Microsoft Embracing Bitcoin?

It seems like almost daily bitcoin is being mentioned in traditional media and other news outlets. Either a new company announces they will begin accepting bitcoins or some new bitcoin related product or servic is released. It seems like there is no stopping the crypto currency's momentum as more and more people become aware of what bitcoin is and start buying or mining bitcoins themselves. Some of the companies may be unknown start-ups but there are also many large, highly reputable corporations. Well now you can include Microsoft to that list. While you cannot buy a new surface tablet with bitcoins, they are promoting another bitcoin related item on the Bing search engine. Now you can actually get bitcoins from Bing, via their Bing Rewards program which awards points for doing searches or other easy tasks that can be traded in for all kinds of items. All you need to do is use the Bing search engine and you accumulate points each day. Once you save up enough points you can use them to get different rewards such as gift cards from many different retailers and access to services such as hulu plus or Xbox Live. There are also different sweepstakes and giveaways that you can enter to win various items. And now with the newest giveaway you can win $500 worth of bitcoins! Although you can't use your bitcoins to buy anything from Microsoft, I think this is a step in the right direction for the Redmond, Washington based company. Who knows, maybe in the future you will be able to shop from the Microsoft store and use bitcoins to pay. Even if this never happens maybe it will introduce bitcoin to people who have never heard of it before and make others more intrigued so they want to find out more about crypto coins, especially bitcoin. The more people who know about it and tell others about it, the more the currency will be worth because more and more people will be wanting to join in on the crypto coin revolution.

Yahoo and Bing Announce New Ammended Search Partnership

As the number two and three players of the top three search engines on the internet, Bing and Yahoo have announced a recent ammendment to their search relationship, to "improve the search experience, create value for advertisers and establish ongoing stability for partners." The two companies have had an agreement in place since 2009 and this is just an evolution of that partnership. Yahoo will continue to serve Bing Ads and will now be able to give consumers the same experience on both mobile and desktop platforms. Microsoft will be in charge of all ads through the Bing Ads services while Yahoo will be the sole salesforce for the Yahoo Gemini platform, allowing the sales and engineering teams for each product to operate closely together in order to serve advertisers best. Microsoft gives Yahoo a portion of the revenue obtained through Yahoo's search user, a fact that remains unchanged with this update to their agreement. For more information, the full press release is available here.

XBox One - Not the Original XBox 1, the New XBox One

We've been waiting for it for years now. 8 years to be exact. But now it's finally here, the new Xbox has been announced. And it's not called the Xbox 720 like most people have speculated. Actually the number to denote the model number wasn't doubled to 720, it wasn't increased at at - it was decreased. By 359 actually. That's right the new Xbox will now be the Xbox One. If you're like me and all my friends, that's what you already call the original Xbox, which means that the new Xbox model will cause nothing but confusion among gamers. Hopefully the technical specs and other features more than make up for the stupidity in the naming convention.

So what are the tech specs and cool new features of the Xbox One? Well don't look for the controller itself to be a exciting new design. It looks pretty much exactly the same as all the different Xbox 360 controllers, so nothing new and exciting in the design department there. The console itself, and the included Kinect both have a cool new design that distinguishes it from other Xbox models. And speaking of Kinect, yes the Xbox One will come bundled with a new and updated Kinect that is so sensitive that it can sense movement in your wrists as well as detect your heartbeat. Some people have dismissed this fact, but personally I think it is really cool. Not just the fact that you can sense your heart beat and your wrists moving, which is pretty cool and can add some neat game play elements. But also the fact that all Xbox One models will come with a Kinect. That means that all games can take advantage of the features provided by Kinect. I don't expect all games to use the Kinect as the only controlling mechanism, but imagine if they used the Kinect in conjunction with the regular controller. In a racing or first person shooter game you could move your head around to move the view in the game. If you moved to the left or right a little the camera could shift slightly in that direction. Or if you ducked your head down your character on the screen could match your movement and duck also. This wouldn't completely change the gameplay, but it would give it a great new immersive feeling that no other console could match. I think that this could give game developers a bunch of new options for their games. I know the Kinect is nothing new, but the fact that all Xbox One consoles will have a Kinect means that they can now take advantage of that peripheral like the couldn't before. And as far as the technical aspects, the new Kinect will capture 1080p @ 30 fps, compared to the current Kinect that only captures VGA.

More info will come out as we get closer to the release date, but what they have shown us seems pretty cool. Hopefully it lives up to the hype. You can find more info about the XBox One here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/21/microsoft-confirms-that-the-xbox-one-will-come-with-an-incredibly-sensitive-new-kinect/