Microsoft buys Multimap to boost advertising strategy

Microsoft continues to make acquisitions to boost its online services and advertising strategy. Early Wednesday the company said it snapped up Multimap, a U.K. company that provides online mapping for Europe, North America and Australia.
The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. Multimap, based in London, will act as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft and employees will be integrated into the company's Virtual Earth and Search teams in its Online Services Group (OSG), Microsoft said.
Multimap has staff in the U.K., U.S. and Australia, and Microsoft said it is not sure yet if those employees will stay where they are or move to other offices. The Multimap office in the U.K. will remain open and employees will continue business as usual there, the company added.
In addition to providing online maps, Multimap also offers location-based services to find local businesses, hotels and restaurants, as well as business services to provide mapping, proximity searching, routing, aerial images with map overlay, and local information to business Web sites.
Microsoft has been looking for ways to boost the value, and thus revenue, of OSG, which oversees MSN and Windows Live. Microsoft hopes to leverage these properties to sell online advertising and generate revenue in this area to compete with Google.
Last week the company said it purchased Seattle startup WebFives, formerly Vizrea, which provides a Web-based file-sharing service for Internet and mobile video, photos, audio, and blogs. Microsoft also made its largest acquisition to date to boost the revenue of OSG with its purchase of aQuantive digital advertising and marketing services firm for US$6 billion earlier this year.
In addition to making acquisitions, Microsoft also has been partnering with online content and service providers to offer online advertising. On Monday, the company announced a deal to be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising for CNBC.com, a deal similar to ones it already has in place with Facebook globally and Digg in the U.S.
All of these efforts are part of a now two-year push to add services and content for its online brands to boost the revenue of its Online Services Business segment. To date, Wall Street analysts have said they are unimpressed by the growth of this segment, and Microsoft's moves seem to be evidence the company is getting that message loud and clear.
Revenue from online services grew only 8.7 percent from $2.3 million to $2.5 million for Microsoft's fiscal year 2007, ended June 30. For the company's first quarter 2008, during which the aQuantive deal closed, revenue from OSG was better, up 25 percent year over year. But even Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell acknowledged when first-quarter earnings were revealed that Microsoft would like to see more growth from this business segment.

Download the Official Windows XP SP3 Overview

The official overview of Windows XP Service Pack 3 is available for download straight from Microsoft. While the Redmond company has been synchronizing the development milestones for Windows Vista SP1: Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn; and Windows XP SP3, the third and final service pack for Vista's predecessor, was slipped into the background. In Microsoft's perspective, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 can be nowhere than at the center-stages of the upcoming releases for the first quarter of the next year. Planned by mid 2008, XP SP3, although long overdue and heading for approximately 80% of the operating system market, is not on Microsoft's priorities list.
With the Release Candidates of Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 heading to increased testing pools the past week, and with Microsoft cooking the first public build of the first refresh for its latest Windows client, the official overview for XP SP3 is the only crumb from the service pack fiesta over at the Redmond company. The Release Candidate of XP SP3 in a pre-final stage has already shipped to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. With Vista SP1 RC going public any day now, a similar release of XP SP3 is not far behind. The overview for XP SP3 has recently been made available, but Microsoft refreshed its availability as of December 10.

Google launches iPhone app

Google has fully signed up to the hype around Apple's first mobile device, announcing this week that it is launching an iPhone application.
The Google iPhone application is designed to bring all the Google services and applications, like Google search, Gmail, Calendar and Reader, into one user interface on the iPhone, making it easy for people to find, use and switch between them and access information wherever they are.
The new application is designed to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of Apple's Safari internet browser, which comes as standard with the iPhone and the web 2.0 browser technologies (like asynchronous JavaScript and XML or AJAX) that Google said made Gmail and Google Maps possible on the desktop.
"In supporting these advances in web technology, the iPhone's Safari browser not only delivers an excellent mobile Internet experience; it enabled our product and engineering teams to create an optimal Google experience on a mobile device," said Google in a statement.
Although the application currently only works on the iPhone, Google added it is committed to making the application device-independent and that it is working to develop new, fast and easy-to-use mobile technologies available on more devices.
Steve Kanefsky, the Google mobile software engineer who developed the iPhone application, wrote in a blog that he wanted to create a user experience that was "fast" and "fluid," in contrast to traditional mobile internet browsing.
"I set out to create an application that would preload my favourite Google products and allow me to switch between them instantly," he said. "I wanted web results as well as image, local, and news results without having to repeat my search. I wanted to check Gmail and my news feeds in Google Reader without having to load a new page every time. I also wanted Google Suggest to save me time typing queries on the virtual keyboard."
The company also pointed to a recent example of its mobile development work called My Location, which is a Google Maps-for-mobile feature that shows users their location directly on the map with or without GPS.

Seven updates from Microsoft to fix flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer in its last update for 2007 are sure to keep administrators busy before Chr

Microsoft has decided to end the patch year with a bang by scheduling seven security Patch Tuesday updates to fix flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer.

Despite just celebrating its first birthday, Vista is affected by five of the seven updates. "That's no small percentage," wrote Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle. "This perpetuates the fact that even though Microsoft said it was secure, it still needs plenty of patches."

And three of the patches are rated as critical. Alan Bentley, regional vice president of Lumension for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) said: "After a light Patch Tuesday in November, security administrators will have their hands full this month."

The three critical patches all address remote code execution, which Bentley said should be rolled out as quickly as possible. "The vulnerabilities are web-based, and hackers can prey on unsuspecting end-users by dropping malicious code into videos and other media on legitimate websites," he added.

"This is particularly troublesome because attackers can prey on users as the weakest IT security link by posting seemingly harmless videos on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook or similar sites. If a user watches one of these infected videos, malware will execute, compromise their machine and put the entire network at risk."

There is also the potential for these critical vulnerabilities to also be exploited directly through web-based email. "This will allow hackers to target individual users or user groups, making attacks much more difficult to identify," Bentley said.

One of the critical vulnerabilities (bulletin seven) affects both Internet Explorer (IE) 6 and IE 7. He said: "This is concerning since it will affect the entire Internet Explorer user community. It is vital to deploy this patch as quickly as possible because it affects a larger number of users than is typical."