Microsoft today announced Office for iPad, a trio of apps that bring Word, PowerPoint and Excel to tablets. Those should be showing up in the App Store shortly — around 11AM Pacific (2PM Eastern), to be exact.

I’m looking forward to seeing it.

I’m happy that Gibson honored Skunk with his own model, but I was never a big fan of the Firebird.

BusyContacts is a complete replacement for the built-in Contacts app on OS X that is designed to make creating, finding, and managing contacts faster and more efficient.

From the same company that brought us BusyCal.

We were excited to see what we could do with iBeacons at the show. We focused on using iBeacons in a way that was both exciting and appropriate for the event. We settled on check-in to speed up people getting their badges and a game to help people investigate the show floor and highlight how beacons can help explore large environments.

Great to see.

I recently revamped the way I travel, so I found Michael Lopp’s article interesting.

If I just made $2 billion, the last thing I’d be doing is defending the sale—I’d be knee-deep in Heineken bottles.

Clearly, it’s good when price cuts happen, but as noted in the story, this is the 42nd price cut for AWS since it’s introduction.

In my short time leading BlackBerry…

Blah, blah, blah

But, when curiosity turns to criminality, we must take strong action.

Blah, blah, blah

This may mean you see a few less blog posts with photos and rumors…

Nobody gives a sweet flying shit.

It’s always important to understand what happened in attacks like Basecamp suffered through.

If you ask me, that is the real story here — realization that there is a glass ceiling to advertising especially as we shift gears and move away from the old desktop advertising ecosystem to a smaller, pocketable ecosystem that is less prone to cheap optimization tricks and is also limited by available attention…

I buy that argument, but Zuck said they don’t plan to make money from selling the Oculus hardware and would use it for advertising and virtual goods. If Facebook is looking for additional revenue streams, I’m not sure they found it.

Modine’s award-winning diary becomes an immersive audiobook experience performed with original music and sound effects.

There are some great rewards if you pledge to support this project.

The New York Times plans to launch two new subscription products on April 2: NYT Now, a standalone iOS app that costs $8 a month, and Times Premier, which the company describes as a “premium subscription service designed for The Times enthusiast.”

The premium product will cost $45 every four weeks.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was not interested in becoming a hardware company and did not intend to try to make a profit from sales of the devices over the long term. Instead, he said Facebook’s software and services would continue to serve as the company’s underlying business, potentially generating revenue on Oculus devices through everything from advertising to sales of virtual goods.

Personally, I find this purchase odd.

Some good thoughts from Om Malik.

Seems clear they made it. Congrats Apple.

Kaleidoscope is one of the world’s best tools for spotting differences in images and text. Now it supports the ignoring of leading, trailing and line-ending whitespace too. Kaleidoscope integrates directly with Git, Subversion, Mercurial, P4, and Bazaar to fit perfectly in your workflow.

I always felt bad for HTC. I think they made a good product, but didn’t have the marketing budget to compete with Samsung, which meant people didn’t pay much attention. I’m not sure the new phone will change that.

Jim and Dan talk about Google Glass and its myths, escaped water buffalos, Peter Gabriel and his flute, Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes Radio (now with NPR), “The Techtopus”, wage suppression, and more.

These are good tips.

The new related search suggestions mark one of Apple’s first attempts to augment App Store search results with visual semantics for apps. In testing the feature, I was able to get suggestions for specific sub-categories such as “business news” and “video game news”, “writing” and “story ideas”, or “healthy cooking” and “food recipes”; each set of related searches included new results that were more specific and relevant to the suggested search.

I like this. Anything Apple can do to show more relevant results will help them and the user.

You can’t make this shit up.

This is incredible. We often talk about how the possibilities of what we can do with an iPad seem endless, but this is a step above.

Matt Gemmell has a really nice piece explaining why he doesn’t post on sites like Medium and instead writes for his own site.

Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR channel on iTunes Radio.

Great news for everyone.

Record anything on your screen, edit it with powerful yet efficient tools and share them with just one-click!

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Voila is especially useful for educators, students, designers, corporates and the like who need brisk, high-performance and solid screen captures without breaking a sweat. Creating tutorials, training manuals, lessons, DIY videos etc. is now super easy and you also get to manage them expertly with Voila’s smart organizational abilities. It’s that simple!

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My thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Pixelmator is one of the apps that I use every day and have for years. It’s very powerful, but yet approachable, allowing new users to instantly manipulate their images. There is no better image editor.

Perfect for fans of John Bonham, Simon Phillips, Alex Van Halen, and Dave Grohl, this is the groove inspiration you’ve been looking for – a powerful source of rock drum loops inspired as much by the classic grooves of rock as much as more contemporary rock styles. Just pure, live rock drums. No beat detective. No sequenced samples. This is live, steaming, sweaty, raw rock and roll – the way it was meant to be.

Sounds perfect.

The Google Glass team posted “The Top 10 Google Glass Myths” trying to stem the tide of bad press. They didn’t mention how creepy the company is—perhaps that’s for another “Top 10” list.