You must be aware of the on going anti-trust trial from European Commission against Google on their search practices. The companies which oppose Google in this case includes Microsoft, Yelp, Trip Advisor and more. Recently, they have created a new website to showcase their concerns to the competition commission. As the European Commission considers how best to address its anticompetitive concerns with Google, they have offered this tool, Focus on the User – Local, as a potential framework for ensuring that consumer welfare is maximised.

You might think that Google gives you the best answers from across the web when you search for something as important as a pediatrician in Munich, a bicycle repair shop in Copenhagen, or a hotel in Madrid. But Google doesn’t actually use its normal organic search algorithm to produce the responses to this question that you see prominently on the first screen. Instead, it promotes a more limited set of results drawn from Google+ ahead of the more relevant ones you would get from using Google’s organic search algorithm.

The European Commission is weighing its options to ensure that consumers searching using Google can access all websites, not just content powered by Google+. We think the best way to do that is using Google’s own organic search algorithm to identify the most relevant results — regardless of their source — from across the web.

We built a tool to demonstrate how easy it is to make this happen. We’ve even tested its results with thousands of users to show that consumers prefer results that aren’t exclusively powered by Google+. Rather, they prefer to get the most relevant results. All of the information in this demonstration comes from Google itself, and the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms, followed by a basic sort according to average rating and review quantity.

Find more information about it here.

Nokia MixRadio for Windows Phone devices today got updated to v4.5.2.468 in Windows Phone Store. This is a minor update with some bug fixes and performance improvements.

What’s MixRadio?

• MixRadio is a streaming music service. It brings you free, personalized music with no advertising.
• Start listening with Play Me, an ever-changing mix based on the music you love.
• Use Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down to make the mix better each time you play. It’s like having your own personal radio station.
• Also includes hundreds of handcrafted mixes, create a mix, gigs, artist notifications, mp3 store and player, and of course the ability to save your favorite mixes for offline playback so you can listen even without an internet connection.

Download the update here from Windows Phone Store for free from your Lumia device.

Till now, Samsung was using its own document tool called JungUm Global for productivity experiences. Today, they have announced that they will be switching from their own tool to Microsoft Word. Samsung has decided to go for Microsoft Word because it is the de-facto productivity software used by over 90% of the people in the market. Also it will make communications with Samsung’s other business partners easier. Another important advantage of using Microsoft Word is the improved compatibility with others such as Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

“Since MS Word supports almost all operating systems, such as Windows, Android and Linux, our staff can also work in a smart manner through PC, smartphones, and tablets,”

Source: yonhapnews

While we are waiting for Microsoft to start its press event in the US to talk about its upcoming version of Windows,Rafael Rivera today highlighted one the key improvements Microsoft has made in Windows 9. Microsoft has finally decided to improve its Command Prompt/console. Microsoft is including several experimental features in this release. Some of the experimental features include line wrapping selection, ability to filter clipboard contents on paste, support for new Control key shortcuts and more.

If you use Command Prompt often, I’m sure you will be delighted to hear this new feature in Windows 9.

Read more at Rafael Rivera’s blog.

Forza Horizon 2 racing game is going on sale today for Xbox One gamers. Race through a massive wide-open world featuring dramatic weather and day to night cycles. Instantly connect with friends in the ultimate celebration of speed, style, and action-packed driving. Explore beautiful and exotic locations in more than 200 of the world’s greatest cars, all created with precise detail in 1080p. This game already received hugely positive reviews from the critics. 

Game Description:

Explore a Massive, Living Open World – A world of beauty and freedom awaits.

• The next evolution of the best-in-class Forza graphics engine delivers full day and night cycle with spectacular weather, lighting, and visual effects.
• An epic road trip career mode adapts to your car choices with hundreds of events across a beautiful and diverse European landscape.
• However you like to play, there is an endless variety of free-roam driving fun. Whether you’re racing, hunting hidden treasures like exotic barn find cars, or showing off your customized rides at car meet locations spread across the world, the choice is yours.

Action-Packed Driving – Take risks and earn rewards for showing off your driving skills and style.

• Smash through fences onto back country dirt trails, plow though fields of crops and dense forests, and discover new shortcuts on your thrilling, high-speed adventures.
• Race against aircraft and trains in thrilling Showcase events.
• Make your name at the Horizon Festival. Whether you’re racing in traffic, catching huge air, or racking up skill points and combos with awesome stunts, your legacy begins here.

Instantly Connect with Friends – Only on Xbox One.

• Jump between solo and online play instantly. No lobbies, no waiting.
• Join friends online and free roam together, compete in races and team modes, or take part in fun co-op Bucket List challenges.
• Join or create your own Car Club of up to 1000 members to expand your network of friends and rule the leaderboards.
• In solo play, Drivatar technology fills your world with your friends even when they aren’t online.

Your Ultimate Car Fantasy – Drive more than 200 of the world’s greatest cars.

• A diverse collection of amazing vehicles ranging from extreme off-roaders to modern supercars, classic muscle, and much more.
• Every car and truck is recreated in obsessive detail, with full cockpit views, including functional windshield wipers, working headlights, and authentic interiors.

The Horizon Festival invites you to join its celebration of cars, music, freedom, and fun on the world’s greatest roads. Get ready for the road trip of your life!

You can order Forza Horizon 2 for Xbox One from Amazon and Microsoft Store.

You can order the Xbox One Console – Standard Edition without Kinect for $299 from Amazon.

You can order the Xbox One Console – Standard Edition without Kinect Microsoft Store.

  

Microsoft today updated the Nokia Play To in Windows Phone Store to v3.5.1.1. This new update has added the ability to scale images to Full HD or 4K Ultra HD, share OneDrive album contents and more.

New in this version:

– Scale images to Full HD or 4K Ultra HD
– Share images from your OneDrive albums
– Turn shuffle on and off while playing music

The free Lumia-exclusive app can be found in the Windows phone Store here.

Microsoft allows Windows and Windows Phone app developers to easily publish their apps to various countries. If they are using Microsoft Advertising as their monetization method, they needed a world map view of their app performance. Microsoft heard this feedback, and they have added it to the pubCenter. To access the World Map, simply go to the pubCenter dashboard and select “Map”. You can analyze key business metrics – like revenue, ad requests, fill rate and CPM – is as easy as hovering over a specific country on the map. Also you can zoom in on any area of the map to view data for smaller countries.

In addition to that, Microsoft has implemented a streamlined payout process, resulting in more than 50% faster payout. Any developer that has reached the payout threshold will receive payment earlier than in previous months.

Read more about it here.

Some reports claimed it worked on non-Samsung hardware too. So, I put it to test and tried to install it on Nokia X2 by downloading and tapping on the apk file. It didn’t work initially, but then I noticed that on opening it talks about updating the app. So, it was clear that the existing HERE app on Nokia X2 needed to be removed first. After uninstalling the HERE app, the leaked HERE Beta got installed like a charm.

Three things are worth noticing here. HERE Beta for Android has a installation size of 74 MB as compared to 15 MB required by HERE apps for Nokia X2. Also this Beta release is dated wk 36, which means it was released in 1st week of September. The HERE Beta for Android hasGlympse integrated as confirmed earlier by Nokia.

Download It Here

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is currently visiting India for the first time after he became CEO. In a press event held today in India, Satya revealed that Microsoft will build data centers in India to serve the demand for cloud-based computing. Microsoft will be offering both Azure and Office 365 services in India with this upcoming data center by end of 2015.

“Microsoft’s cloud services in India have grown over 100 percent in revenue in the past year,” the company said in a statement. “Microsoft’s locally available cloud services will open opportunities for banking, financial services, and insurance companies, state-owned enterprises and government departments.”

Source: Bloomberg

Amazon.in: Online Shopping India - Buy Books, Mobile Phones, Laptops, Tablets, Cameras, Toys & Games, Baby Products, Sarees, Salwar suits, Kurtas, etc..

Shop on Amazon India faster with this app.

This is an Unofficial App developed for slow connections.

Install the Amazon India Fast App for a secure shopping experience at your finger-tips anywhere & anytime when you are having a slow network connection.This App gives faster access to shipping on Amazon India store to buy online any products online easily.

For those who like to shop on Amazon India while on slow 2G connections, can now easily shop with this App.

Download From Store:  Windows Phone Store Link

Seems, fellas at XDA have somehow managed to locate HERE Beta apk for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, which should be officially out in early October, as promised by Nokia at the time of announcement.

For your info, Samsung licensed HERE Maps to be compatible with its full range of Galaxy devices. Not only existing Galaxy devices will be able to download the HERE Beta apps whenSamsung Gear S hits the store, but seems new Samsung Galaxy devices will come with HERE app pre-installed from next month.

XDA members are reporting that the HERE Beta works fine on even non-Samsung hardware. The step-by-step voice navigation, offlline maps download is already present with this version of app.

Download link     Via

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that they rebuilt MSN from the ground up for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Microsoft will no longer produce content in-house, instead the new MSN brings together the world’s best media sources along with data and services to enable users to do more in News, Sports, Money, Travel, Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, and more. Over the past 3 weeks, nearly 10 million users tested out the new site and more than 80,000 gave feedback. Based on the feedback, Microsoft has made numerous changes to the site.

Over the next 72 hours, Microsoft will roll out the new MSN to the more than 425 million people in over 50 countries around the world that come to the site each month.

The new MSN is here

The new MSN is completely built from the ground up on Azure to provide massive, cost-effective scale (with more than 30,000 Azure cores for serving and 100 Terabytes of storage), reliability, and ongoing agility for a cloud-first, mobile-first world. Every single line of code was re-written to ensure that you have one consistent experience regardless of whether you are accessing your stocks in MSN Money, your favorite sports teams in MSN Sports, or your recipe collections in MSN Food & Drink. All of those experiences will always be with you across your devices.

The new MSN provides a global, comprehensive perspective from thousands of worldwide, authoritative sources across 11 categories. It’s simple to personalize what you want to see based on your interests. In the coming months, we will release a suite of MSN apps across iOS and Android to complement today’s release of the Windows and Windows Phone apps. You only need to set your favorites once, and your preferences will be connected across MSN, Cortana, Bing and other Microsoft experiences

Source: Microsoft

As we reported few hours back, Microsoft has now rebranded all their Bing apps with MSN branding. Along with this update, Microsoft has delivered few new features to MSN Weather and MSN Health and Fitness Apps.

In the MSN Health & Fitness and Weather app, If you’re running the Nokia 1520, 630 or 635, you can keep track of steps taken via the pedometer and GPS tracker in the Health and Fitness App directly from the lock screen. You can no longer sync your fitness data with Microsoft HealthVault. However, Microsoft has added a new independent cloud store that syncs your data across devices.

Also, MSN Weather app can offer up-to-the-minute weather statuses from the Weather app.

Download  MSN Health And Fitness and MSN Weather apps from Windows Phone Store.

Nokia’s “affordable flagship”, the Nokia Lumia 830 may come to AT&T on the 7th November.

The 10 megapixel handset is rumoured to come in a special black version which AT&T presumably feels suite their customers better than neon orange or green.

The handset features a 5 inch 720p HD screen, 10 megapixel camera with OIS, Snapdragon 400 processor, 1 GB RAM and 16 GB storage with microSD card expansion, and is only 8.5 mm thick.

No pricing has been announced yet, but given the handset’s tagline we are going to assume it will launch at around $100 on contract.

Udemy is the world’s largest online education service, with more than 3 million students.

The service offers a huge number of (unaccredited) courses which makes learning a new skill very easy, but unfortunately do not offer a Windows Phone app.

Developer Efrat Barak, who is related to famous Windows Phone hacker and now Apple employee Justin Angel, has decided to change this, and has released an unofficial but pretty comprehensive version of the app for Windows Phone.

The app lets you find interesting courses based on availability, sales and categories, check out course information such as rating, user reviews, description and much more and watch videos for courses you own and sample lectures from most other courses.

Courses cover a variety of topics such as: Programming (java, python, php, ruby, and more), Entrepreneurship, Photography, Yoga, Marketing, Salsa, Cake Decorating, Design and more.

Being 3rd party, the app still requires you be an existing Udemy user and does not support purchasing new courses in-app. This can of course be done via a browser however.

Download the free app from the Windows Phone Store here.

  

One of the things cortnana lacks is the ability to search using multiple search engines.. With Cortfinder you can search using google yahoo , wikepedia ebay etc. right from cortana..

Want to search using multiple search engines with just your voice ? Cortfinder is the solution for you.. Cortfinder integrates with cortana and allows you to search multiple search engines with your voice..

Currently Supported --  Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, E-bay, Urban Dictionary, (More to come in future updates)

To search , just say “search ” followed by your search engine followed by for and your query..

ex:

search google for games

search yahoo for cars

etc..

Fast Simple And Convinient !

You can grab Cortfinder for Windows Phone 8.1 From here

Asus is planning to release an entry-level PC called VivoMini which will look like a Mac Mini. This PC box will be powered by an Intel Celeron 2957U Haswell CPU and Asus has plans to offer models with Core i3 and Core i5 processors as well with higher price tags. Since it doesn’t comes with any internal storage and wireless card, it can’t be used as a standalone PC by connecting it to a display. However, this model comes with 4 USB 3.0 ports, HDMI and DisplayPort, Ethernet jacks, full and half-sized PCIe card slots inside the case and an m.SATA connector for storage and wireless cards. Also, it supports up to 16GB of RAM and has 2 SODIMM slots.

The PC measures 4.9″ x 4.9″ x 1.7″ and features a VESA mount-compatible design if you want to mount the VivoMini to the back of a TV or monitor.

This will go on sale for $149 in November.

Source: Liliputing

Microsoft Prediction Lab has launched a new website-based showcase and laboratory for the ongoing work of David Rothschild, a Microsoft researcher and leading expert in a new kind of data-driven predictive methodology.

In the Microsoft Prediction Lab you can make predictions about upcoming events and view the combined predictions of the crowd.

1. Predict the 2014 U.S. Elections and other topics including Foreign Affairs,
   Social Issues, and Science and Technology.
2. Challenge your friends and compete with other teams to see who is best
   at forecasting the future.
3. Follow your predictions as events unfold.

The idea is to collect data quickly and update it as often as possible.

This interactive platform houses all of the predictive efforts Rothschild has been featuring on his blog and in academic journals and presentations. Microsoft Prediction Lab displays his predictions — some of them updated in real time — in a wide range of fields, from sports and entertainment to politics and economics.

Rothschild sees the new platform as “a great laboratory for researchers” as well as “a very socialized experience” for interested users. Among other contests, he plans to predict the results of every upcoming U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial race. Users will be able to customize views on the site based on their geographic location and their interests.

via: Microsoft

HP today announced two new affordable HP Stream 7 and HP Steam 8 which are 7-inch and 8-inch Windows tablets. Both these tablets are powered by  Intel Atom Z3735G quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, 32GB internal memory with support for expandable storage and Bluetooth 4.0 support. These tablets also come with a 1-year subscription of Microsoft Office 365 Personal which includes 1TB of OneDrive online storage and 60 minutes of Skype each month. Another cool value add for the HP Stream 8 tablet is that it also includes an optional 200MB of free 4G data each month with no annual contract for the life of the device too.

The HP Stream 7 tablet is expected to be available starting at $99.99 (U.S.) and the HP Stream 8 tablet is expected to be available starting at $149.99 (U.S.) in November.