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At a time when the government is working to build a disabled-friendly environment, leading brands here are following suit by making employment more inclusive. Individuals with hearing and speech impairment can now be seen taking orders and manning billing counters at different outlets of brands like KFC and Sagar Ratna, among others. Microsoft went disabled-friendly, with the establishment of their Disability Employee Resource Group in 2009. “Besides, the company also has an ‘Autism Hiring program’, which is a multiple-day hands on academy that focuses on work ability, team projects and skills assessment,” said Rohit Thakur, Head Human Resources, Microsoft India.

Cloud service provider 21Vianet Blue Cloud is participating in the second Microsoft Ignite China Conference, scheduled in Beijing. At the conference, an important milestone is being announced: the release of Power BI operated by 21Vianet in China. 21Vianet Blue Cloud is one of Microsoft’s key partners in China, helping the IT giant launch Microsoft Azure and Office 365 in the Chinese market. 21Vianet Blue Cloud has operated Microsoft Azure and Office 365 for Microsoft in China for over two years.

It looks like it will be raining games this December with the number of titles slated to release on Xbox One and Windows PC. Not only will we see The Last Guardian but also Mario’s iOS debut in Super Mario Run, along with another entry in the superlative Don Bradman Cricket series. Other notable releases include Steep, Dead Rising 4, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, Stardew Valley, Super Mario Maker and Yakuza 6.

Imagine, if a smartphone could detect when the driver is too tired and yawning, and send an alert to his supervisor. Or, if data transfer could be automatically scheduled in accordance with the strength of the signal to save battery. These are some areas of research Venkat Padmanabhan, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, is working on. He is one of the recipients of this year’s Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology. He won the award “for his pioneering work on indoor localization, smartphone-based sensing, and mobile communication, which has resulted in academic and industry-wide impact and technology transfer to Microsoft’s products,” says the citation.

Microsoft has added some new titles to its Xbox One Backwards Compatibility Library. These additions are just icing on the cake to some major games that have been added to the library earlier this month. In all, Microsoft has announced four more games, though none are of the stature of the Mass Effect games that were added earlier in November. The four new titles are The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ($15), Astropop ($10), Medal of Honor: Airbone ($15) and Trine 2 ($15).

Microsoft has announced some versions of the PowerPoint presentation will get some new features including real-time collaborative editing. This means that two or more people can pitch in at the same time into a document, all at once and the changes made will be seen and shared with everyone. MS Office corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer said in a blog post, “We are excited to announce that real-time co-authoring is now available in PowerPoint on Windows desktops, allowing you to see what others are typing as it happens on a given slide.”

Microsoft’s Garage Team has launched a new app for Android users called Clip Layer. The app essentially allows you to copy text from any screen, including ones that don’t allow selection and paste it in any third-party app of your choice. The Microsoft Clip Layer app is 1.64MB in size and is available via Google Play. It works like Universal Copy, but seems simpler to use. On installing Clip Layer, it takes over as assist trigger, which means long pressing Home Button will now trigger the app and not ‘Now on Tap’ as is the case on many Android smartphones.

Imagine a future where attacks on IoT infrastructure could bring down power supplies of entire cities, tamper the manufacturing process in a factory, stop a Tesla in the middle of the highway, overflow tanks in an oil rig, shut down a ventilator in ICU or even tamper cardiac implants. Peter Gartenberg, GM, Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft India says, “We secure the IoT device while it is being deployed in the wild by enabling device level provisioning and authentication and at the same time we ensure that all data transmitted between the IoT device and IoT hub is confidential and tamper-proof by facilitating a secure, encrypted channel for the data communication between the device and the cloud.”

Months after its first release, Microsoft is now set to transform Windows 10 into a full-fledged platform for Linux developers. The operating system is presently under development to receive some major tweaks to “comprehensibly” support development tools for Linux. “We are not done yet,” says Rich Turner, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft, in a recent video. “We have a long way to go yet until we can fully say that this thing is really comprehensibly compatible with most the tools that you want to use.”