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Microsoft today opened up its Windows Marketplace for Mobile to developers. The move, which brings Windows mobile up to date with Apple's App Store and the Android Market, provides developers yet another way to generate revenue from their applications.

According to Microsoft, the process is simple. You'll need a Live ID and $99 to sign up; to get paid, you'll need to provide bank account and tax identification details.

Windows Live received a major makeover last November, and part of this makeover included the ability to aggregate updates from third-party services like Flickr, Pandora, or Twitter. Today, Microsoft announced that its users will now also be able to import their updates from 20 additional partners, including Digg, Last.fm, SmugMug, and Facebook. In addition, users will soon be able to invite their friends on MySpace, Hi5, and Tagged to join their Windows Live network. In Europe, Microsoft Live has also teamed up with a number of popular local services like Hyves, Dailymotion.com, and Dada.

Microsoft, in a new report about Internet usage in Europe, predicts that the Internet will overtake TV as the most consumed form of media in Europe by the middle of next year. Broadband connections in Europe have grown by 95% in the last five years and the average European now spends about 8.9 hours per week online. Microsoft also predicts that over the next 5 years, usage patterns will shift away from traditional PCs to other web enabled devices like game consoles, IPTV, and mobile phones.

Microsoft's years-long-running multimedia CD-based encyclopedia product, Encarta, will be history by the end of the year. According to Ars Technica, Microsoft quietly announced the discontinuation date for Encarta to be October 31, 2009. Although the MSN press release doesn't go into too much detail on all the reasons why this decision was made, (nothing about Wikipedia for example), they do mention that the way people look for and consume information has changed substantially in the last few years, which seems like a fair assessment.

MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft's Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

Yesterday, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 finally came out of beta, but according to the latest data from StatCounter's GlobalStats, users are not exactly in a rush to update their browsers to IE8 just yet. Even though IE8 had been in public beta testing for a year, its market share only rose from 1.39% on its launch day to 1.56% today.

After more than a year of beta testing, Microsoft released version 8 of Internet Explorer today. IE8 is definitely a better browser than IE7, and features quite a few important new functions, including accelerators, and web slices. IE8 is also significantly faster than IE7 and features a large number of new functions that make browsing the web easier and more secure. IE8 is an important upgrade for those users who are still using IE7, but we don't think that it offers enough compelling reasons for users of other browsers to switch back to Internet Explorer.

At its annual MIX conference, Microsoft today introduced a number of interesting new products, including a beta of Silverlight 3 and a preview version of Blend 3, its Silverlight development tool. Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform also received a number of major updates today. Microsoft also announced that Silverlight 2 has been installed on more than 300 million PCs since its launch in October 2008 and that NBC will use Silverlight 3 to power its online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Microsoft's Windows 7 development team yesterday confirmed that users will be able to remove Internet Explorer 8, as well as several other Microsoft applications, from Windows 7.

This appears to be a major step by the company in addressing the long standing anti-trust complaints of bundling their applications with Windows, and may account in part for the recent scaling back by the European Union in its monitoring of the software giant.

Vista, the overbearing and rigid operating system that many deemed Microsoft's greatest disaster, and others considered to be the beginning of the end for Microsoft, may have been exactly what the company needed. A hard lesson certainly, but also a shocking wake up call.

A video released by Microsoft's Business Division today demonstrates technologies that we do not generally associate with Microsoft. Intuitive, seamless and sexy, the future as Microsoft sees it, could just be its saving grace.