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On the heels of an official Windows Phone release of the popular traffic service Waze, a report from the well-established Israeli paper the Globe states that Google will pick up the company for $1.3 billion USD.

Google, Facebook and even Apple were all rumored to be interested in buying the Israeli-based company, with Apple gaining the most from the purchase as they could continue to distance themselves from Google and their Maps. Evidently, due to the high price though, Apple never submitted an official offer.

Changes continue to impact the Windows Phone Youtube app at a fast pace. First came the official Youtube app recieved a major overhaul, then Google complained that the app violated YouTube's API and Terms of Service, then Microsoft updated the app to comply with some of Google's requests.

The latest chapter in this saga has the Youtube app being pulled from the Windows Phone Store and news of a collaboration between Microsoft and Google for a solution.

Microsoft has given in to Google's requests by updating its YouTube app for Windows Phone, but only to a degree. The company will be complying with some (but not all) of Google's terms of service. The two giants have been locked in a fist fight for some time regarding the official YouTube app for Windows Phone. It doesn't look like it'll be over anytime soon either. 

We've previously touched on Microsoft's new email service, Outlook.com. The service has replaced Hotmail and offers advanced functionality along with a refreshed user interface to better match Windows 8 and other products. As well as checking through email, users can also chat with Facebook and Skype contacts in the sidebar. Microsoft has now implemented support for Google Talk. 

I know what you're thinking, "Oh, not more patents!" Believe me, we wish we could simply forget about the business altogether and focus on technology and innovation, but we're talking about multiple corporations here. Microsoft is battling it out against Google and are currently in a strong position. This has been reinforced with ZTE becoming the 20th company to have taken a royalty-bearing Android license. 

Today the Munich Higher Regional Court rejected Google's (Motorola) appeal against Microsoft's injunction against Motorola, which was granted back in 2012. The patent in question is EP1304891 on "communicating multi-part messages between cellular devices using a standardized interface." The lower court's ruling has now been affirmed by the appeals court and so the injunction remains in place for the foreseeable future.

A group of companies led by Microsoft are calling on European authorities to launch an antitrust investigation into Google. The motion behind the move is the search giant's hold over the mobile industry with Google services on smartphones.

The group (called FairSearch) of 17, which includes Nokia and Oracle claim that Google is acting immorally by giving away the Android mobile operating system to OEM partners with the requirement for its software and service applications (Google Maps, YouTube, etc.) to be installed and prominently displayed. 

The past few months we’ve seen official apps slowly trickle into the Windows Phone Store. And for those services (cough YouTube, cough Instagram) that don’t provide an official app, third party developers have stepped in to provide incredible applications.

Sometimes doing a job so good it’s hard to see what companies can do better (Metrotube is a great example of this). Unfortunately, most apps require workarounds to function properly and can easily be broken by a change server side to all these apps. Right now users might experience some issues with MetroTalk and GVoice because of some authentication issues.

Nokia has made an intellectual property rights declaration to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) with respect to Google's VP8 data format and decoding guide, listing 64 granted patents and 22 pending patent applications. VP8 is Google's dream to create a royalty-free codec, but it's reportedly not open standard and Nokia is having none of it (to see why, check quote below). The company is already seeking injunctions against HTC in Germany over two VP8 patents.

Google, like Microsoft, is a company in transition. This can be evidenced today by their entering into the “high end” Ultrabook market with their new Chromebook Pixel. It’s an odd move not because the hardware is not nice (it is) but the pricing: $1299 (32GB) $1449 (LTE, 64GB).

For a company that prides itself on 'free' it’s a different approach from the previous Chromebook strategy of low-cost devices.. To quote iMore’s Rene Ritchie “When did Google become Apple?”.

The other question is how does it stack up against Microsoft’s Surface Pro? We’ll take a look to see how things stand and if Google is making the right move here.