McAfee, Symantec accused of patent infringement

The firm's founder and chief executive officer is Nathan Myrhvold, the former chief innovation officer of Microsoft Corp. Since its founding in 2000, "Intellectual Ventures has purchased more than 30,000 patents" and "earned near $2 billion by licensing these patents," according to court papers.

Microsoft Corp. won a contract to provide Web-based e-mail and other services to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making headway in efforts to gain share in the growing market for cloud computing.

The federal agency will move 120,000 users to the company's Internet-based e-mail and conferencing software, Microsoft said. The company said it beat out Mountain View's Google and IBM for the deal, and the department confirmed it looked at all of the available competing options.

"Our greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google," Bartz said at an event sponsored by Bloomberg Businessweek in New York on Tuesday. "They're a hot site, nevertheless there's room for more than one of anything."

Bartz said that her company once weighed buying closely held Facebook for about $1 billion and that her acquisition strategy is to focus on companies that bring users, content, engineers and advertising research. Yahoo is adding features to keep from losing Web surfers to sites just as Facebook and Twitter that make it easier to interact with friends.

Related Topics: Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Internet, United States Department of Agriculture, Check Point, IBM, McAfee, Chief executive officer, Cloud computing