Author: Microsoft Stories

Windows Phone fans, we suggest you grab this one before it disappears. The phone is being sold for Rs 21,000 on Flipkart. There is one catch however, the Lumia 1020 is only available in the black option. Both yellow and white versions have been out of stock for quite some time now.

Microsoft Devices Group has tied up with Idea Cellular to allow the telco’s 34-million data users to purchase apps and pay for them through monthly bills or prepaid balances. Idea Cellular’s customers will be able to make the purchases from Microsoft’s Windows store. Partnerships where telcos team up with app stores may work better in India where the credit card adoption and use for making payments over mobile is far less than net banking or debit card usage.

With optimism surrounding the economy and organizations fighting for the best talent, a few cutting-edge practices promise to keep the fittest ahead in the race. HR heads from different sectors shared their idea of top trends in 2015. Rohit Thakur, HR Head at Microsoft India, said, “With the growing proliferation of data analytics in the corporate world, many organizations are using reliable data to make strategic decisions. One key trend we see is enterprises leveraging HR analytics for measuring productivity and employee effectiveness. Intuitive technologies based on analytics are enabling HR teams to make more informed and accurate decisions in a shorter amount of time, which is why we will see continue to see this trend grow at an accelerated pace.”

Microsoft rings in New Year by rolling out new enhancements to its Azure cloud computing platform. The company has announced larger, high-performance virtual machines, a Key Vault for secure storage of customer encryption keys, and availability of Docker images for customers to use on Azure. Today marks another milestone of the Microsoft Azure integration with Docker container technology and ecosystem with a fully integrated Docker engine on an Ubuntu image, available in the Azure Marketplace,” said Corey Sanders, director of program management, Azure, in a blogpost.

Microsoft’s Bing now shows users a list of bestselling books when they use certain search terms. The books shown in the carousel added on top of search results are picked up from the New York Times Best Sellers list, and comprise business books, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. Users can search for terms like ‘best-selling fiction’, ‘nonfiction best-sellers’, ‘best-selling kids’ books’, and ‘current times best business books’ for the results to show.

Microsoft’s White Space tech may not sound fancy like Google’s Internet beaming balloons or Facebook’s Internet Drones but certainly has the potential to pave way for wider and affordable Internet connectivity, ultimately help realize Digital India goal. “Low frequency spectrum which is also known as TV White Space –found between spectrum bands used for TV transmission – is a natural resource available to the Government. Microsoft Research has developed a technology to utilize this largely unutilized spectrum to provide cheap connectivity,” says Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft Corporate India Pvt.

The wide-angle 5MP front-facing camera of the Lumia 730 will give about-to-be married couple the best frames, angles to capture all their wedding frenzy and moments of their special day captured in selfies, giving them the perfect #selfieshaadi. Couples from all over India can send photo entries and after registering on the Microsoft Wedmegood page.

Microsoft will soon enter the state’s classrooms to spread awareness about one-horned rhinos among teachers and students.The global IT giant has selected “My Horn My Life”, a project prepared by Kendriya Vidyalaya art teacher Anutosh Deb, among 30 projects from the country for the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (MIEE) programme-2015. The MIEE programme aims at encouraging teachers to use information and communications technology (ICT) tools to create projects for global classroom transactions.

ING Bank is a global financial services brand offering a range of banking and insurance services in over fifty countries. They chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM to give their sales, marketing and branch personnel a holistic view of their customer interactions enabling them to take advantage of cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Microsoft announced the release Sway, an app that lets users make interactive and easily shareable projects, in India and several other nations where English is an official language. Sway is an online presentation tool that helps people create web-based canvas to jot down ideas ad share them with friends with the least amount of effort. Sway was initially rolled out in New Zealand, but is now rolling out in countries like India, Australia, Canada and many others. Sway is available for only iPhones as of now.