This year’s Imagine Cup, a Microsoft sponsored student competition featuring student teams from around the world, is kicking off its finals in Paris, France.  Of course we’re rooting for our friend (and arch-rival) Long Zheng and his SOAK team …

More news on Live Search and Virtual Earth. Live Search Maps China has expanded and improved it’s site with:

• Real-time Traffic in Beijing
• Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
• Transit data refresh for existing 11

Chris Pendleton,Virtual Earth Evangelist, lets us know that Ask.com is now using Virtual Earth as their mapping platform. In this they are following portal sites as YellowPages.com, Superpages.com, and WhitePages.com.

Ask.com has integrated it into Ask …

Like the soap opera it has become, the workings behind a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! just don’t ever seem to end.  This week we’ve seen a Yahoo! PowerPoint presentation that tries to place all the blame on the failed …

OneCare version 2.5, which went into public beta in early April, has just been released into production, and is available now by download at www.onecare.live.com.  While the newest build (2.5.2900.3) won’t show much if anything in the way …

Remember Albany Beta? Well, it has been renamed to Equipt and is released today!

REDMOND, Wash. — July 2, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Microsoft Equipt, an all-in-one security and productivity software subscription service for consumers. In

Catherine Heller has recently done an interview with Charles Teague, Lead Developer on the Windows Live Writer team. In the interview (which you can see after the jump) Charles talks about what Live Writer is, what blog engines it …

When we talked to Bill Gates last November at Mix n Mash, he described Windows Live:

All those consumer services are basically big, big volume. They’re tiny businesses in a sense, but they’re very important for the population of users

After much ho-humming around whether Microsoft would or would-not acquire Powerset, the deal is now done and announced over on the Live Search blog. Though the price has not been announced, ReadWriteWeb were running with a rumour a …