SOFTWARE

Shares of business software maker Oracle says its fiscal third-quarter profit rose, helped by rising software and services revenues, however its yearly revenue missed expectations of Wall-Street.

Software maker Blizzard, maker of the hugely successful Warcraft video game series, is engaged in a legal dispute with a programmer who has created a tool that automates actions inside of one of its popular games.

Microsoft may sweeten its bid to acquire Internet-giant Yahoo, according to one analyst, sending shares of the firm higher in Tuesday trading.

Apple's iPhone received a corporate push earlier this month as the company rolled out more features to cater to the enterprise market, but conspicuously neglected support for Lotus users.

Microsoft has released the first major update to its Windows Vista operating system on Tuesday, promising better performance and increased stability.

Apple has called its Apple TV product a hobby while its iPod and computer products have served as its main growth engines, however new surfaced patents could morph the product into a game-changer one analysts contends.

Microsoft and Yahoo senior executives met on Monday this week and discussed about Microsoft's takeover for the internet giant according to published reports.

The U.S. Department of Defense issued restrictions to Google saying the internet giant shouldn't take its roving photographic vehicles that acquire Google Maps Street View images, near the U.S. military bases.

Microsoft released a test version of its latest web browser, Internet Explorer 8, on Wednesday.

At Microsoft's MIX08 online technology conference, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, provided a first glimpse at the successor to IE 7, which was released in October 2006.

Yahoo Inc extended a deadline to nominate board directors, buying the company time to pursue alternatives to Microsoft Corp's $41.7 billion offer, while also giving Yahoo room to negotiate a friendly deal with Microsoft.

Social networking site Facebook denies rumors that it has approached major music labels about launching a music service in a bid to compete with Apple's iTunes, according to news reports.

Google is making Google Gears available on mobile phones, an application programming interface that allows users store Web application data on their handsets.

For the second time in a month, Apple has simply missed the mark. Apple reportedly has failed to meet their goal of having 1,000 titles available on the iTunes Store rental service by the end of February.

Facebook, the social network site that has enjoyed spectacular international growth in the past year, despite being published only in English until recently, said on Monday it was offering a German version.

Microsoft Corp, faced with Web rivals looking to poach its business customers, said on Sunday it plans to broaden the availability of its online services for e-mail and collaboration software. Last year, Microsoft started subscription-based online services to run its Exchange corporate e-mail program and SharePoint collaboration software on Microsoft's own computer systems as an alternative to customers buying their own hardware to run licensed software.

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it plans to cut prices of its Windows Vista operating system sold at retail outlets in a move aimed at pushing customers to switch to the newest version of Windows. The world's largest software maker said it plans to lower retail prices for Vista in 70 countries later this year in tandem with the shipment of the first major update to Vista, known as Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Google Inc said on Wednesday it is offering a simple Web site publishing tool for office workers to set up and run their team collaboration sites, taking aim at Microsoft Corp's rival SharePoint franchise. Google Sites, as the new site publishing service is known, is a scaled back version of JotSpot, an easy-to-edit service for organizations and individuals to set up and edit Web sites that Google had acquired 16 months ago for undisclosed terms.

Microsoft plans to launch a special test version of its latest Internet Explorer web browser, the company said Tuesday, boasting new features and better support for widely held Internet standards.

Apple Inc's iTunes media store emerged the second most popular music retailer in the United States behind Wal-Mart Stores.

Software maker Adobe Systems launched new software to make it easier for programmers to build applications that work online and offline.