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Software giant Microsoft continues to showcase new products, which they are hoping, would help them expand their market share in the various markets and expand revenue streams for them.

One of these new products is FonePlus, which the company is portraying as a low cost alternative operating system for mobile phone.

They displayed a prototype of the platform at their daylong Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) in Redmond yesterday.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer believes that this operating system powered mobile phones could become the first personal computers for people living in developing and poor nations.

This could also be used on devices, which plan to take on Nicolas Negroponte’s USD 100 PC in the market. This 100-dollar PC is using a customized version of Fedora Linux as its operating system.

Software giants CA have claimed that security application makers F-Secure is trying to boost the sales of its mobile security applications by over-hyping the scare of mobile malware.

This revelation came after the announcement that Finnish security vendor F-Secure would be providing mobile antivirus service to a U.K. telecommunications company.

Sam Curry, vice president of product management at CA said in a statement: “The only [mobile malware] we are seeing is proof-of-concept. There are no worms or Trojans that are a massive threat.”

F-Secure recently signed on a deal with Orange Personal Communications Services that would see them provide its F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus service to Orange UK in the third quarter.

Mikko Hypponen, manager of antivirus research at F-Secure spoke on that development: “Indeed, we’re warning about the threat of mobile malware. This risk is not invented. It’s not theoretical, nor is it hypothetical.”

He further said: “Our count of mobile malware is now over 300. F-Secure is far from being the only company warning about malware on mobile devices. Companies that are working in the field and actually shipping products to protect users include global players like McAfee, Trend Micro and Symantec.”

If Time Warner’s internet division AOL can start offering their own security applications in collaboration with McAfee, Yahoo! won’t be far behind.

The internet giant has now revealed that they would be offering Norton Internet security software to their customers to make their online experience more secure.

The package offered by Yahoo! would include security applications developed by Symantec. These would include protection against the most common cyber threats, such as spyware, spam, and identity theft.

Yahoo! is collaborating with Symantec to offer co-branded version of Symantec’s Norton Internet Security package. It would be integrated with Yahoo! toolbar and other products like their email and job-hunt services.

They would also be providing Norton AntiVirus and Norton Personal Firewall for extra security for their customers. Yahoo spokesperson Nicole Leverich said in a statement on this new development: “Our users want to feel safe online and not have to put a lot of work into feeling safe. With the Norton Internet package we are providing an easy way to add comprehensive protection.”

This deal is pretty crucial as Yahoo! wants to counter Microsoft’s entry into the security application market by becoming a part of the industry themselves. Microsoft made an entry into this segment by launching their Windows Live OneCare package.

As per informing information, Microsoft wants to make sure that users of the Windows XP operating system would get the Internet Explorer 7 web browser update when it is released in its final version.

To get this done, the company might release the browser update through the automatic updates program for Windows XP.

However, to make sure that they are not going to cause problems for people who are not in a position to upgrade from IE6 to IE7, the users would get a clear message telling them about benefits of upgrading to the latest version of the web browser.

Instead of an automatic installation, users will be presented with three options on a screen Install, Don’t Install and Ask Me Later buttons. If the user chooses the second option, they would be barred from future notifications unless they manually decide to install the browser.

They would also make available tools for network administrators to make sure the users on their network do not accidentally upgrade their IE6 versions, which might cause problems in their regular work.

Security vendor McAfee has claimed that they have detected in wild a Trojan Horse, which pretends to be a Mozilla Firefox extension.

They have named this Trojan “FormSpy”. Trojans are basically programs, which appear to be harmless but can be quite damaging to user privacy.

The company added that this Trojan is downloaded on a machine, which is already infected with another Trojan horse called “Downloader-AXM”.

This Downloader-AXM contacts server to download other malicious programs to a computer without letting the user know about it.

And once this new Trojan is downloaded, it installs itself as a Firefox extension and monitor user’s activity on the net. It pretends to be the “NumberedLinks 0.9? extension and in reality transmit information in a Web browser to another Web site.

McAfee added that this Trojan is also capable of stealing e-mail, ICQ instant messaging service, and FTP passwords.

Software giants Microsoft have confirmed that they have now closed the acquisition of VPN vendor Whale Communications.

The company also outlined a road map for how it would integrate Whale’s products into its own security product range in the coming months.

They are planning to continue selling all the products in this range, which includes the Whale Intelligent Application Gateway and Whale’s application optimizers.

Microsoft is currently offering a 25 percent discount on them until December 31, 2006.

The products developed by Whale Communications give remote users access to applications when they are outside of the corporate firewall. These products are more powerful and capable than Microsoft’s own remote access security product, ISA Server.

Software giant Microsoft would soon payout $1.1 billion to California consumers and businesses. This payment is part of the antitrust claims, which were filed against the company in the courts.

The process of this payout begins next month and would see vouchers being given to Californians who have filed claims.

These vouchers could be redeemed for cash during the next four years as per the information made available to the media.

The settlement was originally approved way back in July 2004 but some legal hassles delayed the payout.

As per incoming information, most customers could claim an amount under $100. However, it all depends upon how much software was purchased by the party. Interestingly, this is just one of the many such payouts issued by Microsoft in the recent past.

Mark/Space has finally announced the launch of the Missing Sync for Windows Mobile v2.5. This version is available as a free update for users of version 2.0.

For new users, this application would cost around $39.95. The application is designed to help the users of Windows Mobile-equipped smartphones and PDAs to synchronize data with Macs.

This latest application is compatible with devices running Windows Mobile 2002, 2003 or 2005.

It also works with Microsoft Entourage and Apple’s Address Book and iCal and other Sync Services-compatible software too including the Chronos SOHO Organizer and Market Circle Daylite.

The application has been released as a Universal binary, which supports the Intel and PowerPC-based Macs natively. The company however warns that USB synchronizing with Windows Media devices is “a little slow” at present and recommends the users to use Bluetooth instead.

Software giants Microsoft has released a new build of their upcoming operating system Windows Vista.

The company said that this latest build improves upon quality and performance and includes some of the suggestions it received on the beta 2 release.

The latest build of Vista now stands at 5472 and it is also the first official update from the company after releasing the Vista Beta 2 for public testing.

This latest release is available to limited number of beta testers.

Some of the enhancements in this release are related to how the users can set up and control user accounts. The company has also made improvements to the Windows Media Center. Some bugs have been quashed and other improvements have been applied.

Software giants Microsoft has announced that they would be working with Linux supplier XenSource. The two companies plans to develop solutions to make it possible for users to run the upcoming version of Microsoft’s Windows server operating system on computers that are simultaneously running Linux software.

This is great news for the corporate sector as Microsoft is finally dropping its resistance to Linux. Microsoft as a result would get the help from XenSource to compete with VMware who are now the biggest supplier of “virtualization” software to the market.

Microsoft and XenSource together released a joint statement saying that they would work together on the development of technology that makes their respective “virtualization” software programs work side-by-side on the same computer.

Microsoft added that they expect to conduct a public trial of Windows Server virtualization by the end of this year.