You may not have heard of the Bing Maps Ortho Project but its goal is to up the ante on the digital maps scene by delivering high-resolution ground images of continental USA and Western Europe. Imagine the currently available Satellite views and imagine you could use those to zoom in even further down… Way in, actually, as the imagery is all shot from a small plane, not a satellite.

For this project Microsoft has equipped planes with specially designed 220 MP cameras and 13 PCs each. The planes were sent off to 5.8 km high in the sky to cover about 18 million square km. Do I hear those numbers crunching in your head? Yeah, the project is that optimistic and capturing those image data and importing it to Bing Maps it will cost Microsoft just about $130 million bucks.

In contrast, Google uses different sources for their aerial view of our dear planet Earth. Microsoft aims to win over the die-hard digital map enthusiast with sheer quality here. Bing Maps is becoming quite the adversary to the widely popular Google Maps and Google Earth and at the end of this project the scales might be tipped in Bing Maps direction.

A few weeks ago I told you about some new Windows 8 screenshots illustrating the tablet-oriented Metro UI. Until now it was not clear whether we are going to see this user interface elsewhere or not. You would better like the Metro UI because it will stick around for a while.

The Outlook screenshot above is taken from the Milestone 2 version of Office 15. As you can see the Metro UI has taken over the Outlook, so I expect to see it everywhere in the Office 15. It makes sense Its already in the Windows Media Center, the Zune lineup and the Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft is expanding StreetSide to Europe thats the Bing Maps equivalent to Google Street View. Microsoft is already mapping London and claims their service will be different from Street View in terms of privacy and scale.

Microsoft has partnered up with NAVTEQ for this project, obviously one of the advantages of the deal with Nokia. StreetSide is already available in a number of US cities but now Microsoft has set foot in Europe. They are already mapping London and moving on to other major European cities next month.

Microsoft is not collecting Wi-Fi data yet they want to avoid Google blunder with storing private data. Some Wi-Fi data will be collected at a later stage, but just the bare minimum needed to use hotspots for positioning.

Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 10 they showed it off at the MIX11 developer conference, which started yesterday at Las Vegas. They did a demo, with Windows and IE10 running on an NVIDIA Tegra platform (with ARM processor).

The first Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 10 is available for download. Alright, the bigger the version number, the merrier I suppose, You can ask Google, they will confirm. You can grab a copy of Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview from here. I did and took it for a quick spin its far from ready but its good for a few benchmarks.

The new version of Internet Explorer promises much better support for HTML5. Hardware acceleration has also been improved.

But of course, the biggest news is that the browser and Windows 8 itself run on ARM processors 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 in particular for the demo. By the looks of it, Microsoft ARM tablet plans are going full steam ahead.

Video Below!

It was just yesterday we saw a bunch of Windows 8 screenshots from the latest (Milestone 3) alpha release. Today we got something even better a few shots from the tablet-oriented Immersive UI of Windows 8.

The screenshots above are taken from the Immersive browser, which implements the Metro UI, but acts as the desktop Internet Explorer 9. It was designed to work on a specific resolution, which resulted in the improper displaying.

The other app we get to see is the Modern Reader a PDF reader integrated within the Windows 8. It is an AppX application it is a new application package (.appx) platform that will be distributed via a new dedicated Windows 8 application store. Sounds familiar, By the way the AppX apps are very similar to the Windows Phone 7 application packages, which hints of the potential source of apps for the new tablet-bound Windows 8.

It seems Microsoft is also building bridges between its mobile and desktop operating system. I cannot wait to see what the Windows 8 will turn out in the end.

The SP1 for Windows 7 hit the PCs around the world only recently, but Microsoft is already prepping the next Windows installment version 8. Some developers aleady have access to an alpha version (Milestone 3) and we get to see a a glimpse of it right now.

The most important visual change you’ll notice is the tabbed (ribbon) structured menu on various places. It’s similar to the Microsoft Office 2010 looks and honestly, its quite ugly.

I understand the ribbon interface was introduced into the Office suite to simplify its interface and eliminate the drop-down menus, but transferring it to Windows? It seems Microsoft is trying to spare us the right-click menu here and the end result is rather confusing, even a bit ugly. There is a lot of time ahead before the RTM version gets ready and I believe Microsoft will get it right in the end.

The next visual change is the log-on screen, which resembles the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI. There is also a profile picture in the system tray, right next to the clock.

Windows 8 is also rumored to have an 8-minute installation process and an option for factory reset just like in the phones. That way you can always rollback to a fresh start should something go wrong. According to some leaked roadmaps we should see the official Windows 8 beta this summer (June/July), while the Release Candidate will come in the autumn (September/October). The final version of Windows 8 is expected in early 2012.

HTC have confirmedMicrosoft have taken the lid off a new app they have been working on, MSN Onit, which can really only be described as a guy app. It offers up content that men would find interesting, such as stuff from Esquire, Men Health etc.

The content is very blokish with car themed content from MSN Autos such as reviews, slideshows, etc. There is how-to guides from the likes of Esquire and Popular Mechanics; fitness and health information from Fitbie, Fox Sports Flash, Men Health, etc. Tech  news comes from MSNBC, LIFE, Popular Mechanics and TheSmokingJacket.com

Internet Explorer 9 launched the other day and it seems to be gaining popularity quite quickly. The latest version of the world most popular web browser scored some 2.35 million downloads in the first 24 hours of its existence alone, which is pretty impressive.

That makes over 27 download per second or nearly 100 000 downloads each hour. Now that might not be as impressive as the Mozilla 3 Guiness Book record, but if the trend continues Microsoft will finally be able to stop the rapid shrinking of the IE market share and might even start fighting back at some point.

Chrome has been putting a lot of pressure on competitors lately and with Firefox maintaining its sizable market share the expansion of the Google browser was mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 9 is all done and baked and ready for download. Maybe you have played with the beta but I had not so I took it for a quick spin a few benchmarks and a few clicks on the more interesting-looking buttons.

First off, here are a few screenshots for those of you who have not seen Internet Explorer 9 before… It goes for an ultra-minimalistic look, which is the current trend among web browsers. By default, it puts tabs on the same row as the address bar but there is an easy option to change that. Oh, and Opera users will recognize the start page.

One cool option is to create faux apps from websites just drag their favicon to Window taskbar and it will create an icon just like an regular app has. Those icons start the browser and direct it to the specific page. There are some customizations look at the first screenshot below, specifically the icon and back/forward buttons. Sure, its just a fancy way to bookmark things but if you use Gmail as your primary email client, this can be pretty valuable.

And finally, here are a couple of benchmarks done with whatever browsers I had installed. I ran the Acid 3 test and V8 Benchmark Suite v6.

I was also going to test out the GPU acceleration (which supposedly beats FF and Opera) but it turns out the video card on this computer (NVIDIA GeForce 6150) chocked on only 20 fish so I skipped that one.

Guinness World Records has confirmed that the Kinect for the Xbox 360 has cracked the world record for fastest selling consumer electronics device for a period of 60 days. Microsoft managed to sell an average of 133,333 Kinect units per day, making a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days of sale from 4 November 2010 to 3 January 2011.

If you think about it, this means that every hour over 5 thousand people bought the Kinect. Impressive numbers indeed, but the story doesn’t end there. Today marks the day of an even bigger achievement for Microsoft, as the company announced that they have sold their 10th million Kinect. Not only that, but along with them they sold over 10 million standalone games specially designed to makes use of the sensor, too.

In comparison, Kinect main rivals the PlayStation Move and the Wii with its Wiimote cannot brag about their sales so much. PlayStation Move sense controller sold merely 4.1 million units for roughly 2 months. And as far as the Wii goes, Nintendo reported back in January that it sold 7 million units in 2010, which does not seem too good, compared to the 10 million consoles it shipped in 2008.