In the News

Microsoft is opening a 38,000 square foot outreach center in University City. This will be its first such facility in the Philadelphia area and the third nationwide. The Microsoft Innovation Center will open this summer at the 3711 Market St. headquarters building of the University City Science Center business incubator and research hub.

Microsoft and the R3 Consortium announced a strategic partnership that will accelerate the use of distributed ledger technologies. It is also known as block chain, among R3 member banks and global financial markets. Distributed ledger technologies enable enterprises and business network participants to complete financial transactions with greater speed, security, cost-efficiency and transparency relative to solutions currently used. “With intelligent, cloud-based technology, R3 and member banks will experiment and learn faster, accelerating distributed ledger technology deployment,” said Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President of global business development at Microsoft.

KPMG LLP and KPMG International announced new Microsoft offerings in data and analytics (D&A), cloud transformation and compliance (CTC), and customer relationship management (CRM). The partnership aims to help clients transform their businesses and accelerate growth in a trusted cloud environment. Ulrich Homann, Distinguished Architect, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft Corporation, said, “Over the past 12 months, we’ve made great progress in our expanded collaboration with KPMG. Around the globe, we’re successfully bringing together KPMG’s business transformation expertise with Microsoft’s industry-leading cloud technologies and business solutions to give companies the combined business and technological strengths they need to be successful.”

Toyota Motor Corporation is expanding a five-year-old partnership with Microsoft Corporation to develop new internet-connected vehicle services for owners and dealers. The automaker has established Toyota Connected, at its U.S. headquarters in Plano, Texas, to consolidate its existing connectivity services and serve as the company’s “data science” hub. The new wireless services will use Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure platform. Toyota launched its initial partnership with Microsoft in 2011.

The Telangana government has inked more than 28 memorandums of understanding with various companies, including Development Bank of Singapore, Cisco, Microsoft, YES Bank ahead of the new ICT policy 2016. The MoUs were inked in the presence of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and State IT Minister KT Rama Rao and Senior Cabinet colleagues and IT sector players and other industrialists.

Microsoft once again spoke, at the recent Build Developer Conference, about all the benefits of using its cloud technology when it comes to gaming. In order to show just how this tech works, the company showed off a new browser-based game called Age of Ascent. The game is currently in public Alpha and relies heavily on the Azure Cloud in order to facilitate the large number of players already trying the title out.

Windows 10 is making steady progress, according to the latest figures released by NetMarketShare. The OS bean counters found that Windows 10 now has a 14.15% share of the desktop market as of the end of March, compared to February’s figure of 12.82%. In January, Windows 10 had a share of 11.85%. In other words, Microsoft’s newest OS has made better progress across March with a 1.33% gain in the last month.

Microsoft Executive Vice President Qi Lu had an interesting pitch for developers: Build applications that use data from Microsoft Office. Lu, speaking at the company’s Build Developer Conference 2016, announced six new APIs to improve the Microsoft Graph, including one that allows developers to see when a group of users is available to meet. Microsoft also announced new Skype for Business mobile and web SDKs. It’s useful for companies wanting to build applications to connect people with one another through video chat.

Wacom officially announced that it will be working with Microsoft as it enters a new Universal Pen Framework initiative. Microsoft will now be licensing its Microsoft Pen protocol to Wacom, meaning that Wacom’s digital pen solutions will soon incorporate both Microsoft Pen and Wacom Active ESTM Pen protocols in the near future. Bryan Roper, Executive Demo Lead at Microsoft, who showcased Microsoft Ink’s capabilities, later put out a tweet stating that Wacom and Microsoft are even working on a pen that will work across a number of pen-enabled devices.

Microsoft’s new feature for Windows 10 will soon let Android phone users view their notifications and respond to text messages right from the desktop. The new feature was announced at a session at Microsoft Build Conference 2016. The feature will enable Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant app for Android, to communicate with Windows 10, relaying Android notifications like missed calls, text messages, and the like.