, amended, and breached in many ways, and AT&T's spotty recent service history plus the explosion of the iPhone and the mobile market in general have given Apple any number of reasons to revisit the deal. In addition, the two companies obviously hit the negotiating table again to hammer out the iPad's pricing plans, and there's no way of knowing whether that deal involves the iPhone as well."

According to the latest NPD figures, the Android operating system has finally overtaken the iPhone for the number two spot in the U.S. smartphone market share, taking 28 percent in the latest quarter.

RIM's BlackBerry OS remains the clear leader at 36 percent, with the iPhone OS in third place at 21 percent for the Q1 2010.

"As in the past, carrier distribution and promotion have played a crucial role in determining smartphone market share," adds Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD. "In order to compete with the iPhone, Verizon Wireless has expanded its buy-one-get-one offer beyond RIM devices to now include all of their smartphones."

Some of the prominent phones to be used in the BOGO promotions were the Motorola Droid and the BlackBerry Curve, both strong sellers.

Overall, AT&T subscribers accounted for 32 percent of all smartphone sales with Verizon close behind at 30 percent.

Adds Rubin: "Recent previews of BlackBerry 6, the recently announced acquisition of Palm by HP, and the pending release of Windows Phone 7 demonstrates the industry’s willingness to make investments to address consumer demand for smartphones and other mobile devices. Carriers continue to offer attractive pricing for devices, but will need to present other data-plan options to attract more customers in the future."

Vodafone, Orange and O2 have all priced their iPad 3G data plans, with each offering micro-SIM cards, now.

O2 offers the following price tiers:

500MB per day- £2.00
1GB per month- £10.00
3GB per month- £15.00

Orange offers the following pricing:

200MB per day- £2.00
1GB per week- £7.50
3GB per month- £15.00
10GB per month- £25.00

Vodafone is the only to offer unlimited, and offers the following:

1GB per month- £10.00
Unlimited per month- £25.00

Additionally, Orange and O2 offer unlimited Wi-Fi through "BT Openzone" hotspots.

The iPad will go on sale in the UK on May 28th and will cost £429 for the basic model (Wi-Fi, 16GB) and £699 for the 3G/Wi-Fi/64GB model.