MICROSOFT

U.S. stocks opened lower on Friday as data showed the U.S trade deficit widened in December, and jitters over Egypt continued.

The top pre-market NASDAQ stock market gainers are: Orthovita, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Panera Bread, Wright Medical Group, Body Central, JDS Uniphase, Akamai Technologies, Microsoft, Netflix, and Shire.

The deal with Nokia is significant for Microsoft, which is trying hard to capture smartphone market share from the likes of iOS and Android.

Nokia is dropping its home-grown platforms and putting Windows Phone 7 on its devices, dropping the Symbian and MeeGo platforms.

It is official. Nokia will be adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 as its new smartphone operating system (OS), a move that could be the beginning of a new era for the Finnish mobile giant.

Nokia said on Friday it was teaming up with Microsoft to take on Google and Apple in the fast-growing smartphone market and set financial targets for the group.

Following is the full text of an open letter published by Nokia Chief Executive Stephen Elop, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Both Mozilla with Firefox and Microsoft with Internet Explorer make 'Do Not Track' official on the most recent versions of their browser.

Smishing, Botnet , BlueBugging, Pod Slurping, Ransomware, Scareware, Sidejacking, Black Hat, White Hat and RATs -- this is the vocabulary of hackers -- and useful for users to understand.

Nokia's wisdom in picking outsider Stephen Elop to return it to its former glory will be tested on Friday when the new chief executive reveals his plans to transform the world's biggest cellphone maker.

Micro blogging giant Twitter is said to have held low level acquisition talks with Google Inc. and Facebook.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop trashes Symbian and says company is far behind Apple and Android.

A possible management shake-up in the Microsoft camp is due to throw up senior product executives with engineering muscle at the top to tackle the might of Apple and Google in the smartphone, tablets and cloud domains.

Share of Google’s Android in the US smartphone platform market increased to 28.7 percent in the last quarter of 2010, overtaking the share held by Apple, said a report by comScore on Monday.

Jefferies & Co. said investors are uncertain about Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) future in consumer technology and that they have chosen to discount all parts of the business until it becomes clearer what Microsoft’s competitive position in the key areas of tablets, smartphones and online search will be.

The program secures pre-admission for university students in the IESE Business School's MBA class and also places them in a prominent firm for two years at least so that they fulfill the experiential requirements of the prestigious full time program.

Now that all the hype and the hoopla of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States are over, the same basic commercial question remains unanswered: How can American companies create more jobs for Americans by selling more American goods and services in China?

A massive R&D budget and the addition of Windows phones may not help Nokia's standing in the smartphone market.

Market analysts speculate that Nokia would eventually join the Google's Android or Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 ecosystem.

Microsoft said it would release 12 security patches and software updates to fix 22 bugs in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, Visual Studio, and IIS.

Calling AT&T's billing system a rigged gas pump, the a court filing says that AT&T systematically overstates its users data transactions.