Microsoft has launched some new features for the mobile version of the Bing search engine, which is available at m.bing.com. These include features related to the NFL and to travel.

The NFL feature lets the user type a team or player and see upcoming games, stats, and scores. If you use the feature while a game is being played, you can get real-time updates on the plays. The feature is only available in the U.S.

National Geographic and Weather.com are not, if we’re to be honest, nearly as trendy as something like Twitter or Facebook.  Still, both entities garner a significant amount of respect (and a significant number of page views), and Bing recently received a sort of nod from each of them.

A majority (79%) of information technology (IT) professionals use social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube, but 21 percent do not use social networking sites at all, according to a new survey by CompTIA.

Of the major social networking sites, Facebook was the most popular, with 57 percent of respondents reporting they had been active on the site within the past 30 days. YouTube was the second most popular site (53%), then MySpace (29%), Twitter (25%) and LinkedIn (22%).

Research from AT Internet Institute indicates that Microsoft is losing European market share in the web browser sector with Internet Explorer. The firm says IE is being seriously shaken up by rival browsers across the continent.

Catching episodes of your favorite show(s) on Hulu just became a little easier.  The site’s introduced a "Coming Soon" page so that early bird users can figure out when the stuff they want to see will actually become available.

One might argue that this is a very minor feature – essentially a redundant online TV guide, given that most Hulu users know episodes become available the day after they air.  Still, even if that’s the case, it should prove handy for folks who are new to the site.

Update: Amazon announced the completion of its acquisition of Zappos.com today. The Zappos management team will remain intact, and Zappos will operate independently with its headquarters in Las Vegas.

Original Article: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh sent an email to Zappos employees today informing them that Amazon is becoming the only shareholder of Zappos stock. The following video from Jeff Bezos was also posted on the Zappos Blog:

Here’s an interesting twist on the ‘pay for access to conten’t dilemma that faces the newspaper industry these days. Newspapers who do this may actually lose a writer or two! While it’s not likely that staffers at any newspaper are looking to just walk out the door to another job because there really aren’t any but you may get some that are going to walk n principle.

UPS has introduced a new application for iPhone and iPod touch users that ships and tracks packages and also uses built-in GPS features to find the closest UPS store.

Available at the APP Store, the new UPS Mobile APP for iPhone allows users to track shipments, create shipments using the My UPS address book, calculate shipping rates and time-in-transit.

Many products are initially available in English, and then branch out into languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish.  (There’s even an acronym, FIGS.)  But Google Search by voice broke with tradition – and started to make its way into a huge market – by moving straight from English to Mandarin Chinese today.

Last month we looked at Twitter’s numbers for user registrations and total tweets for the month of September. We saw a small decline in new user registrations, but tweeting appeared to be on the rise again following the previous month in which tweeting declined.

The numbers for October follow a similar trend. The information was supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer of the Twitter app, Twellow.

Google has launched a new feature for Google Checkout, which allows merchants based in the US to create and run their own Checkout promotions at any time.

Users simply need to sign in to their Checkout merchant account, go to the "Tools" tab, and click the "Promotions" link to create a promotion. Google says the process takes less than a minute. Users can specify the date and time they’d like the promotion to run, and choose from different dollar-off discounts to offer their buyers.

Overall retail sales are expected to show no gain this holiday shopping season, while online retail sales in the U.S. will reach $44.7 billion during the holiday season, an eight percent increase over last year, according to a new report by Forrester Research.

The growth rate represents an increase from 2008, when, on the heels of the global financial crisis, online holiday retail sales in the U.S. grew just five percent. Forrester defines the holiday shopping season as months of November and December.

Consumers in the U.S. prefer email marketing to direct mail, social media and telemarketing, according to a new survey by smartFOCUS.

When asked to rank their preferred ways of receiving marketing messages, the majority of respondents (62%) said email was their preferred channel of communication, followed by direct mail (23%), and social media (13%). The least popular way to be contacted was telemarketing, with 80 percent putting it at the bottom of their lists.

Microsoft has entered into a partnership with advertising start-up OpenX, focused on promoting each other’s products to their respective customer base.

Under the terms of the multiyear agreement, OpenX will expand its distribution of its technology for delivering ads on websites. In addition, OpenX will promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products.

Online video viewing reached another record in September, driven largely by TV season premieres, according to the latest report from comScore.

More than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Nearly 26 billion videos were viewed in September, as Google sites accounted for more than 40 percent of videos viewed online by Americans.

Google sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property in September with nearly 10.5 billion videos viewed. YouTube accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed at Google properties.

More than 15 million Germans should now have a little additional Yahoo in their lives.  Yahoo’s signed a mobile search deal with O2 Germany, and the American company’s search engine and a number of other services are getting promoted as a result.

Google launched AdSense for Feeds all the way back in 2005. Now the company is integrating it right into its Blogger property.

Call it "The Battle of the Bands and the Social Networks."  Following Weezer-MySpace and U2-YouTube match-ups in the past ten days, a third pairing will soon be added to the mix as a live Foo Fighters performance is scheduled to stream on Facebook this evening.

The global mobile phone market saw slight growth in the third quarter, according to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

Year-on-year growth remained negative, but improved from the first half of 2009. Mobile shipments totaled 287.1 million units worldwide in Q3, down from 6 percent from the previous year, but up 5.6 percent from the second quarter.

Earlier this month, StumbleUpon started showcasing their new homepage design, when they touted their “Google + Twitter” social search. Now they’ve gone through the rest of the site to make it more consistent (less customizable), easy to understand and streamlined.

The first Internet addresses with non-Latin characters will soon be online after today’s approval of the new Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.

Spammers may want to steer clear of Facebook in the future.  Late yesterday, a representative of the social network’s legal team announced that it was awarded $711 million in damages as a result of a case against Sanford "Spamford" Wallace.

Google announced that it is testing a new AdWords feature called AdWords Comparison Ads. These are ads that let users compare multiple offers from the same advertiser that are relevant to the user.

Google says the feature is part of its continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to users and help advertisers reach the people who are most interested in their products and services.

Update 2: It appears that Twitter is widely rolling out the "Lists" feature now.

Update: On the Twitter Status Blog, the company announced that it has expanded the availability of the "Lists" feature to 5% of its users. The company also says it will work its way up to a full rollout in the coming weeks.