The Xbox 360 is still gaining market share in the console race, selling 430,000 units in March. I’m sure some of it is due to the Kinect, but they have a huge library of great games.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console sold 430,000 units in the U.S. in March, up 28 percent from the same month a year ago, according to data released today by the NPD Group market research firm. That makes it the top-selling console in the U.S. for nine out of the past 10 months, according to NPD.

There is a new trojan making the rounds that targets Windows Activation. While not a direct target, it attempts to mimic  the activation process, saying your copy of Windows is locked. A series of phone numbers are listed to call and get an activation code to unlock your data. If you encounter this, do not call the numbers.

While these numbers may look like generic service numbers, they aren’t. They go to various countries ("00" is the prefix for international dialing). The countries are: São Tomé and Principe (239), Denmark (45), Madagascar (261) and Globalstar Mobile Satellite Service (8819).
The trojan claims that the call is "free of charge" but it isn’t, and the trojan author will earn money from the call via a technique known as short stopping. This method involves rogue phone operators who route the expensive calls to cheaper countries.
After three minutes or so, the caller is given this unlock code: 1351236.
The unlock code appears to be the same every time the number is called.
It’s a pretty clever bit of social engineering and some victims may never even realize that they’ve been scammed.

Well, isn’t that dandy for Apple? Bing is the number one Free iPad application. Great news for Microsoft and their Bing search engine. Of course, Apple doesn’t have their own search engine, and I’m not sure where Google would fit into the ratings.

Image Courtesy of Greg Sterling

The release of Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 is coming mid-summer of this year. There will be more updates and details coming during TechEd in mid-May.

As we briefly discussed on our last SP1 post, changes to Office and SharePoint products are cumulative. Any updated packages we ship (Word.msp, for example) contain Cumulative and Public updates to date. This is an advantage of Automatic Updates that is often unrecognized – keeping current significantly reduces the amount of testing necessary for Service Pack releases because those Public Updates already include the Cumulative Updates for the affected products / packages.

Set to be released May 16th, the Kinect for PC SDK (Software Development Kit) will allow programmers to officially support the Kinect in Windows 7. This should allow more than just the hacks that have already surfaced without the need for the SDK. If you are a programmer, and you want to mess around with the Kinect using Windows, here’s your chance! Note: This is only for NON-Commercial use for the time being.

• The latest advances in audio processing, which include a four-element microphone array with sophisticated acoustic noise and echo cancellation for crystal clear audio.
• Sound source localization for beamforming, which enables the determination of a sound’s spatial location, enhancing reliability when integrated with the Microsoft speech recognition API.
• Depth data, which provides the distance of an object from the Kinect camera, as well as the raw audio and image data, which together open up opportunities for creating richer natural user interface experiences.
• Highly performant and robust skeletal tracking capabilities for determining the body positions of one or two persons moving within the Kinect field of view.
• Documentation for the APIs and a description of the SDK architecture.
• Sample code that demonstrates how to use the functionality in the SDK.

This SDK is intended for non-commercial use to enable experimentation in the world of natural user interface experiences, with new state-of-the-art features planned for future releases that will continue to provide new ways to experiment.

An early build of Windows 8 from Milestone 1 in September of 2010 has leaked to FTP sites and Torrent sites. This is definitely an older build, and is not anywhere close to what to expect from Windows 8.

The build is currently being distributed on FTPs and file sharing sites after an anonymous leakster posted the bits to the beta archive site. The build is an early sample of Microsoft’s work with Windows 8 and does not reflect the current state of winmain builds. As the build was compiled in late September it has since expired and those wishing to experiment with it will need to turn their BIOS clocks back.

Wow. That was fast. Internet Explorer 10 is already seeing the light of day in the form of a platform preview. As usual with these platform preview’s, it is more than likely just a shell of a UI with the rendering engine being the main focus.

The Internet Explorer Platform Preview has been updated. We encourage you to try out the newly added platform capabilities, and report any issues that you find in the Internet Explorer 10 web platform. Note: some features are incomplete or might change later. For more information, visit the IE Test Drive site and read the Platform Preview User Guide .

With the leaks that have been coming from the newest version of Windows, “Windows-Next” or Windows 8, there was bound to be a new skin to make the Windows 7 UI look similar to Windows 8. Although, the look is similar, it is still not going to have the functionality of a full blown Windows 8 installation. But, it’s still nice to look at!

Support:
– Windows 7 SP1
– X86(32Bit) and X64(64Bit)
– Best Work in X86(32Bit)
– All Language Versions

If you bought a Kinect for your family, you’ll find that most of the Kinect games are child friendly. Here’s another kid friendly game: Fantastic Pets. Microsoft has just released the demo to Xbox Live for you to test it out and buy it if you like it. I’m not sure how it’s going to compare or compete with Kinectimals, but I’m going to have to load it up and give it a shot.

Fantastic Pets is the only video game that lets players create the pet of their dreams – real or fantastical! Selecting from four different animal species – dog, cat, lizard or horse – players can customize and create countless variations of pets to nurture, train and play with. For the first time ever players can join their pets on-screen and play together as if their pets were real, living creatures using augmented reality technology on the Microsoft Kinect. Players can use both voice and full-body commands to nurture, play, train and grow closer to his or her animal friend. Players compete in Talent Shows to level up their Pet Trainer to unlock new customization options, accessories and achievements!

Add the free demo to your Xbox 360 download queue

Another leak comes from Windows 8: SmartScreen, a feature that is currently in Internet Explorer & Windows Live Messenger, is being included in the operating system itself. This should definitely pump up the security as it blocks malicious software from running. Software that is unknown or is black listed by Microsoft would be blocked from running on the system.

In Windows 8, SmartScreen appears to serve two purposes – to reactively check the file system and proactively prevent any downloaded applications from running that are unknown to the filter. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to trigger it so I don’t know exactly how it responds but I presume not unlike a security warning. Having said that, it’s comforting to know the feature can also be disabled for the brave.