Microsoft has released an SDK for Windows 8 that you can use to develop Windows Store apps that take advantage of cloud services and Windows Azure. An equivalent SDK is also available for Windows Phone 7.x.

Project Hawaii is a Microsoft Research initiative investigating the role of the cloud in enhancing how we use mobile devices. Its latest SDK is a set of services and tools that you can use in your Windows 8 or Windows Phone apps. It includes a number of cloud services, starting with the Social Mobile Sharing (SMASH) Service. This gives you an easy way to prototype apps that provide some element of social computing. Smash provides a general sharing mechanism for observable collections.

A path prediction service is another service that you can use in a mobile app to predict a user’s destination based on the information about their current route. There’s a translator service that lets your apps use the Microsoft Translator to translate text from one language to another and to obtain an audio stream that renders a string in a spoken language, and a speech-to-text service that takes a spoken phrase and converts it to text. Another service provides OCR on photographic images containing text, returning a text string.

Two more services provide storage and message handling. The relay service provides a relay point in the cloud that apps can use to communicate. The service gives you an endpoint naming scheme and buffering for sent messages. The key-value store service provides a simple key-value store so your apps can store and retrieve application-wide state information as text by using key-value pairs.

Currently the system is under development and you can use Hawaii for research and experimentation only. Presumably at some point in the future a commercial license will be created.

You can download the SDK here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/hawaii/download.aspx and you can read more about it here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/hawaii/default.aspx