In the News

Earlier in the month, Microsoft revealed that it is testing a new wireless chip for the Xbox One for FCC approval. At the time it was speculated that this could be for a slimmed down version of the Xbox One or a new iteration. A report on Thurrot.com lends credence to this discovery, along with another more recent one that states the Xbox One Slim, or Xbox One II as its being nicknamed, has been in mass production since February 2016.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave a keynote speech at Hannover Messe, a vital conference for industrial technology, and talked about his vision for the next generation of technology. His vision is that of the Internet of Things, where all kinds of inanimate things become connected and smart. Nadella said, “The very thing that you produce, that you manufacture, for the first time is connected to the web of activity around it. It’s not just the connection with everything, it’s the ability to reason about that activity, that data that’s being generated, continuously.”

Microsoft artificial intelligence guru, Eric Horvitz, has received another award for making computers smarter. Horvitz, Managing Director of Microsoft’s Redmond research lab, received the prestigious ACM — AAAI Allen Newell award for his work building tools that help computers better understand and react to human intent.

Microsoft Corporation and Funai Electric Co. Ltd., announced their successful partnership with the renewal of a patent cross-licensing agreement covering a range of consumer audio-video products. Nick Psyhogeos, President, Microsoft Technology Licensing, said, “Microsoft and Funai Electric will continue to benefit from each other’s innovations in building enhanced experiences for our customers. This cross-licensing agreement is another example of the advantages of an IP-led economy, encouraging product interoperability and accelerating research and development advances across companies.”

Microsoft armed Windows Insiders with a new technique to help bash bugs when it rolled out its Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14332. The Redmond giant is allowing Windows Insiders to tackle the bugs in the sequence and style that comes naturally to them, rather than laying out the steps to access a feature or scenario. With this open-ended approach to bug-bashing, Microsoft will likely receive a wider range of bug reports.

Bsquare announced that it has extended the terms of its distribution agreement for Microsoft Windows Embedded, including IoT products such as Windows 10 IoT. This agreement, which maintains a longstanding relationship between the companies, enables Bsquare to continue providing Microsoft Windows IoT to its OEM customers as well as to DataV IoT customers that require a robust embedded OS.

Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis, announced Microsoft has agreed to purchase ten million long oligonucleotides from Twist Bioscience to encode digital data. Doug Carmean, Microsoft Partner Architect, Technology and Research organization, Microsoft, said, “As our digital data continues to expand exponentially, we need new methods for long-term, secure data storage. The initial test phase with Twist demonstrated that we could encode and recover 100 percent of the digital data from synthetic DNA. We’re still years away from a commercially- viable product, but our early tests with Twist demonstrate that in the future we’ll be able to substantially increase the density and durability of data storage.”

Microsoft has asserted that it is committed to the Windows 10 Mobile platform and is currently working on the next-generation products. Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President, Windows and Devices Group, Microsoft, said in an email, “I understand that you are hearing concerns from certain partners about Microsoft’s commitment to the mobile space. Let me be very clear: We are committed to deliver Windows 10 on mobile devices with small screen running ARM processors.”

Microsoft’s new business communication product is finally coming to the Mac after the company launched it for PC users last year. The company announced the first technical preview of Skype for Business for Mac. This provides users of Apple computers an easy way to connect to meetings they have scheduled through Microsoft’s professional audio and videoconferencing software.

The article presents a review of the ‘Gears of Wars 4’ game, available on Xbox One. The game runs extremely well, thanks to the improved hardware in the Xbox One. It did make some sacrifices in terms of textures to help ensure players get a smooth 60 fps multiplayer experience which makes a phenomenal difference to the Gears of War 4 multiplayer.