During his keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, this morning, RIM (RIMM) co-CEO Mike Lazaridis demonstrated the forthcoming browser, which is based on the same WebKit rendering engine used by the iPhone and phones based on Google’s (GOOG) Android OS. Slated for release sometime later this year, the browser is allegedly more network-efficient than its rivals and handles AJAX, CSS and HTML5 with ease.

Indeed, Lazaridis said it scored 100 percent on the Acid 3 test for Web rendering. Seems RIM’s acquisition of browser-design firm Torch Mobile last year was a wise one–albeit late. Lazaridis also said the browser will be available sometime later this year. Below, two video demos.

Earlier today, BoomTown posted about a visit this morning from a passel of top Microsoft search execs rolling into downtown San Francisco to show off even more new features for Bing.

I am here, but the donuts are not. Um, Google always has organic donuts!

In any case, the lineup included: Satya Nadella, SVP for research and development for the Online Services Division; Harry Shum, a corporate VP who is leading core search development; and Brian MacDonald, corporate VP for Core Search Program Management.

As I previously wrote:

“The rolling-stone-gathers-no-moss team at the software giant–which has been seeing some promising progress in its quest to raise its search market share with its snappy new service–has announced an ongoing series of features since Bing was launched earlier this year.”

It’s 10:07 am PT and I await new wisdom from Microsoft (MSFT).

10:10 am: Nadella, the point man on Bing technology, begins.

He kicks off the show with some stats and a main point: Microsoft’s search share has, as his first slide reads: “Still a long way to go.”

At 9.9 percent versus Google’s (GOOG) share of more than 70 percent, Nadella is correct. But that is up from eight percent in a short time, so not bad.

Unique monthly visitors are also up from 71.7 million to 83.3 million. And perception, which was low, is now 48 percent.

In other words, more consumers seem to know what Bing is.

Personally, if I were Microsoft, I would declare victory and quit now!

10:19 am: A demo dude arrives to show “task” pages, which cluster around intent of searchers.

These are cool, and he’s showing a John Mayer page, which includes concerts and more. I hate that whiny singing dude, demo dude. He was mean to Jennifer Aniston, so he is dead to me.

Phew, the demo dude moves on to Miami. I love Miami. Trying to gauge intent, there is a slideshow available, better weather (rainy but 82 degrees!) and flight info. Plus no John Mayer!

Next, demo dude does movies. He shows times for the freaky “Paranormal Activity” and then offers hi-def trailers. Demo dude’s wife wants him to see it. I advise against it, unless he wants to be looking under the bed for the rest of his life.

Now the cheeky Softies, showing off how good Bing’s info is about Apple, (AAPL); display financial info and even the customer service number. I contemplate ordering a Mac.

This is followed by moves through universities and diseases (with related drug cards).

10:30 am: The demo dude moves on to an early look-see of Bing’s its upcoming Facebook deployment, using its already-announced Visual Search.

It’s apparently going to be very easy to be a stalker on Bing!

On to Twitter, with access to tweets in a variety of ways, from the most tweeted to most popular. Ashton Kutcher pops up like an inevitable Twitter weed, of course.

Nadella comes back and explains that this is being done to “browse to your intent.”

And now it is time for a mobile search update.

Guess what? Intent and search completion in a mobile context is time-sensitive! Who knew?

Actually, I did know and so did the whole world. Here is my typical mobile search: “Where the *&%# is that restaurant/kid party/gas station?”

10:38 am: A new demo dude (let’s call him demo dude #2) is showing off the recent mobile app for Bing, which came out a few weeks ago.

Lots of maps, although he says, “it’s more than just finding something on a map.”

Demo dude #2 types a “T,” which stands for AT&T, and stock info pops up.

He talks into the phone now for weather in Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft has its HQ. Cold and rainy! Which is a shocker for the Seattle area this time of year.

Demo dude #2 does movies and sports, showing a lot of what is on the Web. This is not much different than many mobile apps, but it works nicely.

Nadella seems to be promising an iPhone app soon too, noting that Microsoft will have them for all platforms, but he does not say it outright.

10:47 am: Now, Nadella is onto spatial search, which I like to call “oooh-that’s-pretty search.”

Therefore, we need a third demo dude. Demo dude #3 has a beard!

But he has a real new feature! A new mapping technology, powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight video technology, in beta within minutes. You can see it in action here.

It includes a Google competitor that has been called “streetside” before, with several new twists, which demo dude #3 is calling a “mash-in” (compared to a mashup, which is done a lot with Google by third-party folks).

The demo appears very seamless in comparison, using 3-D modeling and photorealism by integrating its Photosynth research work.

He shows a cool look at a museum and then the French American International School in San Francisco.

In this demo, demo dude #3 was looking at restaurants, which shows reviews and also the whole scene around it, including info on the parking garage you can see.

There is now a Map App gallery, most of which made by Microsoft right now.

11:07 am: A Twitter dude is brought up to show how the microblogger is part of this new mapping stuff from Microsoft, which he calls an “ecosystem.”

Using new geolocating tools on the microblogging service, it shows all kinds of geospatial information of tweets.

Twitter recently signed a data-mining deal with Microsoft, as well as Google.

So, it looks like Microsoft and Google are really going to be duking it out in the online mapping of everyone’s lives. And I look forward to this fight and the eventuality that they will want to map my every move. Bing it on!

11:10 am: Nadella wraps up, essentially trying to keep differentiating Bing from Google.

“We do hundreds of experiments a day,” he says, releasing as many features as possible.

It’s a good stance for a lesser competitor to have: Bing, We Try Harder!

Big words for Microsoft: Intent versus query. Whole page versus blue links. Minimizing time versus task completing. Search hit-or-miss versus dialog.

11:16 am: Q&A!

A question about human versus technology in perfecting this intent goal.

MacDonald and Nadella note that humans are important, but Bing is built around the big computing systems that do this automatically.

Will the structured page be indexable? Meaning Google? No real answer! But I would love to see Microsoft go all Rupert Murdoch on the search giant!

Then comes a question about premium or “non-Google” content. Nadella avoids the question and instead focuses on the “scaffolding” the data.

“We’re not as focused on getting exclusive content,” he says flatly. Uh-oh, publishers! As I reported, Microsoft is not forking over the dough.

MacDonald also tries to stress that Google wants folks off its site and onto the query result and that Bing is focusing on delivering that result right.

Everything is not a command line, declares MacDonald.

On a question of openness and the need to use Microsoft Silverlight technology for some of the rich visual mapping, versus Ajax, Nadella points out the service is too small not to be. Good point!

But Microsoft execs, who often shove their tech right down consumers’ throats, are nearly apologetic about having to use Silverlight (except they add, of course, that it is better!).

Nadella gets another question about paying to de-index Google.

“There is no real intent here that is focused on getting a whole bunch of content that is de-indexed from Google,” he said.

Some more questions about Bing monetization (it had better make money!) and global share.

Since Google is cleaning the clocks of everyone even worse abroad, Bing is focusing on the U.S.

I ask about how the Yahoo (YHOO) deal is going. “Well!”

And while Yahoo seems to be losing some search share to Microsoft, Nadella said his company would provide any “core” technology Yahoo wants to use given that Microsoft will be providing the search platform.

It would have been nice if Yahoo search had done this itself, of course, but Nadella said Yahoo could use the mapping and even task pages.

This morning, the research and development company filed suit against nearly two dozen companies, accusing them of violating two of its patents–U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, the same one Microsoft allegedly ran afoul of, and No. 7,599,985, an extension of the 906 patent that covers embedded apps using AJAX. Among the companies named in the suit: Adobe (ADBE), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), eBay (EBAY), Google (GOOG)–including YouTube–Sun (JAVA) and Yahoo (YHOO).

“All we want is what’s fair,” Eolas Chairman Dr. Michael Doyle said in a statement. “We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else’s innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair.”

Sadly, “what’s fair” in this case threatens the very fabric of the Web, as Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web argued back in 2003 when Eolas was pursuing Microsoft (MSFT). “The ’906 patent will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web,” Berners-Lee said in an appeal to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “[It] is a substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web.”

The move, to be announced internally later today, is not a big surprise, even though Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra in the fall of 2007.

Dharmaraj (pictured here) had previously stepped back from day-to-day leadership at the Yahoo communications and communities division, which is run by former Zimbra President and CTO Scott Dietzen.

But the departure of an innovative entrepreneur like Dharmaraj–although typical when big companies buy start-ups–is never a good thing, given that it’s more important than ever to keep innovative leaders at Yahoo.

New CEO Carol Bartz will have to tap internal leadership if she hopes to turn Yahoo (YHOO) into the kind of fresh opportunity she said it could be when she was hired earlier this month.

Yahoo introduced new email services recently, based on some of Zimbra’s technologies and concepts.

That has been important, since Yahoo Mail has always been a company bright spot and has remained the bigger provider of Web email to general consumers.

But most agree that Yahoo has allowed the Google (GOOG) mail offering, Gmail, to suck up all the oxygen in the room with more flashy features like threading of conversations while not serving up a strong response quickly enough in an arena Yahoo pioneered.

Zimbra vaulted its effort at differentiation from the hyped Google offering forward more quickly.

More importantly, it has strengthened Yahoo’s ability to make online email act more like a computer program than a Web page, which has been the main focus of late of Yahoo, Google, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and Windows Live Hotmail from Microsoft (MSFT).

In addition, since Zimbra was designed with flexible and open Ajax programming tools, it made it easy for third-party developers to make many other applications that jack innovation from the outside, making the communications platform the center of the Web experience with video, search and other tools.

It’s not clear where Dharmaraj is going, but here is a video interview I did with him last year after Yahoo bought Zimbra:

In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.

At first, the beta–current users can register to try it here–will take place in the United States, Brazil, India, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–that will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.

It is also Yahoo’s first attempt at leveraging and integrating technology from its $350 million acquisition of open-source email and calendaring company Zimbra just over a year ago.

And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.

That lack of innovation has resulted in major inroads in recent years by newer entrants like Google, whose calendar launched with more modern features, like color-coding, easy sharing and drag-and-drop functionality.

With its renovation, which is based on open standards, the updated calendar from Yahoo (YHOO) now has these kinds of features and also works more seamlessly with Yahoo’s powerful email product, Yahoo! Mail, which has 278 million users.

The new Yahoo calendar is built on the Zimbra platform, which uses Ajax functionality in its online calendars and iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV3 standards.

That makes it interoperable with other online calendar services, including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Time Warner’s AOL and Google.

One of the cooler features is the ability to zoom-in and zoom-out from a monthly wall calendar view to a single event.

In addition, Yahoo’s new calendar can integrate pictures from its Flickr photo community and also has a “to-do” list.

As the beta is rolled out further in the coming months, Yahoo will add additional synching and event discovery features.

I talked about all this today with Yahoo SVP Scott Dietzen, who came to the company with the Zimbra acquisition and now is in charge of all communications products at Yahoo.

Here is the video interview I did with him:

And here are the screenshots of the new calendar, along with one of the old calendar, for comparison (click on images to make them larger):

The old main Yahoo calendar

The new main Yahoo calendar

The “zoom” feature

The integration with Flickr

The Upcoming.org integration

Why the sudden change? The increasing popularity of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which allows a Web site to refresh content without reloading an entire page, demanded it. “It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,” said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings. “Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full-page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, ‘How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?’ “

Yeah, that or how do I inflate my page views and capitalize on the resulting publicity.

Anyway … one possible result of Nielsen’s adoption of time onsite as its primary metric of audience measurement will be a decline in rank for Google. After all, no one really spends much time on the site. We visit, conduct our search, and then we’re off. That said, the company could probably care less about such things. If Google has taught us anything, it’s that the most meaningful metric for success on the Web is not page views, but profitability.