Redmond, Washington -- In a fresh move to expand its horizon on the social sphere, software maker Microsoft is opening up its emerging Socl social-networking research project, which enable users to create and share visual content in an online gallery similar to Pinterest. It is powered by Microsoft's search engine Bing.

San Francisco -- Popular retailer site Amazon over the weekend said that sales of Microsoft's three-license Windows 7 Family Pack will end next week, according to Amazon, or once they have run out of stock or on December 31st, whichever occurs soonest.

Redond, Washington -- Software behemoth Microsoft Corp., lost its appeal of a lawsuit involving a Canadian company called i4i in May, after a jury ruled that the Redmond, Wash., software maker infringed one of i4i's patents with a custom XML feature found in Word, is preparing to modify its popular Word software to avoid an injunction on sales of the product.

San Francisco-- The first beta version of Windows 7 -- Microsoft’s much-anticipated next-generation operating system and substitute for the most troublesome Vista, which was expected to reach retailer shelves in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season, has apparently popped up on peer-to-peer network BitTorrent as an ISO file, making it available for anyone to download.

A quick search run on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, produced results for two Windows 7 Build 7000 listings, both of which had been posted Friday.

Since Saturday afternoon, one torrent on Pirate Bay display more than 1,800 “seeders” -- the term for a computer that has a full copy of the torrent file -- and about 8,500 “leechers,” or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent.

Microsoft is launching a test program to sell AMD-powered personal computers in India, marking the company's first venture in PC sales.

New Delhi -- A day after NIIT announced a multi-core training program for software developers in partnership with Intel, Microsoft India in association with chipmaker AMD launched a Rs. 21,000 personal computer for school going children from kindergarten to class 12.

To increase IT access amongst masses, Microsoft India, has entered in to partnership with Zenith and AMD and other companies to test-market Microsoft-branded personal computers in India...

Giants to provide joint security architecture -- The result should be a breakthrough in integrated IT security when the whole package arrives in the second half of next year.

Cisco and Microsoft lately released closely held details about their two-year-old partnership to deliver integrated controls that prevent malware-infested computers from connecting into networks, which enable users of Windows Vista and the Longhorn server platform to stay secure when using Cisco networks...

Microsoft, stirring to life in China after years of relative quiet, expects to chalk up sales growth of more than 30 percent in China this fiscal year and hopes to launch its Xbox 360 game console there.

Microsoft's recent advances in the market also come as the deals by the world's top software company come as its peers--from outsourcing specialists such as India's Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy to developers such as Sun Microsystems--launched their own Chinese initiatives.

Redmond, Washington -- In the midst of discarding the preview tag, software behemoth Microsoft is touting a new milestone as it continues its attempts to lure users away from Google's Gmail. The Redmond giant announced on its blog that Outlook.com, the company's new free Internet-based email service, has flourished to 60 million users since launching in “preview” at the end of July, the company will now start phasing out its Hotmail and begin moving users over to its new product, according to the software giant.