Microsoft Rolls Out Student Advantage, Giving Students Free Access To Its Office Suite

Today Microsoft flipped the switch on Student Advantage, a program, announced in October, that extends the availability of Office to students of educational institutions that pay for Office 365 for their staff and faculty. According to Microsoft, 35,000 educational institutions are eligible for Student Advantage, which provides access to the ProPlus SKU of Office 365, again provided that its paid staff are current users of Office 365 ProPlus or Office Professional Plus. Office 365 ProPlus includes Access and Lync, making it a robust set of tools. Microsoft took a dig at Google in its announcement, stating that “[e]ven Google's own job postings require competency with Microsoft Office tools.” What this means in practice is that Microsoft is lowering the marginal cost of Office for students to zero, while guaranteeing itself revenue through contracts with universities and the like. Microsoft cannot afford to cede mind and market share to Google, which provides a free Office competitor, and it must preserve its revenue from the product, which is a key profit source. Office 365 ProPlus generally costs around $12 per month, per user, so the amount of ‘free' software that Microsoft will provide is non-trivial. To protect Office from low, or zero-cost competitors, it's probably sensible for it to sacrifice some revenue opportunity to keep up its primacy in the productivity market.

Salesforce Says Hackathon Winner Didn't Cheat But Declares Tie, Gives Two Finalists $1M Each

Salesforce has responded to cries of foul play in its $1 million hackathon by announcing that while winning team Upshot didn't cheat, judges weren't given sufficient information to select a winner so it's giving $1 million to each of the top two finalists, Upshot and Healthcare.love. Below is the email that Salesforce's Adam Seligman just sent to all participants of the Salesforce1 Hackathon at last month's Dreamforce conference. - Forwarded message ---- From: “Adam Seligman” Date: Dec 2, 2013 1:22 PM Subject: Update on the Salesforce1 Hackathon internal review To: “Adam Seligman” , “April Kyle Nassi” Cc: I want to thank you personally for participating in the Salesforce1 Hackathon. We had a great time throwing the event, seeing the hard work from the developer community, and seeing the live final round judging process. But we also heard your feedback and I wanted to let you know that we took your concerns seriously. We conducted a review led by our internal audit team into the hackathon judging process and eligibility of the top finalists. We just announced our response to your feedback, based on our internal review here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/salesforcecom-announces-two-1-million-winning-teams-for-the-salesforce1-hackathon-2013-12-02 What we determined was that the winning team met eligibility requirements, and their use of pre-existing code was allowed under the rules. What we also found was that we did not adequately equip the final round judges to evaluate the entries that contained pre-existing code. Because we are unable to determine if this would have changed the outcome of the final round of judging, we decided that the appropriate outcome is to declare a tie, and award each of the top two teams, Upshot and Healthcare.love, with the grand prize of $1 million. Both Upshot and Healthcare.love built incredible apps on the Salesforce1 Platform and both deserve to be recognized. We also heard your concerns about the transparency of the judging process. We should have been more transparent about our process and provided feedback to you. I just posted a blog (http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2013/12/update-on-salesforce1-hackathon-feedback-review.html) addressing this issue because we want to be transparent about the issues we heard from you and explain how we made our decisions. We made some mistakes, and we will be taking your feedback into the next hackathon, which we are planning now. If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact me. Adam Nothing is more of an unlikely lightning rod for controversy than a hackathon, and in Salesforce's case the winner caused a tech media firestorm by both having an ex-Salesforce employee as a founder, and allegedly consisting of a year's worth of pre-existing code. Salesforce tells us that they are not sure how old Upshot's code was, but after an internal review, the mobile app the Upshot team submitted was found to be law-abiding. While one of the rules was “have been developed solely as part of this Hackathon,” Salesforce's Chief Legal officer Burke Norton tells us that that stipulation actually meant that ”use of preexisting code was okay as long as it didn't violate any third party rights and comprise the majority of the app.” According to Salesforce, the judges were not actually briefed on on the more granular pre-existing code policy, and if they had been, the 2nd place winner Healthcare.love may have actually won. “We should have better prepared the final round judges around the “Innovation” category,” Norton said, “And made it clear that credit should be given to only the code built for the hackathon.”

Facebook’s Feed Adds More Links And “Related Articles” To Battle News Discovery Apps

Facebook is determined to be your top content discovery destination, so it’s making several tweaks to its News Feed including showing more links to articles, displaying a “related articles” box when you click those links, and bumping old links back to the top of the feed when friends comment on them. The goal is to make Facebook the hub for both news sharing and discussion. Facebook says referral traffic to news sites increased 170% this year, outpacing its user growth. Still it’s up against serious competition in the news discovery space from specialty services like Flipboard, Prismatic, Circa, and others, as well as social networks like Twitter and Google+. Today’s move could be designed to box them out. It also ties in with Facebook’s overarching initiative to become the global watercooler for real-time events. Facebook doesn’t just want to host random commentary, but link sharing related to big moments as well. Specifically, in an effort to help people find more interesting news stories, it will show more news article links in the feed, “particularly on mobile”. It will also show a Related Articles box below links you click. This can show other articles by the same news outlet or that a related to the same topic.

Facebook will also resurface links you might have already seen in the feed, but that have received new comments from your friends. Facebook believes the highest potential for engagement is not just in helping people broadcast news but giving them a place to talk about it. Finally, Facebook also says it’s going to work on distinguishing between shallow meme posts and true news articles so there’s less click-bait in the News Feed. Facebook warns ”This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.” That’s a big deal to content publishers who rely on Facebook for traffic. Facebook Pages may not be able to score as much easy visibility for their brands by just spewing Lolcats and other image macros. While Facebook’s relevancy-sorted feed works fine for discovering evergreen articles and the big ideas of the day, it lacks the immediacy of chronologically-sorted real-time feeds that excel at breaking news. To win the news discovery battle, Facebook may need to devise a way to recognize and surface not just what content is the best, but what’s important right this minute.

Facebook Is Replacing Its “Hide All” Button With “Unfollow”

Here's a new tweak to how Facebook users can filter their News Feeds: The company says it's rolling out a button that allows you to “unfollow” other users. To be clear, it sounds like the functionality is pretty much identical to what users could already accomplish by hitting the “Hide All” button. For those of you who haven't tried it, Hide All is a way to remain Facebook friends with someone while hiding their updates from your News Feed - say if they usually post content that you find annoying or boring, but you don't want to offend them by completely severing your Facebook connection. What is changing is the specific wording. Thanks to services like Twitter and Instagram, users have presumably become more familiar with the concept of unfollowing, and it seems that the language of following and unfollowing is becoming a bigger part of Facebook. Next to the “Like” button in profiles, Facebook will also show users whether they're following someone (this will show up on on individual user profiles and on company Pages). The mechanics of following, which allows you to follower a user's public updates (assuming they've opted in) without becoming their friend, will remain the same, but this may encourage more users to take advantage of this option to influence the kind of updates that show up in their feed. “The goal of this change is to help people curate their News Feed and see more of the content that they care about,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Apple Buys Topsy For Price Reportedly North Of $200M, Could Use Social Signals To Bolster Siri, App Store Relevance

Apple has purchased social analytics firm Topsy, which focuses on parsing data from Twitter, reports The Wall Street Journal. The deal was apparently worth ‘more than $200M' according to the publication. Topsy is one of several firms that have been focused on gathering and parsing data from Twitter's platform. It allows customers to tap into a store of over 425M tweets from 2006 onwards to sniff out trends. Topsy competitors in the Twitter data reselling game include DataSift and Gnip, but its user-facing tools including a topic and trends search engine have made it one of the more popular options for those looking to make sense of the stuff people are tweeting about. Given that Apple is a Twitter partner already, and hosts login and posting features for the social network on its iOS and OS X platforms, this seems like a confusing deal if all that it's after is the Twitter data firehose. It seems more likely that Topsy has technology or engineers (read: acquihire) that can parse trends in a way that Apple wants to incorporate into one of its products. If I had to hazard a guess, this might be related to Apple building out the relevancy engine of its App and iTunes Stores. Adding social signals to the searching algorithms of its stores could help to improve the relevance of search results, and help Apple surface apps that are hotter and more interesting to users. Tracking app trends across social networks would allow them to fine tune categories and collections of apps, and surface apps that are gaining steam more quickly. Pulling the thread out a bit further, it's possible that Apple could even use the data from your Twitter feeds to recommend apps on a more personal basis, rather than ‘generically' to everyone. Apple has done little of this kind of personalized recommendation work to this point, but there's always a first time for everything. The WSJ article points to iTunes Radio ads and the iAd platform as possible beneficiaries of the Topsy engine too. Apple could theoretically use social data to help advertisers display ads to more relevant viewers. This would boost revenue and relevance across Apple's ad platforms, which haven't been incredibly robust so far. Apple purchased the app search company Chomp last year, but ended up using mostly its ‘card-like' interface, not what some viewed to be its superior discovery model. Unfortunately, the acquisition did not lead to a massive improvement in app store search results. Apple has recently been tweaking results to better correct for mis-spellings and mis-typing when searching the store. There is also a slim possibility that Apple may want to use Topsy's stored trends data and firehose access to improve Siri search. It could provide Siri with a reliable way to present people with trending topics and search results according to Twitter when queried. Topsy has also filed for over a dozen patents related to social networks. These include systems and methods for prediction-based crawling of social media network and systems and methods for customized filtering and analysis of social media content collected over social networks. As one of only a handful of companies with Twitter firehose access, and one of Twitter's first Certified Product partners, Topsy's purchase will change the market for those left behind. And it shows that Apple has a growing interest in the data flowing through networks like Twitter, which is a refreshing notion. The company has not typically been bullish in this arena previously. Apple confirmed the purchase with the WSJ.

Amazon Is Experimenting With Autonomous Flying Delivery Drones

Between launching a charity-friendly buying program, announcing Sunday deliveries, and gearing up for the first wave of frenzied holiday shoppers, Amazon has been busy these past few weeks. But that didn't stop CEO Jeff Bezos from spending a decent chunk of time talking to Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes about something, well, new. 60 Minutes has been more than happy to tease the unveiling with a clip of Bezos leading Rose into a room to show him something that elicited an “Oh my God!” from the veteran TV journo. The exclamation seemed to stem from a place of pleasure rather than worry, but the segment just aired and the truth is out. So what did Bezos have up his proverbial sleeves? Amazon Prime Air drones that could feasibly be used as autonomous delivery vehicles. To hear the chief executive tell it, those electric drones - or “octocopters” as he referred to them - could make for delivery times as low as 30 minutes. Naturally, the size of those drones means there's a strict upper limit to how much cargo they can carry, but Bezos says they can carry packages of up to five pounds for round trips as long as 10 miles. Thankfully for Amazon, that means nearly 86 percent of the items that it carries can be lashed onto one of its sky-bound couriers. Just don't expect to see one of them land on your doorstep any time soon. The FAA still hasn't given its blessing to domestic drones yet (though it just recently laid out its vision for such a situation), which means the earliest that Amazon will be legally able to bring Prime Air online is in 2015 - a launch window that Bezos says is “optimistic” at best. There's also no word on what company (if any) Amazon is working with to develop its fleet of drones, but at this stage, there's no shortage of players eagerly working to bring drones into the world of business. The rest of the report didn't shine too much additional light on what makes Amazon tick, though it did afford us mere mortals a closer look at how its gargantuan fulfillment centers work. They're stunningly large models of efficiency - the one 60 Minutes toured was 1.2 million sq. ft. and the workers packing products into parcels were able to do so with remarkable speed. Sadly, since the segment was filmed over the span of a month, there's no official response on the recent BBC report that took aim at Amazon UK for warehouse working conditions that could potentially cause “mental illness and physical illness”.

Winter-Proof Your Chapped Cheeks With DIY, Natural Chapsticks

Winter is coming. And for a lot of people, especially kids, that means chapped cheeks. Over at One Good Thing By Jillee, there's a DIY solution to make your own, natural chapstick for cheeks, since the store-bought chapsticks for lips won't do much for your cheeks. It's not too difficult either: 1/4 cup organic coconut oil 1/4 cup olive oil 2 Tablespoons beeswax pastilles 20 drops Lavender essential oil Melt the coconut, olive oil and beeswax in a warm bath, stirring every few minutes until melted. This will take at least 15 min, you want a slow melt. After the oils & wax are completely melted, add the Lavender essential oil and stir. Using a pipette (or whatever means you can to pour the liquid into the tubes) carefully fill the tubes with the melted liquid. Allow to cool until hardened. This should give you enough to fill 10-12 chapstick tubes, a pack of which costs around $4 on Amazon. It'll be quite handy to make a batch and have them on you, as well as in your car, home and office for the winter.