Microsoft launches Bing

In today's podcast: Microsoft launches Bing; Dell results flop; and Google catches Wave.

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Microsoft has picked Bing as the name for its new search engine, putting to rest months of speculation of what the next iteration of Live Search would be called. The search engine will be rolled out over the next few days, and will be available worldwide by next Wednesday. Microsoft said it has designed Bing as a "decision engine" to help people search the Web more intelligently and to simplify everyday tasks such as getting directions. Bing includes a set of navigation and search tools called an Explore Pane on the left side of the page that offers a feature called Web Groups, which organizes search results not only in the pane but also in the actual results generated on the page.

Government ministers from the European Union's member countries are calling for an investigation into the way Google Books handles copyright. Google Books carries extracts of books protected by copyright, as well as complete works whose copyright has expired. Authors and publishers have to opt out of the service to get their titles removed. The German government suspects that this business model is illegal in Europe, and wants the European Commission to open an inquiry to see if Google Books conforms with Europe's copyright laws.

Dell reported a 63 percent fall in net income during the three months to May 1, a result of reduced PC sales and a restructuring charge related to cost cutting. Revenue fell 23 percent, to 12.3 billion dollars. Despite the reduced earnings, Dell stressed it is taking steps to maintain profitability during the challenging economic environment. The company continues to cut costs and is looking to get deeper into sustainable markets such as data centers, services and software.

Google released to developers an early version of a collaboration and communication tool called Wave that consolidates features from e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, multimedia management and document sharing in a continuous conversation across media. Google plans to publish the specification for the Wave protocol, and to open source the first Wave application, in the hope that other organizations will adopt and interoperate with it. Wave lets people create a document to which multiple users can add rich text, multimedia, gadget applications and feeds, and do so concurrently in the way in which people interact on, say, instant messaging. These "waves" can be rolled back to view the evolution of the document. Google expects to keep Wave as a developer preview product for at least several more months.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.