Juan Carlos Perez

Microsoft Corp. is launching on Thursday a subscription service that offers users a tight link between the company's MSN Hotmail Web mail service and its Outlook e-mail client PC software. The new service, called Microsoft Office Outlook Live, costs US$59.95 per year and includes Office Outlook 2003 for Subscription Services, which is a new downloadable subscription version of Office Outlook 2003, 2G bytes of online storage, spam and virus protection and the ability to send 20M-byte attachments.

Google Inc. is developing a desktop search tool designed for corporate use, several months after launching a similar tool for personal use.

Google Inc. has improved its enterprise Search Appliance so that it can now index documents that aren't accessible via the Web protocol HTTP, thus significantly expanding the range of data the product can search for and retrieve. Google plans to announce the improvement Thursday.

Microsoft Corp. has joined the desktop search fray with its release Monday of the beta test version of a suite of tools designed to let users find information stored in their PCs.

Five Across Inc. has upgraded its workgroup instant messaging client by adding RSS support and developed its first workgroup instant messaging server, the Palo Alto, Calif. company announced Wednesday.

A preview release of Firefox available since last month has been downloaded over 8 million times, the Mozilla Foundation said Tuesday.

Google Desktop Search will let users search for information stored in their PC files, local e-mail inboxes, archived chat sessions and list of Web sites visited, the company says.

America Online Inc. (AOL) is launching a program Monday to promote and facilitate the creation of what it calls AIM Robots for its AIM instant messaging system.