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According to a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling filed last week Google Inc.'s trademark application for its Nexus One mobile phone has been denied on the grounds it replicates existing trademark held by Portland, Ore.-based Integra Telecom Inc. The ruling says that Google's application was denied because of "a likelihood of confusion" with Integra's "Nexus" trademark.

As Google is negotiating its status with the Chinese government and is supposedly determined to leave the country 27 of Google's Chinese ad partners wrote a letter asking the Internet giant to explain and detail its position in China. They said that their businesses are hit by the situation around the search engine company and they want to know whether and how they will be compensated if the company decides to exit after all.

According to the report from an analytics company Flurry, Google’s sales of its Nexus One smartphone have significantly straggled the pace of Apple’s iPhone and Motorola’s Droid sales.

Google launched the Nexus One phone, which it developed with handset manufacturer HTC Corp of Taiwan, in January, marking the first time the search engineer had sold a hardware device directly to consumers.

Google Inc predicts the rates paid by companies for search ads on mobile phones could surpass the rates of its existing PC-based ad business. The growth is boosted by the increasing popularity of powerful smartphones.

Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra said that over the recent years mobile ad rates have increased "dramatically". He also noted that the number of Google searches on mobile phones have increased five-fold in the last two years.

Facebook plans to set its office in India in a move to join a long list of international firms that have looked to employ a skilled workforce that can deliver support services at relatively cheap wages.

As company’s representatives stated on Monday, Facebook's office in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad will support users, advertisers and developers in India and around the world.

Latest reports reveal that Google is now "99.9 per cent" sure it will close its Chinese search engine as the negotiations with the government reached an impasse. Citing the sources familiar with the matter the Financial Times reported the news hours after a Chinese minister warned Google that it would "have to bear the consequences" if it stopped censoring results on Google.cn.

Google is negotiating grand reformation of its business policy in China. Eric Schmidt, a CEO of the search engine giant, reiterated that the company is talking with the Chinese government over its future in the Heavenly Empire and he expects some sort of the situation further development soon. Still, Schmidt didn’t provide any detailed information on the matter.

"I can't really say anything other than that we're in active negotiations with the Chinese government, and there is no specific timetable," he said. "Something will happen soon."

Microsoft reached an agreement with Motorola over putting Bing search and mapping services on the company’s phones utilizing Google's Android operating system.

As the mobile phone producer stated the collaboration with Microsoft means that a Bing bookmark and search widget loading on phones in the coming weeks, starting with China’s phones.

A research published this week by Morningstar analyst Larry Witt claims that Yahoo’s “competitive position is weakening.” According to him Yahoo will be further losing its market share with the pressure on its online advertising business as online marketers are offered more options.

"Although Yahoo remains one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, user growth has slowed as audiences have begun to fragment, akin to the rise of cable networks at the expense of broadcast television," Witt wrote.

One more strategic step was made by Google in its strong competition with Microsoft. The search engine giant has purchased a small start-up company DocVerse which enables Microsoft users to edit their documents on the Web. Terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.

"With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications," Google Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said in the blog post.

Google Research head and the company's former director of search quality Peter Norvig said he is currently exploring some sort of new-age search engine aimed specifically for students. The statement was made at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Silicon Valley.

"I'm starting to work now on education search," he said.

It is getting a common thing or Microsoft to release apps for the products of its utmost rivals. In December 2008 the company launched an iPhone app — Seadragon Mobile. Later it introduced another application called Tag, into Apple’s App Store. This time the same thing has been done to Android.

Microsoft launched Tag developed specially for Android, it is the first time the company designs the app itself for the Google mobile platform. Apart from Android and iPhone, Tag also currently works on Windows Mobile, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 phones.

As Microsoft and other largest competitors of Google are calling for legal complaints against the world's No. 1 search engine Yahoo Inc keeps to a more dispassionate position. The company CEO Carol Bartz said that Yahoo has other tools to compete with Google including its latest searching deal with Microsoft.

"I think for the most part the markets work and I'd rather be competitive in the market," Bartz told reporters at a special briefing at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, California headquarters on Tuesday.

This week Google announced the acquisition of popular online photo editing service Picnik. The search engine giant says that Picnik was "one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud."

Picnik is an online service that allows users edit their images without launching Photoshop, iPhoto or any other photo editing software. The website features Flash-powered interface that allows users to tweak, crop, and touch-up their photos in the web browser.

Last month Google was challenged by an unexpected lawsuit filed in response to its own filing submitted in October last year. The complaint filed by the search engine giant was so trivial that it was a surprise to see a 24-page antitrust lawsuit against Google where the search engine was accused of a litany of monopolistic abuses, reports the Wall Street Journal.

But what really caught Google's attention was the Internet site's legal counsel: It was Charles "Rick" Rule, long the chief outside counsel on competition issues for Google archrival Microsoft Corp.