In the News

Xbox One and Xbox 360 players can get their hands on Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch DLC for Crystal Dynamics’ Rise of the Tomb Raider. The DLC is available either with the $30 Season Pass or as a standalone purchase for $10. The Baba Yaga DLC sees Lara Croft exploring the wilderness of Siberia to discover a forbidden forest.

Box today unveiled three new integrations with Microsoft that enable seamless collaboration across devices and platforms. Box’s next-generation content management and collaboration platform now supports new integrations with Microsoft Office Online with real time co-authoring, Office for iOS and Outlook.com. “We designed the Cloud Storage Partner Program to make it easier for people, including Box customers, to work with Office documents no matter where they’re stored,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office.

ROBLOX expands the boundaries of user-generated gaming with its launch of ROBLOX for Xbox One on Microsoft’s Xbox Live. ROBLOX’s unique platform debut on Xbox One includes 15 user-created games, across 10 genres. ROBLOX will continuously unlock new titles on its Xbox app, ultimately providing unlimited access to the millions of ROBLOX experiences.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a set of deals to more tightly integrate services built by other software makers into its Office suite. People who store Office files on Box or Dropbox, along with two other popular online file storage and sharing services, will now be able to edit those documents at the same time as other users. Previously, that function was only available for Office documents stored on a Microsoft service.

Called News Pro, the app takes your LinkedIn and Facebook account info and turns around results based on your profession and interests. You can also choose other topics of interest, just like you can with Apple’s News app or Flipboard. As the name suggests, this app seems to be focussed on professionals who need to know everything about an industry or area of focus quickly.

In order to speed up their AI and speech recognition projects, researchers at Microsoft have developed a toolkit that uses deep neural networks and multiple graphics processing chips for quicker results. The company has now open sourced the Computational Networks Toolkit (CNTK) and made it available for anyone to use in their own work on GitHub. It’s not the first tech giant to release deep learning software for free; last November, Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning system that powered its Photos search functionality.

Microsoft is introducing a tool designed to smooth businesses’ move to the cloud. The company this week will roll out an early preview edition of “Azure Stack,” a set of software that allows businesses to use a common set of tools to manage programs running on their own servers, as well as on Microsoft’s data centers. The platform is designed to give developers and information technology managers the ability to use the Azure cloud-computing platform programming interface and tools to run their own data centers.

Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC and Olio Devices Inc. signed a patent licensing agreement covering wearable devices. Nick Psyhogeos, president of Microsoft Technology Licensing, said, “Mutually beneficial and collaborative patent licensing agreements like this one promote innovation and lead to better products and experiences for consumers.”

With the Type keyboard attachment and the Microsoft Surface Pen, this tablet gave us over 8 hours of battery life. On our test bench this tablet fared better than some of the mid to high end full time laptops. On PC Mark 7 it scored 4,773 points indicating very good performance and on 3D Mark Vantage it scored 5,362 points showcasing mediocre performance. Combined with the keyboard attachment the price goes over a lakh. However, when you compare it to the Apple iPad Pro (in India), the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 is still cheaper (with the stylus and keyboard) and has much more to offer with a brilliant Windows 10 OS.

Microsoft has updated its Office suite of apps on iOS with added features that make the most of newly introduced 3D Touch input method. With the update, Word, Excel and PowerPoint can be easily accessed via the ‘Peek’ and ‘Pop’ feature to launch these apps immediately or and open recent documents. 3D Touch integration also allows users to create or open documents, spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides straight from the home screen app icon.