Redmond, Washington -- When Office 365 was released just a couple weeks ago, one of most distinct feature that it was lacking in comparison to its arch rival Google Docs apps was that there was no way to collaborate in real-time on Word documents using the Word Web App. Well, from now onwards that is no longer an issue -- As software giant Microsoft today announced the availability of co-authoring in its Word web application.

Software Giant Microsoft might unwittingly become instrumental in bringing about changes in the European Data Protection Laws to give it more teeth.

Software Giant Microsoft knows how to tread obstacles. When Android started to gain in popularity and was picked up by a number of major manufacturers to use in their phones and tablets, there was a general impression that Microsoft would be on its back-foot but it is clear for everyone to see that with its patent licensing Microsoft is increasingly making more money from the sales of Android devices.

San Francisco -- Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. have been slammed with a lawsuit accusing the two tech giants for allegedly violating the a Louisiana company's patent covering mapping technology that helps computer users see locations in three dimensions, according to Bloomberg.

In a bid to quell privacy fears, software giant Microsoft has released the source code for software it uses to collect Wi-Fi data.

Shanghai -- Software monopolist Microsoft Corp. and Chinese web giant Baidu Inc. agreed to bolster their Internet-search partnership in China, on Monday said it had inked an agreement with Microsoft to provide English-language search results generated by the software giant's Bing search engine, as the companies seek to gain users from Google Inc. in the world's biggest Internet market.

Winrumours reported on Friday, “Marketplace trackers windowsphoneapplist.com is currently tracking 25,015 apps in the U.S. market place alone. WP7applist is tracking 24,784 applications worldwide and explains 4,025 of them are inactive, 51% are available for free and the average price is $1.48 per paid application.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has been growing at an impressive rate. The software giant added 3,000 applications in April alone after reaching its 12,000 milestone in late March. The Marketplace passed 15,0000 apps in April just in time for its six month birthday. WP7applist says that 188 apps are updated on average each day. In the last 24 hours, 66 apps were updated and 79 were added.

Redmond, Washington -- Striving to save some energy for itself, software monopolists Microsoft over the weekend announced that it is pulling the plug on its free online “Hohm” consumer energy management application because of poor uptake.

Microsoft and Onkyo Corporation have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for certain Onkyo tablets running the Android Platform," reported the Microsoft News Center on Thursday.

Although the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicate that Microsoft will receive royalties from Onkyo under the agreement.

“Microsoft on Wednesday released the Office 2010 Service Pack 1 which combines improvements, new features and previously released updates in a single update pack, say a ghacks post. Microsoft Office 2010 is a productivity suite for Microsoft Windows and is the successor to Microsoft 2007.

Microsoft notes that Office 2010 SP1 contains all “public updates that were released through June 2011″ and all “cumulative updates that were released through April 2011″ in addition to “improvements in stability, performance, and in security”.

The description of Office 2010 SP1 page details the new features and updates of the service pack. Here is a short list of the most promising new features, fixes and updates.

• Stability, Performance and backward compatibility of Excel 2010 has been improved.
• Office 365 support has been added to Outlook 2010
• PowerPoint Viewer is now included when selecting the Package for CD option
• Fixes the following error message in Word 2010: Microsoft Office Word has encountered a problem and needs to close.
• Fixes Word co-authoring issues and conflicts.
• Open OneNote notebooks from Windows Live Sky Drive
• OneNote synchronization improvements with SharePoint and Windows Live SkyDrive.

As is obvious from the above and the official listing at the Microsoft KnowledgeBase, there has not been many feature additions.

A lot of the features improve cloud connectivity or fix minor issues. That is, apart from all the updates, especially security related, that the majority of Office 2010 users have probably downloaded before.

The 32-bit Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 has a size of 361 Megabytes, the 64-bit SP1 one of 439.

The update is available for free if downloaded from the Internet. Your can download the Office 2010 Service Pack 1 from the links given below:

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2010 32-bit Edition [link] Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2010 64-bit Edition [link]

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.

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 -- 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.

London -- According to a latest report from the UKOM suggests that social media leader Facebook has surpassed the world's biggest software monopolist Microsoft for the first time last month, to become the second most popular website in the United Kingdom.

Companies are continuously looking at new ways to engage consumers' attention. Now, Microsoft too has joined this bandwagon with its introduction of Kinect-enabled interactive advertising platform. They have named it NUAds, an abbreviation for Natural User Interface Ads and as the name suggests the ads respond to the users gestures and voices. “This means that users will now be able to share ads with friends by means of voice and motion commands”, reports NYTimes.

Redmond, Washington -- Fans of the SkyDrive are going to be thrilled at this segment of news: Barely two weeks after Apple rattled the industry watchers by introducing iCloud, and after apparently being ignored for months now, Microsoft announced a major facelift for its SkyDrive cloud storage service early this week to give it a wider appeal.

San Francisco -- Hoping to entice mobile users, and fans of Bing on their mobile phones will be pleased to know that the software titan Microsoft has breathed a little more life into its mobile search service, Bing for Mobile, adding some social networking, mapping, and yeah, search improvements.

Redmond, Washington -- Keeping up to the promise it made to Webmasters, Microsoft's Bing has disclosed the news in a blog post about some pretty hefty enhancements it has released to Webmaster Tools in an update called “Honey Badger” that will give you more configuration and deeper customization to manage their sites' visibility on Bing search engine results, so that they can make any required modifications to recover how Bing crawls their pages content and ranks their website pages.

Redmond, Washington -- Early this year, Microsoft introduced the public beta version of Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses. Now, the Redmond Vole is planning to unleash the cloud-based version of its popular Office 365 productivity suite on June 28, the company confirmed Friday.

Redmond, Washington -- Software monopolist Microsoft today unveiled an improved version of its Streetside feature for Bing Maps search engine, rendering the view with more continuity when users move up or down a road, thus earning some credit for at least taking a different approach than Google's Street View.