Author: Microsoft Stories

Desktop PC continues to be most popular corporate device among businesses, a reflection that mobile device adoption in the workplace is not yet mature, per Gartner. Gartner analysts expect that more employees will receive convertible laptops in the next three years, driven by the Windows 10 refresh that can enhance the user experience with touch-based input. Adding desktops and laptops (including convertible laptops) together, 75 per cent of workers will receive at least one PC-type device in mature countries, it added.

Comcept’s ReCore, the not-all-that-bad-but-not-all-that-good third person shooter platformer, has been confirmed to support high-dynamic range lighting or HDR on the Xbox One S in 2017. Xbox Studios GM Shannon Loftis noted on Twitter that the game will be patched for the same next year.

Microsoft-owned mobile keyboard firm SwiftKey on Monday launched the transliteration feature in Hindi and Gujarati languages. The company had been working on the phonetic typing or transliteration or multi-script typing for long, and it will let users type in English to form proper Hindi or Gujarati words. SwiftKey already offers keyboards in 22 Indian languages

Microsoft recently launched an app called Color Binoculars that uses the phone’s camera as a lens to help users with color blindness. “It’s an app that helps color blind people distinguish color combinations that they would normally have trouble telling apart,” says creator Tom Overton in a Microsoft blog. “For example, since I have difficulty distinguishing between red and green, our app makes red brighter and greens darker so that the difference is more obvious. It replaces difficult color combinations, like red and green, with more easily distinguishable combinations like pink and green.”

Microsoft launched WISE in 2014 to inspire women engineers to pursue rewarding careers in the field of software technology. “We have worked with partners who interacted in local and regional colleges to help the volunteers offer the students a strong platform that nurtures their technical capabilities and enhances their soft skills to be job-ready at the end of the programme,” told Charumathy Srinivasan, Partner Group Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft India Development Center. The idea stemmed from a group of women engineers at Microsoft India who wanted to help women engineering students carve out successful careers in technology.

GoDaddy’s India & Australia MD & Vice President, Rajiv Sodhi has resigned and would be heading to Microsoft starting December where he would be leading the Cloud and Server business. Sodhi is an old timer at Microsoft where he was earlier the Director, India SMB, Cloud and Software Sales. He had been at Microsoft between 2002 and 2012, when he quit to join GoDaddy.

In an opinion piece, Radhakrishnan Srikanth, Group Program Manager, AI and Research Division, Microsoft India Pvt Ltd, said, “Bots are now taking center stage. As these technologies evolve, the popular prediction is that conversations will be prevalent between people, digital assistants and bots. Given this, Microsoft is making available the Microsoft Bot Framework, a comprehensive offering that a developer can use to build and deploy high quality bots for their users. This framework along with associated API offerings from Microsoft will enable developers to take advantage of technologies like Machine Learning, Deep Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing, Adult and Offensive filtering, Image Processing etc., to enable new and custom bots which are not only conversational and intuitive, but also possess deep capabilities.”

Microsoft is planning on pushing the best, most high end specs into the console market ever- in fact, that seems to be the very point of the Scorpio. “Hey, I want the most power, I want the best experience possible,” and that’s what Project Scorpio is all about,’ Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg said in an interview with IGN. ‘It will be the most powerful console ever made. It will deliver 4K gaming to people in the living room on their TVs that they have not experienced before.’

Microsoft announced a completely revamped version of its painting app, simply named Paint 3D. Now the Redmond-based company has made the new version of its painting app available for use with its latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build. Paint 3D, put simply, allows users to make their paintings in 2D as well as 3D using various tools at their disposal. Even though the app doesn’t introduce a breakthrough technology, because of its simplicity and easy controls, it can be termed as a 3D painting tool meant for use by a wide range of users.

Microsoft has announced that it will now put its effort into doubling down its quantum computing research, in an aim to produce a scalable quantum computer using what is called, a topological qubit. Microsoft Executive Todd Holmdahl will lead the scientific and engineering effort to create scalable quantum hardware and software. He has also played a key role in the development of other products such as Xbox, Kinect and HoloLens. “I think we’re at an inflection point in which we are ready to go from research to engineering,” said Holmdahl, who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s quantum program.