When Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft chairman last year, he vowed to “substantially” increase the time he spends at the company, with a particular focus on “ambitious scenarios,” though he didn’t reveal what exactly he would be doing. However, in an Ask Me Anything question and answer session on Reddit yesterday, Gates revealed that he is currently working on a project dubbed Personal Agent.

“One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to,” he said. “The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model – the agent will help solve this.” Read more »

Today Sony has unveiled a new music streaming service that will become available in the spring. It’s called PlayStation Music, and it will be powered by Spotify. It will be available on PS3 and PS4, as well as unnamed “Xperia smartphones and tablets”.

You may be wondering what this means for Sony’s in-house developed service called Music Unlimited. Well, nothing good as it turns out. Music Unlimited will be shut down on March 29 in all the 19 countries where it’s available. Prior to that, from February 28, all of its users with active subscriptions will get free access to the service until it closes down. Read more »

The Sygic GPS navigation app that’s apparently amassed more than 75 million users on iOS and Android is now finally available for Windows Phone too. The app will provide some interesting competition for Nokia’s own solutions, now licensed to Microsoft for use in its mobile OS.

Sygic for Windows Phone comes with “forever free” GPS use, offline maps by TomTom, points of interest, route planning, and map updates. Read more »

Twitter is mostly a public social network, but it improved its private messaging experience with Direct Messages for groups. Another change today is the ability to record, edit and share short video clips publicly.

The new features will be rolled out gradually to all users, but you can view videos and be invited into conversations by people who have already gotten access to the features. Read more »

Last week all eyes were on Microsoft and the announcement-rich event, held on January 21. A lot of groundbreaking and game-changing plans were unveiled to make the next installment of the OS a truly revolutionary experience. But perhaps the thing that excites us the most is the future of Windows on mobile devices.

Microsoft has made it clear that it will spare no resource in following its One Windows strategy and unifying the user experience across all devices. This, of course includes the unification of the app ecosystem, allowing developers to write code that works seamlessly across PCs, smartphones, tables and even Xbox consoles. Read more »

Online reviews service Yelp has updated its app for both Android and iOS with some small but useful features, including event RSVP and better media uploads.

The updated app now allows you to RSVP to events – you can check out your profile to see as well as comment on all the events that you’re attending. Read more »

HTC started rolling out the update to Android 5.0 Lollipop for the unlocked and Developer Edition units of the One (M8) in the US a couple of weeks ago, and today the Taiwanese company has made the next important step for developers.

It’s now posted the kernel source for its particular flavor of Sense-infused Android 5.0.1 Lollipop on its specialized developer website. This release is different than Google’s Lollipop kernel source exactly because it’s for phones running HTC’s UI overlay. Read more »

Facebook has employed a rather odd approach to the mobile market and it seems to be betting on quantity, rather than quality for quite some time now. When the social media giant decided to detach the messenger from its main application, thus making it all that less appealing to most users it sparked an avalanche of complaints with a lot of subscribers rage-quitting on the main app.

Facebook surely must have felt the negative consequences and while initially it seemed like a good enough marketing step to promote the messenger itself the detrimental effect have apparently caught on as a new application has silently made its way to the Google Play Store. It is essentially a lightweight version of the social platform that aims to offer services to low-end devices at faster speeds and best of all, with lower bandwidth. Read more »

Last year Microsoft announced that Opera will take over the browsers and app stores running on Nokia’s former platforms – Series 30+, Series 40, Symbian and Nokia X.

The transition is starting this month and Microsoft promises it will be an easy change. Read more »

Cortana’s location-based reminders, that trigger notifications when you arrive at specific geographic locations, have now started working even in unsupported regions – they are now available in Jordan, as well as Russia.

According to a Geeks on Gadgets report, the feature now works perfectly in Jordan. “Navigation commands also work, bringing a list of nearby locations and approximate distances (in miles however), with the option to navigate to the through HERE drive,” the report notes. Read more »

If you are among the owners of a Windows RT tablet, you may have wondered whether about the future fate of Windows RT devices and whether they might get updated to Windows 10 eventually.

It turns out Windows RT devices will get updated with some of the features of the upcoming OS, but not the OS itself.

Even though Windows RT appeared as the OS of choice on a few quite capable tablets, it never managed to gain traction mostly due to the lack of support for x86 desktop applications.

Today, it’s mostly outphased by a slew of tablets running proper Windows 8.1. Read more »

Undoubtedly the most important event of the week was the official unveiling of Microsoft Windows 10. The Redmond software giant skipped a digit, and is planning to offer a seamless multi-platform experience across all your devices.

From smartphone to tablet, to PC, Windows 10 will be the one operating system to rule them all. Read more »

Popular OS X and iOS app iA Writer is coming to Android. The developers have announced a beta version, which will be available for the first 999 people to sign up on their Google+ page, with the final version arriving later.

iA Writer beta will be available through the Play Store for $0.99. The reason behind this is that Google doesn’t allow developers to release a free app and then make it paid later. On the upside, if you are one of the 999 people to get the beta for $0.99, then you won’t have to pay anything extra when it gets updated to the final version later, which will cost $4.99. Read more »

There have been recent concerns over the security issues in the rather outdated WebView mode in Android Jelly Bean. Due to its outdated nature, it is facing security issues, which would otherwise be a non-issue on newer versions of Android.

Google has responded to these concerns by basically saying they won’t be updating the WebView in Jelly Bean. But while that may not be what people have been expecting, Google does have a reasonable explanation for it. Read more »

Complying with US sanctions on Crimea and following in the footsteps of Apple, Google will soon restrict the use of some of its services in the peninsula. Late last year the US government issued a new round of sanctions to retaliate against Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and this is the direct result of that.

Google can’t collect money for services from the peninsula, nor can it make payments to anyone over there. So the company will cut off services – some that will mostly impact businesses, such as AdWords and AdSense, but also one that will have an effect on ordinary citizens too, namely the Play Store. Read more »