Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft has announced that it would begin offering advertising inventory on Skype in India. Speaking to BestMediaInfo, Sonia Pandey, Partner Sales Lead – India, Advertising and Online, Microsoft, said, “Skype as an engagement platform for people, in terms of sharing their opinions and moments, can be a really powerful tool.”

A middle-aged Patiala housewife, running a ‘bottoms’ shop in Hyderabad, earlier sold the products mostly based on word-of-mouth advertisement. Her nine-year-old son Kuljot Singh has now built a site for her using Microsoft’s Azure offerings and helped expanded her market across the country – with the launch of her ‘e-commerce’ window. He accomplished it after listening to experts talking about the cloud and the fast-changing technology landscape at the two-day Microsoft Azure Conference in Pune last week.

Microsoft has expanded relationship with Polycom, which plans to deliver a new series of video collaboration solutions purpose-built for Skype for Business called Polycom RoundTable. This is an affordable and easy-to-use video solution for huddle rooms that will allow small to midsized businesses (SMB) and teams with Skype for Business and Microsoft Lync 2013.

Microsoft’s Annual CIO Summits represent the most exclusive gatherings of the world’s leading CIOs as they explore the next wave of enterprise technology. At the heart of this year’s Summits was the Cloud and SaaS delivery models, showcasing the value of the Microsoft Cloud for the modern enterprise. This year, Microsoft extended a speaker invitation to BrightStarr CEO, Jon Parker, to showcase the company’s Unily product.

Microsoft announced that its Xbox Music service has been integrated with the company’s cloud storage service, OneDrive. Any music file – be it mp3, m4a, or wma – can be accessed via the Music folder on OneDrive. The music file is playable on the Web or the Xbox Music app on Windows 8.1, Windows Phone 8.1, Xbox 360, and Xbox One for free – no Music Pass required.

Advaiya marked its presence in the Symposium on Project Management Practices 2015, organized by FICCI in partnership with PMI at theFICCI auditorium in Delhi. The symposium was organized to submit recommendations towards leveraging the science and art of project management for ‘Make in India’ combined with a supporting eco-system. Advaiya participated as a Microsoft EPM Partner in this event and represented Microsoft booth.

Microsoft has just made the Lumia 430 official. The smartphone is priced at $70 (approximately Rs 4,500), and the company has announced that it is coming to India next month. At this price tag, this is the cheapest Lumia smartphone. The Lumia 430 features a 4-inch WVGA (800×480 pixels) LCD display, and is powered by a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 200 dual-core processor paired with 1GB RAM.

Microsoft has launched a Cloud Accelerator Program to boost cloud adoption among the government organizations and the BFSI segment in India. The announcement made at the 2015 Microsoft Azure Conference, is in sync with the company’s announcement to offer Azure and Office365 services from local data centers by end of 2015. The company has already on-boarded 15 channel partners including HCL, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, and plans to enable 10,000 SMBs from 250 cities across the country to the cloud.

As part of its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy, Microsoft has spent close to $4.5 billion in setting up 19 data centres across the globe, Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman, Microsoft India, said. Three are in India and will be operational by the end of 2015, he added, while talking about cloud adoption, the need to push mobile handset numbers and the coming Windows 10.

In a move that helps solidify Microsoft’s attempt at being taken seriously by PC gamers, the company is partnering with Tencent to bring popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game League of Legends (LoL) to the Windows 10 store. This was announced on the company’s blog.