Author: Microsoft Stories

The Microsoft Research video, titled ‘Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction’, showcases how users can interact with a smartphone’s touchscreen display by simply hovering their fingers over it. The video shows how the Pre-Touch technology can intelligently understand the difference between similar gestures like swiping and selecting. The technology appears to use a variety of sensors to detect the position of the user’s hands as well as the way the smartphone is held.

Bharti Airtel has expanded its cloud service portfolio with the launch of Connexion. Airtel has also entered into a partnership with Microsoft for Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute. Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Networking, Microsoft Azure, said, “Enterprises are increasingly leveraging the power of cloud to empower their workforces and Microsoft is expanding its service for India and global customers. Our partnership with Airtel, the third largest global carrier, is a major step in this direction and we hope to bring in an integrated and seamless experience for our mutual customers,”.

Enterprises should have an easier time migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10 than they did the last go-round. The migration-to-10 process will likely take significantly less time than the upgrade to Windows 7, but not only because enterprises can reuse most of the same tools and policies. Other factors that point to an easier migration this time include improved application compatibility.

Microsoft’s report on cybersecurity threats around the world, revealed that about 18 percent of computers had encountered a virus or malware last year. This was down from 19 percent the previous year. But the rate of infections was far lower, says the report. Tim Rains, Director of Security, Microsoft, said, “Everyone’s paying attention to cybersecurity, and everyone understands the sense of urgency. There’s a recognition in the industry that having services that can be trusted and have security built into them is table stakes.”

Alteryx Inc., the leader in self-service data analytics, announced further product integration with Microsoft, to empower data analysts. Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director, Data Platform Marketing, Microsoft, said, “We have seen a growing number of analysts using in-database blending to speed up their time to insight. Now, more users can take advantage of this time to insight by using Alteryx to perform in-database blending in the Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse service. Combining the powers of Alteryx and Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse empowers analysts with even more scalability and performance in the cloud.”

HYPE Foundation, providing people with entrepreneurship mindset and start-up best practices, announced that it has joined hands with Microsoft and Saucony, to launch the first global platform in tech innovation for sports. The platform will include a global youth startups competition that will take place alongside the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The goal of this project is to create the world’s first wide-scale platform for groundbreaking innovation in sports, focusing on wearable accessories, broadcasting tech, apps for athletes, coaches and fans.

Microsoft is offering developers guidance on dealing with its .Net Framework programming model and compatibility issues around it. Specifically, the company advises developers to target newer versions of .Net Framework, but they shouldn’t retarget existing projects to the latest update unless absolutely necessary. Microsoft recently discontinued some versions of .Net framework. But targeting these frameworks while running on a new framework will continue to be supported as per the newer framework’s support policy. Applications that ran on .Net 4.0, for example, may need to run on version 4.6 after an upgrade to the framework.

Microsoft has reminded that the free promotion for Windows 10 upgrades is finishing soon. The software maker released Windows 10 as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1 on July 29th in 2015, and gave everyone a year to upgrade free of cost. Now the company has decided to stop the free updates from July 29, after which the full version will cost $ 119 (Rs 7923) or would be free on a new machine.

Microsoft has joined Ford in contributing to a $253 million investment round in Pivotal, a San Francisco cloud-computing company. It is unclear how much Microsoft paid into the round, which also included contributions from existing Pivotal Investors General Electric, EMC and its VMWare subsidiary. Pivotal develops a Web-based software platform on which other companies can build software tools.

According to Microsoft, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Palestinian territories, Bangladesh, and Nepal attract the highest rates of attempted malware attacks. Countries that attracted the fewest include Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Microsoft said in a new study, based on sensors in systems running Microsoft anti-malware software. Microsoft Manager Alex Weinert, said, “We look at north of 10 million attacks on identities every day.” Tim Rains, Director of Security, Microsoft revealed, that on an average, 240 days elapse between a security breach in a computer system and detection of that breach.