Microsoft training youth to love intellectual property
617227
Microsoft is stuck in the past and is trying to train kids to stay there, too.
418599
Down with the kids Teenage intellectual property (IP) law swotters are less likely to illegally download music and film files from the internet than their clueless counterparts, Microsoft claimed yesterday.â¦
426598
Aiming to recruit more students to programming and to its set of tools, Microsoft plans to give away full versions of its Visual Studio and Expression development tools.
354714
Microsoft Corp  unveiled a new  initiative on Monday that will give college and high school  students around the world free access to technology tools used  to develop and design software.
674174
(InfoWorld) - Any U.S. high school student who has struggled through verb conjugations in Spanish class knows how hard it can be to keep all of the verb forms straight when trying to learn a new language. Now Microsoft Corp. has filed a patent for a technology that may help by automatically conjugating verbs in various languages. According to a patent application Microsoft filed Aug. 31, 2006, to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company aims to patent a "verb conjugating system" that "allows a user to input a form of a verb and display the verb forms." The system would allow a user to input an infinitive or non-infinitive form of a verb. When a user inputs a non-infinitive form of the verb, the software would identify the corresponding base form of the verb. It then would use that base to display the forms for the verb. Other characteristics of the technology would be to provide verb forms in a certain language when a user enters a verb in that language, and to identify the exact verb when a user enters the spelling for a verb that could pertain to one or more different languages, according to the patent application. The verb-conjugating system may also allow a user to input a phrase that includes a verb, and will display the verb forms corresponding to that verb. It also may detect a misspelling of a verb form and provide suggestions for alternate spellings. According to the filing, the inventors of the technology are Microsoft employees Eric J. Voetberg, Jinsong Yu, Mark D. Stumpf and Robert E. Parkin. In an e-mail statement, David Kaefer, general manager for Microsoft Intellectual Property & Licensing, said that the patent is for software Microsoft is developing that will help people learn new languages. "Just like complex software algorithms can help a user spot flawed grammar or autocorrect spelling, software can help us learn new languages, and weâre building methods to do just that," he said. Kaefer did not say when the software would be completed, or if it would become an actual commercial product on its own or be integrated into another one of Microsoft's products.
461981
Yep, your 7-year-old knows more than you Children are becoming tech-savvy from a younger age, a new study has discovered.â¦
135789
Microsoft is giving away development and design software to university and high school students around the world through a program aimed at fostering technology innovation worldwide.Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates&#160;is expected to unveil the DreamSpark program Tuesday at Stanford University on the first stop of a U.S. and Canadian college tour. The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.Software available to students through DreamSpark includes Microsoft&#39;s development environment, Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, and its Web and graphic design toolset, the Expression Studio. Microsoft also is making available XNA Game Studio 2.0, SQL Server Developer Edition, Windows Server Standard Edition and other software and resources through the program.In the next six months Microsoft expects to extend the program to college students in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and other countries. And in the third quarter, the software will be available to high school students as well, Microsoft said.DreamSpark is part of a company-wide effort to work with local governments, communities, and academic institutions worldwide to give potential technology workers a head start in the competitive job market to foster technology innovation and improve citizens&#39; quality of life, especially in developing countries.Microsoft also is trying to compete worldwide with open-source technologies such as Linux that are freely available to anyone and thus popular with student computer enthusiasts who may not be able to afford to purchase Microsoft products.One major benefactor of DreamSpark is Aisec, an international exchange student program. Its 28,000 students will get software such as Microsoft&#39;s Office productivity suite, said Michelle Galant, vice president of communications.Aisec, which has 1,100 offices in 100 countries, will also use the company&#39;s Exchange e-mail server, Gallant said. &quot;It enables us to run offices and enables us to run our exchange program,&quot; she said.More information about DreamSpark can be found on Microsoft&#39;s MSDN developer site.
551998
Microsoft has announced a new promotional program offering free access to some of its development, design and gaming software to students worldwide. The stated goals of the program are to help spark creativity and prepare the next generation for high-tech careers. In addition, the promotion may also help develop a preference for Microsoft  among a younger generation that often leans toward open source alternatives.
696749
SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp.'s effort to compete against Apple's iPod juggernaut will focus on the idea that people want to be able to easily share music with friends and others.
287750
Sticky notes. White boards. Videogame consoles. For a Microsoft Corp. event designed to show off cutting-edge software inventions, there are a lot of familiar tools on display. That's intentional, said Rico Malvar, the managing director of Microsoft Research's Redmond lab, at TechFest, the annual gathering of the software maker's international research department Tuesday.
85785
Blog: Recent events underscore how many companies want to help bring computing to the world's children--so long as they can make money.
748078
The courses include free or cheap software for schools and bring computer literacy to about 10 million students.
571299
(InfoWorld) - Forty students from around the world got to pitch their software projects to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday as part of a worldwide software development challenge. Gates as well as Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, asked questions about and tried out software innovations from the students, who visited Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters from Egypt, Japan, France, Poland, Korea, the U.S., and the U.K. TheÂ Imagine CupÂ is Microsoft's worldwide software design competition for students. This year it challenged participating teams to build a product that can enable better education for everyone. It has attracted 100,000 students in 100 countries. The final competition will happen in Korea in August and Tuesday's event was an opportunity for some of the leading teams to present their ideas to Gates on Microsoft's campus. The group from Egypt designed software that would allow teachers to input test questions and automatically generate a test that is modified for students with special needs, such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder. A math test, for example, suited for a dyslexic student would use images of houses rather than numbers in addition problems. The U.K. team's project would allow kids to learn software programming. Looking at an image of a fish bowl, a user could, for example, move one of the fish and then see on the side of the screen the code that makes the fish move. Gates called the software "fantastic." "The magic of software can do far more amazing things than people imagine," Gates said in his introduction to the event. Some of the other teams have developed social networking services that let students with similar interests from around the world meet online. The U.S. team had a service that allows students to help each other learn languages, improving their rankings on the site each time they help out another member. The Imagine Cup started five years ago and initially attracted 10,000 participants. Then, the contest had a more general technology focus. "It took off when we connected technology to a social cause," said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer & Platform Evangelism Group. Last year students were challenged to focus on medical innovations. The winner of the first Imagine Cup, Tu Nguyen, spoke to the competitors visiting Microsoft's campus, urging them to let the judges see their passion for their projects. A student at the University of Nebraska when he won, Nguyen has since built a company, DocCenter, to commercialize his invention and recently received a $375 million investment. He developed a system for his parents' Vietnamese restaurant that lets wait staff take orders in English using handheld devices and then translates the orders into other languages understood by the cooks, displaying them on monitors in the kitchen. He built the system because his family relied on him for that translation service and he wanted to get out of the restaurant business. While some of the bright students progressing in the competition could be targets for jobs at high-tech companies like Microsoft, such companies say they are severely restricted in doing so by the limited number of worker visas made available by the government. U.S.Â lawmakers are currently wranglingÂ over new immigration legislation and high-tech companies are lobbying them to dramatically raise the number of visas the government issues for foreign workers and students. Currently, the government issues yearly 65,000 work visas plus an additional 20,000 visas for students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.
683469
In the U.S., Microsoft will offer training vouchers, migration products and online tech support to NetWare users considering a switch.
142211
Young people just need to get started.
353539
To protect computer networks against attacks, students learn to 'think like a hacker.'
151742
OPEN SOURCE champion Microsoft is expanding its programme to give government organisations some of its source code. In a communique from the lair of the Vole, in Redmond, spinsters have said that Microsoft