Redmond, Washington -- Bing, the much-touted search engine from Microsoft, is feeling the heat of a trademark conflict, as a small Missouri company called Bing! Information Designs, having the word “Bing” in its name has sued Microsoft for branding its search engine with the same word, alleging trademark violation and unfair competition by the software giant in a lawsuit filed last week in Missouri circuit court.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Missouri-based computer design firm states that Microsoft's use of “Bing” puzzles the public and falsely infers the companies could be connected.

Bing Information Design registered the case in a St. Louis circuit court last week, seeking indemnification including corrective advertising paid for by Microsoft to eliminate confusion between the brands, the company's law firm said in a statement.

Redmond, Washington -- Even though Microsoft's Windows Mobile business competes with iPhone maker Apple, the Redmond, Wash., software maker's new Bing app is pushing its Bing search engine pretty hard into the mobile space. The application made its debute in the iPhone Apps Store yesterday and can be downloaded directly to the iPhone if users so wish.

The company announced on its Bing community blog early this week, bringing together the many features of Web search supported by the company's Bing search engine to the tips of your fingers.

For instance, the app, which is available free of cost, supports straight Web searches (and even provides suggestions as you type search terms), as well as other specialized queries supported by Bing, such as voice search, which allows you to speak a search term into the phone, and Bing will locate the search results and map it if it has a location, plus images, videos, maps, business locations, and news.

San Francisco -- With competition between tech titans on the rise, it looks as if Redmond software maker Microsoft is running out of ideas and is now desperately adopting crooked ways on ruining their reputation by using stolen code. A popular Asian microblogging start-up “Plurk” accused Microsoft of plucking off around 80 percent of code and interface design to build a new MSN social-networking site in China.

According to reports, the software giant is suspending access to the MSN site, but it appears it is still online.

“Counterfeiting may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world. Yes, we are talking about Microsoft,” reads a blog post from Canada-based startup Plurk, which claims a membership in the “mid seven figures” concentrated primarily in Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. According to a company spokesman, it also has members in the UK, US, Australia, and Canada.

Copenhagen, Denmark -- As world leaders gather in Copenhagen, planning to thrust engagement and support of actions against climate change, Software behemoth, Microsoft rolled out a new Web-based applications designed to highlight environmental problems during the COP 15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which runs through Friday.

Microsoft has rolled out two new applications designed to help individuals analyze the climate debate and manage their carbon footprints. Microsoft is operating with the European Environmental Agency (EEA) to use its Bing Maps, Silverlight multimedia technology and Azure cloud platform to show how climate change is affecting certain regions in Europe.

Redmond, Washington -- Software maker Microsoft has recently been moving cautiously in an attempt to expand its software in to health-care industry, on Thursday announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire “Sentillion Inc.,” a privately held developer of software tools for the healthcare industry.

Perhaps most publicly with its HealthVault services aimed at hospitals, which empowers users to share and control access to their own medical records, healthcare organizations, and researchers, will evolve with products from Sentillion starting in 2010, the Redmond company announced.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed; But essentially, the software giant plans to leverage Sentillion's products with the Amalga UIS, in order to streamline access to multiple IT applications, as well as sources of patient data.

New York -- Microsoft and Yahoo have finally finalized the terms of a comprehensive search and advertising services and sales and license services agreement, but the two companies still wait for regulatory approval. The news seals the terms of the agreement announced in July, intended to help them compete more effectively with Google.

Before Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo can actually begins working together, the deal is subject to approval by Government regulators, a milestone which the companies are expecting will be achieved as early as next year.

The companies announced the agreement, in which Microsofts Bing search engine would power Yahoos search results and Yahoo would deliver premium search-advertising services for both companies, in July.

Redmond, Washington -- Barely a day after beautifying Bing with various enhancements, including the beta version of an improved mapping service, Microsoft had to apologize for a widespread outage that kept the search engine offline for about 30 minutes late last week, a sign that Microsoft's effort to challenge Google's search supremacy remains vital.

During the breakdown, Bing went blank between 6:30 and 7:00 PM PT, users either could not get the site to load at all, or they received substituted result pages for their search queries, Microsoft said.

In a post on the Bing blog, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services division, confirmed that Bing.com was inaccessible from 6:30 pm to 7:00 pm Pacific time on Thursday (0230 GMT to 0300 GMT on Friday).

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.

Redmond, Washington -- After quietly releasing the Office 2010 public beta, software maker Microsoft is reportedly prepping the next major release of its productivity applications suite -- Office 2010 -- right on time, in June of its namesake year.

The Microsoft Office 2010, and its related products, is planned to be released in June, and will be available in six editions for Windows 7, Vista and XP that includes: Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional, and Professional Plus, including for 32-bit and 64-bit editions, Microsoft said, in response to many Internet reports about a possible ship date for the software. Also, there is no official word from Microsoft on pricing.

Presently, Office 2010 Professional Plus is available as public beta, which is valid till October 31, 2010. Basically, one gets over a year to check out the Office 2010 suit and then decide whether to buy it.

If it delivers Office 2010 on time, it will be following the general availability, or “GA” in Microsoft parlance, of the suite right down to the wire, since the company has been propagating for months that it will deliver the completed suite in the first half of next year.

Australia -- Responding to criticism over the lack of the Windows 7 Family Pack during last month's introduction of the new OS, Microsoft Australia has finally yielded to pressure from customers and retailers and unleashed a local version of the bundle -- which includes three licenses for Windows 7 Home Premium -- for $249.

Just in time for Christmas -- Microsoft Australia coming to its senses! Starting December 1 Microsoft's Australian retail partners will put on sale the software under a Family Pack licensing scheme that had previously only been available to its US customers.

Originally hesitating to confirm whether Australia could be part of the previously announced “limited pilot” to see whether consumers would prefer to, you know, actually save money on multiple Windows 7 purchases, even unable to say so at Win 7's official launch, the news has come today that the Family Pack is now available in Australia.

New York -- According to a news report appearing Sunday in the Financial Times quoting person familiar with the situation, that Microsoft has initiated discussions with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. over a deal that would see the media magnet get paid to remove its news websites from Google, while continuing to publish it on Microsoft's online properties, according to people familiar with the matter.

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has expressed he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites. Other publishers including The New York Times are also exploring for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give news through search engines such as Google and Yahoo Inc.

The Financial Times first reported the story Sunday, stating that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them about removing their sites from Google. News Corp, which possess such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Sun, started the discussions, which were at an early stage, the source said.

Los Angeles -- For every modern businesses, even with the availability of open source office applications, Microsoft Office is the standard for productivity applications. During this week's Professional Developers Conference PDC09 in the Los Angeles Convention Center, Microsoft unwrapped a free public beta of its forthcoming version of popular Office suite, Office 2010, In addition to and the “streaming” technology it will use to deliver some paid versions of Office 2010 next year.

So the arrival of Microsoft 2010 products that is due to ship next year -- now released into beta -- is big news. Microsoft Office 2010 is moving ahead by completing the transition that started with Office 2007, with an attractive upgrade for companies finally moving on from Windows XP and Office XP or 2003. And with the free beta, anyone can try it.

London -- The software giant Microsoft aiming to go head to head with Google, has officially took the wraps of the UK version of its Bing search engine, when it announced to deliver fully localized services and search results to UK users, taking the UK site out of the Beta testing stage it has been in since launch in June.

The website, which is designed to contend with Google's dominance of the online search market, was introduced in the United States in May. Until now, UK web users have only been able to access a US version of Bing, but with this launch, the UK will become the third country after the United States and Canada to receive a tailor-made version of Bing to deliver more relevant search results.

Redmond, Washington -- While there have been a number of .NET libraries for the Facebook Platform for some time now, Microsoft on Monday officially unveiled its latest software development kit for Facebook that empowers developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.

The two companies' latest venture incorporated Web, client, and social technologies for building apps and services for the social networking site. While there are a number of significant gains to this upgrade including the ability to easily view indigenous Facebook Platform methods within the Microsoft Development environment with intellisense. As Microsoft previously displayed applications build using the Facebook library within Microsoft applications, this is the first official rollout of the libraries.

San Francisco -- Despite all the benefits reaped by other companies, this will surely come as a surprise to some. Industry tracker comScore, Inc., last week released a study showing that, in terms of time spent on sites, the Redmond-based Microsoft sites ranked as the most engaging global property in September, followed by Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

According to the study, Microsoft websites seized nearly 15 percent of time spent online worldwide in September, and almost 70 percent of the time spent on its sites was through Windows Live Messenger.

People are passing more time on the Internet -- searching more, shopping more and possibly even working more online. A record high population of 1.2 billion Internet users aged 15 or older spent a total of nearly 27 billion hours online in September, according to the study.

Redmond, Washington -- Striving to strengthen its medical pedigree, software behemoth Microsoft Corp. is ready to debut an online video series, “Health Tech Today,” describing the developments in the health care technology field, beginning tomorrow Nov. 10.

The forthcoming show will concentrate on how health and information technology run across. Microsoft's cloud-based storage facility for patient information, HealthVault, is just one of the health care IT-related programs and products that companies ranging from Google and Intel to Oracle have been pushing into the public sphere.

The show's entertainer, Bill Crounse, senior director of worldwide health at Microsoft, is a seasoned of both mass communication medium and medicine, having acted as an announcer and practicing physician prior to joining Microsoft. In a chat on Friday, Crounse assured that the show itself wold not be an ad for Microsoft's health care software, though the company is sponsoring the first few episodes with some short commercials.

Redmond, Washington -- Mass downsizing at Microsoft continues, as the Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth on Wednesday said that it is notifying approximately 800 workers that their jobs are being eliminated in addition to 5,000 layoffs it announced earlier this year.

“Earlier this year, Microsoft said we that in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and prioritize our focus areas, we would it would cut approximately 5,000 positions before the end of the next fiscal year, which ends in June. With the latest cuts, Microsoft said it has essentially completed those layoffs. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in May that it was mostly, but not entirely, done with the job eliminations.”

A Microsoft spokesman said the cuts will be broadly “spread across multiple businesses and locations,” and added that the company will continue to hire in priority areas. Microsoft had 91,005 employees worldwide at the end of September, according to The Seattle Times.

Redmond, Washington -- Barely three months since Yahoo revamped its home page, Microsoft aiming to keep pace with the trend, the Redmond Vole, begins doing the same on Wednesday with its MSN portal. Microsoft is previewing its newly redesigned MSN portal beginning tomorrow, that delivers a modern look and new social networking tools.

Although MSN is far less popular than the company's Bing or Windows Live efforts, Microsoft is geared up to give its MSN portal a major upgrade, redesigning the popular destination with a new look and feel with social networking hooks such as integrated Facebook and Twitter feeds.

The redesign is rolled out with several new ad offerings, including a more prominent 300x250 ad and synchronized rich media units.

Redmond, Washington -- With Microsoft's ad deal with Yahoo getting prolonged, The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant just added yet another layer of weapons in its battle against Google and others for search advertising. Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced that it has signed a deal with OpenX Technologies Inc., a Pasadena-based Web advertising start-up have partnered to expand the reach of contextual online advertising service designed to compete with rival technology offered by Google Inc.'s AdSense.

Under the terms of the multi-year partnership, Microsoft and OpenX will enhance the potential reach of those ads by making them available to its network of 150,000 websites, which display 300 billion ads every month. OpenX will be the preferred partner to publishers for enterprise and server solutions, and it will promote Microsoft's Content Ads, which matches ads to relevant editorial content, to its customers.

Los Angeles -- Curtain will fall down on yet another Microsoft product. Microsoft has placed a notice on its MSN Direct Web site informing users that the company will shut down its MSN Direct, Microsoft's data disseminating network, is to be switched off in 2012, leaving literally dozens of users bereft of updates and another Microsoft initiative in the dust.

According to the post, “MSN Direct service will be available only until January 1, 2012, terminating the company's half-decade penetration into wireless consumer electronics and demonstrating that mobile telephone networks can provide for every kind of connectivity”.

However, customers can continue to reap the full benefits of MSN Direct, along with service and support, up until that date. Pro-rated refunds for unused portions of existing One-Time Payment and other subscription plans will be automatically credited after January 1, 2012.