Darren Straight's Blog

ICT Enthusiast and photographer.

By - Darren Straight

Amazon drops Google on A9 and Alexa in the US

A9 (Amazon’s search engine) and Alexa (online traffic monitoring service) have now replaced Google as their default search engine with Windows Live Search. There’s no official information about this change and it’s only seems to be viewable for people from the US but this is the first major success for the new Windows Live Search, the replacement for MSN Search

By - Darren Straight

Windows Live Shopping Beta Launched

Microsoft has now launched the Windows Live Shopping Service. Today we launch the brand new Windows Live Shopping site! What is it? It is the beta launch of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 shopping experience, featuring one of the world’s largest product catalogs, user-created content and an easier-to-use interface built on 100% AJAX technology. It uses a unified shopping engine to search

By - Darren Straight

Microsoft’s EU appeal case ends

The week-long anti-competition hearing involving Microsoft and the European Commission has finished – with neither side willing to predict the outcome. Microsoft is appealing against a 2004 ruling when Brussels told it to change how it sells its Media Player software and fined it 497m euros ($613m; £344m). The Court of First Instance may not deliver a verdict until early

By - Darren Straight

Installed Lush Theme for WordPress

I was going to wait until the anniversary of my blog which is also my birthday, to change to another wordpress theme for my blog but I just found out that the blog theme Lush for Typo has now been ported to wordpress so I guess it was something I couldn’t resist so I installed it and I must say

By - Darren Straight

Windows Live Beta Tester Community on Microsoft Connect

Just a minute ago or so I was just loading up the Microsoft Connect website to submit a suggestion for the Windows Live Mail Desktop as I’m now a managed beta tester and well as I was looking around I thought I would check to see if any new beta programs had been added, I had only checked about half

By - Darren Straight

Will Blahblahbox be the next big social networking site?

I haven’t blogged about any social networking sites for quite a while now, well I guess except Ziki which I finally blogged about not long ago after I was testing it for a month, and if you haven’t tried Ziki yet I recommend you do because it’s pretty cool. Anyway as I was saying, I haven’t blogged about any social

By - Darren Straight

What is live.com and what is the team trying to accomplish!

So some people have been asking me lately what is live.com, what’s new, what can it do that other services can’t, were is Microsoft hoping to go with Live.com and all it’s related services. Well let me help you all out a little on these questions by providing you with an extract from a blog post titled Improving Live.com which

By - Darren Straight

Microsoft’s Mobile Operating Systems Crossbow and Photon

Microsoft is now starting to share more details about its next generation of mobile operating systems. The company is planning to deliver the next version of its Windows Mobile platform, code-named Crossbow, to providers by the end of this year. And it is going to follow up one year later with a refreshed Windows Mobile release, code-named Photon. Via: Microsoft