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Mobile Minutes: Microsoft Office 365; banner ads; wearables weakness; mobile payment deals

In a significant strategy shift, Microsoft is aiming to maximize users over dollars with its Office franchise, traditionally a cash cow for the company. Microsoft is eliminating the fee to use most functions of its mobile apps for Office 365 ? the Web and mobile version of the popular Office software bundle.

Twenty years ago last month, a team of well-meaning designers, coders and magazine publishers inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting world one of the most misguided and destructive technologies of the Internet age: the web banner ad. If that is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one.

As the Internet of Things becomes an actual thing, more steps are being counted, more sleep patterns are being logged, more activities are being app-ified. What isn?t appearing in the data is much common sense or ambition. 

To save this holiday season, it may pay to pull out your phone instead of your cash. But don't plan to leave your wallet at home just yet.