According to BBC News, Microsoft is paying $8.5 billion to acquire Skype. It’s unclear why Microsoft is so interested in Skype, whose growth has been stagnant over the past few years, but BBC news business editor Tim Weber speculates that Microsoft could have plans to integrate the technology into the Xbox Kinect and Windows 7 phones.

Now that Blackberry has confirmed they will use Microsoft’s “Bing” as their default search engine on their phones, it seems Microsoft is poised to gain larger share of the mobile market.

In other Microsoft news, the company’s cloud-based building and hosting platform known as “Windows Azure” has released an iOS toolkit, making it easy for iOS developers to integrate the service with Apple products; an Android toolkit is also in the works.