Recent News

Snapdeal, in collaboration with Microsoft India, organized a two-day Hackathon that saw engineers jointly identify real-life business needs, develop technology concepts and in-house solutions. Continuous coding led to the development of winning ideas like dynamic machine-based personal assistant for sellers and message-based listing modifiers to ease the online selling process. Mr. Harish Vaidyanathan, ‎Lead – ISV Business at Microsoft India, said, “Technology is changing the face of the ecommerce industry in India. Omni-channel retailing is the new norm in the industry and powered by Cloud technologies, sellers are focusing on delivering differentiated customer experiences.”

Microsoft has acquired Talko, a second startup founded by entrepreneur Ray Ozzie. A mobile messaging app that was launched in fall 2014, Talko will join Skype. Talko’s dozen employees, who are in Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, will join Microsoft’s Skype team, without Ozzie. The idea behind the app, with voice, text and conferencing features, was to make it easier for teams “on-the-go” to communicate effortlessly with each other.

According to an article in the latest edition of Barron’s, Microsoft shares could rise 30% in the next 18 months, thanks to its cloud computing business. Many big investors believe that the company is worth far more than the average analyst price target of $57 a share.

Microsoft’s end of the year sale for the Xbox Store, Countdown, is starting from today. The sale is for both Xbox 360 and Xbox One owners, and promises for “up to 40 to 60 percent off” on digital games, with the discount stretching to more than 60 percent on some deals. There is more for Xbox Live Gold members, as they can avail another 10 percent on all purchases. It will continue into the first week of January.

Microsoft launched Microsoft Apps, a new application that gives users of Google’s operating system a one-stop shop to find apps like Word, Cortana and Bing. Users can download the app to their devices, browse and download any number of Microsoft apps. The app happens to be just a simple, straightforward directory of all the Android applications available from the company.

Microsoft has acquired Metanautix, a Palo Alto, California maker of business data tools. Its technology, designed to connect and analyze companies’ data across different database software and storage locations, will help Microsoft integrate it into its own data tools, including SQL Server and Cortana Analytics Suite.

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global security software solutions leader, announced the integration of Trend Micro Deep Security into the Microsoft Azure Security Center. Customers will now have access to a single view of all Azure subscriptions, live workload monitoring capabilities, and suggested remediation steps to address security issues. Nicole Herskowitz, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure said, “With the dynamic capabilities of Trend Micro Deep Security integrated in the Azure Security Center, customers will now be able to easily identify security and configuration issues, and quickly address them.”

Conversations will be more exciting for iOS and Android users now, thanks to Microsoft Translator. The company had incorporated smartwatches into its Android Microsoft Translator app earlier this year. The updated Android and iOS version of the app will now allow back and forth conversation: One person can speak into the phone, and the translation appears on the smartwatch, and vice versa. These conversational features will work for Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish languages.

Microsoft has released a new update for Xbox Fitness that does not require Kinect. With this, Xbox Fitness expands its reach to a much larger number of Xbox users. The company announced that the update will now let users experience the world’s best workouts on Xbox One. It would also allow them to download their purchased workouts.

Microsoft has announced that SmartScreen will now protect users from drive-by attacks in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11. These attacks are malicious web attacks that tend to start on trusted websites, targeting security vulnerabilities in commonly used software. If SmartScreen finds a website to be potentially malicious, users will see a red warning and the content won’t render in either Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10.