Okay it's time to ban lawyers from representing technology companies I think or maybe let's just ban them all together. In a letter dated March 20, 2008 Deutsche Telecom, aka T-Mobile, sent Engadgetmobile.com a cease and desist notice to stop using the color Magenta. Oh sure they flowered it up a bit but if you read the letter they are pretty clear that they believe they own the color Magenta and are willing to defend that ownership.

They hold trademark protection on a color, not I said color not color code? Sure I might see that if a site was doing something like "T-Mobilizer, Your Source for Cell Phones" but come on could anyone ever mistake basically a Blog site about mobile services with the service provider T-Mobile?

Anyone for claiming trademark on white?

Some online demo videos:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/CH100740841033.aspx

An online OneNote Course:

http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC102640561033

And as always for a FREE One Month Trial of a Secure Online Backup Solution please visit:

www.esecurebackups.com

YEah Microsoft saw this coming and is trying to head off a media nightmare. Free support from Microsoft for ALL SP! install issues:

https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-us&prid=11274&gprid=500921

For those that don't know FolderShare was this great little app that allowed you to setup multiple computers to sync multple folders across pretty much any type of network or Internet connection. I say "was" because Microsoft bought FolderShare a few years back and it's been pretty much in limbo since then.

Well today Microsoft updated the client software and website and so far it's, ok. The new web interface is model after Microsoft's Live services. It's a bit snappy and I think I like it a bit better. It certainly looks more business oriented and finding what computers are doing what, are online and so forth is slicker. The client application has changed it's build info which is certainly strange as we went from 2.5.10 to 14.0.1325.0310.

Of course the tray icon is changed as well but other than that so far I've seen little change performance. I will say that over the past few weeks I've had a number of times FolderShare will not logon. They seem to acknowledge the issue:

I don't use the ability to browse my own PC from the web normally as I'm not sold on the security of this feature but I did give it a test. Browsing one of my computers across the Internet was simple and actually pretty fast. I was able to open PDF and image files however for some strange reason when opening Excel 2007 the web interface locks up, Word 2007 files worked fine.

So hopefully they are working on things and it's nice to see an update finally. Downside is if your relying on FolderShare for your business use you probably need to be rethinking that until they get the Microsoft take over bugs worked out. If you can deal with issues here and there then heck it's Free right?

From a few slips of the fingers to a little digging into the Blogger's Bio it appears we have some info on where Microsoft is going with Vista's replacement, Windows 7. Yeah that's right Microsoft is already working on the next version of Windows even while they are just now getting the bugs out of Vista.

So what in the world am I talking about? Basically a simple little blog post and the resulting leaving of Microsoft by the blogger pretty much tells us what he said opened the door a bit to wide for Microsoft's notoriously super secret future product plans. Hilton Locke back in December posted this little paragraph which started the ball rolling:

Also, I want to apologize to the Tablet fans out there for not posting for so long. Reorgs, moving buildings, and Windows 7 work have all conspired against blogging here.

I will say that if you are impressed by the "touch features" in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales.

So what's the big deal with this post? Well first off he said he was working with Windows 7 which is Microsoft's next version of Windows. To date most of the information on Windows 7 is that it's very, very basic at this point and not something you could even start to play with. This however must not be the case because Locke goes on to say how "blown away" we will be with the "touch features" in Windows 7. This is probably the point he went a bit to far for Microsoft as he freely admits he got called to the rug about this blog post. So he let us know Windows 7 will use Windows Touch Technology which will replace the current Pen and Slate system used in Tablet PC's. Windows Touch Technology is suppose to take the touch interface of Pen and Slate to new levels allowing for a user to flick his finger across his screen to turn the page of an eBook or draw his hand across the screen to reshape a picture. Yeah you have probably seen the demo of Surface which does this.

At this point maybe we should give some background on who Hilton Locke is and what he does for Microsoft as this adds to the mystery. Locke is a tester for Microsoft, not just any tester but the Primary Test Engineer for Windows Vista. Locke has been at Microsoft for some 10 years so his "leaving" points to his revelations of where Microsoft is going as fact and not rumor. So as he is not a developer per say  and the fact he has been working with Windows 7 and he was on the Vista touch input team tells us Windows 7 has moved far enough along that they have a real GUI with a full touch interface that is leaps ahead of Vista already working. If Windows 7 is that far along could that put a hurt on Vista deployments? That's what I think got Microsoft bent all out of shape and in the end got Locke canned from Microsoft.