Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft has named Moravia, Supplier of the Year in the large company category of the 2016 Microsoft Supplier Program Excellence Awards. The MSP selected Moravia for its innovative machine translation evaluation platform to improve supply-chain management and help Microsoft deploy machine translation. This year marks the third time Moravia has earned an MSP Excellence Award, and the first time to be honored as Supplier of the Year Large Company.

ValChoice, the first analytics company that lets consumers of insurance know which companies offer the best price, protection (claims payment) and service, announced that it has received a $120k Microsoft BizSpark Plus Award. Joshua Drew, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft, said, “ValChoice was a clear choice for the Microsoft BizSpark Plus award because of the unique technology platform the company has developed to bring industry-first transparency to the insurance industry. We look forward to further their goal of becoming a mainstream insurance rating service.”

Microsoft turned heads earlier this month when it announced its acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. It signified Redmond’s largest acquisition to date and the company’s ninth recorded deal exceeding $1 billion. As part of the deal, expected to close by year’s end, the professional social network will retain its name. It will remain an independent operation under the leadership of CEO Jeff Weiner, who will report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

At ISTE 2016 opening general session, the International Society for Technology in Education and Microsoft announced their plan to combine and expand a host of their world-class initiatives to ensure educators and school leaders around the world have access to school planning and professional development resources. Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Education, Microsoft, said, “Microsoft’s focus on supporting education transformation has great synergy with the work of ISTE. We are proud of the collaboration announced today and the opportunity we have together to empower students, educators and school leaders globally to achieve more.”

AI powered chat bot platform, ‘Yellow Messenger’, allows end users to search for products and services based on their location and past search behavior across its multiple services like cab booking, e-commerce purchases and mobile recharges. Incubated at Microsoft’s Bengaluru Accelerator, it is powered by the Microsoft’s open sourced Azure services and its Bot Framework. This framework enables the startup to create machine learning bots which would interact with users in a conversational way.

Microsoft’s Surface 3 has been on the market for over a year with no successor in sight, but it now looks like the lower-cost Windows tablet is on its way out eventually. The company has confirmed that it will stop producing the Surface 3 by the end of December. As it stands, the company says that stock is “limited.”

Microsoft has significantly upped the tally of U.S. government gag orders slapped on demands for customer information, according to court documents filed last week. In a revised complaint submitted to a Seattle federal court, Microsoft said that more than half of all government data demands were bound by a secrecy order that prevented the company from telling customers of its cloud-based services that authorities had asked it to hand over their information.

Three vendors, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, have won a key U.S. government authorization that allows federal agencies to put highly sensitive data on their cloud-computing services. The AWS GovCloud, Microsoft’s Azure GovCloud, and CSRA’s ARC-P IaaS have received provisional authority to offer services under the high baseline of the government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a set of security standards for cloud services.

Microsoft announced the list of 35 teams that will go to Seattle to compete for the Imagine Cup 2016 after making in the World finals. The Imagine Cup consists of five competitions including the software design competition and four challenges. Axe Julius, a team from India, winners of the Innovation Category at the National Finals held in April 2016 has made it to the World Finals. The team includes Adish Jain, Akshay Kumar Gupta, Akshit Sharma and Harv Jasuja. Their project aims to revolutionize the way eBooks are distributed which benefits both the publishers and the reader.

The Xbox One Scorpio, when it was announced at E3, appeared truly astounding. As Microsoft rattled off the specs for the console, it became clear that they had managed to build a beast of a machine. It would be the most powerful console ever, they promised, when it launched in 2017. Aaron Greenberg, Marketing Lead for first and third party titles for Microsoft, said, “We’re going to build a box, we’re going to build a beast of a box that will be 6TFLOPs of power that will be able to deliver true 4K games, and be able to do high fidelity VR, in the living room, on a console.”