With the new version of EMET (ver. 2), there’s a better user interface, a more robust infrastructure and more mitigations, says the official announcement. And although anyone can use the tool, there’s a big corporate focus with its development – the announcement notes in particular its benefit to “line of business applications on backend servers and browsers on the desktops of corporate executives.”

The updated software hasn’t arrived yet, but reports from the conference say it should be made available in August. 

Among the companies who visited Microsoft at this “SocialFest” event, as it was called, were Cortex Intelligence, a data mining and sentiment analysis company, Calinda Software, an email message mapping tool, Confer, a communications platform for microblogging, status updates, and chat, Leverage Software, an email organization technology, Liaise, an email data extraction tool, and Loqu8, a data lookup tool.

However, the winner of the top prize was Huddle, a collaboration platform for file sharing and online meetings. Their creative entry into the competition was a technology that allows separate SharePoints from different companies to integrate with each other and collaborate even though each SharePoint site was behind a separate firewall. The content between both sites are synchronized while maintaining auditing, compliance, and identity management functions. Genius!

Image Credit: Huddle

And when they say “desktop,”  they don’t just mean your computer desktop, but your Windows Live Mesh desktop. That’s because the Colaab mesh app actually installs an icon on the desktop you see when you log in to www.mesh.com.

Once launched, users can access their workspaces, files, and the other online resources found in the application. To see this application in action, check out this video where they demo how they access contacts and folders and more using their mesh-enabled application.

(img courtesy of News from Microsoft Ireland)

David Kaplan of paidContent.org chimed in early, echoing the NY Post article, as well as reminding everyone of Jerry Yang’s avoidance of Microsoft products, and how much an acquisition could close the gap between Microsoft and Google. Reuters also covered the story with this choice quote from Peter Lobravico of Wall Street Access: “You can’t find a stronger buyer than Microsoft and while it would spur a lot of political and regulatory noise, everyone knows in the end that the deal would go through.”

Scott Beale picked the right graphic for Laughing Squid’s coverage, and also highlighted the 18 point jump in Yahoo’s stock on news of the negotiations. He also pointed out Eric Schonfeld’s post at The Next Net, which notes that the deal would have an air of desperation, and that, “The culture-clash of two companies could undermine any financial gains a Microsoft-Yahoo merger could produce.” Some astute opinion came from Henry Blodget at Internet Outisder, who recommends the two companies join, and then for Microsoft to spin off a Yahoo-MSN organization.

This questions raised by this morning’s news are far more interesting than the coverage of it, given that very little has actually transpired. So what are the questions then? What are your wildest fantasies about how a Microhoo/Yahsoft would exist, and what sort of combinations could make the new company insanely great?

As Jeremy points out at Ars Technica, this ability to essentially stream Vista is great news for admins, who until now would’ve had to look longingly at *NIX operating systems which boot over the network. While Mary Jo says Wall Street and the Feds are prime candidates for this, the question should be raised around smaller groups of users. New Web-based operating systems are cropping up all the time as Richard points out at Read/Write with Desktop On Demand, and you can’t get anywhere near northern California without hearing about Goobuntu (though I prefer my own term, GooOS). There’s more to be found on Microsoft’s virtualization plans courtesy of Clive Watson’s posting of new whitepapers, as well as Rodney Buike’s post on the Future of the Server Room tour next month.