Microsoft, which last year made a failed $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, would finally win what it wanted most from the Internet pioneer — huge volumes of queries that run through Yahoo’s search engine.

At the same time, Yahoo is expected to reap additional search-advertising business to expand its share of the market.

It isn’t clear who would benefit the most out of this, as Bing would get the much needed boost in search market volume, while Yahoo! would get better search advisement deals via Microsoft adCenter. Besides that, I don’t think other players like Google would be sitting quietly about this, because the Google Yahoo! advertisement deal also attracted a lot of attention from legal authorities.

Since we don’t have any official details about the deal yet, so we can’t jump to conclusions. Expect more on this topic soon when the details about the deal are finally revealed.

[via WSJ]

Though this might just be a coincidence, one can’t underplay the fact that the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world was taken to court recently, and surprisingly, according to a recent update on Gizmodo, the prosecution had just closed their arguments.

The Pirate Bay is the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world right now, with well over a billion torrents under its watch. If courts manage to sink this boat, then according to some watchers, the entire BitTorrent fleet is pretty much going down too. The prosecution filled a number of charges against the web based operator including “facilitating piracy by giving an open path” and earning around a million dollars an year illegally.

The Defense is yet to respond officially but they claim both these arguments to be invalid and overstated. Previous attempts at shutting down the site have failed and its still pretty hard to judge who would win this time around. But if the service does come to a halt, I really doubt that BitTorrent or P2P file sharing in general would come to an end (Mininova anyone?).

Update: According to another update at Gizmodo, the reason seems to be a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, often termed as domain hijacking. According to the article, it’s an orchestrated DDoS assault, and that the culprit may have hijacked a botnet to make it happen. Another angle coming up else where is that the site is taken down on purpose in order to delay the prosecution.

Almost every major cellphone platform out there now has some sort of online application storefront set up thanks to the fad started by Apple. The reason? It is a whole lot more convenient to buy (if there are any prices) an application from a universal catalog than to go to the website of each and every publisher. Why no cellphone vendor ever though of it before is beyond me, but now everyone is doing it, so why not Nokia?

The Symbian Series 60 platform is the most dominant smartphone platform in the market, with a market share of 49% according to a recent study. It is only logical for Nokia to capitalize on that as Apple already earned huge profits even with a 10% share in the market.

And now Palm, Android and RIM also have their own stores leaving behind only Microsoft and Nokia, the two top platform developers who don’t have an online store front. An article published on Unwired News, Nokia has already done internal testing for the service and would officially be announcing the service at the Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona.

If this turns out to be true, a lot of people would have their prayers answered (including me) and finally start getting the right applications they want.