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Google said Tuesday it is working with airports in the U.S. as well as Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, Airport Marketing Income and others to provide free Wi-Fi as a "holiday gift" through January 15, 2010.

The free Wi-Fi is available in 47 airports, including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte. As a result of this project, Burbank and Seattle airports will begin offering airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

"We’re very happy to extend our Holiday Wi-Fi gift to the millions of people who will spend time in airports over the next few months," said Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google.

"We know that this is a very hectic travel season for people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little bit easier."

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 100 million people will pass through the participating airports between now and January 15, 2010. Travelers often have extra time on their hands after they pass through security for a variety of reasons, including bad weather.

A recent study by the Wi-Fi Alliance found 50 percent of business travelers take red-eye flights in order to be "reachable" during business hours, and the majority (82%) said that being connected via Wi-Fi would help solve that problem.

"Google gets this year’s Wi-Fi Santa award for sponsoring complimentary access in dozens of airports, both to the traveler’s and airport’s benefit," said Dave Hagan, president and CEO of Boingo Wireless.

"In addition to the obvious bonus holiday travelers will enjoy, sponsored access will increase overall Wi-Fi usage in the participating airports and help supplement the airport’s increasingly important non-airline incremental revenue."

In keeping with the spirit of the season, travelers who log on to networks of the participating airports will have the option to make a donation to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Google said it will match the donations made across all the networks up to $250,000, and the airport network that generates the highest amount per passenger by January 1 will receive $15,000 to donate to a local nonprofit of their choice.

In October, Google partnered with Virgin America to offer free in-flight WiFi to all passengers flying with the airline. Five of the airports participating in the program are also Virgin America destinations: Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego and Virgin America’s newest destination launching November 18, Fort Lauderdale.

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Earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hit a pessimistic note by saying that he expected to see IT spending growth, but not recovery.  Now, it seems that Microsoft is about to prove it’s still in recession mode, as rumors of imminent layoffs are circulating.

Todd Bishop wrote late last night (or early this morning, to those of us a few time zones east of Seattle and Redmond), "We’re hearing from unofficial but reliable sources tonight that Microsoft is poised to make additional job cuts this week . . ."

As for the size of the cuts, Bishop then continued, "This latest round of layoffs is expected to be noticeably smaller than the first two — numbering in the hundreds but totaling less than 1,000 overall."

Still, morale among Microsoft’s employees isn’t likely to get much of a boost as a result.  Since many analysts believed that both the economy and the company were doing better these days (the Dow’s risen 6.21 percent in the past three months, while Microsoft’s stock has gained a whopping 18.05 percent), they may have expected the era of layoffs to be over.

Perhaps Google’s Matt Cutts should extend to some Microsoft engineers the same job offers he lobbed in Yahoo’s direction.

UPDATE: The elimination of 800 jobs has been confirmed.

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The next version of Bing is quite impressive and will be released in the near future, according to a couple of Microsoft employees.  In fact, two of the corporation’s employees have indicated on Twitter that Bing 2.0 should come out within the next 20 (or maybe even 7) days.

Yesterday, Microsoft held a large employee meeting at a baseball stadium in Seattle.  Monte Enbysk, a senior editor of Microsoft Office Live, tweeted following a demo there, "Bing 2.0, out this month, has some exciting new features.  Imagine seeing maps plus pics from the neighborhood of a restaurant to try."

The tweet was later deleted, but Mary Jo Foley saw it, and you can view Twitter Search evidence of it below.

Sushil Choudhari, a software design engineer, also had something to say, stating that the "super impressive" Bing 2.0 will arrive next week.

So, assuming that this isn’t some sort of repeat of the Facebook/TechCrunch prank, a significant Bing update right around the figurative corner.  And considering that reviews of Bing in its current form have been pretty positive, it’s difficult not to wonder how close Bing 2.0 will come to the Google benchmark.