Mary Jo Foley An unblinking eye on Microsoft Subscribe Alerts Bio Mobile
Pick a blog category .Net Framework Activation Advertising Anti-piracy App Compatibility Apple CES 2007 CES 2008 Channel Code names Corporate strategy CRM Live Database Development tools Dynamics CRM Dynamics ERP Exchange Server Expression Studio Facebook Fiji Google Healthcare Housekeeping Internet Explorer Legal Linux Management tools MIX07 MSN Network service providers Network service providers Novell OEMs Office Office 2007 Office for Mac Office Live OGA Popfly mashup tool Research Resellers Search Security Service Pack Shared Source SharePoint Server Silverlight (wpf/e) Speech SQL Server SQL Server Support Surface System builders System Center System Center Systems integrators TechEd 2007 Telecommunications Virtualization Vista Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) VOIP Web 2.0 Web conferencing Web video WGA Windows 7 Windows CE Windows client Windows Essential Business Server (Centro) Windows Home Server Windows Live Windows Mobile Windows server Windows Server 2008/ Windows Server Longhorn Windows Small Business Server (Cougar) Windows XP WinHEC Xbox Xbox Live Zune January 9th, 2008
Microsoft’s incubation labs keep the innovation fires burning
Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:17 am
Categories: Corporate strategy, Office, Research, Web 2.0, Advertising
Tags: Team, Microsoft Corp., Add-in, Team Management, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Management, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley
1 TalkBack Share Digg Del.ico.us Sphere Blog This Print Email Recommend Don't Recommend +11
Microsoft — always in search of ways to prove it’s an innovator and not just an imitator — is continuing to rely on its various “Labs” incubators for new services and components that it can roll up into new and existing paid products.
One of those incubators, Liv eLabs (a cooperative effort between Microsoft researchers and Windows Live experts) pushed out an update this week of “Listas,” a user-editable, list-sharing tool.
Microsoft released a first test version of Listas in October. The January 2008 Listas update adds support for new community lists, task lists, recently created lists and top users. The update also improves printing support, history and version management, according to Microsoft.
(Based on the user feedback on the Listas’ site, testers seem unsure what Listas is meant to do and why it is supposedly useful, however.)
Meanwhile, the Microsoft adLabs team (a joint effort between Microsoft Research and the adCenter team) rolled out on January 9 the final version of the adCenter add-in for Excel 2007. The add-in allows advertisers to do keyword search inside of Excel. The adLabs team developed the front-end for the plug-in, which Microsoft demonstrated in April 2007.
