In the News

New footage of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s campaign was showcased at San Diego Comic Con. Dubbed “Black Sky”, the mission sees Settlement Defense Front forces attacking the UNSA (players) during a relatively peaceful period. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is out on November 4th for Xbox One and PC. Those who pre-order the Legacy Edition or Digital Deluxe Edition will also receive Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered with 10 multiplayer maps from the base game.

Hangar 13’s Mafia 3 is looking better with each passing day, offering a throwback to a 1968-style culture of mob violence set in New Bordeaux. A new live-action trailer showcases not just the violence that protagonist Lincoln Clay doles out to those who crossed his friends but also highlights how it’s affecting the man. It will be releasing on October 7th for Xbox One and PC.

Microsoft has decided to make a few changes to its Account service and Skype account. The user is now required to sign into the Xbox Services at least one in the preceding 5 years to keep the gamertag associated with the account. This move has been taken to free up user tags that have not been used in a long time. Microsoft has added a prohibition on posting of terrorist content, in its Code of Conduct section. The company has also added a section for group messaging services, and Bing Places services.

Microsoft has added a host of new features to its OneDrive, allowing users to find and view photos easily. Keeping in mind the Pokémon mania, the Redmond based giant also added a Poké detector feature that makes it easier to find all Pokémon screenshots at one place. “When you have the OneDrive app on your phone and camera upload is turned on, the screenshots you take from the game are automatically saved to OneDrive and 150 Pokémon are identified for your searching and viewing pleasure,” said Douglas Pearce, Group Program Manager for the OneDrive team.

DNA storage is a sci-fi fantasy that might as well turn to reality. Karin Strauss and other scientists at Microsoft Research is working to convert digital information to DNA. They aim to help companies and institutions archive huge amounts of data for decades or centuries, at a time when the world is generating digital data faster than it can store it. The idea is once translation between two codes is made, strings of DNA can be custom-made to carry the new code, and hence the information that code contains.

Microsoft’s 3D Touch was reportedly being tested on a prototype device named McLaren, before the Redmond-based company decided to abandon its plans to focus on Windows 10 instead. Now Windows Central got their hands on with the device and has reviewed it. Nokia McLaren’s design puts it right in between Lumia 1020 and Lumia 925, according to Windows Central. It had a 5.5-inch display, and was powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 chipset, 2 GB RAM and 32GB internal storage.

Microsoft will preview a new service that lets enterprises mine data that Windows collects, including software usage statistics, to accelerate adoption of Windows 10. The service, called Upgrade Analytics, was announced by Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski, a company Program Manager, in a brief post to a company blog. Upgrade Analytics extracts data from individual PCs and produces a dashboard to give corporate IT a view on the state of their machines prior to a migration to Windows 10.

As part of a road map for its open source .Net Core runtime, Microsoft is planning more APIs, an upgrade to the F# language, and expanded processor and Linux support. “This release will bring back many of the missing APIs in .Net Core, including networking, serialization, data, and more. These APIs will be part of .Net Standard 2.0, which will be released at the same time, resulting in APIs being consistent across .Net Framework, .Net Core, and Xamarin,” said Microsoft’s Scott Hunter, a member of the .Net engineering team.

While Sonic fans will celebrate the series’ 25th anniversary with a 2D throwback game in Sonic Mania, the official Sonic Team is working on something new – “Project Sonic”. It is due for the 2017 holiday season on Xbox One and PC. Gamers can expect both a “Modern” and “Classic” Sonic to make an appearance.

Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC and Ryussi Technologies Private Ltd. announced a new partnership in business and technology solutions covering Microsoft’s File Access Server Protocols for the enterprise data storage market. Nick Psyhogeos, President of Microsoft Technology Licensing, said, “Microsoft’s patent collaboration with Ryussi Technologies will offer enhanced interoperability between Windows and non-Windows computers worldwide.”