Microsoft did a good thing when it teamed up with the Children’s Miracle Network to give three hospitals Xbox 360 game rooms. I still think it would be great if they gave the fourth place hospital a gameroom too, but I think I already covered that. Anyway, the three winning hospitals have finally been announced after the voting ended on Saturday night.

Fellow nerds will know that Final Fantasy VII had a special “mode,” I guess, called “All Lucky 7s” that triggered when your HP was at 7777. I bring this up to segue into this story, that Microsoft is giving away 777 copies of Windows 7 to the lucky residents of Zevenhuizen, in Groningen, in The Netherlands. “Zevenhuizen,” of course, translates to “seven houses.”

Turns out our source had it right: Microsoft engineers who worked on the Danger/Sidekick meltdown have been able to recover “most if not all” of the data that was lost during last weekend’s catastrophic server failure.

In a statement, Roz Ho, Corporate VP of Premium Mobile Experiences addresses the unfortunate T-Mobile Sidekick customers and apologizes for the massive fail:

Building upon the success of the custom ATI Xenos GPU that’s found in the current Xbox 360, Microsoft and ATI have apparently already struck a deal to continue using ATI chips in the next generation of Xbox consoles, according to Fudzilla.

Slightly better news for anyone who lost data during the recent Microsoft/T-Mobile Sidekick outage. While it initially appeared that user data may have been lost forever, T-Mobile issued a statement late yesterday saying, “Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible.”

Years ago, when Microsoft started pushing Internet Explorer, it enjoyed favorable adoption rates because, well, it’s already on there, so why not use it? (Law-breaking aside, of course!)That may be what Microsoft is thinking this time around with Office 2010. Redmond will allow OEMs to install Office Starter 2010 on brand new Windows 7 PCs. It will be a pared down version of Office, and one that will be ad-supported. That, of course, has caused the Internet to freak out.

Maybe I’m speaking for the minority here, but I have to get this off my chest: Project Natal is sorta “meh,” no? I attended Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards for a few minutes last night, and they had on display Project Natal. It was that paint-throwing game. Now, I know that’s just a tech demo, but I left feeling a little concerned about its future.

When we first mentioned Microsoft’s new keyboard idea, it was mentioned that there would be a contest, and students all over the place would be competing to create the coolest applications for the device. Well, the contest is over and the winners have been announced. So if you were thinking of entering, too bad. You’ll have to wait for the multi-touch mouse contest.

So they had three categories: most useful, best implementation, and most creative. Remember, these are just demos made by students, so forgive their lack of polish. The demos, I mean, not the students.

You probably know by now that at least some of us here at pretty high on the Zune HD—look at the lengths I went to get it up and running!—but I recognize that not every Mac owner is going to jump through hoops just to be able to use the device. But maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is finally ready to do what so many people have asked it to do: make a Mac version of the Zune software, thereby enabling all the Mac owners out there to use the portable media player a little more easily.

While the multi-touch mice took up most of my visit to the dark corridors of Microsoft Labs, I did get to see some other fun stuff. They’ve got a rapid prototyping workshop, an anechoic chamber, and of course that pressure-sensitive keyboard I posted a while back.

Check out what goes on behind closed doors inside.

The other day, I went on a short tour of some of Microsoft’s Labs, where they do everything from rapid prototypes of new products to acoustic testing in anechoic chambers. Most of my time was spent in the Applied Sciences group’s labs, where they are working on some seriously interesting devices.

And they’re not just into mice; in fact, the lab’s specialty seemed to be anything to do with optics and/or input. This lab worked on Project Natal, and also on the pressure-sensitive keyboard I wrote about a while back.

They were kind enough to show me all these crazy multi-touch mice, and, when I was too inept to demo even one of them solo, offered to go through them with me on video.

The trickle of news about Microsoft’s Courier device continues, and this time there’s a bit more of a realistic walkthrough. The device is being shown to be much more of a next-generation notepad than all-purpose tablet, and that’s probably for the best; Microsoft overreaching with a device like this could result in a real crash and burn. I suppose the best way to picture the Courier is just as a web-connected organizer — you know, one of those leather-bound ones that business people used to have, and which the Courier seems clearly designed after.

Of course, with an internet connection and full-color touchscreen, much more is enabled and the device becomes much more complicated. Microsoft’s (and Pioneer’s) task has been to pare that down to a product, and it really looks like they’ve done it right.

I’ve just hooked up the LifeCam Cinema to my desktop, and thought an SD comparison was in order. In a stroke of genius, I attached the LifeCam to the top of my Mac so it and my iSight were pretty much aligned — though not so much that it’s seamless. I did a little video so you can compare color, fidelity, and all that.

What happens when your Windows 7 party gets a little crazy? People start talking about things like “boot sectors,” “man-on-man DIMM insertion,” and “[beep].”

via BBG

Last week we showed the highlights and 10+ minutes of video footage of an exclusive hour-long TechCrunch interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Now for the rest of that interview. The video was just a teaser. I spoke with Ballmer for another 50 minutes on the record, doing a deeper dive into five key areas of Microsoft’s product strategy: Big Opportunities, Operating Systems/Browsers, Mobile, Search and Developers.

This post is about big opportunities at Microsoft beyond their dual cash cows of Windows and Office. Microsoft generates around $20 billion a year in pre-tax profit, and spends nearly $10 billion on research and development. When Microsoft thinks about increasing (or sustaining) those profits, they have to think big. And they have to think long term.

Ballmer says he thinks about new business opportunities in three buckets: expanding current businesses (short run), building things from scratch (long run), and big aquisitions (short cuts).

Come back with me to 2001. A young man got up on stage one afternoon in November to announce something new and amazing: an operating system dedicated to tablet computing. That young man was Microsoft’s Bill Gates and that operating system was Windows XP Tablet PC edition. Chances are that is the first and last time you saw a working tablet computer. The thinking was this: if you can streamline appellations – data entry applications being the target here – you could sell smaller, more expensive computers to medical and business clients. It didn’t work and Windows Tablet PC has been little more than a clever solution to a nonexistent problem.

So what’s with all the tablet talk lately?

I posted some pictures of Sony’s and Ubisoft’s booth at this year’s Tokyo Game Show yesterday, but booth-wise, Square Enix, Microsoft (Xbox 360) and Capcom made quite a strong showing, too. Here’s some proof.