Microsoft has acquired MetricsHub, a startup company that monitors and automates resource allocation for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

“MetricsHub will now offer all Windows Azure customers our premium product as a pre-release, no charge, service available through the Windows Azure Store,” Microsoft said in a statement.

“We will also be converting all paying customers to this no-charge version of the service and MetricsHub technology will continue to keep your cloud applications running.”

Details of the deal were not disclosed.

MetricsHub was one of the companies awarded with $20,000 at last year’s Microsoft Accelerator program by VC fund TechStars.  TechStars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator.

MetricHub’s tools will allows Azure users to “collect performance data on cloud applications to determine how and when they need to scale, in addition to providing rules-based automation, such as scaling certain Azure roles or setting minimums and maximums for the number of instances.”

ViralSearch

Azure isn’t the only place automation and metrics are being applied.  If you’re familiar with memes, this question may have probably crossed your mind at some point, “How do they become popular?”

You may not have to do your own research on how memes got popular or how Gangnam Style and Call Me Maybe became popular, as Microsoft unveiled its research project aptly named as ViralSearch.

ViralSearch tracks the diffusion of news, videos, and photos to determine exactly how they were shared on Twitter and to rate their virality.  It represents data in an interactive timeline format that details when a particular content’s popularity peaks.  It gives you an idea how stuff becomes viral, what role Twitter plays in the infection, and which types of people spreads the content.

The project is not yet available for the public to use as Microsoft is still figuring out a way to incorporate the project into its products for internal use.

Kinect is in the future of laptops and tablets

At the Microsoft TechForum, Craig Mundie, senior adviser to Microsoft’s CEO, revealed plans of Microsoft taking Kinect to the mobile world.

What Microsoft plans on doing is to “miniaturize” Kinect so it can be incorporated into other Microsoft products such as the Surface tablets.

“You want to be as cheap as possible and physically as small as possible,” Mundie explains. “My dream is to get a Kinect into the bezel of something like this [Surface tablet].”

Microsoft has already equipped screens at its envisioning center with thinner and smaller version of Kinect but declined to comment if its the second generation of the popular sensor.  This move makes it seem like integrating Kinect to laptops and tablets may just be around the corner.

But before that happens, Microsoft has to deal with a lot of challenges, such as finding a way to make Kinect work when using a device in direct sunlight.  Kinect uses infrared and the sun is a huge source of infrared.  Using Kinect in direct sunlight will be quite impossible since the sun will drown it out.  Microsoft could use another type of sensor for use in Kinect for laptops and tablets.