San Francisco -- The Redmond, Wash., software giant Microsoft, taking aim at one of Google's most popular services, Google Maps, continues to fine-tune its fledgling Bing search engine -- on Wednesday enhanced its own online mapping service with several new capabilities, including a street-level view that takes users inside public buildings, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed to provide a better search experience and hopefully lure people away from Google, which dominates the search market.

The revived Bing Maps released in beta, employs Microsoft's Silverlight multimedia technology to provide a smoother way to zoom in and out of cityscapes that appear as 3D-like images and also boasts a gallery for applications, such as live traffic data feeds or input from travel webcams or Twitter Maps, according to Microsoft. The beta service also includes Microsoft's answer to Google Street View, which it calls Streetside.

For starters, Bing's new Streetside element borrows a page from Google Maps by providing street-level views of specific locations. One of the first is a Twitter application that uses the geolocation data recently included into Twitter, so that tweets can be viewed over a map in the locations they were sent from. That might assist people get real-time updates on a local news event, for instance.

New York -- Massive Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s in-game advertising subsidiary, announced a multi-year ad partnership with “Guitar Hero” and “World of Warcraft” game publisher Activision and its corporate sibling Blizzard Entertainment, a company specializing in Web-based multiplayer games, to provide ads for 18 of its titles and for Battle.net, its online game service.

In doing so, it has landed the big kahuna -- J. J. Richards to lead Massive’s overall operations.

As part of the agreement, Massive said Wednesday it will provide dynamic in-game ads for up to 18 Xbox 360 and PC titles, which means the ads change over time and can be targeted based on a gamer’s location, including the latest version of Guitar Hero: World Tour, James Bond: Quantum of Solace, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, AMAX Racing, and Tony Hawk.

In a bid to shore up its management line, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of privately held DesktopStandard, a developer of group policy-based enterprise desktop and server management tools, in a move designed to help customers leverage the value of policy-based management and their investments in Active Directory, the two companies said in a statement.

Group Policy lets administrators control desktops and servers throughout a network by assigning policies according to user groups. The ease with which Group Policy can be administered can have positive effects upon an enterprise's bottom line.

Beta version of Office 2007 identifies hot spots worldwide

Microsoft has issued beta test software for a Wi-Fi management utility called Windows Live Connection Center WiFi to a limited group of Office 2007 beta testers.

According to the Techlog.org blog, Microsoft has invited a small number of Office 2007 Beta 2 testers to preview a forthcoming service called “Windows Live Connection Center Wi-Fi Beta,” yet another addition to the burgeoning list of the services Microsoft dubs "Windows Live," is expected to be available to business users by the end of the year, and consumers in early 2007.

Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and MCI Inc. said they are teaming up to extend the reach of MSN's instant-messaging service into the crowded global computer-to-phone call market.

The companies are the latest to enter the market for calling using personal computers. Those in the market include Skype, recently purchased by eBay, along with Google and Yahoo.

But the service will permit only outbound calls at first, even as rivals Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc. allow instant messaging users to receive calls from conventional phones as well as to call out.

Redmond, Washington -- In an attempt to meet the needs of growing social, email, and mobile channels, and just ahead of its Q2 2013 earnings announcement, Microsoft on October 17, announced that it has completed the acquisition of marketing automation software company 'MarketingPilot' for an undisclosed amount, which now becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.

Microsoft is known for its positive as well as negative acts, but it always strikes a balance between the two. The software giant is planning to give soldiers a little bit of a holiday morale boost by its deed of making a pretty big donation to dozens of USO centers around the world. The deed seems to be interestingly big as Microsoft will deliver 380 Xbox Kinect gaming systems to bases around the globe.

Redmond, Washington -- Adobe is not the only company being attracted by the sweet taste of HTML5, reports are swirling across the tech media and the blogosphere that Microsoft is shifting its emphasis away from its own Silverlight rich client environment in favor of HTML5.