Tech News - Microsoft Buys Fast Search And Transfer.

Here is this week's round-up of the latest tech news and what is hot in the Web :

1. Microsoft Buys Fast Search and Transfer.
With all the recent buzz over Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo, its purchase of Fast Search and Transfer, a Norwegian search engine company, for US$1.2 billion went largely unnoticed.

With the purchase, Microsoft is hoping to improve its enterprise search capability and have indicated that Fast's search capabilities will integrate well with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Unlike Google and Yahoo, enterprise search engines are usually customised to search for information within corporations, and with companies digitizing their information like documents and drawings, search is the fastest way to get and share corporate data.

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With Fast, Microsoft wants to help workers within businesses quickly locate information that are kept in different types of files and databases. Using the Fast software, businesses can build customised applications like industry-specific search engines or websites that provide content in real time.

Together with its bid for Yahoo, Microsoft's purchase of Fast indicates that the software giant is stepping up its efforts in increasing its search capabilities and presence in a Web that is currently dominated by Google.

2. Google Partners Panasonic.
TV manufacturer Panasonic is working with Google to build television sets that comes with access to YouTube and Picasa, allowing users to watch videos and photos directly from their televisions sets.

Expected to be launch in the US by the middle of this year, the Panasonic Veira PZ850 allows for direct downloading of content from YouTube and Picasa with just a simple click on the remote controller. The tv is likely to be connected to an Ethernet port or comes with Wi-Fi capababilty.

For Google, the partnership is a chance to experiment with new services and acknowledges changes in consumers' habits as user-generated content becomes increasingly popular.

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3. Summize That Review
Always got confused by the many conflicting reviews of a particular movie, book or product? Then try Summize, a free web service that goes through the thousands of blogs and review sites, analyses their opinions and aggregates the results into an useful colour-coded chart. One look and you will be able to tell how reviewers feel about a particular book, movie and gadget.

Simply type in the name of the product you want to find out about, and the search engine will help you organise all the reviews, with star ratings, making it especially easy for you.

4. Lenovo's Facial Recognition Idea PCs.
Instead of typing in long alphanumeric passwords, Lenovo's new range of IdeaPad notebooks and the IdeaCentre desktop PCs comes with facial recognition capabilities, allowing you to just smile to log in.

For notebooks, there are the 15.4-inch IdeaPad Y510 notebook PC and the 11-inch IdeaPad U110, both powered by Intel Centrino processors. The desktops - K200 and Q200 - both comes with anti-bacterial keyboards and one-touch data recovery.

*Related Tech News :
- Apple Launches MacBook Air
- Google Challenges Wikipedia With "knol"

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