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Microsoft's giant touchscreen

Microsoft is trying to out iPhone the iPhone. The software company, not renowned for its slick interfaces, has built a piece of equipment that will turn any flat surface into a giant touch-sensitive screen.

Michael Arrington, of the TechCrunch blog, got a sneak preview of Touchwall, due to be unveiled at Microsoft’s headquarters today. His video demonstration (above) shows off the screens capabilities.

Users will scroll through content by caressing the surface and zoom in by sweeping their hands apart in an amplified version of the finger-pinching motion used on the Apple iPhone. Tapping on images, videos or documents embedded in the surface brings them up to full-screen size, while digital drawing tools allow users to add text and free-hand illustrations.

Microsoft's demonstration focused on office applications, but with a little imagination the device could easily be yoked up to gaming and home entertainment systems.

Unlike Surface, Microsoft’s sophisticated but prohibitively expensive table-top computing system, Touchwall has been put together using hardware costing only a few hundred dollars: three infrared lasers and an infrared camera. The lasers project a mesh of beams over the front of the surface, while the camera detects when and where the beams are broken.

Inexplicably, Microsoft said it had no current plans to put Touchwall into production.

Does Microsoft really want to buy Facebook?

Out of one multi-billion dollar attempt to take control of an internet company and straight into another?

So it would seem for Microsoft, which has reportedly lurched from aggressively seeking to take control of Yahoo!, the struggling internet portal, to politely approaching Facebook and asking what it would sell for.

Fresh from being rebuffed by Yahoo! - for which Microsoft had offered $47.5 billion - on the weekend, the company's bankers are said to have approached Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old chief executive, to inquire what he thinks his company is worth. Or so reported the Wall Street Journal. (Neither company has confirmed the approach.)

Certainly, for Microsoft to express interest in one of the world's most talked about and influential social networking sites is not surprising.

The software giant already owns a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook - having bought a $240 million chunk in October which valued the young company at $15 billion. And only last week Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, cited it as one of only six 'internet properties' that had "any real scale."

As with many of Microsoft's dealings, however - and the company is a veteran corporate operator, not least in the field of takeovers - there may be more here than meets the eye.