Microsoft News Tracker

The Dutch parliament is considering mandating the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) across the entire Dutch government and unsurprisingly Microsoft lobbyists are on the case:

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Back in June, Microsoft started an overhaul of its MSN Mobile portal for cell phone users and today announced some new steps in that process:

Mobile display advertising is now available on MSN Mobile for the first time, Microsoft Corp. announced today. Starting today, MSN Mobile customers in the U.S. will begin to see banner and text ad placements that conform to the U.S. mobile advertising guidelines provided by the Mobile Marketing Association to deliver a more consistent and engaging experience for consumers. Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars North America are among the first companies to launch an MSN Mobile campaign in the U.S.

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Through technology created by Microsoft’s Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group and by the acquisition of ScreenTonic SA, a leader in mobile advertising in Europe, MSN Mobile is now able to provide ad placements that optimize the customer experience and provide advertisers with a new way to reach out to the ever-growing number of mobile consumers.

What would a portal be without “reaching out” to the users with copious advertising? ScreenTonic was acquired last May.

As for the horoscopes:

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Microsoft announced Office Live Workspace in October and today started rolling out the public beta. The play here is for Microsoft to bring some sort of equivalent of the easy document sharing provided by Web-based office software competitors to the users of their cash cow desktop Microsoft Office software. They have done this in essence by adding new file saving options to Office applications and connecting them to a document checkout service running on the Internet.

That certainly provides the sharing function, but the early press reviews are generally less than ecstatic because Office Live Workspace doesn’t provide any of Web editing features of the Web-based competition. Past indications were that it would be a cold day in Hell when that happened, but Microsoft seems to be changing its tune as Erick Schonfeld reports:

Granted, this is version 1.0 of a beta. It will get better. One of the Microsoft execs who visited made it clear to me that the company’s goal is “bridge the gap between the online and offline world so that people don’t have to care where a document lives.” He also suggested online editing capabilities would be coming “maybe next year.”

As long as the Web editing functionality is tied to a registered copy of Microsoft Office, the Microsoft bean counters won’t care, but how long can they keep it tied up?

Microsoft today announced an agreement with CNBC to be the financial network’s exclusive provider for banner and contextual ads for the fledgling CNBC.com (replacing Google’s would-be acquisition DoubleClick). You may recall that CNBC.com went its own way last year after having been hosted on MSN.

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