Palm Springs, California -- At the TED conference this week, Microsoft outstripped Google's Street Views application when the software giant unleashed some cool new features for its revamped Bing Maps application, taking panoramic views indoors.

The map service already fine-tuned in December made it more visually spectacular than Google Maps, its established rival, and these new features build on that lead.

Forget the old-time concept of restraining street views on the street, Bing is smartly moving on to providing street-level imagery on its maps product. Bing's Indoor Panoramas crashes through doors with backpack cameras to get inside panoramic views of venues.

New York -- The Redmond, Wash., software maker Microsoft Corp., Tuesday forged a partnership agreement with New York-based Interpublic Group, an advertising and marketing service provider, under which Interpublic Group will adopt Microsoft's Atlas as a preferred ad-server solution for IPG entities.

The Redmond Vole is getting cozier with Madison Avenue in a deal that will make Microsoft the go-to ad technology provider for the U.S. offices of ad giant's agencies, including McCann-Erickson, Deutsch, Hill Holliday and The Martin Agency, heightening the rivalry between Microsoft-Google.

Microsoft, reduced its undisclosed pricing for Atlas so that it will become the preferred option to deliver ads and analyze their performance.

Abandoning an initial goal to make Atlas an end-to-end solution, Microsoft has been “trying to break apart” the product to make it extensible, according to Randy Wootton, Microsoft Advertising's general manager of U.S. specialist sales. Doing this has made it easier to integrate Atlas with SharePoint and other Microsoft offerings, he said.

New York -- The move manifests that Microsoft and Google remain very interested in China has just surfaced. Both companies have reportedly struck deals with “MediaTek,” a Taiwanese semiconductor company that specializes in wireless communications, to strengthen their grip in the smartphones segment aimed at China and other emerging markets.

Emerging markets have immense capabilities in terms of Smartphone market share and others. The tech titans are eying these latent potential and thus are coupling with associates in order to grab a pie.

“MediaTek has already developed a chipset and other hardware for Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 operating system and has sent the package to handset makers in China so they can begin designing new Windows Mobile smartphones, a MediaTek representative said.”  Also, “MediaTek will release a similar hardware and software package with Google's Android mobile phone OS in the second half of this year”.

San Francisco -- Microsoft and Facebook have operated together since 2007, but now their relationship is beginning to develop, with both sides sacrificing a little but harvesting more in exchange. As part of the amended agreement between the companies, Facebook is gaining back control over selling the graphical ads that appear on the site while Microsoft, through its Bing search engine, will be gaining exposure on the most popular social network in the world.

Microsoft and Facebook endorsed a deal back in 2007, which saw the former invest $240 million in the latter. For that influx of cash, Microsoft gained the ability to serve display adverts on the social networking site. Now, as part of the mutually revised pact between the companies, Microsoft, will become the exclusive provider of text ads that appear next to search results on the site.

Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Corp., established that another Windows veteran, “Mike Nash,” corporate vice president, who steered Microsoft's security activities before committing the past several years in the product management and strategy department in the Windows unit, is leaving the company effective before the end of February. He is leaving to join the Kindle group at Amazon.com.

Nash, who has been at Microsoft for 19 years. He has left a striking influence in many places at Microsoft, shepherding various versions of Windows out into the marketplace, and was a driving force behind Microsoft's increased focus on security in its products.

He was the first product manager on the Windows NT marketing team, where he has been looking after security, Internet Explorer, emerging markets and ecosystem management. He has been at Microsoft since 1991 and has worked on Microsoft's security initiatives and Windows marketing.

Redmond, Washington -- Bolstered by an “exceptional demand” for its recently released operating system Windows 7, Redmond, Wash., software giants Microsoft last week said that profits soared 60% in the last three months to US$ 6.66 billion for the second quarter ended December 31, 2009.

Microsoft earned a record revenues to the tune of $19.02 billion from $16.6 billion for the fiscal quarter that ended December 31, 2009. The Redmond Vole's earnings represents a jump of 14% as compared to the same period a year ago, a new set of Windows made a huge difference.

New York -- From administering your daily household affairs to portfolio management, Microsoft's Bing said that it has recently introduced a new “Stocks and Funds pages” features to make it easier for users to find an in-depth financial information for users following or doing research related to stocks and finances.

Bing says it has developed a new stock and funds pages that offers in-depth information on most U.S. stocks, as well as provides comprehensive data about key finance metrics with an easy to interpret summary of key stock information. The pages include an Instant Answer snapshot of what is going on for a stock at the time you search.

San Francisco -- Redmond software maker Microsoft Corp., on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in a California District Court, against the DVR maker TiVo Inc., accusing it for violating on two Microsoft patents connected with video programming as a way of defending its partner, AT&T, which is currently involved in a legal dispute with TiVo over the same technology, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Microsoft, in its suit, alleged that the components of Alviso, Calif., TiVo's set-top box products, subscription services, and software infringe on Microsoft-held patents for a “system for displaying programming information” and a “technology and concept related to purchasing and delivering video content programs.”

Microsoft is demanding unspecified amount of compensation and a court order to prevent TiVo from using the Microsoft technology without permission.

Redmond, Washington -- Succumbing to pressure from European privacy regulators, Microsoft said Tuesday that it has agreed to cooperate with the European Commission by reducing the amount time it retains Bing search data to six months, in compliance with new rules, which is aimed at putting pressure on its biggest rival.

In a latest turn of events in the search-engine wars is revisiting privacy policies. With significant pressure from the European Commission has compelled the Redmond software maker to rework its Bing's data retention policy and to discard user data after six months.

Previously, Microsoft has been retaining the search information from Bing for 18 months, but to comply with a new European Commission directive on Internet privacy the company will delete the IP addresses entirely after six months. Microsoft's Bing decision puts pressure on Google to slash its retention time.

Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft's new Internet search engine Bing continues to post modest gains in the US search market share in December, and is now growing faster than ever before any of its rivals, according to figures released by online tracking firm comScore.

However, Google remained the undisputed leader of the most profitable US search and advertising market last month, capturing majority of searches, with a 65.7 percent market share, up 0.1 percentage points from November, according to comScore figures released Friday.

In December, Microsoft Bing's share of searches in the U.S. gained 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of all search queries, according to the latest comScore qSearch statistics.

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 -- 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.

Redmond, Washington -- While it is striving arduously at creating the next iteration of Internet Explorer, the Redmond software maker, Microsoft has jumped on to join a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Scalable Vector Graphics bandwagon, IE senior program manager Patrick Dengler has blogged.

Essentially, the Redmond company wishes to be intimately involved in the evolution of XML graphics for the web. The company said it plans on developing future versions of the W3C's scalable vector graphics (SVG) recommendation, currently at version 1.1.

The move came as “part of Microsoft’' continued commitment to interoperability and standards support, revealed Dengler. “We are excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users.”