In 2012, Microsoft's Rick Rashid blew an Asian audience away with a live translation of his speech into Mandarin. On Monday, Bing added some of that technology to Bing Voice Search, to cut down the processing response time of voice input into Windows Phone by half, while improving accuracy at the same time.

Microsoft said that it is rolling out updates to Windows Phone customers to greatly improve the accuracy of SMS messages that are transcribed using the service, as well as searches performed using voice. The accuracy of those transcriptions has been improved by 15 percent, Microsoft said, while the response time has been halved—from about a second to just about half that. The service also does a a better job of cutting out ambient noise.

"Better results and better latency," Michael Tjalve, a member of the Bing Speech team, said in a video describing the improvements. "So you get better results from the speech recognizer, and you get it faster."

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Software AG is building out its portfolio of CEP (complex-event processing) software with the acquisition of Apama from Progress Software, in the second CEP-related deal this week. Terms of the deal, which was announced Thursday, were not disclosed.

Apama and other CEP products ingest and analyze streams of data, looking for patterns and correlations, and are used widely in areas such as financial trading and fraud detection.

Software AG already had a CEP product called WebMethods Business Events.But it plans to continue marketing Apama under the same name due to its “high brand recognition,” according to a statement.

“We are making this acquisition because, as companies focus on becoming truly digital enterprises and addressing the four megatrends of cloud, mobile, social and big data, we see an increasing demand for CEP based solutions,” Software AG chief marketing officer Ivo Totev said in a blog post. “CEP is an important capability helping customers detect important events and information that are critical to fast and accurate business decisions.”

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Gliffy, the web-based diagram creation and editing utility, has been rewritten in HTML5, allowing its developer to add a slew of new features, including support for Microsoft Visio as well as Google Drive cloud storage.

Chris Kohlhardt, chief executive of Gliffy, said the shift from Flash to HTML5 was "highly risky," but something that the developers have seen as necessary for the last two years to improve performance. Gliffy is actually live in both Flash as well as HTML5, but given the large number of HTML5-compliant browsers available, the Flash version is quickly losing relevance.

Rewriting Gliffy in HTML5 aligned the online utility with modern standards, Kohlhardt said. Customers who have signed up for Gliffy Online, its software-as-a-service platform, can now store their files inside Google Drive, using a variety of formats, including SVG, GXML, and JPEG.

Gliffy is one of a small ecosystem of app providers working within collaboration platforms like Atlassian and Microsoft Office. The company provides tools to quickly create diagrams and flowcharts that can be added to wikis and other documents. Gliffy makes money by convincing customers, such as those who write manuals and other documentation, to store diagrams online and create embeddable diagrams within electronic documents that can be dynamically updated.

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Oracle has announced the availability of Java Platform Enterprise Edition 7, a release that brings new capabilities for HTML5-based application development to the framework.

HTML5 applications are easier to build with Java EE 7 through features such as “low-latency, bi-directional communication with WebSockets,” data exchange via JSON and the ability to support more concurrent users, Oracle said on Wednesday.

Other aspects of Java EE 7 are aimed at performance and scalability. For example, batch jobs can be divided into “manageable chunks,” giving OLTP (online transaction processing) applications uninterrupted performance, Oracle said.

Oracle gained control of Java through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. That move had some community members initially concerned about Oracle’s stewardship of Java, although those fears subsequently seemed to die down.

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The German city-state of Berlin won’t migrate to open source software. Instead, its parliament decided in principle to choose workplace IT based on open standards.

Berlin’s Green party had proposed to have 25 percent of its standardized IT workplaces running open source software by 2018, according to the proposal that was voted down by the state parliament on Monday.

It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin’s 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party’s spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.

Switching to open source can work, said Birk. By switching over 80 percent of its 15,500 desktops from Windows to its own Linux distribution, LiMux, and OpenOffice.org software, the city of Munich said it had saved over €11 million ($14.6 million) by November last year.

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The operator of a website that sold more than $100 million worth of pirated software to customers worldwide was sentenced Tuesday to 12 years in a U.S. federal prison.

Li Xiang, a 36-year old resident of Chengdu, China, was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and criminal copyright infringement for operating the website crack99.com, according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) statement.

He was arrested in June 2011 by U.S. agents when they lured him to a meeting in Saipan where he believed he was delivering 20 gigabytes of data to the representatives of U.S. businessmen. Saipan, an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and like the Atlantic island of Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S., giving American authorities jurisdiction.

Li’s website specialized in offering copies of industrial software which had the access control or licensing files removed or circumvented.

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Marketo says it has created tools that put it far ahead of rival marketing automation software vendors by making it much easier to run targeted campaigns, and more effective ones to boot.

The new capabilities go into general availability Friday in two versions, a basic version at no additional charge to existing customers and a paid edition for power users, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez said in an interview prior to Tuesday’s announcement.

Until now, marketing automation software allowed users to build a degree of sophistication into their ad campaigns by setting up a series of rules, Fernandez said. For example, a gaming company could decide to send out an emailed loyalty offer to all male customers in their early to mid-twenties who have bought at least three games in the past year, according to Fernandez.

The problem has been difficulty in taking the targeting down to a more individual level. This requires increasingly complex rule sets and just doesn’t scale up well as marketers try to reach more people individually, Fernandez said.

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Recent numbers by a market research firm appear to show that Android users spend 20 percent less time using their apps than iOS users spend.

That discrepancy largely has to do with how the two ecosystems have developed, noted Mary Ellen Gordon, director of industry insights and analysis for the research firm, Flurry.

Flurry analyzed four years worth of its own data to understand who is ahead in which contests, discuss the apparent strengths and weaknesses of the competitors, and consider the implications for the overall mobile ecosystem, according to the company’s blog.

Up to the introduction of the newer Samsung Galaxy S models, Android buyers were purchasing their phones for different reasons than iPhone users, she explained.

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Buffeted by concerns about the economy and IT spending, tech stocks have gone on a roller coaster ride lately, but on the whole they’ve managed to hang on to gains they made earlier in the quarter.

The Nasdaq Computer Index, which tracks more than 390 tech-related stocks on the exchange, was up about 1 percent in midday trading Friday, on a generally up day for markets. That brought it up to its level of a month earlier, after 30 days of ups and downs. The Nasdaq Computer Index is on track to close Friday up about 7 percent for the year.

In midday trading, major indexes looked good Friday on news from the U.S. Department of Labor that the U.S. added 175,000 jobs in May. Although the unemployment rate increased slightly to 7.6 percent, market observers looked at the news was looked with favor.

The general consensus seems to be that the numbers were good enough to show that businesses are hiring, but not so good that it would cause the U.S. Federal Reserve bank to stop its “quantitative easing” program of buying up securities in order to prop up markets.

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SAP is at work on a new product called Sentinel that is supposed to be "nothing less than the Amazon for Stocks and the Facebook for Investors," according to a job posting associated with the project.

"We take our metaphors seriously," adds the job listing, which was first flagged Thursday in a blog post by SAP consultant Richard Hirsch.

That said, the Amazon comparison seems more apt than the Facebook one, based on other passages in the ad.

"Sentinel blends Algorithmic Trading with deep News Analytics into a disruptive synergy, powered by SAP's revolutionary in-memory HANA platform and deep text analytics capabilities," it states. "Our sole purpose is simply this: to help millions of investors identify profitable trading opportunities with minimal cognitive overload. The end-goal is to build a system that is simple but not trivial; deeply quantitative but not confounding; advanced but not abstruse."

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Beginning June 26, users will be able to download the beta or preview version of Windows 8.1 fairly simply, via the Windows Store. But Microsoft officials confirm that upgrading to the final RTM build will include a gotcha—you’ll need to reinstall all of your apps.

Put another way, Windows RT users will be forced to reinstall all of the “Metro” apps (now known as modern apps) they’ve added to the OS, once the final RTM version is released.

And Windows 8 users will be forced to reinstall all of the modern-stype apps and all of the desktop apps they’ve added—a real pain for anyone with a well-populated system, according to ZDNet, which first reported the story.

However, if the average user opts out of the Windows 8.1 beta and decides instead to upgrade to Windows 8.1 when it is finally released, they will not be required to reinstall their applications, Microsoft representatives confirmed. The Windows 8.1 preview is meant for enthusiasts and IT pros.

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Microsoft announced that Outlook 2013 RT will be coming to Windows RT, along with the Windows 8.1 update. Sales of Windows RT tablets like the Surface RT have been underwhelming thus far, but Outlook will change that.

When the Windows 8.1 update comes to the Windows Store later this year, Outlook RT will join Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote as a free app on Windows RT systems. That is huge news in general, but it’s particularly intriguing for business users.

The Surface RT (and Windows RT tablets in general) is a decent tablet, but it's not a great device for business computing. It has distinct advantages over its Surface Pro sibling—it’s thinner, lighter, cooler, quieter, and has significantly better battery life—but it can’t join a Windows network domain.

With the Windows 8.1 update, it still won’t be able to join a network domain, but the IT and BYOD management features in Windows 8.1 make it much more business friendly. The addition of Outlook is the real game changer, though. The default Mail client in Windows 8.1 is no match for Outlook, and business users need consistency between the tools they use on their primary PC, and the apps available on the Windows RT tablet.

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SAP is buying privately held Hybris in a bid to build out an e-commerce software offering that connects with customers across multiple “channels, devices and touch points.”

Terms of the deal, which was announced Wednesday, were not disclosed. It is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.

Hybris, which is based in Switzerland, is the fastest-growing e-commerce software vendor in the world, according to SAP’s announcement. It sells an “omni-channel” platform spanning mobile, call center, in-store and Web commerce, and caters to both large and small companies, SAP said.

In addition, the Hybris technology provides a “single view” of customers and products across channels thanks to built-in master data management and other capabilities, SAP said.

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Informatica has given its virtual data machine technology a proper name and is planning to create versions of it that can run on anything from high-end servers in private data centers to small devices and sensors.

Dubbed Vibe, the “VDM engine” concept has been part of Informatica’s data integration platform since the beginning, said Marge Breya, executive vice president and chief marketing officer. It allows users to create data-integration mappings once, and then run them across multiple platforms.

Informatica recently ported its VDM to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing. The VDM provides an abstraction layer that makes users of Informatica’s PowerCenter application “defacto Hadoop developers,” since they can use their existing skills, according to a statement.

But Informatica’s goal with Vibe is to have the VDM technology running in far more places, such as sensors on industrial equipment or smart utility meters, capturing data and sending it to back-end systems for analysis.

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Compuware has updated its application performance management (APM) software to give administrators more insight into what might be slowing application performance, thanks to the inclusion of new metrics showing the operational health of the host infrastructure.

The new technology, called PureStack, allows the dynaTrace Compuware APM software to “connect the infrastructure with the applications,” said John Van Siclen, the general manager of Compuware’s APM.

“Imagine a CPU spike happens in some tier in the environment for some reason. With PureStack, you can correlate that CPU spike to the exact set of business transactions affected, and the number and the exact users who were affected,” Van Siclen said.

Typically, in order to pinpoint a performance problem with a Web application, an administrator would have to correlate timestamps from different system logs, said Steve Tack, chief technology officer of Compuware APM. PureStack “reduces the amount of time it takes to find the problem,” he said.

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Nearly three dozen computer scientists have signed off on a court brief opposing Oracle’s effort to copyright its Java APIs, a move they say would hold back the computer industry and deny affordable technology to end users.

The group, which includes prominent names such as MS-DOS author Tim Paterson and ARPANET developer Larry Roberts, signed the amicus brief in support of Google in its copyright lawsuit with Oracle.

Oracle vs Google

Oracle accuses Google of infringing the copyright on its Java APIs (application programming interfaces) in the development of Google’s Android OS, and it is seeking billions of dollars in damages. Google denies any wrongdoing and has argued, in part, that software APIs aren’t eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law.

Last year, a district court in California largely agreed with Googleand ruled against Oracle in the case. Judge William Alsup determined that the Java APIs in the case can’t be covered by copyright because they’re a functional part of the Java platform and required by others to use the Java language. Copyright law typically does not extend to works that are functional in nature.

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Zoho is getting into the business social-networking game with a new product called Pulse, which also ties back to many of its other applications.

Pulse features the now-familiar mix of activity streams, private messaging, notifications, blogs, groups and people search functionality familiar to anyone who's been within striking distance of both consumer social networks like Facebook and the many offerings for business, such as Yammer and Jive.

It also features applications for iPhone and Android devices, with iPad coming later. The applications are native to the devices but have some components that use HTML5, said Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna.

It's integrated with Zoho's Calendar, Chat, Discussions, Docs and People products, as well as the Creator database application development tool. The last feature gives companies the ability to embed custom applications inside Pulse.

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The nine best free tools for the busy geek

AirDroid

CamStudio

Chrome Remote Desktop

GameSave Manager

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What makes the Internet the extraordinary resource that it is? Some people say it’s the way the Web seamlessly connects all of us; others value its role as a limitless data repository; still others are just there for the cute animal pictures. (Grumpy Cat doesn’t count.) All of these points are valid, but when you drill down to nuts-and-bolts usefulness, one thing trumps them all.

The Internet is full of free stuff.

We’ve spent countless hours culling the jewels from the junk to craft our 18th annual roundup of free stuff, a virtual smorgasbord of the very best no-cost programs, apps, and services available online. To make your life easier, we’ve categorized the entries by the types of people they’ll help most.

Dig in. You’re sure to find something unexpectedly awesome.

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If you were going to sum up Windows 8 in a single sentence, “It’s all about the apps” would do the trick. And that’s why a new study from Soluto, a company that offers a remote troubleshooting tool for Windows PCs, suggests a somewhat stark reality for Microsoft's new-look operating system.

Windows 8 was rebuilt from the ground up to revolve around finger-friendly Windows apps. The modern UI Start screen is chock-full of Live Tiles generated from those apps, virtually all of Microsoft’s default programs sport that oh-so-modern (a.k.a. the interface formerly known as Metro) luster, and users don’t even get the option of booting straight to the desktop. You have to stare the Start screen’s shiny, shifty app collection in the face every time you boot up your PC.

With that heavy a focus, Windows 8’s very future hinges on the success of its apps. Soluto’s report digs into how often people really use those apps on a daily basis.

The news isn’t wonderful. Of the 10,848 Windows 8 devices studied by Soluto, the majority of traditional desktop and laptop users—even ones using a device with a touchscreen—fail to open a modern-style app daily. (Note that this study refers only to modern apps, not to traditional desktop programs.) Even on tablets, the devices best suited for Windows 8’s modern UI, just 56 percent of all users launch a Windows 8 app day in and day out.

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Welcome to the wacky world of tech patents—a place where you’ll find not just the crazy-sounding ideas that inhabit any category of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but some ideas that seem so minute or so obvious that you wonder how they ever qualified as patentworthy.

Once issued, however, a patent isn’t just a shield. It’s a weapon that companies and individuals can use against their competitors. “Patent trolls” are infamous for acquiring patents and then making the business of filing lawsuits against alleged infringers their core competency.

The technology sector is hardly alone in taking patent-holding to extreme levels of judicial enforcement. But some of the most bizarre tech patents we found suggest that we may need a new idea for protecting ideas—one that can more easily weed out the lawyers and the loonies.

The 'Interactive Web' patent

1998

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Microsoft has responded to a high-profile put-down by Google CEO Larry Page, but Oracle, at least for now, won’t be drawn into a public fight with the executive.

Page criticized Microsoft and Oracle in response to questions after his keynote speech at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Microsoft came under fire about instant messaging interoperability, while Oracle was singled out over Java.

“We’ve kind of had an offer forever that we’ll interoperate on instant messaging,” he said in response to a question. “I think just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us, but not doing the reverse. Which is really sad, right? And that’s not the way to make progress. You need to actually have inter operation, not just people milking off one company for their own benefit.”

Microsoft fired back Thursday via an emailed statement: “It’s ironic that Larry is lending his voice to the discussion of interoperability considering his company’s decision—today—to file a cease and desist order to remove the YouTube app from Windows Phone, let alone the recent decision to make it more difficult for our customers to connect their Gmail accounts to their Windows experience.”

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We've seen several Linux tablets emerge over the past year or so, but examples with triple-boot capabilities are much less common.

Enter the Python S3, a tablet released on Monday by Italian Ekoore that can boot three operating systems: Ubuntu Linux, Android, and Windows 8.

“The Python series was born with the purpose of uniting in a single tablet multiple operating systems,” explains the Italian Ekoore website. “The components of this device are the result of careful and accurate selection, to ensure perfect compatibility with all operating systems.”

Ready for a look? Here's what we've got.

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Regular PCWorld readers may recall Cinnarch, a Linux distribution I covered last fall that combined Arch Linux with the relatively new and alternative Cinnamon desktop environment.

Cinnarch was just in beta at the time, but recently the project team behind it announced that they planned to abandon Cinnamon  as a default desktop, calling it “too much a burden to maintain/update going forward.”

Making good on their promise, the team this week announced the birth of Antergos, a brand-new Arch-based Linux distribution that's based on GNOME 3 instead.

'Modern, elegant, and powerful'

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It's been about six weeks since the release of Firefox 20, so assuming Mozilla stays on its usual schedule, Firefox 21 will make its debut on Tuesday.

This next version of the popular open source browser has already attracted attention for the changes brought in early versions to Firefox's “Do Not Track” capabilities, but those are by no means the only interesting additions we'll see.

Several changes and new features are slated to arrive in the final version of Firefox 21, in fact. Here's a quick rundown of some of the highlights you can expect to find.

1. Three 'Do Not Track' options

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Windows RT just can't catch a break. Friday's big news— Apple's refusal to create an iTunes Windows 8 app —was another blow to the beleaguered OS, for even though Microsoft's finger-friendly programs are dubbed "Windows 8 apps," they're truly "Windows RT apps." The ARM processors powering Windows RT tablets can't run traditional desktop programs (like iTunes) and are instead forced to rely upon the lackluster selection in the Windows Store.

Apple's decision to pass on a Windows 8 app doesn't affect hardware running the full version of Windows 8 in the slightest, as those users just grab the classic version. But for people who bought into the promise of the Surface RT and its ilk, the snub cuts deep.

The lack of an iTunes app is a big deal, and not just because the current state of Windows 8 music apps is so …wanting. (The baked-in Music app? Meh.)

More important, iTunes is a juggernaut of an ecosystem, gobbling roughly two-thirds of all paid digital music and video sales alike. If you buy digital media, there's a great chance you have something stashed in iTunes—and, if that something includes any video files or DRM-protected songs, you'll find it utterly inaccessible on Windows RT.

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A U.S. appeals court has ruled that an abstract idea is not patentable simply because it is tied to a computer system, signaling what one judge described as the "death" of software and business method patents.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Friday that four patents held by electronic marketplace Alice are too abstract for a patent, despite a long-standing legal assumption that software running on a computer is eligible for patents.

The implications of the case are huge, wrote Judge Kimberly Moore, dissenting in part with the majority decision.

The ruling in CLS Bank v. Alice gives "staggering breadth to what is meant to be a narrow judicial exception" on patent ineligibility, she wrote. "And let's be clear: if all of these claims, including the system claims, are not patent-eligible, this case is the death of hundreds of thousands of patents, including all business method, financial system, and software patents as well as many computer implemented and telecommunications patents."

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There's no doubt that desktop Linux has become increasingly user-friendly over the years, but it's equally true that some distributions focus more on ease of use than others do.

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are two examples at the forefront of this usability trend, but recently I came across another that has put friendliness at the forefront of its goals.

Enter Korora, a distro that “was born out of a desire to make Linux easier for new users, while still being useful for experts,” in the project's own words. Originally based on Gentoo Linux when it launched in 2005, Korora was re-born in 2010 as a Fedora remix with tweaks and extras for additional usability.

Korora recently got a key update to version 18, and it looks intriguing. Here's a summary of what's inside.

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Canonical on Wednesday announced its next moves on the way to market with a Linux-powered phone.

By the end of this month Canonical plans to equip its employees with early versions of its widely hyped “Ubuntu phone” for testing and refinement.

“We should drive as hard as we can to making it so that we can use our phones with Ubuntu Touch as our real daily phones as soon as possible,” said Rick Spencer, Canonical's vice president of Ubuntu engineering, in a Wednesday blog post. “Really eat our own dog food, so to speak.”

'User data is retained'

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Intel has acquired two software companies as it continues to build its burgeoning portfolio to include more tools to write and manage programs and interfaces.

The company on Thursday announced the acquisition of Belfast-based Aepona and San Francisco-based Mashery, which offer software to help manage APIs (application programming interfaces) so partners can monetize services based on customer context.

For example, Aepona’s API management tools can track location, device type, and other features tied to a mobile connection, which can act as a basis for communication service providers to enable transactions such as one-time payments for services. Mashery also provides software to help partners manage API tools that have been deployed.

Intel was not immediately available for comment regarding terms of the acquisitions.

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