In the News

Microsoft’s Surface 3 has been on the market for over a year with no successor in sight, but it now looks like the lower-cost Windows tablet is on its way out eventually. The company has confirmed that it will stop producing the Surface 3 by the end of December. As it stands, the company says that stock is “limited.”

Microsoft has significantly upped the tally of U.S. government gag orders slapped on demands for customer information, according to court documents filed last week. In a revised complaint submitted to a Seattle federal court, Microsoft said that more than half of all government data demands were bound by a secrecy order that prevented the company from telling customers of its cloud-based services that authorities had asked it to hand over their information.

Three vendors, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, have won a key U.S. government authorization that allows federal agencies to put highly sensitive data on their cloud-computing services. The AWS GovCloud, Microsoft’s Azure GovCloud, and CSRA’s ARC-P IaaS have received provisional authority to offer services under the high baseline of the government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a set of security standards for cloud services.

Microsoft announced the list of 35 teams that will go to Seattle to compete for the Imagine Cup 2016 after making in the World finals. The Imagine Cup consists of five competitions including the software design competition and four challenges. Axe Julius, a team from India, winners of the Innovation Category at the National Finals held in April 2016 has made it to the World Finals. The team includes Adish Jain, Akshay Kumar Gupta, Akshit Sharma and Harv Jasuja. Their project aims to revolutionize the way eBooks are distributed which benefits both the publishers and the reader.

The Xbox One Scorpio, when it was announced at E3, appeared truly astounding. As Microsoft rattled off the specs for the console, it became clear that they had managed to build a beast of a machine. It would be the most powerful console ever, they promised, when it launched in 2017. Aaron Greenberg, Marketing Lead for first and third party titles for Microsoft, said, “We’re going to build a box, we’re going to build a beast of a box that will be 6TFLOPs of power that will be able to deliver true 4K games, and be able to do high fidelity VR, in the living room, on a console.”

Kicking off on July 5th, the Microsoft Flagship Store in New York will host a free series of unique summer camp experiences called “Be an Inventor with littleBits”. This will be part of Microsoft Stores YouthSpark camps taking place throughout July and August in their New York retail location. The free four-day maker camps at the Microsoft Flagship Store located at 677 Fifth Ave. in New York will take place throughout July and August and will allow kids to explore their creativity through littleBits, a platform of easy to use electronic building blocks.

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, announced a relationship with Microsoft to integrate its most widely used product lines with Microsoft’s Office 365. The integration makes it easier for students and researchers to download, email, share, and access their research content from anywhere using familiar tools. The products include All Gale In Context resources, Gale Researcher, Infotrac including Powersearch, Gale ebooks on GVRL, Contemporary Authors Online, LitFinder, MLA International Bibliography and more.

Microsoft’s Project Premonition is designed to assist entomologists to track mosquitoes that spread deadly diseases like Dengue fever, Chikungunya, West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis and Zika. To gather all this information, the traps use two small, battery-powered microprocessors, which gather data that can then be wirelessly downloaded and sent to the cloud. The latest advances in machine learning are also utilized for insights. “We’ll have a plethora of data we never had before about the behavior of the insects,” said Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft researcher who is leading Project Premonition.

As Microsoft hurtles towards the release of its major Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the company has introduced a tool that’s supposed to help PC owners resolve problems with activating the operating system on their computers. The new Activation Troubleshooter should make it easier for people to reactivate their computers after changing hardware, such as swapping out their motherboard or hard drive. Using the Activation Troubleshooter, users can associate a digital Windows 10 license with their Microsoft account. After that, they can change out hardware on their PC and re-activate Windows with the license that they associated with their account.

‘Mafia III’ is going to release on 7 October 2016, on Xbox One. Mafia III’s Family Kick Back trailer shows off the exclusive pre order onuses for the game that users can get their hands on. The Family Kick Back pre order bonus comes with ‘gifts’ to kick start criminal empire. The variety in weapons will help cater to three different play styles to give a little freedom in how users want to dispose of those who get in way.