Bing Cashback is a Microsoft program that rewards users for shopping through the Bing search engine. They have partnered with hundreds of online retailers to offer up-to 30% off entire purchases (cashback percentages depends on the individual store).

The program is pretty simple, but you will need a Microsoft Live account to begin. If you don’t have one, sign up here – it’s FREE.

Go to Bing.com and search for the product you want to buy.

The results of your search are denoted with retailers that offer cashback. If no cashback results are returned, the product may not be eligible for Bing cashback.

Selecting any of the cashback links will prompt you for your Live credentials before shopping.

Alternatively, you can browse the list of cashback stores and shop through the link that Microsoft provides. Either way, this enable a cookie in your browser that allows Mircosoft to know you are eligible for cashback and how much to credit your account.

Every eligible cashback purchase will receive a confirmation email. Cashback activity is logged through a Live account. Cashback can be redeemed in the form of a chack, direct deposit, Paypal or Amazon payment, in about 60 days after your purchase (the waiting period varies by store) and with at least $5 in your cashback account.

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With Netflix’s introduction of instant streaming on the Mac, I had to install Microsoft Silverlight 2 in order for it to work. The install was very straight forward on my macbook, but I came across some minor complications when performing the same install on my hackintosh (MSI Wind). Because Silverlight 2 verifies your processor before install, it was registering my hackintosh as a non-intel device (PPC) and refuse to install. To install Silverlight 2 on older PowerPC or non Apple hardware (OSX running on Windows hardware), you simply have remove the CPU check in the installation package.

To do this:

1. Download Silverlight 2 from Microsoft Website
2. Mount the Silverlight 2 DMG file by double click it
3. Right-click on the .pkg file and choose “Show Package Contents”
   
4. Navigate to: Contents > Resources
5. In Resources, locate the file “InstallationCheck” and trash it
   

Now that the CPU check has been removed, rerun the Silverlight modified .pkg and it should install without any complications.

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Microsoft’s hardware engineering team has revealed that they will be producing a USB powered laptop cooling pad (left on the pic above) that is slated to be released this July ($29.95). But WHY? This is a really bazar. Beyond the fact that Microsoft is in a market that they really shouldn’t be in, they are revealing a product that is a exact replica of Belkin’s F5L001 Laptop cooling stand (right on the pic above), which is cheaper ($20.95) and available now. I can’t understand what is going on in Redmond, are they just really bored?

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Microsoft Research Asia Innovation Forum conducts the most cutting-edge fundamental research in computer science. It is Microsoft’s premier research lab in Asia Pacific and it aims to drive the usage of computers and the Internet to foster more healthy knowledge economies in the Asia Pacific region.

The heavily sought after tickets for the “Microsoft Research Asia 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum” celebrated the lab’s efforts on “turning ideas into reality” for the past decade. More importantly, it brought together some of the best visionaries in our time to explore new avenues for us to make a contribution to the world.

I was on hand last night at the HK Convention & Exhibition Center for Bill Gates keynote speech. He spoke very little about what Microsoft Research Asia Labs was doing, instead he gave a motivational speech encouraging the students within Hong Kong to embrace innovation, think outside the box, and challenge traditional procedures to create more green, efficent, and effective lifestyle centered around technology.

In addition to Bill Gates keynote, there was panel discussion that consisted of Bill Gates and three of Hong Kong’s top University Presidents, Professor Paul Ching-Wu Chu, President of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Professor Lawrence J. Lau, Vice-Chancellor and President, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Professor Lap-Chee Tsui, Vice-Chancellor and President, The University of Hong Kong. Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia served as the moderator to their discussion.

The discussion amongst the panelist was very much centered around education and was fueled by very generic questions, nothing that you may not have heard answered by Mr.Gates already; however, I still felt  the forum was a success. The presence of Mr. Gates and our fellow University Presidents has inspired me (and possibly my fellow classmates) to innovate and not give up on what we want to achieve.

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The Microsoft BU has just announced that Office 2008 for Mac will be released in the second half of 2007. Office 2008 will be Universal and include a number of Mac only features:

• Publishing Layout Views – Let’s you create newsletters and things by presenting the related Office tools in a new layout
• Ledger Sheets – Makes managing your finances even easier in Excel
• My Day – A new stand alone application that lets you stay on top of your activities across Office applications

From the looks of it Office 2008 for Mac run and generate in the new Office Open XML Formats so it’ll be compatible with Office 2007 on Windows. For more details check out this interview with Roz Ho, general manager of the Mac BU.

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Needless to say on launch day it was even out done by the Shuffle.

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Out of the box the Zune will include earphones, a protective sleeve, a USB sync cable and a sticker. It is hopping to build a “MySpace-like” Community, where users can share music. You can actually send a file to another Zune user, but it will only be playable three times or stored for three days, whichever comes first. But there’s NO VIDEO! How on earth can it be an iPod Killer with out video.

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Microsoft’s Photosynth is an awesome program that’s a bit hard to explain, but when you see it you’ll get what I’m talking about. It’s a product of Microsoft Live Labs that “takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.” If you don’t understand my explanation I recommend you checking out the videos on the MS Photosynth site. Photosynth definitely has you saying “wow.”f you havn’t seen it yet I suggest you check it out.

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Chris Stephenson, Microsoft’s new GM of marketing for MSN Entertainment Business, said Zune will be an umbrella brand: “a family of hardware and software products” aimed at digital entertainment.

There’s not much more information then this at the moment but, the company has set up a site to collect emails for further information at ComingZune.com.

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