Microsoft has released new Bing App for iPad which is available for free from Apple iOS App Store.

The new app, which is available in the iTunes App Store starting today, sports a homepage featuring the trademark Bing photo of the day, along with tiles showing local weather, news, maps, movies, and trends. The interface makes a lot of use of the swipe touch gesture, especially in image search. A dropdown menu offers all these choices plus Images, Videos, Shopping and History,that is, users' search history, not the school topic.

Bing's iPad app hits the App Store today and is being offered as a separate entity from its iPhone and iPod Touch sibling.

Since IE9 was released on Monday night, it has now been downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours. The latest version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer includes a do-not-track tool that helps people keep their online habits from being monitored, according to a report from Wall street Journal.

Microsoft is also including a feature in Internet Explorer 9 called “tracking protection lists,” which will let people prevent specific Web-tracking companies from snooping on their browsing habits.

Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser in the world, and IE9 has been well received thus far, with good reviews and a record-breaking number of downloads while the product was in beta testing.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine recently announced a partnership with Kayak to incorporate Kayak’s travel search services within Bing Travel in the USA.

Kayak aggregates information from airlines, hotels, rental car companies and other travel service providers. Microsoft said that in the coming weeks, Kayak will provide search results in the U.S. from multiple cities, airports and airlines for Bing’s travel search section.

This partnership between Bing and Kayak should be a good move for both companies to battle Google’s potentially formidable travel search service once the ITA acquisition completes.

Microsoft recently has released a new version of the Bing browser toolbar, which includes Facebook integration.

The Bing Bar leverages Microsoft’s continuing relationship with Facebook. “People told us that they spend a huge amount of time on Facebook these days, and we are building on our relationship with Facebook to bring a great Web experience to our joint customers,” Joshua Schnoll, a member of the Bing team, wrote on the Bing Community blog.

The notification capabilities on Bing toolbar could help users know their new activity on their Facebook account, according to Schnoll.

In addition, the Bing Bar features Facebook and e-mail alerts, weather advisories, translation alerts for Websites in languages different from users’ browser, and breaking-news updates. The application’s e-mail preview supports Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker said its netincome for the latest quarter fell slightly from a year ago.

Net income was $6.63 billion, or 77 cents a share, compared with $6.66 billion, or 74 cents, a year earlier, Microsoft said in a statement.

Sales rose 4.9 percent to $20 billion. The results beat the average projections of 68-cents in profit and $19.1 billion in sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Redmond, Washington-based sold 8 million Kinect devices, more than twice its initial forecast.

“They beat on revenue and profit and showed some nice expense control,” said Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in San Francisco. “The business side is good and then Kinect was good.”

Recently, Microsoft updated Bing Maps, added a new application – WorldWide Telescope (WWT), users can view the stars, planets, solar systems of their region just at home. In order to use WWT, users must have Silverlight client. You can view most of its features in the Silverlight client right in Bing Maps.

the WWT provides real time information about how the space is moving over the Earth. This provides context for where celestial entities are in real time if you were to look up at the night sky. With WWt application, you'll be excited with viewing something in the sky. Click the "Start Here" button, WWT will enable a telescope mouse pointer. Once you drop it on the map the map will fade to the constellations and stars overhead. Read the rest of this entry »