Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ashwini Kumar Varma

Akhilesh Kaza

Andrew Clinick

Nora Micheva

Lei Xu

Theron Thomas Fennel

Matthew Hidinger

Ali Rafiee

Jie Jerry Liu

Melissa Wood Dunn

Megan Galbraith Donahue

Rhoniel Villano Manlapaz

Fang Wang

Alan Michael Bush

Rachel Jiang

Vijayendra Gopalrao Vasu

Amy Elizabeth Alberts

Dimitrios Lymperopoulos

Jan H Karachale

Jon Changzheng Xu

Jason Eric Black

Joel Robert Bergman

Gerardo Garcia

Jen-Hsien Kenny Chien

A facility for providing enhanced time-sensitive notifications on an electronic device is described. In some such notifications, the facility replaces an icon or name of an application presenting the notification with another image or other text, respectively. In some such notifications, the facility renders certain aspects of the notification on an optional basis, such as based on the capabilities of the electronic device.

Enhanced notifications

The subject disclosure is directed towards a task switching technology on a computing device such as a Smartphone. An application is comprised of one or more tasks. When a user requests that another task be executed, information about the previously executing task (e.g., including a screenshot) is preserved to a stack. If the user invokes a task switcher program, the user is presented with a view of the stack, e.g., containing the screenshots (and representative text) of the tasks that previously executed. The user may navigate among those presented task representations to arbitrarily select any one, with the selected task resumed upon selection.

Task switching on mobile devices

A location-related entity ranking technique is described that allows a user see the ranking of location-related entities near a desired location in response to a query. The technique can leverage the searches performed by a community of mobile device users at a given location and at a given time to infer the location-related entities that are popular at this specific location and time window. The technique can also filter out or re-rank these location-related entities based on the personal preferences of the person that submits the query and group preferences of a group to which the user belongs. The personal preferences can also be context specific (i.e. different restaurant preferences for lunch and dinner times).

Real-time personalized recommendation of location-related entities

Embodiments are disclosed herein that are related to preserving battery life of a mobile device. One disclosed embodiment provides, for example, in a mobile device server, a method for sending messages to a mobile endpoint utilized concurrently with a non-mobile endpoint. The method comprises receiving a first message sent from a different user and sending the first message to the mobile endpoint. The method further comprises receiving a second message sent by the user from the non-mobile endpoint and, in response, suspending a session with the mobile endpoint. In response to receiving a third message from the mobile endpoint, the method comprises resuming the session with the mobile device.

Batching of messages for mobile endpoint

Systems and methods for providing context sensitive help on an electronic device. The system include a processor, an application attributes discovery module which provides one or more attributes associated with an application running on the electronic device, a system state discovery module which provides system information associated with components of the electronic device, a help infrastructure module which uses the system information and application attributes to determine a help context at the time a user invokes a request for help, a help context mapping module which includes one or more help contexts including a context node that best matches the system state information and which contains one or more help topic identifiers that are mapped to help topics, a help topic collection module that provides one or more help topics corresponding to the help topic identifiers and a help viewer that displays the help topics.

Context sensitive help

Growing community of inventors

Renton, WA, United States of America

Ashwini Kumar Varma