We’ve received a couple of tips in the past 24 hours or so pointing us to what looks to be another new feature for Hotmail: an inline audio player, and with a little help from our friend F Martin Garcia…

Microsoft’s highly anticipated Build conference, this year’s version of PDC, WinHEC (and Mix?), all rolled into one, gets started next week with keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday, starting at 9am PDT (GMT –7).

We’ll be there, of course, liveblogging one …

The look of Windows Live Messenger is great, no? Yet sometimes you wish you could adapt it to the theming of your desktop, only if just a little. This can be achieved by applying a skin, something which only the …

Earlier this evening (Pacific Daylight time), Hotmail, SkyDrive, all the .live.com services, MSN.com, Office 365, and live@edu addresses went down, according to various reports around the web.  Downrightnow.com, a “crowd powered” service monitoring service, pins the service disruption as …

A number of Microsoft online services, including Hotmail, MSN, Office 365, and seemingly most if not all of *.live.com addresses are currently “experiencing an outage”.  MSN and Office 365 have already tweeted about it:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/MSN/status/112008273120595968″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/Office365/status/112008132443648000″]

Omar Shahine, …

A number of reports surfaced today about a set of upcoming changes to Zune Pass, set to take place on September 13th.  The changes have to do with the number of devices you can connect via Zune Pass.  An …

When Microsoft released the new Windows Live SkyDrive Wave 5 M0 update back in June 2011 with a full UI revamp, while it provided a much more user-friendly interface to view and manage your files, it still carried many inconveniences …

Inside Facebook is reporting today that although games have traditionally held the top spots on Facebook in terms of monthly active users, a new class of applications, those integrating Facebook and large tech and/or media companies, such as Bing and …

As usual, the buildup to Build, and what will be revealed about Windows 8 and its surrounding ecosystem, is much more about what Microsoft is NOT saying than what it has.  After the Windows 8 demo at this summer’s D8 …

Microsoft is in the process of finally actually doing something useful with SkyDrive, after years of supporting a promising yet crippled product.  Perhaps driven by the success of Dropbox (and its supposed $4 billion valuation), and also the obvious usefulness …