When Microsoft introduced businesses last spring to its plan to attach its brand to virtually all digital voice communication, by inviting businesses to participate in the first stage of the assembly of a voice-automated "Unified Communications" platform, a majority of would-be interested parties did not take Microsoft too seriously.

Microsoft is not a company that appreciates not being taken seriously for very long, and this morning, it responded with all the vim and vigor of the Microsoft of old: by buying an established provider of such services outright.

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Microsoft is stepping up efforts against cybersquatters in the United States and Britain, saying Wednesday it had filed several new lawsuits in the US and expanded another. Several cases are now in settlement.

The newest action is against Maltuzi, LLC of California, which Microsoft says is profiting off of domain names that use Microsoft trademarks. The company is accused of registering large blocks of domain names in an attempt to profit off of their sale later.

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Despite two high-profile departures and continued confusion over branding, Microsoft delivered some positive Windows Live news Wednesday, announcing a deal with Lenovo to pre-load Windows Live services with the manufacturer's ThinkPad notebooks and desktop PCs.

Live.com will become the default homepage for those systems, and the Windows Live Toolbar will be pre-installed. Lenovo indicated it will deliver PC updates and other information through the customizable Live.com site to customers. The OEM deal is the first involving Windows Live for Microsoft; previously, the company offered its MSN portal to PC markers.

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Nokia said Wednesday that it had been selected by Sprint to begin building out its fourth-generation wireless network based on WiMAX technology. Four Texas markets, including Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin will be first to receive service in early 2008.

Sprint plans to cover about 100 million people across the nation with its WiMAX network by the end of next year, according to the company. Nokia would be in charge of deploying the necessary infrastructure in the initial markets. No announcement was made as to whether Nokia will be involved in other locations.

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As if to answer the question, "What's the real value of the paid content deals YouTube is not making with content providers like Viacom?" today, two new deals with NBC Universal were announced: one with the burgeoning player in the IPTV space, MobiTV, and the other with an emerging YouTube competitor, VMIX.com.

The MobiTV deal will make primetime programming from NBC and several of its cable channels, including Bravo, Sci-Fi Channel, USA Network, and Telemundo, available following their initial airing, for a streaming fee of $1.99 per show. Each show would then be viewable and even repeatable for a 24-hour period, though the show isn't fully downloaded to the user's hard drive. Instead, the fee opens up a window for viewers to tune into shows they may have missed - or that they'd rather see online at their own convenience anyway.

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Microsoft continued to build on the success of its Xbox platform by extending it's popular Live gaming platform to Windows PCs. The service would debut on May 8, and would connect gamers on both platforms together.

"Shadowrun" will be the first PC and Xbox 360 title to allow gamers on either platform to play one another in a single environment starting in June, although the Vista version of "Halo 2" due May 8 will permit person-to-person matches across either platform.

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While AMD and Intel have been using die size and lithography as measures of finesse and production power against one another -- a measure where smaller is better -- IBM stayed largely out of the foray up to now, making a conscious choice to keep its Cell BE CPU at 90nm while the x86 producers move on to 65nm, and soon 45nm.

IBM's reasons at the time had something to do with leakage: As some theorized, the way Cell's processing engines were designed, current leakage could impact reliability for the symmetric processing units if they were made any smaller.

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With an absence of fanfare, but otherwise on schedule, Microsoft opened up its download page for Service Pack 2 of Windows Server 2003, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Perhaps most importantly, enterprises won't have to wait until Longhorn to be able to utilize Windows Deployment Services, the company's new image-based system for pre-composed, remote Windows installations.

Keeping the little abbreviations after the operating system name straight has been a tricky job for server admins. Two years ago, Microsoft released WS2K3 Service Pack 1, which added the Windows Firewall and Group Policy Management Console for the first time. Using both these tools together, admins could craft policies -- not unlike creating filtering rules in Outlook -- for guiding and filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic.

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802.11n wireless networking came closer to becoming an actual standard on Tuesday, as the IEEE said that 'Draft 2.0' received more than the required 75 percent supermajority required for the process to move forward.

Nearly 84 percent of those eligible to vote approved of the draft. While the vote does not mean the fight over the 802.11n standard is over, it does show all involved are beginning to meet eye-to-eye when it comes to the actual technical standards within the draft.

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Apple on Tuesday released what is likely to be its final update to Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" before it releases Leopard this spring. Included in the patch are fixes for .Mac, Bluetooth, Mac OS X's standard productivity applications, networking, and printing, among other issues.

The Cupertino, Calif. company has repeatedly pointed to a spring 2007 release date for the next update to Mac OS X. As with past releases of its operating system, Apple has stuck to a pretty much monthly patch schedule with major releases coming about once every 12 to 18 months.

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While advance statements to the press, especially in Germany, managed to build up expectations that EU Commissioner Meglena Kuneva's much anticipated program for consumer protection would include measures giving dissatisfied buyers a way to "return" downloaded tracks from iTunes and elsewhere, the actual program released this morning only makes parenthetical references to the Internet and digital music.

Yesterday, a portion of a German Focus magazine interview with Commissioner Kuneva highlighted her disapproval of the idea that audio CDs purchased anywhere could be heard through any CD player or computer, but tracks downloaded through Apple's iTunes could only be heard using iPods or Apple's software. Kuneva made this reference to illustrate the types of consumers' grievances that keep them from using the Internet to make any kind of purchases from companies outside their native countries' borders, including the US.

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Motorola said Tuesday that it had made an investment in Amimon, a company that specializes in technologies that allow for the wireless transmission of high-definition video. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. It is likely that the electronics maker made the move in response to increased competition in the wireless entertainment industry, and build on the company's strengths in wireless.

"Our investment reflects our belief that Amimon's solution is well positioned to offer a high quality wireless uncompressed HDTV link between video sources such as a digital set-top and a high-definition TV," Motorola Ventures chief Reese Schroeder said. Animon's technology uses the 5GHz unlicensed band to transit video data through a technology called WHDI (Wireless high-definition interface).

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The case that will likely determine the future of the online video sharing industry at least, and the Internet media economy at most, has been filed. Viacom, one of the world's largest media rights holders, has sued Google in federal court in New York, seeking $1 billion in damages for an estimated 1.5 billion separate infringements of copyright.

Viacom's legal team released a four-paragraph statement this morning, which is best read in its entirety:

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Nintendo is working on several new features that will be added to the Wii console over the next few months, gaming blog Joystiq reports. Among the new functionality would be new text-to-speech capabilities, a feature that would allow the console to detect where you are and where you might go next, and a Mii popularity channel where two Mii characters battle to be the most popular.

Text-to-speech would allow the console to read news, e-mail and other items while you are gaming. The motion sensing capabilities would likely be used for features like menu shortcuts. Details were scant on the Mii Popularity Channel, but it sounds like an America's Next Top Model of gaming, where two Miis walk the runway to be voted the most popular.

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Microsoft is close to a deal with Tellme Networks, a company that specializes in voice recognition technology. An acquisition would likely bring voice recognition to several of Microsoft's Web-based products.

It is said the deal could be worth as much as $800 million, and would allow Microsoft to push into an area that is widely untouched by its rivals. Other projects like Office or Windows Mobile could also benefit by the acquisition.

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