Windows Phone's Cortana voice assistant to be powered by Foursquare, says Bloomberg

[dgstorm]

Microsoft made a multimillion investment in Foursquare out of the blue the other day, leaving us to wonder what's behind it. Bloomberg is now reporting that the partnership is actually for Cortana, Microsoft's upcoming voice-operated assistant in Windows Phone 8.1.

With the deal, Microsoft will get deeper access to Foursquare's database of places and reviews, so that Cortana and other WP apps give you personalized and location-aware recommendations, deals and tricks. “We’re building some contextually aware experiences to power some upcoming products in Windows Phone,” commented Zig Serafin, a vice president in Microsoft’s Bing search unit.

Continue Reading @: Windows Phone's Cortana voice assistant to be powered by Foursquare, says Bloomberg

 

[stevenrossvanduyn]

A owner of surface pro and surface pro 2

I recently bought a surface pro 2 128gb same as the original i bought back in june last year and here are my findings
Slightly quicker boot up speed in the surface pro 2
Battery life is a big difference ( probably around 3 1/2 hours )
kick stand is not really a problem in the first version
Sound quality is much improved (louder and clearer)
Another thing i noticed is surface pro has 109gb to store files but the surface pro 2 has 112 gb to store files which i cant fathom.
As for wifi i havent seen any difference although i only had a couple of times that had issues
These are the things i noticed
I am waiting for my keyboard type 2 to see the difference also