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Coca-Cola has its super secret cola recipe, Dolby has its closely-guarded noise reduction circuit design, and Google has… what is it that Google has? For Microsoft, Google or any other software business, the thousands of lines of code, and the philosophy that informs them are their stock-in-trade, their capital. Google has had the Chinese authorities hack into its Gmail accounts recently; if they, or any recreational hacker were to succeed in getting into their system, and to sell their loot to the highest bidder outside, it would quickly bring Google’s search business to its knees. Or if it were the Chinese authorities doing it, or a competing search engine,they could ever-so-slightly modify Google’s codes, to make it less effective, or spy on everything Google did, and lend themselves a better advantage.

This is no longer just a doomsday scenario passed out in a Hollywood movie. This is exactly what Google declares China did earlier this month to it. Google announced that some of its copyrighted code had been stolen, and the code owned by several other companies as well. Google, with help from VeriSign iDefense, when it investigated these attacks, did not even know if it has its original code anymore. They believe that China’s government has possibly inserted alterations in Google’s core coding that will help them spy on Chinese citizens using Google to search for restricted information in China. Why, in Greece, five years ago, hackers inserted alterations to Vodafone’s code, so that they could listen in on conversations conducted by the country’s political and military leaders.

Just as Microsoft has been a favored target for years, Google and Adobe are in the cross hairs today. Adobe’s software is reputed in particular to be deeply flawed security wise; since it enjoys 95% market penetration with one or another of its products, anti virus experts have their attention trained on Adobe now. It is becoming obvious too, that China, a country that first rose to prominence for its cheap knockoffs of reputed branded goods, still retains its knack for counterfeiting. Routers by Cisco, for example, are legally required to include firmware that will allow the government to obtain a backdoor into your information, for criminal investigations purposes. China could easily manufacture counterfeit Cisco routers, that will help the Chinese government look in for more information than a democratically-elected government would ever be allowed to. As it happens, the biggest risk that software corporations face still lies in the way employees can get careless, and open tainted spam when they are at work, at a company terminal.

Dubai was reported to be in financial trouble recently; Iceland is practically in hock, and Greece is waiting in line. In all the countries around the world that have fallen to the financial meltdown, getting a regular job at a factory or at a newspaper office, or selling investments, is the dream that is best abandoned at this point. But people in poor countries still can get enough to get by on, if they have a computer connection at home, and don’t mind doing a little online grunt work. It goes by a more printable name, called Crowdsourcing. This is where you take company tasks that you would normally delegate to some tread- upon factotum at your office, and spread the cheer among a hundred unseen factotum across the world. And you would spend pennies on them for an hour of their time.

Amazon.com ‘s Mechanical Turk and Live Work websites have been picking up freelance efforts in this way from all around the world for years now. But in the years it’s been around, it’s only lived on the fringes of the outsourcing business. For the last three years, the Californian start up CrowdFlower has really got into this business, to try to make it a regular part of the average major corporation’s outsourcing plan. CrowdFlower allows businesses to use Mechanical Turk and Live Work and allows them to verify the credentials of the online workers they list too;, and it will keep an eye on quality control in addition, in a way that ordinary freelance classifieds like Amazon’s ventures could never do.

This is quite a fascinating way in which to tap human resources. And it is reminiscent of the way cloud computing works too – with the cloud, you are supposed to not actually have any computing resources yourself; nor are you supposed to have resources earmarked for you at a remote location. You’re just supposed to trust that in all the pooled resources, somewhere, will be something for you at the right time. And it still always turns out to work exactly as if you had your own dedicated arrangements. Crowd Flower allows you to switch on or off an entire global army of qualified labor, and leave it to the managing companies to pick up the loose ends. You could hire your own full-time gopher to do your work, and micromanage and pay that person all the time, or you could farm the work out to a dozen people for a fraction of the pay. You get your results in a fraction of the time too. It isn’t just the small Internet businesses trying to make a quick buck that step into crowd sourcing either. Corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have discovered this as a way of simplifying their little jobs too.

At the opposite end of the crowd sourcing spectrum is the way companies try to harness creativity in the crowd. The French company Eyeka does marketing, or consumer engagement, as it is called, in this way. Companies and brands contact Eyeka to have innovative viral advertising campaigns dreamt up for them. Eyeka’s thousands of members pick up assignments they like and create videos or pictures for the project. If they get picked, they get the job. If it happens to be any good, some young kid out there who’s been putting out videos on his personal YouTube clone for free, suddenly gets a couple of hundred thousand dollars for his trouble. From pennies an hour to hundreds of thousands of dollars, crowdsourcing seems to be finding its niche.

Have you ever wondered how it is that when you try to look up the weather on the Internet, all the brand-name weather sites just can’t agree on what the weather is going to be like. Well, Microsoft certainly has noticed this, and is trying to win some points trying to smooth this over for for you. When you search on Bing for the weather in your local area, we will certainly get your usual list of major weather forecast websites; but if you venture further, you can find an automatic Bing Compare laid out for you of what all the other websites say. And to help you decide which website you prefer for your forecast, Bing will even write up a journal for you of what the weather has been like over a period of time. Additionally, Bing will also match up the forecast against what really happened, and over the course of a month or two, to give you recommendations on which forecast service is best to choose.

Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.

All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.

Bing is full of surprises these days in its unending competition with Google. Bing adds new features regularly like the Wolfram Alpha function and mapping tools that are visually stunning. Integration with the Wolfram Alpha computational engine means that they will now be able to interpret what you ask in human terms. If you search for “fast food”, it will give you the usual restaurant information, but also exercise tips and indigestion information. Yahoo has introduced a major search feature too – as of last year. The feature is called Bing. Yahoo is finally throwing in the towel in search; they may have snubbed Microsoft’s $44 billion takeover offer two years ago, but they have other Microsoft-friendly attitudes in place.Yahoo has closed its search business, and is allowing Bing to do the backroom work. They closed down their shopping API as well, and chose to power their shopping site with Price Grabber.

There have been other reports out there wondering if Yahoo is preparing to shut shop entirely; if they don’t do their own search, what is it they do? Yahoo’s management has put out a vehement statement about how it isn’t fair for anyone to consider Yahoo a spent force. The statement claims that Yahoo has a great relationship with its developers and a commitment to open platforms; well, my Log Blog was an innovative service that developers and geeks loved too. And that’s been closed by Yahoo as well. GeoCities recently got the ax, and it looks like Yahoo these days is all about closing down and outsourcing. It would appear that pretty soon, the US search market will be left with just a big two – just like the US auto market when it lost Chrysler.

But Yahoo is still in the search business to all appearances. They take care of all the advertising business on their own site as well as on Bing’s. Yahoo’s plan is to cut costs, of course. But to do that, it still needs to be around, doesn’t it? Yahoo is no longer a website that provides original services; it is just an aggregator. And this makes for the passing of an era.

Microsoft’s MSN portal has always been a solid effort; the reporting, the stories and the fun videos and gossip have always been dependably present, as an entertainment backup, if not the main act itself, for millions (for about one hundred million users though, MSN’s services are their main Internet destination). Where TMZ succeeded in up-to-the-minute gossip, MSN’S Wonderwall provided pretty good visuals and high-voltage fun. Where Salon.com had a lock on liberal news and opinion, MSN had the superbly written MSN Lifestyle, MSN Money, MSN Health, a website for every interest group on earth. But Microsoft has other purposes on its mind than merely providing a wholesome all-round visitor experience: it needs to have MSN funnel users to its Bing search service.

With that in mind, MSN has a brand-new makeover this week, having retained the same look since 2004. The new MSN is pleasingly streamlined, fashionably minimalist and glossy in the way Windows 7 and Bing are. Even MSN’s stylized butterfly is drawn edge-on to look closer to the Bing logo. Bing is integrated quite deeply into the MSN experience now. MSN Local Edition, the popular service that serves up a community news catalog by ZIP code has Bing-searchable indexes now for example. Local weather reports are no longer just cursory; they give you additional information for everything you might want to do in good weather: they give you concert news, restaurant opinions, traffic information and so on.

Integration with Twitter and Facebook exists now too, in a nod to that side of the market. You can keep up with all the Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live updates coming to you right on the MSN home page. That must make sense, seeing how it is reported that half of all MSN regulars are Facebook fans too. But the integration could have been better; clicking on the Facebook widget only takes you to the Facebook site. There is nothing right on the MSN site that can help you keep in touch with Facebook.

MSN’s ambition is to be a one-stop website for every need, perhaps in a way similar to what Yahoo attempted a while ago. But Yahoo has seen considerable success with its remodeling. Will MSN find the magic balance too?

One of Agriya’s most popular products, Anova has been programmed in ASP.NET and the final software called Anova.NET is the newest release.

AnovaPRO and Anova.NET have the same features, the only difference being the fact that Anova.NET has been programmed in ASP.NET.

As the Internet market is getting exceedingly competitive, it has become very important to constantly revamp existing products with newer features that increase their functionality and efficiency.

The primary question now is ‘what is ASP.NET and how will it help Anova work better?’ ASP.NET expands to Active server pages. And as an overview the .NET version of Anova enables seamless integration with all the existing ASP.NET applications.

.NET reduces the lines of coding required to produce large applications and also keeps the smaller and larger applications safe with built in windows authentication and each application being individually configured. This makes Anova a lot more manageable, reduces the time and effort taken involved in the coding processes and definitely makes it more user friendly. It also enables better performance using its specialized features and also makes it very easy to perform common tasks from site configuration to form submissions. All the processes are monitored by .NET and if one specific process is dead another one takes its place to make sure the applications are continuously running. Since this aspect has been incorporated into Anova.NET, it ensures very high levels of security protecting your software from any form of cyber crime. And finally ASP.NET is an application which runs at high speeds and handles large volumes of users without exhibiting any technical hitches, thereby making Anova.NET the perfect answers script, with high performance, functionality and efficiency all at very high speeds along with smooth delivery.

It is based on all the above advantages that ASP.NET was incorporated into Anova now called Anova.Net, and this guarantees to satisfy any user looking for the ideal answers script programmed in .NET applications that will comply with their server.

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The recent buzz in the net world is the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal according to which Microsoft will integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its search engine Bing and Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Through the deal, Microsoft has taken a brilliant move to capture the search market.

According to figures released by Hitwise last month, Microsoft’s search market share will rise to around 21.5% or roughly one quarter of Google’s share. Ergo, SEO people have to concentrate on Bing while promoting their clients’ sites for reaching all the net surfers.

When we focus on search algorithm, it is clear that Bing concentrates on keyword placement in the sub or root whereas Google focuses on exact keyword matches. By default, Bing’s results are richer than Google and Yahoo. It is more likely that the market for search engine Bing will expand.

If you don’t have an account with the Bing webmaster tool, it is time to start your account and learn the difference between Bing and Google to optimize your site for Bing.

Even if Bing does not overtake its rival Google, it will be the second largest search engine. Hence you have to work for Bing to reach global audiences irrespective of search engines used. Obviously the changes will not take place overnight, but potentially Google could have a much bigger, consolidated competitor in the near future.

Every successful corporation has a responsibility to use its resources and influences to create new things for people. Bing is the latest attempt by Microsoft to gain popularity in the search market. Bing, is a new Internet search engine designed to navigate the web and find online information easily.

Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. There are hundreds of new features on Microsoft’s Bing. A few of the interesting features include:

Bing will provide useful links and information related to your search. For instance, if you search information about a black berry, Bing will provide links to reviews on the item and give you complete details about the particular product as well. This feature will reduce a user’s clicks to find specific information.

Going into search engines, typing something in, and searching items is very difficult nowadays. Bing facilitates people to save favorite sites while they are searching information. It helps them to save their time by saving their favorite stuff and accessing them at anytime.

Microsoft maintains partnerships with different online services like airlines, hotels and holiday resorts. If you are searching for flight information, Bing can offer specific information like flight deals, reviews etc.

Bing will Auto-Suggest the search queries. For instance, if you’re looking for “Obama” then it will auto-suggest some additional queries like his biography, information on his speeches, quotes, facts and so on.

Bing can also provide videos and images about an item in the search results page.

Microsoft is currently holding a third-place behind Google and Yahoo Inc. it hopes that Bing will play a big role to reach a good position in the search market. Microsoft is trying to pull people away from Google and Yahoo.

In what seems to be a shot across the bows of the dreadnought that is USS Microsoft, Google and Yahoo today announced a two week long ‘experiment’ of swapping ads with one another.

Effectively this means that Google can serve ads on Yahoo’s results page. The percentage is around 3% of all Yahoo searches will show Google ads.

Is this a calculated shot from the two internet monsters that they will not accept Microsoft’s pestering of Yahoo lying down?

Read the full story on BBC News