Exact details of the patents in the agreement were not disclosed, although the two companies say it covers a "broad range" of products either company offers.

Financial terms of the deal were also not disclosed, although the companies say that the agreement results in a net financial benefit for Microsoft. The two companies had already been collaborating on certain technologies in the past.

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Too often, retailers' Web sites don't work right, if at all...and they keep chasing after new customers instead of trying to retain their current ones. Are some big online retailers focusing too much on the competition at the expense of their own evolution?

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - With retail Web sites that are too glitchy and search engines that don't always turn up the right stuff, a lot of retailers trying to sell online are still missing the boat with consumers, according to an analyst at Forrester Research.

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Amazon.com said on Monday that it would rather pay €1000 a day in fines than abolish its free shipping on books in France.

Free shipping from Amazon.fr is apparently a violation of a 1981 law that was passed to ensure the French public receives equal access to all forms of literature.

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One of the principal products in the LAMP open source arsenal will become a Sun Microsystems product, possibly by the end of this quarter.

When discussing enterprise database installations worldwide, as of today, it will be impossible not to consider Sun Microsystems along with Microsoft and Oracle. This morning, Sun announced it has reached an agreement with MySQL -- which by some accounts may have become the producer of the most widely installed database, under everyone's noses -- in a deal expected to be closed as soon as this March.

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Verizon's V CAST Mobile TV service, which uses MediaFLO to provide television entertainment to capable handsets has received a service upgrade in the areas surrounding New York City.

Included in the expansion is the greater part of Suffolk County including Lindenhurst, West Islip, Holbrook, Centereach, and from Coram east all the way to Riverhead, All of Staten Island, portions of Essex, Union, Passiac, and Morris Counties in New Jersey. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx will also receive a service enhancement.

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After four years of waiting, Mac users are finally able to get their hands on a new version of Microsoft's productivity suite for the platform.

The suite is a major step forward for those who prefer to use the Redmond company's applications for the Mac platform. Since its last update in 2004, much has changed on the Windows side: this effectively brings Apple customers up to speed.

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Facebook has been asked by makers of the classic word game Scrabble to remove the online version of "Scrabulous" from the popular social networking site.

In North America, the rights to the game are owned by Hasbro Inc., the company which also owns Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Risk, Clue, and Magic: The Gathering. The rights to the game in the rest of the world are covered by Mattel Inc., the world's biggest toy company, who sent the demand to Facebook.

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The Microsoft rival plans to announce the software at its Lotusphere conference to be held next week.

The software will either be free for those who hold a Web-access license, or $39 USD for new users. It will essentially complete the business capabilities of the iPhone, which already supports Microsoft Exchange.

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It was by any measure a stellar year for the world's leading microprocessor manufacturer, but what's disappointing investors this quarter is the disheartening news that 2007 is over.

It doesn't take much to disappoint Wall Street, and in recent days, investors are looking any excuse to justify a selloff that was probably well overdue anyway. But Intel has fully recovered from its last wave of restructuring, and shows no signs of future trouble. What it does show is some reduced growth -- not a pothole ahead, but not smooth sailing, either.

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Alienware's new Area 51 m15x gaming notebook will hopefully provide some balance in today's notebook news, offering graphical processing power over a small profile.

The 15.4-inch notebook can come with either an Intel Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme mobile processor, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT or 8800M GTX GPU. Alienware also includes its own BinaryGFX technology, which allows for switching between the built-in and high performance graphics processors according to the user's demands.

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PERSPECTIVE -- Love him or hate him, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has the keen ability to get people excited about anything and everything, regardless if you even care what he's talking about.

SAN FRANCISCO (BetaNews) - I've attended a lot of press conferences and keynotes over the years, and none of them compare to a Macworld keynote when it comes to fervent enthusiasm and an almost cult-like atmosphere. During the keynote, it was amusing to even hear fellow members of the press have to pick their tongues off the ground when the MacBook Air was first introduced.

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As some analysts see it, Apple's 'Air' has something for just about everyone: gesture recognition, a dual-boot function, a full-fledged screen and keyboard, and possibly the slimmest PC notebook form factor anywhere.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Apple rolled out the MacBook Air notebook computer instead of an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) at Macworld today -- and some industry analysts are already predicting that the dual-bootable Air will be a hit with Microsoft Windows users in addition to long-time Mac fans.

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Apple is now in the position where it cannot hold a proper Macworld without unveiling "One More Thing." But with the iPhone being a hard act to follow, was the MacBook Air enough to keep the world's gadget haven at the top of its game?

It is not the iPhone -- that is, it isn't the game-changing device that forced an entire segment of the industry to rethink its approach to design, functionality, and service. The MacBook Air is an attempt to fill a gap, and with the iPhone now having reportedly sold 4 million units by Apple's numbers, that gap is smaller now than ever before.

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Moxi manufacturer Digeo suddenly changed course Tuesday, canceling two planned products and laying off nearly half of its workforce.

To blame is the company's apparent inability to get its products to market on time, and the current state of the DVR market as a whole. Neither of the products -- its Multi Room HD DMR and Moxi Home Cinema Edition DMR -- reached final production.

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Last week at CES, Gefen was among the companies hoping to catch some of the spotlight that last year was devoted so heavily to companies that make cables. But it may have done itself a service by waiting one week to announce how its new product will output a DVI video signal from your PC using a USB cable.

The Gefen USB-to-DVI Graphics Adapter plugs into a USB 2.0 port and outputs video in DVI-I format with screen resolution up to 1600x1200. It supports 32-bit versions of XP and Windows 2000, versions for OS X and Vista are currently in development.

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