“Microsoft Corporation” on The Daily Caller

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) agreed to buy Skype Technologies SA for $8.5 billion in cash to gain the world’s most popular Internet calling service and its 663 million customers. (more)

Would Bill Gates have become the world’s richest man without Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen? Would Paul Allen have made the billionaires list without Bill Gates? (more)

Microsoft has dialed up its competition in the search-engine wars with the introduction of a daily deals facility on Bing. (more)

A 2006 law that requires the U.S. Justice Department to deploy a high-tech system for catching child pornographers has identified hundreds of thousands of criminal suspects — and collected extensive evidence pointing to the locations of their child victims. (more)

Tick-tock goes the Federal Communication Commission’s merger clock counting the days the agency has spent reviewing the proposed Comcast-NBC Universal merger. The FCC says it tries to act on merger applications within 180 days. The clock is now at “Day 215″ — more than a month of working days past its self-professed goal. (more)

How’s this for a provocative start of an article: the Tech Guys advocate attracting 100 million new immigrants to the United States in the next 20 years. Why? For three simple reasons: to expand the economy, to remain the world’s strongest country and to be consistent with American values. (more)

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is vowing to bring the immigration-related “DREAM Act” to the Senate floor and some Senate Republicans are sounding the alarm bells, highlighting that it would offer amnesty to an estimated 2.1 million illegal aliens. (more)

TIM NICHOLS measures fun. (more)

SAN FRANCISCO — Online advertising offers marketers the chance to aim ads at very specific groups of people — say, golf players in Illinois who make more than $150,000 a year and vacation in Hawaii. (more)

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. (more)

Google Android has been riding a wave of staggering growth in 2010, going from barely a blip on the market share radar to the fastest growing mobile platform on the planet, challenging BlackBerry for top honors in the U.S. and setting its sights on Nokia for supremacy worldwide. (more)

A new study confirms what some in the technology industry have long sensed: Apple commands an inordinate amount of the media’s attention. (more)

Research firm Gartner has just released a report projecting that Google’s Android smartphone operating system will assume the number 2 position worldwide this year, and will close in on Symbian and its long held number 1 position by 2014. (more)

Washington, D.C., can get hot and muggy in August, which is why lawmakers leave for most of the month, and many staffers, lobbyists and other industry-types also clear out of town in search of cooler climes. (more)

Microsoft’s product groups are busy crafting their answer(s) to the Apple iPad. But Microsoft Research is working on slate/tablet-related projects of its own, including a way to add physical keys to the backs of these kinds of mobile-computing devices. (more)

Edwin Perello discovered that Bing, the Microsoft search engine, could find addresses in his rural Indiana town when Google could not. Laura Michelson, an administrative assistant in San Francisco, was lured by Bing’s flight fare tracker. Paul Callan, a photography buff in Chicago, fell for Bing’s vivid background images. (more)

The online habits of most people who use the world’s dominant Web browser are an open book to advertisers. That wasn’t the plan at first. (more)

The European Union said Monday it has launched an antitrust probe against IBM Corp., reviving decades-old allegations that the technology giant has abused its dominant position in the mainframe computer market. (more)

Late last week, Google announced that new models of its Nexus One will no longer be shipped: (more)

Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector has just gotten a bit more social courtesy of a new update that has added Facebook and Windows Live Messenger integration to its mix. (more)