Microsoft Research (MSR) Asia hosted its 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum in Hong Kong on Aug. 12 to celebrate a decade of ground-breaking work alongside Asia’s burgeoning IT talents and academic communities.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates joined MSR Asia leaders and prominent members of Hong Kong’s educational institutions this week to highlight the innovative achievements China and Microsoft have shared over the past ten years, and to convey their vision for China’s leading role in global innovation.
Founded in 1998, MSR Asia began with a dozen employees and has since grown into a thriving lab of 350 full-time employees and as many interns. The organization conducts research work in more than 20 different fields, including natural user interface, multimedia, data-intensive computing and search and online advertising. MSR Asia’s headquarters are located in Beijing, China.
Source- Microsoft Press Release
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Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology. SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.
Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.
According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates’ technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005. A Microsoft spokesperson refused comment.
Source: SD Times
Bill Gates has been awarded the first Einstein Award from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the American Friends of the Hebrew University (AFHU).
“The Einstein Award represents the creation of a continuum of great minds and was inspired by the legacy of Albert Einstein, a founding father of our university who wrought a profound revolution in human understanding of our world,” said Professor Menachem Magidor, president of the Hebrew University.
“Bill Gates is a most worthy recipient. Like Einstein, he is a leader whose actions stem from the knowledge that human progress includes alleviating human suffering.”
Gates will be honoured at a gala dinner in New York in December. Proceeds will help to fund plant and animal science research at the Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences in Israel.
Source: www.vnunet.com
The founder and head of Microsoft, the world’s largest software company Bill Gates steps down on Friday. One of the richest men in the world, Gates will now work full time for his charitable organization The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The 52-year-old will continue to be chairman though, but will only retain a nominal role in the software empire. He is still is the biggest shareholder of the company and his 8.7 per cent stake in Microsoft is worth about 23 billion dollars.
Gates authored the personal computer revolution three decades ago when he founded Microsoft along with his friend Paul Allen.
Microsoft released a commemorative video paying tribute to Bill’s service to the company, titled "Bill Gates: Looking back, Moving Ahead". It can be watched on the company’s website here.
Source: TechPowerUp
For industrial design student Avery Holleman, the inspiration for his award-winning entry in this year’s Microsoft-sponsored Next-Gen PC Design Competition struck late one evening as he chewed over prospective form factors for his design concept.
One person it struck a chord with was Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who knows a thing or two about business plans. In addition to being awarded first place by the Next-Gen PC Design Competition’s distinguished panel of expert judges, drawn from the ranks of leading international industrial designers, Holleman’s Napkin PC concept also earned the distinction of winning the Chairman’s Award, handpicked by Gates. Holleman received $20,000 in prize money for both accolades.
Now in its fourth year, the Next-Gen PC Design Competition, endorsed by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), throws down the gauntlet to budding industrial designers and seasoned professionals working in the field worldwide to apply their ingenuity, design prowess and creative flair and vision to the task of not merely give existing computing form factors a superficial makeover, but fundamentally rethinking the PC as we know it from the ground up.
For Microsoft, the competition affords an invaluable opportunity to identify fresh design talent and foster dialog and collaboration between design professionals and the PC industry – interaction that is increasingly important amid the emergence of user experience as a key driver of technology adoption.
This year’s competition issued an open call to entrants to dream up futuristic PC designs that give a new lease of life to people’s passions, such as travelling, music or photography. Contestants were challenged to come up with groundbreaking designs, not only featuring eye-catching aesthetics, but melding cutting-edge hardware with the latest software to empower people to follow their passions.
Source- Microsoft Press Release
Ankur Mittal | August 14, 2008
