After Adobe announced their plans to stop developing Flash Player for mobile devices, we are now hearing that Microsoft plans to do the same with their own proprietary plugin, Silverlight. Microsoft Silverlight never really managed to gain the same amount of popularity among web developers.

But now it seems that will not be an issue for long. Microsoft is on the verge of announcing the next version of Silverlight, with the beta version already having been released back in September. But this will probably be the last version of Silverlight.

The Microsoft Kinect has anounced some very interesting uses that are not at all what most of us first envisioned when the controller landed for the Xbox 360 and gamers. Microsoft would be offering a SDK for businesses to make apps that would use Kinect for things in the business world.

The Kinect for Windows SDK has now hit beta 2 and you can download it right now to play with. The SDK still supports the Kinect on machines running Windows 7. It offers APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking. The SDK allows devs using C++, C#, and Visual Basic via Visual Studio 2012 to access the capabilities of the Kinect.

Microsoft has announced a special version of the popular Firefox browser that comes with the Bing search engine. As you might guess, this version of Firefox changes the default search engine and homepage from Google to Bing.

For Mozilla, this will serve as another form of revenue. For Microsoft, this move will help boost the user base for Bing. With two of the world most popular web browsers using Bing as their default search engines, this could help accelerate Microsoft plans to take over Google as the most popular search engine.

Microsoft 8.5 billion USD acquisition of Skype has finally been closed, the company recently announced. The plan is for Skype to become a new business unit within Microsoft, with Skype CEO Tony Bates becoming the president of the newly created Skype division. Users should expect for Microsoft to integrate Skype into a variety of its products, including mobile.

The Official Skype blog Posted :

"Joining forces with Microsoft is the best way to accelerate this mission and capitalize on our position at the intersection of social, mobile and video communications. Simply put, we want to transform communications. Microsoft is committed to the ubiquity of the Skype experience communication across every device and every platform will remain a primary focus. And we have only scratched the surface."