Now that the celebration is over, we can get into the stuff that really matters on the Kinect for Windows front – software. Over on the Microsoft blog, the Kinect team detailed changes being made to the beta 2 SDK that will move the Kinect software up to version 1.0. As previously reported during CES, the retail price of Kinect for Windows is $250 with special academic pricing being set to $150.

The list of features added to version 1.0 really helps to set Kinect for Windows development apart from its Xbox 360 equivalent. People should be able to take the device to new highs with these new features. As an aside, it can be assumed that some of these features will be showing up in Kinect for Xbox 360 dev kits as well.

Support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer.

Significantly improved skeletal tracking, including the ability for developers to control which user is being tracked by the sensor.

Near Mode for the new Kinect for Windows hardware, which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 40 centimeters in front of the device.

Many API updates and enhancements in the managed and unmanaged runtimes.

The latest Microsoft Speech components (V11) are now included as part of the SDK and runtime installer.

Improved “far-talk” acoustic model that increases speech recognition accuracy.

New and updated samples, such as Kinect Explorer, which enables developers to explore the full capabilities of the sensor and SDK, including audio beam and sound source angles, color modes, depth modes, skeletal tracking, and motor controls.

A commercial-ready installer which can be included in an application’s set-up program, making it easy to install the Kinect for Windows runtime and driver components for end-user deployments.

Robustness improvements including driver stability, runtime fixes, and audio fixes.

Microsoft hopes to release updates to the SDK and runtime two to three times a year. The team is already working on the second update as you read this. They are also continuing to invest in other programs like the Testing and Adoption Program and the Kinect Accelerator. They will continue creating new programs in the future to support their developer and partner ecosystem.

With the amazing stuff people have already put out using the beta drivers, it will be interesting to see what developers do with custom-tailored for Windows software. It’s also safe to assume that whatever the Kinect for Windows team cooks up will make its way to a Kinect for Xbox 360 near you as well.

Related Article: Kinect Star Wars: May The Force Be With Scott Pratt

To see what Kinect for Windows can already do, have a video of Skyrim on PC being controlled via Kinect:

Curious to learn who’s still keeping the Vista spirt alive in the world, Pingdom took a look at the global market share of operating systems to find out who exactly still uses this OS (and then troll those parts of the world unforgivably) (actually, the Pingdom people didn’t troll anybody for their OS choices). After looking at data for 216 countries, Windows Vista was found to still be in use among 10.5% of all desktop operative systems. Windows 7 commanded the greatest portion of desktop OS market shares with 44% and Windows XP claimed 35% of all market shares.

And in case you’e wondering which country out there is still using Vista the most: Ireland. Oddly, the country with the lowest percentage of Windows Vista usage was Cuba. As much as I want to tease out conclusions from these findings, I wouldn’t go too far in extrapolating conclusions about the cultural climate of either country based on their Vista usage (or lack thereof), but simply smile, say an amused “Humh,” and enjoy the new piece of tech trivia. And really, the world seems to still love it some Vista: out of all 216 countries included in Pingdom’s survey, 182 of them – that’s 84.2% – Windows Vista is the third most commonly used OS.

One piece of trivia I do enjoy, however, and that does have some small validity to it: Windows Vista is still more popular worldwide than Mac OS X. In fact, only 16 countries in the world use Mac OS X more than Vista. And surprisingly, 2 countries out there can say that more PCs use Linux than Vista.

So if you’re one of the many out there still rocking the Windows Vista, I invite you to share with us in the comments why you’ve remained attached to this particular OS system over the years.

Onlive, the company that made cloud computing cool with their game streaming service, are bringing virtual desktop streaming to the iPad. They announced that their OnLive Desktop app will be available on the iPad on January 12.

The OnLive Desktop app builds upon their previous experience with streaming PC games to stream a Windows 7 desktop to devices. The iPad being the first device to receive the service. With the app, iPads will have access to all the business applications that Windows users enjoy such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The app also brings with it a full on-screen Windows keyboard and handwriting recognition. This will bring the full desktop experience to the iPad with all the viewing and editing tools needed to work on complex documents.

“OnLive Desktop is the first app to deliver a no-compromise, media-rich Windows desktop experience to iPad, opening up powerful new possibilities for consumers and businesses,” Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO, said. “iPad users will now be able to simply and securely view and edit cloud-hosted documents with full-featured Windows desktop applications like Microsoft Office, just as if they were using a local high-performance PC. Multi-touch gestures respond instantly and smoothly, while HD videos, animations and PC video games—never before usable on a remote desktop—play seamlessly.”

There will be a free and pay for version of the desktop app available on the iPad app store. The free version launching on Thursday offers 2GB of cloud storage and as-available access to a cloud-based Windows 7 PC. In layman’s terms, it means that free users have to wait in line until a server is open for them to use. After all that line waiting though, users will be able to play around with a pre-populated Windows desktop featuring Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

The pay for version will come later, but will offer 50GB of cloud storage, priority access (less line waiting), full-featured web browsing, additional PC apps and other OnLive-unique features for $9.99 a month.

The OnLive Desktop app will also be coming soon to Android devices, PC, Mac and monitor/TV support through the company’s MicroConsole or Google TV.

Interested parties can sign up for their free account now.

Will you be using the OnLive Desktop app? Does Windows on an iPad seem amazing to you or just heresy? Let us know in the comments.

It’s this OS bloat that Microsoft is looking to avoid with its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. In fact, the latest post at the Building Windows 8 blog has to do with improving the overall boot up speed as we transition from Windows 7 to the 8 environment. Using the boot process to measure your computer’s power is a concept understood by Microsoft as well:

This is understandable—boot times represent an effective proxy for overall system performance and we all know the boot experience is an incredibly important thing for us to get right for customers.

Because of that, improving the boot speed was one of Microsoft’s primary goals with Windows 8. In fact, Windows acknowledged three major points in relation to booting up in with future Windows 8 boxes:

Effectively zero watt power draw when off

A fresh session after boot

Very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.

In order to do improve the boot times, the Windows 8 developers developed a slick little option that should improve these boot up times in a noticeable manner:

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk… Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

To quantify their findings, the entry also included a measurement chart that shows the difference in boot speeds with regards to Windows 7 and 8. The chart leads this post, and as you can see, in each condition these tests were performed under, Windows 8 outdid its predecessor, and the new hibernation system is largely credited with the speed improvements:

It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents.

Microsoft has also embedded a video showing these new boot times in action. It’s awfully impressive:

According to the Windows 8 Center blog, who offers a detailed description of the leak, the version that escaped from the Redmond labs is the first build of the 8 environment and for hackers who are reading, the full build string for the version that leaked is 6.1.7850.0.winmain_win8m1.100922-1508_x86fre_client-enterprise_en-us.iso. While that particular description isn’t very revealing, it’s pretty clear we’re dealing with the Enterprise edition of Windows 8.

Currently, Windows 7 features the following versions: Home, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. Will the Enterprise edition of 8 replace any of these or will it be another version users can upgrade to? Of course, this information can only be answered with speculation, because it’s doubtful the Microsoft developers would be forthcoming about such an important piece of software that isn’t even scheduled for release was just recently schedule for a September reveal and its first public beta. The Windows 8 Center offers some ideas about these upcoming features, but again, this is all speculation:

As an early build, many of the leaked features we have written about may not be present. As well, several features such as the installation wizard seem to have still maintained the Windows 7 look. This should not come as a surprise since most aesthetic changes occur in the Milestone 3 branch.

While the information about the initial leak is rather limited, there are some screenshots of it:

Click for larger images

Naturally, there’s absolutely nothing about release dates, even from a speculation point of view. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to see Microsoft improve on something that works instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, er, operating system.

The Flickr Windows Phone 7 app is available in the Zune Marketplace and the Windows 7 tablet app can be downloaded from the Flickr website.

Key features of the Flickr app include:

*Swipe through panoramic blades to see recent activity, including uploads from contacts.

*Optimized for hi-resolution display. Tap on a photo to bring up a full-screen lightbox view and zoom in to enlarge and get close up on details in a photo.

*“Context View”, a new way to get the full story behind a photo and discover new and relevant content. Zoom out from a photo in lightbox view and get more information such as other photos in the set, group, from a contact or nearby on a map.

*Geo-location capabilities display photos on an interactive, full-screen map.
 

Rumors doing rounds suggest that the Samsung tablet to be portrayed in the event will operate with Windows 7 in the landscape mode and will possess another OS interface while in the portrait mode. When asked to comment on any of the above news, spokesperson Sarah Reid, who works at the software giant’s public relations agency, Waggener-Edstrom said, “Microsoft makes it a practice to not comment on rumors or speculation.”

This is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to show off its Windows 7 tablets. Apparently, a year ago at the CES 2010, Ballmer showcased HP’s Slate tablet which later began developing its own webOS operating system instead of running on Windows 7. There are also heavy but obvious chances of Samsung and Dell operating on Android tablets, but will Microsoft’s Windows 7 get some respite from tablet makers; this only time will tell. Kevin Burden, a vice president at ABI Research said “The division at Dell that would build a tablet is the same division that built the Streak, and those guys have told me that Android is the key operating system for their mobile phones.” Burden added and by this made it clear that Windows 7 will have a tough fight “I don’t imagine they’d want to take whatever work they’re doing on the Android tablet and come out with a Windows 7 or Windows Phone 7 tablet. Dell’s building expertise in Android, so 80 percent of their development is going into that OS.“

Another big question now is which OS will Microsoft tablets run on and the response to this will in fact answer yet another question of how Microsoft will position its tablets. Windows 7 put into any device can do anything and everything, but you might as well have a PC for this. But the Windows Phone 7 is tailor made for Tablets which showers users with whatever applications they want, like that in a Smartphone. Since it is clear from Ballmer that it is going to be a Windows 7 tablet, all we can do is wait. Wait until the Windows 8 is launched since most of us already own a PC and the launch of Windows 8 in all like-ability won’t happen for the next couple of years.

There are two reasons why Microsoft is striving to make it big in the Tablet market. One is its own efforts to cannibalize its PC market and, two is because according to Goldman Sachs, tablets will eat into 35 percent of the PC market next year. These are palpable reasons for someone who has made it so big in the PC market to now make it big in the Tablet market.

I can only wish Microsoft – all the very best for their tablet endeavors.

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The company also took the opportunity to show off some new enhancements to Bing, to accompany its new browser. Taking advantage of the HTML5 capabilities of IE9, they’ve added some nice new features that are exclusive to Bing use in that particular browser (at least initially). 

The coolest of the new features, while having little to do with search, is what Bing has done with its homepage. It uses HTML5 to replace the homepage image with a homepage video or an image that you can zoom in and out of. You can see this in action (along with the other new feature) in the following video.

Other features are more related to search. These include:

- Smooth transitions from one screen to the next, as you search

- Previews of images, videos and text are bigger and bolder

- Bing has an IE9 "jump list", which lets users search various Bing categories like travel or shopping right from the Windows 7 taskbar. 

- New smooth scrolling that keeps a search box in place and related searches at the side, in case you need to refine as you scroll. 

- Quick Tabs and Visual Search transitions in a new app-like experience

The new Bing features for IE9 will be available in preview format for users of IE9 soon. No exact time table was given, but there will be a preview site that users will be able to play around with later this month.

Are the new Internet Explorer features enough to get you to use Bing? Are the new Bing features enough to get you to use the new Internet Explorer? Are you using both? Neither? Share your thoughts.

Analysts thought Microsoft might report something like $17.84 billion in revenue and earnings per share of 59 cents.  Microsoft overshot those forecasts by a significant amount, posting $19.12 billion and 74 cents, instead.

That puts the company up 14 percent and 57 percent, respectively, on a year-over-year basis.  And it would be an understatement to say that victories of this nature don’t occur every day, particularly given our economy’s current condition.

So if you’re happy (and as you’ll see in a minute, investors are), think well of Windows 7.  A record for Windows units was set last quarter, and Peter Klein, Microsoft’s CFO, said in a statement, "Exceptional demand for Windows 7 led to the positive top-line growth for the company.  Our continuing commitment to managing costs allowed us to drive earnings performance ahead of the revenue growth."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, things didn’t go so well in every respect.  The Online Services Business lost a whopping $466 million, which makes for a significantly worse performance than last year (when it lost $320 million).

Then, one other possible cause for skittishness is the fact Microsoft hasn’t yet given any guidance.  Windows 7 can’t sell well forever, after all.

Still, investors have received Microsoft’s news with open arms and fists full of dollars.  Even though the Dow and Nasdaq both sank today (by 1.13 percent and 1.91 percent), Microsoft’s stock is up 1.47 percent in after-hours trading.

Related Articles:

> Bing Now Offering More Finance Information

> OS Software Revenue Up 35%

> Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Approval Gets Deadline In Europe

Sales for the 5-week holiday period totaled $278 million dollars, up from the 13 percent decline during the 2008 holiday season.

The operating systems category showed the strongest improvement during the holiday season, boosted by the sales of Microsoft’s Windows 7. Overall operating systems revenue increased from $10 million in 2008 to $29 million in 2009. Education software performed well, with revenue increasing by 15 percent, driven y the strong performance of Rosetta Stone and Topics Entertainment.  Business software, which posted flat year-over-year holiday sales, was the highest revenue grossing retail software category, with sales of over $77 million.

"Despite a slight decline in overall sales, boxed software showed pockets of strength as publishers, especially Microsoft, invested money in holiday promotional activity," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. 

"Aggressive pricing on Office 2007 and continued strong sales of boxed versions of Windows 7 added a big kick to retail software sales during the holiday.  But weak results in the key utilities category, along with ongoing weakness in PC games sales proved too much for the market to overcome."
 

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

> Yahoo and Microsoft May Be Close to Signing

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts on Publisher Searches