Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft is lending a hand to ten startups working in the highly technical realm of Machine Learning. The company had selected these startups out of 720 applicants to participate in a four-month accelerator in and around Seattle. Technical accelerators are designed to help new companies get off to a running start, offering guidance, networking and funding. The startups range from an artificial-intelligence-powered doctor bot to a university recruiting tool. Hanan Lavy, Director, Microsoft’s Seattle accelerator, said, “We see machine learning popping up all over the place, all sorts of (industries), from DNA sequencing to financial applications.”

Jugnoo, an auto rickshaw aggregator app, operational in 22 cities across the country has recently launched its App on the Windows Phone store. With it, Windows phone users will be able to book their Jugnoo ride with a single click. The aim is to address the travelling woes of commuters by making auto rickshaws available with shortest lead time at minimal cost. The Jugnoo App lets users track their booking and location status, view the entire Jugnoo fleet and use both cash and their personal Jugnoo digital wallet.

Microsoft has come up with an array of technology innovations across its products and service portfolio to promote Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project, Digital India. Along with promoting local languages, Microsoft has revisited key breakthroughs that have helped create economic opportunities, build IT skills, enhance education outcomes, and sustain India’s local language and culture. India, one of the world’s largest digital economies, has an extremely high level of linguistic diversity. Mr Alok Lall, Director, Apps and Services Marketing, Microsoft said, “With Project Bhasha, we are accelerating Hindi language computing in India wherein, Microsoft is primarily focusing its efforts in three key areas: Product localization, Government collaboration, Academia & Developer.”

Sea of Thieves, Rare’s first new non Kinect game in almost a decade, is set to launch later this year. Microsoft’s Aaron Greenburg recently shared some information on the colorful, lively looking pirates themed MMO, “So I get on the ship and I run around and start hitting him with a fish and he’s like ‘What are you doing? There’s water down below. We’ve got to raise the anchor…’ So he starts putting me to work,” he added saying, “It’s just fun. So much fun.”

Microsoft’s Azure Stack private and hybrid cloud platform is what enterprises are asking for. Microsoft can turn Windows Server into a private and hybrid cloud platform that’s in sync with its Azure cloud in a way no other cloud provider can match, addressing worries about regulation and data sovereignty, or latency problems working against data on their own servers. This addresses the demand of the customers who want a way to be able to build technology quickly enough to respond to market opportunities. Azure is growing fast, with over 90,000 new subscribers a month.

Microsoft is releasing developer versions of its Augmented Reality headset, HoloLens in the first quarter of 2016. With this release, HoloLens will transform a simple pastime like watching sports (specifically, American Football) into an interactive dream. The video shows how HoloLens is used to watch the game on an ultra-large screen, looking down on team movements from a birds-eye view hologram of the stadium on the coffee table. It even shows players’ holograms in the room, along with play-by-play analysis of their performance.

Since February 2014, when Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft, he has changed the way the company is perceived by all and sundry. He changed the company’s attention to cloud-based software platform, making Microsoft products and services available to all, bringing a more informal culture within the company and making some key shifts in the company that the investors seem to appreciate. The 5 most significant ways in which he has been able to achieve this transformation are – ‘Consumers first’ approach, reinvention of the company image, great contention with competitors, open source and Research matters (for future).

Microsoft India’s ‘Project White Spaces’ aims to provide low-cost broadband connectivity to the country using the white spaces. The spaces or gaps between various frequency bands used by television companies for broadcast are called white spaces and they ensure that the signals do not interfere with one another. Microsoft aims to use this unused television spectrum to deliver low-cost Internet in India.

Microsoft accelerated efforts to expand the reach of Yammer, its work social network and compete better with other workplace collaboration tools. It announced that any organization with an Office 365 subscription will gain access to the service. To be rolled out to users in waves, it will be automatically activated allowing businesses to quickly spin up online communities for their workers.

Microsoft Corp. is all set to buy London-based smart-keyboard maker Swiftkey for about US$250 million. Founded in 2008, SwiftKey has been one of the most popular keyboard apps on iOS (launched in 2014) and Android (launched in 2010). The company recently launched an Android keyboard that uses a neural network instead of its standard algorithms when predicting words. This leads to speculations that Microsoft may be more interested in its research into artificial intelligence.