Technology

Microsoft Office execs have said for months that the company wants to forge a more open relationship with customers. To build on that goal, Microsoft launched the Office 365 for business public road map on Wednesday. The website shows the status of upcoming Office 365 features. Microsoft also announced an opt-in program called First Release that gives customers early access to new features. This year, Office GM Julia White told Information Week that, because Office 365 is a cloud-based platform, Microsoft can not only introduce new features more quickly, but also offer earlier previews to the public. In a blog post announcing First Release and the new road map, Office 365 group product manager Jake Korzybski reiterated this theme. "Just as we transformed our development process, we need to transform our communication processes regarding changes and future updates to the service," he wrote. Both the road map and First Release are targeted at business and institut...

Apple has already stepped into the health and fitness tracking market with its Health app for iOS. Now, the company could be upping the ante with its upcoming iPhone New code spotted by developers who spoke with 9 to 5 Mac indicates the iPhone 6 could have a barometer built in. See also: 10 Better Alternatives to Your iPhone's Native Apps An integrated barometer would track altitude and air pressure and could infer temperature readings, too. Existing apps already perform many of these tasks, but they use the iPhone's GPS and motion chips to do so. A piece of dedicated measurement hardware is likely to provide better performance. 

Intel wants to inject passion and excitement into mobile chat through a new app that relies on face-tracking technology to assess facial expressions and mood. With Pocket Avatars, users can chat with friends using animated three-dimensional avatars, but there’s a twist. A camera on a mobile device tracks a user’s face and expressions, and those emotions are reflected on the avatar during a chat. The avatar serves as an alter-ego for those who don’t to put their real face on screen, said Mike Bell, vice president and general manager of the New Devices Group at Intel. “It’s just a fun thing on top of standard messaging,” Bell said. Emoticons have been a standard tool for expressions in text messaging. An animated chat that reflects a real person’s mood is more engaging, Bell said, adding that if a user is angry or happy, the avatar will show it, Bell said. The camera captures moving faces, lighting conditions and a range of emotions such as smiles, blinking eyes or kiss...

BlackBerry has confirmed the recently-leaked handset code named 'Winder mere' will officially be announced under the name Passport. It will debut at an event in London this September. Following its quarterly earnings report, during which it announced a return to profit of sorts, BlackBerry CEO John Chen confirmed that the short and wide-set device currently doing the rounds is the real deal. Naturally, as Crack Berry reports, the device will be named after its passport-like dimensions. According to the presentation, the Blackberry Passport will feature a 4.5-inch 1440 x 1440 display that's as square as an Instagram photo. The Passport will be a wide 3.18-inches, which is even wider than the pocket-busting 3.12-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 3. An accompanying photo shows the handset will have BlackBerry's stoutest keyboard yet featuring only three rows of physical buttons. The Passport also appeared along two other handsets named the Z3 and Classic. Internally...

Taiwan's Quanta Computer Inc will start mass production of Apple Inc's first smart watch in July, a source familiar with the matter said, as the US tech giant tries to prove it can still innovate against rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. The watch, which remains unnamed but which company followers have dubbed the iWatch, will be Apple's first foray into a niche product category that many remain skeptical about, especially as to whether it can drive profits amid cooling growth in tech gadgets. The production will be a boost to Quanta, given that its work for Apple till now has focused on laptops and iPods, product lines that are in decline. Quanta's role though is likely to raise questions about what involvement Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, one of Apple's biggest suppliers, will play in production. While the watch is widely expected, the start date of its mass production and the extent of Quanta's involvement were not known until now. Mass produ...

The Amazon Fire phone has finally been announced after years of speculation, and it's certainly bringing some different ideas to the table. First up it sports five cameras on the front - one is the traditional front-facing snapper, and the other four are part of the Fire's Dynamic Perspective feature. Dynamic Perspective tracks your head, and works out the distance it isthe screen, to produce 3D-like graphics on-screen. Firefly is a supercharged barcode scanner which you can use to scan, well, anything. A pub sign, a car, a magazine, a bottle of beer. You name it, Firefly will scan it, and then probably try and make you buy something. Mayday - Amazon's 24-7-365 interactive customer service - also makes the leapthe Kindle Fire HDX tablet to the Fire phone. Thatsounds lovely, but is it any good? We've taken a look at the early hands on Amazon Fire phone reviewsaround the web to gauge the interest. Gizmodo Gizmodo doesn't hold back, declarin...

Teamare Gaston, 17, thinks she'd like to be a business journalist. But Google has other designs on her brain. On Thursday, Gaston and 150 other New York-area high school girls will attend the kickoff event for Made with Code, a $50 million Google initiative with the simple and singular focus of bringing more girls into the coding fold. "Our industry has lots of stereotypes, including the notion that coding means sitting at a computer alone," says Google Vice President Megan Smith. "We hope to show girls that coding is fun. But there's also the simple fact that supply and demand is not working. There are millions of jobs out there going begging." Google's event, held at a hip Manhattan loft called Skylight Modern, features host Mindy Kaling (of TV's The Mindy Project), speakers such as Chelsea Clinton and a range of tech-savvy women bent on inspiring the teens in attendance. Made with Code's mission is anchored by a websitegir...

T he Canadian Supreme Court has put Google on its heels, ruling that search results must be scrubbed clean all over the globe. In a case that had one company asking that Google remove search results of a rival, the courts ruled that those results must be banished the world over, not just Canada. It’s an odd precedent, and one that could have a lasting snowball effect. It goes like this: One company is trying to stop another from selling network devices, claiming they are using stolen trade information. Part of that lawsuit insists Google remove links to the Defendants 300+ websites, where they’re selling the devices. Pretty thorough for the Plaintiff, but the Supreme Court has taken it a step further. The highest court has granted a temporary injunction, saying that within 14 days, Google must remove links to the company’s sites. Not only must they do so for Canada, but the court has ruled that Google must do so in every country. The links will have disappeared from se...

Amazon's new smartphone, the Fire Phone, hits stores July 25. Preorders started June 18. At the phone's launch event, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that the company tried to build a phone that was extremely innovative and different. There are some major features that set it apart right off the bat, including its "dynamic perspective" effects, which make images feel 3-D, its motion-sensing capabilities, and Firefly, its visual search engine.  Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions. Amazon shows off its dynamic perspective feature right from the lock screen. When you tilt the phone, you see the balloons from slightly different angles so they feel 3-D. Although you can use any picture you want as a lock screen, the Fire ships with more than a dozen custom images that will take advantage of dynamic perspective. The Fire also shows off dynamic perspective working tog...

BANGALORE : Mozilla is reportedly planning on launching a Smartphone costing as low as $25 for the Indian markets according to the inputs on the Wall Street journal. The company has announced a tie-up with the Indian OEMs like the Intex and Spice to bring its Firefox OS phones, reports Times Of India. Mozilla will work with the Chinese chipset manufacturer Spreadtrum, to develop the chipsets which will cost low and let the handset manufacturers to keep the price of the Smartphone cheap. There is no word on the specifications of the phone as yet, but the company says the phone will be available in India sometime this year. "Intex is excited to announce its association with Mozilla which will enable us to develop unparalleled smart devices on the latest Firefox OS platform”, said Mr. Sanjay Kumar Kalirona, Business Head, Mobile, Intex Technologies."The platform will give us an edge in upgrading buyers from feature phones to Smartphones while making it affordable for the...

WASHINGTON : MIT researchers have developed a new technology that tracks how your private data is used online. Researchers in the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are developing a protocol they call "HTTP with Accountability," or HTTPA, which will automatically monitor the transmission of private data and allow the data owner to examine how it's being used. At the IEEE's Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust next month in Toronto, Oshani Seneviratne, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Lalana Kagal, a principal research scientist at CSAIL, will present a paper that gives an overview of HTTPA. With HTTPA, each item of private data would be assigned its own uniform resource identifier (URI) that would convert the Web from, essentially, a collection of searchable text files into a giant database. Remote access to...

The quickest way to keep up on the World Cup may be Google. People in the U.S. searching for countries playing in the World Cup will see, at the top of the results, links to highlight videos from the country’s most recent match. Clicking takes users to the website of ESPN, the exclusive domestic English-language broadcaster of the world’s premier soccer tournament. The first-of-its-kind partnership between ESPN and Google gives Google  an edge among competitors  Yahoo  and  Bing on World Cup searches. All three search engines are trying to make it easy to get the latest scores and scheduling details by typing in a country’s name or even just “World Cup.” But watching the early-round games, most of which are in the afternoon or early evening in the U.S., is difficult for those without access to ESPN. Watching the highlights doesn’t require any television subscription, and ESPN said that the highlight clips will show up on search results “as they happe...