Microsoft launched MSN China, a Chinese-language web portal, to tap deeper into the world's second-largest internet market.
The portal will be run through Shanghai MSN, a joint venture Microsoft established with government-operated Chinese firm Shanghai Alliance.
Microsoft has said the portal will offer more communication, information and content than available through the MSN services, such as Hotmail and Messenger, it already runs in China.
Yahoo and Google have already opened Chinese sites and established positions in the market. Microsoft's late entry, coupled with its strategy of working with relatively unknown partners, means it could face a tough time gaining traction, an analyst said.
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Smile for the e-mail: Yahoo is introducing a test version of a new service called PhotoMail that lets users insert up to 300 digital photographs into the body of an e-mail.
Senders simply drag and drop images that are stored anywhere on the computer's hard disk into the e-mail. Yahoo said that users can also add borders and captions to photos and can perform limited editing on them.
Other web-based e-mail services require users to send photos as attachments and there are often limits on how many attachments and how much data can be attached to an individual e-mail.
Yahoo's PhotoMail is the first such service to integrate and simplify its e-mail offering, its online photo storage and editing service and its image search function of more than 1.5 billion images.
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Digital dustbowl: It could take Canon up to two years before its chip-equipment business makes a full recovery amid tough competition from rivals Nikon and ASML Holding, the president of Canon said.
The comments come one month after Canon cut its 2005 target for shipments of steppers, multimillion-dollar machines used to etch circuitry onto semiconductors.
Intense price competition has pushed several digital camera makers into the red. Olympus and Pentax have both recently announced plans to slash jobs in their camera divisions to lower production costs.
Canon runs neck-and-neck with Sony for top spot in digital camera market share. The president of Canon said it was on track to hit its targets for a group operating profit of $1.23 billion on sales, up 10.7 percent from the same quarter last year.
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Mario's revenge: Nintendo's net profit more than doubled for the latest fiscal year, lifted by strong sales of its portable game player Nintendo DS and gains from foreign exchange fluctuations.
Nintendo said its mainline operations were supported by the debut of the Nintendo DS. Launched in Japan and the United States late last year and in Europe this March, combined sales of the "double screen" game player have climbed to 5.2 million units.
The instant success of the handheld Nintendo DS helped offset the slumping sales of Nintendo GameCube game consoles due to intense competition, the company said.
A favorable exchange rate also helped boost the value of the company's overseas earnings. Nintendo keeps a large share of its foreign earnings in overseas markets to take advantage of greater interest income than in Japan, where interest rates remain relatively low.
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Compiled by David Cohn. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
