After some folks felt disappointed that music streaming from Microsoft’s file storage service SkyDrive will not be supported by Windows Phone Mango, this was suddenly changed in the latest build. Build 77212 of Windows Phone Mango was just made available to developers, and one developer named Manan Kakkar confirmed that this new build now supports more »

After rumors of Google and Facebook looking to buy up Skype Microsoft has come in with a a final decision. It seems that Microsoft will be buying Skype for something between $7 billion and $8.5 billion. It seems that the popular VoIP service will be integrated into Windows Messenger Live and other Microsoft services for more »

Microsoft is trying to get an edge over Google and one of the ways that they plan to do this is through Bing Cashback. This program allows you to earn cash on select purchases made using the Bing search engine. The items eligible for the cashback program will appear within Bing search results and sponsored more »

Hotmail has started offering its web messaging service to users in multiple countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, China and other parts of Europe and Asia. With Web Messenger, you can send instant messages from Windows Live pages without the need to download and install Windows Live Messenger. Users will now be more »

Today, Microsoft has announced the merger of Office Live and Windows Live. Instead of offering the applications as two different programs, consumers will have the ability to access both sets of services from one web location.

Office Live is a collection of services appealing to small businesses and are designed as additions to the Microsoft Office software program. The current products included with Office Live are Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business and Office Live Groove. Windows Live is a set of consumer software programs that provide mail, instant messaging, blogging services and more.

By now we knew what to expect from Microsoft’s CES booth. As we could tell by Steve Ballmer’s keynote yesterday, the company is starting to make a big push for Windows 7 (since the press is over Vista). The company had several demo stations set up allowing you to click around in the new operating system, and check out the new version of Windows Live and Windows Messenger. As Ballmer was telling us, Microsoft and the Windows platform are beginning to attack every area of your life: PC, Phone, Car, Gaming, etc.

Hit the gallery below to see what we saw in the booth today.

Click for a larger image. At Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote, an innovative feature was introduced for Windows Live Mail. Here’s the situation: you’re meeting up with a bunch of friends for dinner and you need to send out the name of the restaurant, address, and link to a map to them. Currently, this takes a more »

Not only is Microsoft wanting to be one of the new boys in town in the social networking arena, with their new Microsoft Live platform; they are also planning to muscle in on the digitally distributed PC gaming market.

General manager for Windows Live, Chris Early, confirmed in an interview with ShackNews that Microsoft does indeed have concrete plans to dole out full PC titles. They will be doing this through their Marketplace application, and with this move, will be attempting to play with the big boy in the PC gaming realm, Steam. Read about Microsoft’s plans after the break.

Because we all need all that extra stuff on our system when we bring it home from the store….right? Yeah. It seems as though Microsoft may actually be making a move in the right direction with this call. Their upcoming Windows 7 won’t include several of those built-in programs for email, movie making, and photo editing like they did include with Windows (*ahem*, memory hog) Vista.

In Vista, Microsoft had included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as a part of the OS; until they later decided to offer separate downloadable Live programs that just pretty much replaced those programs with versions that were able to connect to online services from Microsoft and others. As per CNET, “Last night, Microsoft announced it decided to totally remove those features from Windows 7 and only offer the service-connected Windows Live versions as an optional free download.”