Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week? Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites.

If you do a search for “TechCrunch” or “New York Times,” for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under “Latest posts.”

Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.

One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.

Professional social network LinkedIn is showing a little Microsoft love today. In conjunction with the announcement of the beta of Microsoft’s Office 2010 at its Professional Developer Conference, LinkedIn and Microsoft have partnered to offer an add-on that integrates much of your LinkedIn contact information with your Outlook contacts.

The add-on to Outlook will provide professional and social context to any Outlook users everyday email experience. When you received an email from a contact who happens to be a member of LinkedIn, Outlook will show a collapsible pane that will show information on what the contact’s latest activity is on Linkedin.

This is embarrassing. Not only are the Microsoft Stores a clear copy of Apple Stores, but now the employees are trying to be spontaneous and stir up customer reactions with a weird bastardization of Improv Anywhere.

See what I mean after the jump.

It was just 11 days ago that Microsoft’s “ambassador to startups” Don Dodge was laid off as part of a broader workforce reduction. Last week he showed up in Silicon Valley to “see friends” as he put it. But it was clear that he was also interviewing for jobs.

We sat down with him to do a proper exit interview while he was in town.

I got a few tips from Googlers that he was seen roaming their Mountain View headquarters, and I confirmed tonight that he has been offered a job at the company. He has accepted, and will shortly begin working for the company that he only recently considered the enemy.

As Microsoft shed its beta tag for the launch of the UK version of Bing today, TechCrunch Europe has learnt that it held a secret meeting with a group of big European publishers, mainly newspapers.

The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.

What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.

Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering.

At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com.

In July of last year, I wrote about The New Apple Walled Garden. The post was about the irony of developers and advocates who were otherwise open standards and open source champions being absolutely pro-iPhone, a platform that is closed and proprietary in every sense. Since that post, the horror that was foreshadowed by some has been realized – rejected apps, rejected apps, rejected apps. We documented the troubles here at Techcrunch and the overall response was nothing more than long comment threads, complaints, and a few wise people changing their minds. The complaints to date are from some bloggers and a small number of application developers, incidents that Apple are able to write-off as being minor, as they have a dedicated fan base and growing market share to fall back on. That was, until yesterday.

Yesterday, a high-profile iPhone developer became fed up with the nature of the platform and decided it was time to call it quits. Joe Hewitt of Facebook not only pronounced that it was time for him to move onto ‘other projects’, but had the courage to state that his reason was because of the closed nature of the iPhone platform and his frustration with the approval process.

After two straight quarters of annual declines (aka, the Great Ad Recession of 2009), it looks like online advertising revenues stabilized in the third quarter. The combined online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL rose 1.2 percent to $8 billion. While the online advertising industry is not out of the woods yet, it might be stabilizing.

At least it is for Google, which was the only one of the four horsemen of Internet advertising to see its ad revenues rise in the quarter (up roughly $400 million from both last quarter and last year). Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft were all down on both a sequential and annual basis. (All the individual company figures are in the table below). Google benefits more from search advertising and is less exposed to display. The question now is whether display advertising will follow the recovery already being experienced by search advertising.

Ever since Microsoft launched its Bing search engine last May, there’s been buzz that it’s been talking with Wolfram Alpha to license some of its search data. In August, I was able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck between the two. Today, Bing is finally rolling out its first integration with Wolfram Alpha for searches around diet and nutrition.

Whenever you do a nutrition or diet-related search on Bing, it will serve up structured data from Wolfram. For instance, a search for any food item will bring up a nutrition tab and summarize nutrition facts about that kind of food, including the total fat in a single serving, along with the percentage of the recommended daily allowance that represents and other nutritional data. The results will be marked as “computed buy Wolfram Alpha.” Wolfram will also power a body mass index (BMI) calculator which lets you enter your height and weight, and calculates your BMI.

It appears that both Yahoo and Microsoft are duking it out to help power the technology for India’s Unique Identification project. Spearheaded by Indian tech czar and Infosys co-chairman Nanden Nilekani, the project aims to assign every Indian citizen with a unique identification number that will identify him or her, similar to a U.S. social security number.

This is no small task considering India’s population of 1.2 billion citizens. It will involve a powerful technology to assign the numbers and a vast database to organize each unique ID. That’s where Microsoft and Yahoo come in.

Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia’s group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft’s transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant’s overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles.

Market share is probably the easiest and most often used point of comparison between competing products. It makes sense: If something has a large share of the market, it’s probably doing well. But that doesn’t always mean that it’s doing better than something with less market share, especially from a business perspective.

I bring this up because today brought some very interesting numbers from the research firm, Strategy Analytics. According to them, Apple has surpassed Nokia as the most profitable phone maker in the world. I’ll throw some numbers at you in a second to show why this is really incredible, but the key takeaway is that this is why, at the end of the day, Apple wins.

There appears to be a good old bidding war going on for another VoIP startup, Jajah, following yesterday’s news about the acquisition of Gizmo5 by Google, a source in Silicon Valley with knowledge of the talks informs us.

Details are scarce at the moment, but Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Telefónica Europe (O2) are said to be looking to buy the venture capital-backed company for a price ranging from $200M to $400M. We’re digging for more information.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below).

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

Among the 800 or so employees laid off by Microsoft today: Don Dodge, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development for the Emerging Business Team, reporting to VP Dan’l Lewin. Don writes about the change on his personal blog.

All layoffs suck, but letting Don go is a huge mistake for Microsoft. He nearly singlehandedly defends the Microsoft brand in a fairly anti-Microsoft developer and user community. For many people in the startup community, Don is the face of Microsoft. He travels constantly, speaking at events whenever he’s asked, and makes a big effort to give young startups the attention they deserve. This is a guy who gives a heck of a lot more to the community than he ever takes back.

Don has been an expert panelist at all three TechCrunch50 conferences. He has also written guest posts for us covering startup events we couldn’t attend personally.

His reaction to today’s news shows what kind of person he is. I reached him by telephone just an hour after he heard the news. And he didn’t have a bad word to say about Microsoft. He was more concerned that I not write anything negative about the company than anything else. Even after they turned their back on him, he was still on their side.

My opinion of Microsoft dropped a notch today. A big notch. Don invested years of his time making Microsoft seem more human, and there are very few people I respect more than this man. He wasted all that time, apparently.

While the Nintendo Wii continues to have a stranglehold on console sales, both worldwide and in the United States, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are battling it out for the the second place position for year-to-date sales. Just a little over two months ago, Sony announced that they would be slashing the price of their game console, the PS3, to $299. Microsoft quickly followed suit, and in just ten days dropped the price of their most expensive console, the Xbox 360 Elite, to $299. Nintendo, who has sold nearly double the number of consoles worldwide as these two, decided to lower the price of the Wii on September 27th to $199: this was the first time since its inception that the Wii has had a price cut. All three console manufacturers hoped that the decrease in price would help them to increase sales and finish the year on a strong note. The results have been mixed: while all three consoles have seen an increase in sales, the PS3 has seen astonishing growth in the US and abroad, and has wrestled the second-place position in worldwide YTD sales from the 360. As for the Xbox, even in its upgraded Elite form it has seen only minimal gains since the price drop.

In this political season, why not talk about the roughest political argument of them all: the real meaning of Apple’s announcement of over 100,000 apps in the app store. Are these apps important because, as Steve Ballmer says, the iPhone doesn’t handle the Internet well? Are these apps a testament to a strong ecosystem? Or are these apps a testament to Apple’s marketing might and the perception that you just might make your millions by selling flashlight app for the Touch.

The announcement, which basically says that there are over 100,000 applications available for the iPhone and iPod Touch with some of the true winners – Smule’s I Am T-Pain, for example – getting 10,000 or more downloads a day.

OpenX this morning announced it has entered into a multi-year partnership with Microsoft that will allow the companies to “cross-market and promote products” to their respective publishers.

Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers.

Our favorite jingle guy is at it again. Jonathan Mann, who TechCrunch readers will best know as the guy behind the awful Bing jingle, has released another new video (as he does every day), this time to serenade the children of Keith Valley Middle School who recently performed his Bing jingle. “It’s kind of creepy,” Mann admitted at the time, but he was happy to see his work live on, so he came up with this gem.

But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.