Los Angeles -- Microsoft Corp's Web portal MSN on Thursday embarked on a crowded field of online entertainment and celebrity news , taking the wraps off a new website known as Wonderwall.com, a scrolling wall of star photos and news meant to give users the feel of flipping through a celebrity magazine.

Microsoft partnered on the project in a joint venture with entertainment bigwigs BermanBraun Interactive, a media company based in Santa Monica, California, to create a new entertainment and celebrity news site called Wonderwall for MSN, the Internet arm of the US software giant. “As long as MSN.com has been around, we have had an entertainment channel,” said Rob Bennett, MSN general manager. But people had a hard time finding celebrity news and gossip among the existing Music, TV and Movies channels. “Celebrity content is sort of sprinkled throughout.”

Microsoft's attempt to seek a patent for a technology called Legal Intercept, which would allow the company to secretly intercept , monitor and record Skype calls is stoking privacy concerns, reports Computer World

Though Microsoft applied for the patent for Legal Intercept in 2009, well before it acquired Skype, it was made public only last week.

According to Microsoft, Legal Intercept is designed to silently record communications on VoIP networks such as Skype.

Redmond, Washington -- Building on a lengthy partnership, Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co., two of the world's biggest tech vendors, announced a new partnership on Wednesday said they will collectively spend $250 million to develop and more tightly integrate their software and hardware offerings for companies looking to move their applications and data online, popularly known as “cloud computing.” This will help business of “all sizes,” as rivals Oracle Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and others transform themselves as one-stop shops for technology, according to HP.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard in their announcement said this three-year partnership will include an array of openings, all designed to help businesses trim down some of the burdens of establishing and operating data centers, the facilities that houses corporate software and computer equipment.

Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft's advertising developers have created a new gadget that imitates an analogous feature on Yahoo pages and launches a small window of information when users hover over or click on an underlined word on a Web page. A sneak preview of Microsoft Gaze is now available courtesy of the Redmond company, however the Beta can be accessed only on an invitation basis.

Microsoft's Gaze is a project developed to empower content owners to add depth to text on websites, enhancing the information available to visitors via links with ad-supported in-line content. Users would be able to make out that a word has a link because either it is underlined or accompanied by a small icon that sits next to the word.

The declared scope of Microsoft Advertising Gaze version: 1.0.0906.00 Beta is to enhance user experience by offering an large volume of data via advertising to websites.

Los Angeles -- Little green pigs across the nation are shivering in fear now that after a long wait, the wildly popular 'Angry Birds' bird slinging game finally makes its way to the Windows Phone 7 platform today.

It has certainly been a long journey, as Angry Birds has been widely admired on both Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems. The app has finally landed in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Sadly, the app is only available free to try and $2.99 to purchase -- “a few hours ahead of schedule and so fresh it has not even been rated yet,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “Be the first -- or just hunker down with your phone and get dem pigs.”

Redmond, Washington -- Today Microsoft has unveiled some new health search features to its health search capabilities running into its Bing search engines many health-related inquiries, according to a blog post on the Bing Community site.

Users can instantly discover detailed and comprehensive explanation about illnesses, treatments, medical facilities, etc. when entering health-related queries.

“We are delivering more data from new partners and improving instant answers with hard-to-discover information that helps users get more extensive explanation out of their health search experience, both on- and off-line,” blogged Alain Rappaport, Microsoft's General Manager of Health Search.

San Francisco -- If you fancy using Firefox browser but also love Microsoft's Live Search, then you will be happy to know that Microsoft is dressing itself up to combat the 'browser wars' with the release of a new add-on for rival Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. The update would enable to enjoy the optimized utilization of Microsoft Live Search from directly within Firefox.

“We are happy to inform that we have officially incorporated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand,” wrote Beatrice Oltean, Live Search Program Manager, and Debapriya Ray, Live Search Senior Product Manager, in a blog post, last week.

The new auto-suggest add-on, which places a small search box in the upper right corner of the Firefox browser, performs exactly that it says on the tin, helping to auto-complete search queries in the browser as users starts typing search queries. Enter the name Bruce, for example, and the auto-suggest will instantly pull down a list of famous Bruces you may be searching for.

Redmond, Washington -- In an attempt to present U.S. and Western Europe images in high-resolution mapped aerially, the Redmond-based software monopolist Microsoft just rolled out a new Web application that showcases vivid photography of 153 spots around the United States, and is part of Microsoft's Bing Maps Global Ortho project.

The Redmond Vole has embarked with a novel concept to create a high-resolution, seamless mapping mosaic of the world one day which would not only make you admire the place you want to visit, but also be wonder-struck about how symmetric and artistic the world really seems, when seen from up above.