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LEGO teams with Microsoft!

Exciting news spreading in the MINDSTORMS community: LEGO has announced a new partnership with Microsoft to tighten integration of the MINDSTORMS series with Microsoft's consumer-leading Windows operation system.
Microsoft's robotics platform Robotics Developer Studio has been integrating support for MINDSTORMS for years, but the new collaboration is expected to go much deeper: as LEGO MINDSTORMS community manager Stefano Calvino already confirmed, Microsoft will publish a port of the company's flagship browser Internet Explorer 10 for LEGO's upcoming MINDSTORMS generation EV3, thus making use of EV3's new WiFi capabilities.

Microsoft innovation lead Antony Foster is quite enthuasiatic about the "endless possibilities of MINDSTORMS running on Windows and vice versa; also a version of our new innovative Windows 8 running on the EV3 brick seems likely now".

There are also rumours on MINDSTORMS-compatible 3rd party sensors for voice recognition, online movie TV on the brick's display and even life-streaming of your robot building process - this way, your friends can watch on IE 10 while you are creating a new MINDSTORMS robot!

The NXT STEP is looking forward to the golden times ahead!

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