How often has a friend tweeted you from a restaurant? Weren’t you curious to know where exactly it was? Since late 2009, Twitter users have been able to add details of their location to a tweet. Bing Twitter Maps, a new Twitter-based app developed by Microsoft researchers, merges these geotagged public tweets with the rich geographical information available via Bing Maps.

I would like to highlight a recent example from the Netherlands where, Microsoft Partner, Capgemini, will provide a ground-breaking pilot of a smart public lighting system based on Microsoft’s cloud environment, Windows Azure in the Dutch city of Texel.

Our favorite Geek in Disguise, Steve Clayton from the UK, provides on his blog a short and useful summary of Steve Ballmer’s speech yesterday in which the Microsoft CEO described how “we’re all in” cloud computing.

Search is increasingly becoming the main way in which people interact with information online, no matter what form it takes or where it is stored – be it on an intranet or on the Web. According to information technology analysts Gartner, by the end of 2012 more than 75 per cent of applications will use a “search/explore” field as a primary user interface.