Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

George P Moromisato

Raymond Edward Ozzie

Jack E Ozzie

Noah Benjamin Edelstein

Akash Jeevan Sagar

Paresh S Suthar

Matthew S Augustine

Abhay Vinayak Parasnis

Raman Narayanan

Richard Yiu-Sai Chung

Lili Cheng

Anthony Dean Andrews

William D Devlin

Russell P Songco

Eric M Patey

Ming Gang Liu

John D Mehr

Elissa E Murphy

Lara Marie Sosnosky

Aditya G Bhandarkar

David Richard Reed

Eric Randall Sexauer

Michael Steven Vernal

Muthukaruppan Annamalai

Brian M Lambert

Vladimir Dmitri Fedorov

Eric J Horvitz

Alexander G Gounares

Gary William Flake

Dharma Kiritkumar Shukla

David Maxwell Chickering

Kamal Jain

Michael J Connolly

Raymond Edward Endres

Ori Amiga

Radoslav Petrov Nickolov

Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie

Jason Evan Schleifer

Nimisha Asthagiri

Gilad Lotan

Patrick Michael Halvorsen

Wei Dai

Matt Augustine

Justin Michael Harrison

Gregory Scott Klabish

Alexei Evdokimov

Jeffrey R Hemmen

Jerry J Shekhel

Florin Gale

Adam Weiss

Mark Cote

Rajenda Vishnumurty

Mark R Szamrej

Pamela J Taylor-Paris

The claimed subject matter relates to architectures for facilitating network-accessible or local backup or restore features in a manner that leverages event-oriented contextual information associated with one or more users of the data to be backed up or restored. In particular, a first restore-based architecture can interface with an associated second backup-based architecture that hosts or maintains a backup data store in order to retrieve a version of the data file that is desired by a user. Additionally, the first architecture can obtain a log of contextual event descriptions that can be aggregated by the second architecture or obtained independently from, e.g., a social networking service or a calendar application associated with the user. Thus, in addition to displaying time and date information associated with the desired version, the first architecture can provide the user with a social context of event from the social services feeds to aid the user in distinguishing between multiple versions of the data file.

Employing user-context in connection with backup or restore of data

An apparatus and method provide a companion application via a companion application corresponding to a host window provided by a host application, the companion window providing information or metadata descriptive of data in the host window. The host application and companion applications may be separate applications such that the host application is unaware of the companion application. The companion application may hook into the host application (e.g., via an application programming interface) and may monitor host application activities and/or data. Based on identification of data or events in the host application, the companion application may obtain information characterizing or providing a context for data provided by the host application. The host window and companion window may be attached to each other, the host window providing host application data and the companion window providing data describing the host application data.

Live companion user interface

Systems and methods for synchronizing and sharing data associated with sharing relationships are disclosed. Such systems and methods may be implemented by interfacing with an application that manages or accesses the data to be shared, and by making shared data available using a feed along with some mechanism for tracking changes or enabling synchronization between different endpoints.

Data synchronization and sharing relationships

Data files, applications and/or corresponding user interfaces may be accessed at a device that collaborates in a mesh. The mesh may include any number or type of devices that collaborate in a network. Data, applications and/or corresponding user interfaces may be stored within a core object that may be shared over the mesh. Information in the core object may be identified with a corresponding user such that a user may use any collaborating device in the mesh to access the information. In one example, the information is stored remotely from a device used to access the information. A remote source may store the desired information or may determine the storage location of the desired information in the mesh and may further provide the desired information to a corresponding user.

Mesh-managing data across a distributed set of devices

Users of various devices may participate in communication sessions, but only if the interfaces and components of such devices feature a minimum set of capabilities involved in the communication session type; e.g., in order to participate in a teleconference, the device of every user has to be capable of sending and receiving audio. Instead, a communication session server may automatically convert session items received from each user into interface-specific representations for each other user, based on the capabilities of the interface and device of the other user. For example, speech recognition may transform speech to text output; speech synthesis may transform text input to speech; and video recognition may identify individuals and gestures in a video stream and represent this information as text. The server may therefore host a 'mixed' communication session, where each user may fully participate irrespective of the capabilities of the chosen device and interface.

Communication sessions among devices and interfaces with mixed capabilities

A portable computing device may be configured to allow a user to interact with one or more displays in a retail environment. The portable computing device may establish a communication link with a communication device in the retail environment and the user may be able to use the portable computing device to navigate through retail data and have it displayed on the display device in the retail environment.

Interaction with networked screen content via mobile phone in retail setting

Systems and methods for implementing online and offline applications are described. Such systems and methods may in some cases provide the same programming interface, regardless of whether the application is online or offline. Such systems and methods may also or instead in some cases provide additional or other possible capabilities, including installation without elevated privileges, simplified data synchronization, sharing of applications and application data, access to data from other applications, and richer client functionality than may be provided by an application such as a web browser.

Running applications in an online or offline mode based on the availability of the connection to the remote web server

Systems and methods of providing synchronization of providing a device mesh and a virtual computing device are disclosed herein. A selection of a plurality of computer devices, such as PDAs, cellphone, laptops, and the like, can be received from a user. The data at the virtual computing device and the plurality of devices can be synchronized. Access to all applications available in each computing device in the plurality of computing devices can be provided at the virtual computing device. Access to all data available in each computing device in the plurality of computing devices can be provided at the virtual computing device. Access to the virtual computing device can be provided via a data network.

Personal computing environment with virtual computing device

Systems, methods, and user interfaces for gathering and using awareness information with common awareness functionality accessible to multiple applications are disclosed. Such systems, methods, and user interfaces may aggregate awareness information from multiple sources and provide awareness data and other derived information to multiple destinations. In some implementations, such systems and methods may provide additional functionality related to awareness information, such as common user interfaces that display awareness information or mechanisms for determining the relevance of particular pieces of awareness information.

Gathering and using awareness information

The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can facilitate verification or feedback in association with consumer transactions. In particular the architecture can image a transaction receipt, translate the image into text-based data, and extract relevant transaction data there from. Such relevant transaction data can be saved to a data store maintained or supervised by the customer and/or transmitted to authorized components that can benefit from data related to transaction histories, verification, and/or feedback.

Feedback loop for consumer transactions

Embodiments extend functionality of a web page using cloud-based page applications. A page application provider, executing as part of a web browser, receives notification of a web page being accessed by a user of a user computing device. One or more page applications associated with the web page are identified. The identified page applications provide functionality related to the web page and, in some embodiments, interact or share data with the web page. The page application provider presents the identified page applications to the user. Based on a selection of at least one of the presented page applications, the selected page application is provided for execution by the user computing device. In some embodiments, the correlations among the user, web pages, and page applications are available from a cloud-based page application service.

Cloud-based web page applications for extending functionality

The claimed subject matter relates to architectures for facilitating network-accessible or local backup or restore features in a manner that leverages event-oriented contextual information associated with one or more users of the data to be backed up or restored. In particular, a first restore-based architecture can interface with an associated second backup-based architecture that hosts or maintains a backup data store in order to retrieve a version of the data file that is desired by a user. Additionally, the first architecture can obtain a log of contextual event descriptions that can be aggregated by the second architecture or obtained independently from, e.g. a social networking service or a calendar application associated with the user. Thus, in addition to displaying time and date information associated with the desired version, the first architecture can provide the user with a social context of event from the social services feeds to aid the user in distinguishing between multiple versions of the data file.

Queries may be issued against an image store to produce a set of image instance relating to images in the image store that relate to the query. The relevance of the images to the query may be depicted by scaling the image instances according to the predicted relevance of the image to the query. The image instances may be further positioned within the image instance set query result, e.g., by clustering according to image relatedness or by similar predicted relevance of the images to the query terms of the query. The image instances may also be presented as smoothly zoomable images, such that the user may zoom in on the images in an efficient manner that facilitates realtime, gradual zooming with reduced resampling inefficiency.

Image querying with relevance-relative scaling

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

George P Moromisato