Microsoft has cool Windows Phone projects in the pipeline, might phase out Zune for the Ventura service

Ventura is a service “revolving around music/video discovery and consumption." This smells like something cloud-based that allows you to search and stream music and video to your device, much like Pandora does it. Speculations are that this might make it onto Microsoft's Windows Phone OS further down the road. The new service has been spotted when the Ventura Media Services team posted a job position under the umbrella of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division, which is also responsible for Xbox and Zune.
" Mobile-phone users typically search for contacts in their contact list by keying in names or email IDs. Users frequently make various types of mistakes, including phonetic, transposition, deletion, and substitution errors, and, in the specific case of mobile phones, the nature of the input mechanism makes mistakes more probable. We propose a fuzzy-contact-search feature to help users find the right contacts despite making mistakes while keying in a query. The feature is based on the novel, hashing-based spelling-correction technology developed by Microsoft Research India. We support many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Hindi. We have built a Windows Phone 7 app to demonstrate our fuzzy contact search. The solution is lightweight and can be used in any client-side contact-search scenario.
Certainly promising developments on Microsoft's side, the issue is the speed with which they can get all of these to market. Hopefully by the time the Nokia Windows Phone hits, they will have become baked into Microsoft's mobile OS.
source: BusinessInsider& WMPoweruser