Microsoft has been denied an appeal by the Supreme Court after a patent infringement case ended with a verdict that’ll cost the software giant $290 million. Microsoft was sued by i4i in 2007 over technology used in Microsoft Word that violated the Canadian company’s patents. The courts decided that Microsoft had knowingly breached the patent, slapping them with a financial penalty and an injunction against Word sales until the technology had been removed....

Microsoft has paid the University of Nebraska $250,000 to use its new cloud productivity suite, Office 365,Neowin reports. Though there are many jokes that could be made about a company that has to pay people to use its software, software companies often use incentives to accelerate adoption of enterprise software. The funds will cover consulting, licenses, and a Microsoft Premier Support plan, and the move will save the university $500,000 in a year in email operating costs....

For the fourth time in the last week and a half, Microsoft haslanded a patent dealwith an Android vendor. This time around the company in question is Wistron, and as usual, terms of the deal were not released. Even though details were not enumerated, Microsoft did state that it will profit from the deal: “Although the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicate that Microsoft will receive royalties from Wistron under the agreement....

In our continuing series on the Mango update to the Windows Phone 7 platform (based on your feedback, we are trying to be exhaustive on the topic), today we bring you a number of clips that Microsoft posted that explain its vision for mobile email and communication. The videos feature Microsoft employees speaking in hushed tones, waxing on about it was “so fun” to discuss email with focus groups. We aren’t sure what to make of that, but in each video a Windows Phone staffer explains the specific feature that they have been working on....

Microsoft appears poised to follow in the footsteps of Apple’s iOS platform and work towards a single large yearly update to the its platform, as opposed to more the irregular updates favored by other mobile lines. The informationcame outin a Microsoft job posting, originallyreported by Engadgetthat read: This Senior Program Manager position will be the CXE Feature PM that drives all development work on the Application Platform for update releases between major yearly releases....