Of tears and Microsoft !
February 18, 2008
Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.
Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.
Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’
One particular line caught my attention
The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.
And this
That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.
Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.
Microsoft fixes Excel calculation bug
October 10, 2007
I’m pleased that Microsoft responded quickly to the demands of the online community. They have made available patches to the calculation problem which involves calculations around the number 65,535 and 65,536 in Excel 2007 and Excel services.
Here’s the take of the problem from the Excel and Excel services team blog.
The Problem
” This issue was introduced when we were making changes to the Excel calculation logic in the Office 2007 time frame. Specifically, Excel incorrectly displays the result of a calculation in 12 very specific cases (outlined below). The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet. Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).”
The good part is that they will be pushing this out with Windows update, which mean you can have the potential fix without any explicit download. The fix will also be available along with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2007 (official date of release for which has not yet been announced).
Xobni – ‘inboX’ management
August 27, 2007
Xobni, a new email-management service offered by the San Francisco-based startup company Xobni Analytics aims to empower the email user and help them “take back their inbox”. Xobni provides data on things like how much time you spend on email, how long it takes you to respond and what times during the day have the most important emails coming in. They are funded by Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, YCombinator, and a group of angel investors.
Xobni claims that it will help you manage time spent on your email account much more efficiently.The new “Email me instead” allows you to send Facebook messages directly to people’s inboxes, saving the extra step of having to go into Facebook in order to read them. Users can sign up to receive news and updates on the Beta release. Until then, users can visit the site’s blog to correspond with the Xobni team.
They have a button for your blog and claim that users using this on their blog will get priority access for their release. Check this out.