Alan Buckingham

The year was a big one for Microsoft with updates to almost every website and software program, as well as the release of Surface RT. But now it is time to look ahead to 2013 and the company has not only announced the expansion of retail sales for its tablet but the next six company store locations.

Jonathan Adashek, GM of Microsoft's Communications and Strategy, Sales & Marketing Services Group, revealed today: San Antonio, Texas; Miami, Florida;  Beachwood, Ohio; San Francisco, Calif.; Salt Lake City, Utah; and  St. Louis, Missouri will join the current locations around the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

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If you can say nothing else about the company, you at least have to admit that Microsoft has certainly come up with some unique marketing ideas recently. Many would call that a departure from the past, when the ads were either boring or just plain weird (remember Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld)? The company went from that to self-parody and real humor like the recent Internet Explorer 10-Mayan apocalypse campaign.

Now the mobile side of the business has rolled out a new website to let customers know that Bilbo Baggins, of Hobbit fame, is a Windows Phone 8 customer. The site lets you see Bilbo's home screen so that you can get some insight into what is important to the adventurous hobbit, like his map of "home sweet shire" and the current weather conditions in Middle Earth. You can even view his camera roll which, of course, he stores in his SkyDrive account.

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A report surfaced today that Verizon Wireless, a premier mobile carrier in the United States has been breached, with a result of three million customers being compromised. The good news is that the compromise does not seem to be malicious. The bad news is that, as proof of this, 300,000 users' data was released.

While the number may seem large, it represents a small fraction of the company's user base. Still, any customer information released into the wild is bad. So how did this happen and how bad is it?

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Amazon is Netflix's biggest competitors, but the company had a gaping hole in its armor. While the app works just fine on the Kindle Fire tablets, it was MIA for every other Android user out there. Now the retail giant has finally made the service available to other users on the popular platform, but before you get excited, there is a catch, and it is a big one.

When you find the app in the Google Play store you will immediately notice two things -- one is that it only works with version 3.2 and up of the OS. The other is even more troubling. The app is for Google TV only. Even the new flagship Nexus devices are not capable of using it.

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It took an ancient, nearly obliterated society and a looming apocolypse, but perhaps Microsoft is finally starting to get it. The company, once the dominant force in the web browser market after wiping out Netscape, is starting to get its act back together. Between ancient forces and challenges from Firefox and Chrome, the company has started to understand human nature. We may not believe the world will end tomorrow and we may not believe Internet Explorer 10 is actually good, but we can all agree that we love irony.

To that end, the Redmond, Wash,-based company has been on a roll of sorts recently. It launched a website with the ironic name "browser you loved to hate" and even launched a video depicting an IE-hater in action. Now the new kinder, gentler Microsoft meets tomorrow's impending doom with a bit more humor.

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It is that time of year. Every search engine and social media site is posting its top-10 lists. People are shopping, putting up lights and decorations and even getting their computers into the spirit with Windows themes, Chrome New Tab themes and Firefox Personas. Your Android phone or tablet can also get into the spirit of the holidays with some handy apps. The Google Play store and Amazon App Store are both resources for holiday music and and movies, but there are also a number of apps to keep your spirits high.

There are holiday games, shopping apps and wallpapers. You can track Santa's journey around the world or track the calories you consume at that big meal. No, sorry, I am not covering the latter here. You can search for those on your own.

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Google has finally decided to modernize its popular Play Music app for today's discriminating listeners. While the service launched over a year ago, and offers a generous 20,000 songs worth of free cloud storage, Google seems to have been slow in adding features and updates to what could be a winning product.

iTunes, Amazon, 7digital, and others have offered a 'Scan and Match' music services for some time, and Google has finally decided to join the game. The company made the announcement rather unceremoniously via a post to its Google Play Google Plus page. The update should greatly improve the experience for many users.

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Great news for British Ingress players! Google released its Field Trip app in the United States several months ago, but now the company has brought the location-based tool to the United Kingdom, following closely on the heels of other Google UK debuts like Play Music and Play Magazines. Of course, Field Trip is a bit more than just an Ingress player's best friend, as it offers numerous features to help users when they are on the move.

The Android app pops up messages based on location and displays nearby points of interest, from restaurants, to historical buildings and markers, complete with images and a brief synopsis about the significance. Users can customize the app on the go by clicking the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" buttons to help it learn personal tastes.

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Nearly a month ago, I told you about Microsoft's latest Windows Phone challenge -- titled "Meet your Match". Today the company released some numbers from its latest campaign. Although much of this is speculative, at least it almost certainly went better than the recent spectacular #DroidRage failure.

Windows Phone evangelist Ben Rudolph, who launched the successful "Smoked by Windows Phone" during Consumer Electronics Show 2012, began "Meet your Match" to coincide with the release of Windows Phone 8. This time around, instead of a simple speed test, Microsoft challenged customers to see which device better fit their needs -- Windows Phone 8 or the device they currently use.

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I won't lie and say I didn't see this coming -- after all, Microsoft's Live Mesh app has been on life support for some time. Still, it hurts to see it go.

Back in August, Microsoft began overhauling its Live services, along with other changes in its transformation to prepare for Windows 8. When it released the latest iteration with a name change from "Live Essentials" to "Windows Essentials 2012", it was a scaled back array of apps that did not include Live Mesh. The writing was on the wall.

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Remember that Googlezon video from a few years ago? The one that predicted Google and Amazon would take over the world with, perhaps, apocalyptic results? Well, none of that has come to pass, but both companies continue to grow and expand. Amazon, increasingly becoming as much of a content delivery system as a product retailer, made several bold moves to get its media out to even more platforms, today.

For starters, Amazon moved to bring its Cloud Player music service to both Samsung Smart TV's and Roku set-top boxes and made its Instant Video service available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Both services are essentially cloud interfaces for your media.

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We have seen top-10 lists now from Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook. Sure, all of them provided the raw data pertaining to the most-searched for and most-talked about products, events, people and more from the past year. Google, with it's popular Zeitgeist release, did the same. But the search leader took it one step further and, in so doing, was the real winner in this 2012 popularity contest.

Google provides perspective and emotion to raw, boring statistics and creates something that is appealing to basic human instincts. The company put together a video that will jog your memory, make you smile and bring a tear to your eye.

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Within the past few days Instagram has divorced Twitter and added a new filter, Twitter got into the Instagram game by adding photo filters and now Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr has joined the fray with its new iPhone app update. You can probably guess where this announcement is going.

Yes, Flickr has added a set of filters that users can access upon snapping a photo. Like Instagram and now Twitter, there are a standard set of filters including black and white and 15 others that are now part of the built-in editor, which also allows you to crop your image right on the spot. You can then share it via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or email.

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The trend for tech companies in the past few days has been to, well, release lists of trends for the past year. Today Facebook joins Google, Twitter, Yahoo and others in releasing its list of the most talked about stories of 2012. Let's face it though, these lists rarely vary no matter if it's a search engine or a social media website. What people search for most tends to also be what they are talking about the most.

Still, Facebook is one of the biggest influencers on the web right now. Consequently the data the company releases carries some weight.

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The first tablet produced by Microsoft, Surface RT, has the public's attention for a number of reasons. While some customers have found it to be a winner, there has been quite a debate over actual sales figures. Much of that controversy has swirled around the company's decision to limit availability to Microsoft’s Web store and the few Microsoft brick and mortar stores across the U.S.

But Microsoft is no longer going to have limited availability as an excuse for limited sales. In an announcement earlier today, the company said it plans to open the flood gates to get its product into the market, selling it in more than just its own retail stores.

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