The tech giant announced yesterday that it has acquired the company Lookout Software LLC. According to eWeek this company offered "add-on to Microsoft Outlook that indexes and searches e-mail as well as desktop files." The key here is that Lookouts software allowed users to search for desktop files. With all the advance search capabilities being built for Longhorn this acquisition might just speed up the release for the public beta.
MSN continues to delve deeper into search with the acquisition of a 6-month-old startup focused on desktop search. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet division announced late Thursday that it has bought Lookout Software LLC, the maker of a software add-on to Microsoft Outlook that indexes and searches e-mail as well as desktop files. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
While not directly addressing how they will use Lookout's technology, MSN officials said it is part of the company's increased investment in search and its efforts to make results—whether from the Web or from the desktop—more relevant for users. "Our vision is to take search beyond today's basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people's questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources," Yusuf Mehdi, MSN's corporate vice president, said in a statement.
News source: eWeek
MSN continues to delve deeper into search with the acquisition of a 6-month-old startup focused on desktop search. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet division announced late Thursday that it has bought Lookout Software LLC, the maker of a software add-on to Microsoft Outlook that indexes and searches e-mail as well as desktop files. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
While not directly addressing how they will use Lookout's technology, MSN officials said it is part of the company's increased investment in search and its efforts to make results—whether from the Web or from the desktop—more relevant for users. "Our vision is to take search beyond today's basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people's questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources," Yusuf Mehdi, MSN's corporate vice president, said in a statement.
News source: eWeek
Whats New:
Localized versions for French, German and Japanese
Bi-directional coding using an adaptive method
Fully adaptive multiple consecutive B-frames
MPEG-2/H.263 quantization choice
Built-in bitrate calculator
Update checking tool
Automatic update notification for the DivX encoder
Fast mode, revamped for better performance, compression and quality
Feedback mode which is now multithreaded, taking advantage of HyperThreaded or dual CPU for better efficiency
3 point GMC support in the DivX decoder
Changed:
"Slowest" mode removed as the quality differential with "Slow" mode was insignificant, yet the performance differential was massive
DivX Pro Adware bundle replaced by DivX Pro 6-month free trial
Improved:
Smooth playback supporting multiple consecutive B-frames
Quantizer, now using quant scale in video packets
Fixed (Encoder):
A rare issue where rate control sometimes inserted Q=31 frames in video combining low light conditions, high bitrate and specific motion patterns
Fastest mode to respect the user-specified average bitrate (Old "Fastest" behavior can be obtained by disabling profiles and performing 1-Pass, Quality-based encoding with Q=3)
Fixed (Decoder):
A crash occurring in some rare cases with clips that have dimensions divisible only by 2 and use YUY2 color mode
Black screen when decoding old buggy MPEG-4 clips that lack VOL header
Internal flush operation with "Smooth playback" feature
Intra inverse quantization (type 1)
Support for generic MPEG-4 (XVID and 3ivX)
Data partitioning clip
Deblocking to no longer cause solid blocks to appear during playback
DivX decoder to always play DivX video
It's amazing how such a big company like MS, cant do such simple thing and indexed find.
Well I least we will have a free Outlook add-on soon (hope so)
Microsoft knows that they can't get everything into Longhorn that they 'promised', so they'll buy the companies that have it, and implement it?
Microsoft Research already has a very good tool called Stuff I've seen which searches Outlook mail and desktop files/ IE histroy etc.
See http://research.microsoft.com/copyright/ac...nal.pdf&pub=ACM
It seems that Lookout already has some patents on desktop search technology.
Microsoft's work was independetly developed. They are just protecting their back from patent litigations.
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