Microsoft Researchers Show off Wireless Projects
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Several projects dreamed up by the software giant's research department find new uses for mobile phones.
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Technologists have long dreamed of using the Internet to send data about consumer products to shoppers in real time, wherever they happen to be. Researchers at Microsoft Corp. claim they're getting closer to making that happen.
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Next-generation RF tags touted as a way to boost network security.
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Zing lets satellite subscribers connect wirelessly to music programming via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Apple and Microsoft take note. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.
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Microsoft and mobile advertising provider JiWire are teaming up to place ads on municipal Wi-Fi networks.
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Companies will demonstrate how their technology will work together.
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Microsoft Corp. has been doing some soul-searching about the future of municipal Wi-Fi for consumers. The company's market studies are finding end user woes, but also market potential.
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SAN FRANCISCO - The big idea came on a trip: Ted Morgan and Michael Shean used Wi-Fi signals in their travels so often to pick up e-mail, they saw a business opportunity in their future.
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With Bluetooth short-range wireless technology finding its way into an array of hardware products, ranging from mobile phones to in-vehicle telematics systems, a working group promoting the specification has outlined a strategy to make it even more attractive and useful.
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Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies.
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Wireless networks giving computer users  Internet access from anywhere in the home could expose them to  eavesdropping and programmers should make their security  software easier to use, researchers say.
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A new inkjet-printed technology enables a different kind of wireless connectivity between devices.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ is working on a variety of innovative photo projects, ranging from experiments with its 3D maps offering to massive panoramic photos that users can zoom into for details. Developers who work in the company's research arm showed off the technologies on Tuesday during the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington. HD View is one photo project that definitely has the "wow" factor. The technology allows users to combine hundreds of photos to create one massive picture that users can zoom in on to see clear details. In one example, a panoramic photo of the city of Seattle includes 800 images, each 8 megapixals in size, stitched together to create a 3.6 billion-pixel image. On a computer screen, it looks just like a panoramic photo. So, what's the point of combining so many photos? The massive file includes incredible detail. Michael Cohen, a researcher at Microsoft working on the project, zoomed in to the roof of a building where a clay owl peers around a corner. With the picture zoomed out, a viewer doesn't even see a pin prick in the spot where the owl sits. Another large photo of a mountain in Canada looks like a standard nature snapshot. But Cohen zoomed in to discover that climbers are scaling the rock wall. After finding the first climber, he followed the climbing ropes up to find the second one above him on the wall. When the photo is zoomed out, it's hard to imagine there might be climbers on the wall. Microsoft offers the tool to build HD View photos for free on its Web site. Creating an HD View panorama image, however, isn't for just anyone. Such images are quite large and may require special cameras. Another Microsoft project, unveiled last year and built in collaboration with the University of Washington, collects images of a site such as Rome's Trevi fountain from public photo-sharing Web pages such as Flickr. The Photo Tourism technology combines the photos into a 3D image so users can look at the object from any view. The idea was to take advantage of the potentially billions of images that are online, said Noah Snavely, a researcher at the University of Washington who works on the project with Microsoft researchers. Microsoft also demonstrated at the summit some experiments with Virtual Earth. Eyal Ofek, a Microsoft researcher, demonstrated a 3D map of San Francisco that is made up of 10 million images, including 50,000 aerial photographs as well as pictures taken at street level. All the photos are stitched together so a user can navigate from a bird's-eye view seamlessly down to street level. The view is different from the street view capability in Google Maps, which doesn't combine the street-level pictures with aerial shots. About 800 workers are developing projects at Microsoft Research. Some technologies they develop may become commercial Microsoft products, and others could be sold to other companies. The summit, which ended Tuesday, was an opportunity for Microsoft and its partners in academia to show off some of their projects.
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For years, programmers at Microsoft and elsewhere have worked to make it easier for devices like cell phones and personal digital assistants to work instantly and easily with computers.
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A New York City group creates a kit so that anyone with an old computer can create a wireless access point.
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At a renovated textile warehouse near Boston's Fort Point Channel, where 50 employees of Ember Corp. are moving this month from cramped quarters next door, young engineers are busy lining the walls with 600 wireless sensor nodes -- each containing a low-powered radio frequency microchip mounted on a printed circuit board.
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One-third of U.S. Internet users  have connected to the Web using a wireless network to send  e-mails, check the latest news or read other things, according  to a survey released on Sunday by the Pew Internet Project.