Microsoft has begun issuing updates to Xbox 360 consoles that will start moving saved games and profiles away from local storage and moving them into the cloud,Eurogamer reports. The new update will make it possible for Xbox gamers to recover their Xbox Live gamertags across a number of different consoles and will allow them to access save data. Initially the feature will be available on Xbox Live Arcade games but is expected to roll out to other games in the future....

In the era when technology companies are stacking cash by the tens of billions, dividends are perhaps becoming a more attractive method of rewarding investors. Microsoft, at a minimum, feels so. The companytoday announceda 25% increase in its dividend, to $0.20 per share, per quarter. Earlier today Microsoft’s yield was roughly 2.4%, but is now nearly 3%. This move is unlikely to greatly boost the company’s share price, but it will be welcomed by long term investors who are increasingly annoyed by the firm’s entirely too stable stock....

Microsoft todaymade it clearthat it is working on bringing Hadoop, which is rising in both popularity and usage, to its Azure, and Windows Server products. The company is building its own deliverables of the Hadoop stack for its products. Community technology preview builds of the technologies will be available in the next 3 to 15 months. The CTP build of the Hadoop-based service for Azure is due this year, while the CTP of the Hadoop product for Windows Server will be released in 2012....

Microsoft has flipped the switch on itsnew Windows Phone Web Marketplace, allowing users to easily discover applications and games for their Windows Phone devices directly from the browser and have them delivered to their phone via SMS or email link,WPCentral reports. The move sees Microsoft mimic Google’s browser-basedAndroid Market portal, which is able to directly deliver purchases to Android handsets, however Microsoft’s implementation falls one step short with the delivery of a SMS or email message to link the application to the device – resulting in a manual download....

Microsoft todayannouncedthe availability of co-authoring in its Word web application. Yes, until now, the Word web app couldn’t do this. And people wonder why Google Docs has such a following. That aside, what Microsoft has put together seems to be well thought out and usable, if very late. We’ll start with their own words to explain exactly how working with other people inside of an online Word document will now function:...