In the News

Microsoft has announced that its Upgrade Your World initiative will start in India. As part of the initiative, the company will partner 10 NGOs in India, and support them with a donation of $50,000 each and technical support from Microsoft, apart from varied services and promotional activities. For now, five non-profit organisations have been chosen, namely Aga Khan Rural Support Program, Enable India, Magic Bus, Smile Foundation, and Udayan Care.

NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group, announced today it will greatly expand Microsoft Dynamics AX on Enterprise Cloud, the cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution provided on NTT Com’s Enterprise Cloud service. New features will be available by October 1 and include additional templates for five types of industries/purposes, strengthened support for deployment in 12 Asian countries/regions, and compatibility with hybrid clouds.

Amazon and Microsoft just won a huge contract with the FAA, led by IT consultant CSC. This contract will consolidate the FCC’s data centers, moving data to both Amazon’s cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s cloud, Azure. CSC says the contract is worth $108 million out of the gate, and because its a long-term contract, could be worth as much as $1 billion over the next 10 years.

Among some of the best and the most trending apps with different features that people were looking for on a Smartphone is the Microsoft Translator. If you feel the Google translator is not helping you, here is a Microsoft version of the app you can try. It supports over 50 languages and synchronizes all your conversations between your phone and your smart watch. It has most of the features that the Google translator offers with large full screen translation cards to make it easy to display it to others.

Microsoft is finally bringing its much-awaited digital voice assistant Cortana to India. The software giant announced new regions including India, Japan, Australia, and Canada where the digital assistant will now be made available. The feature will be rolled out as an optional download to Insiders (early testers) on the Windows 10 Insider Preview builds 10532+.

At gaming festival Pax Prime 2015, Razer announced the Wildcat controller for the Xbox One. It’s a tournament-grade console controller with multi-function buttons. In addition to this, any button on the controller can be re-bound for easy access. It’s 25 percent lighter than other tournament-grade controllers and has an ergonomic shape that enhances responsiveness and an easy to access control panel that lets gamers create dedicated button profiles for different games on the fly.

A video game that fights tuberculosis by raising awareness about the disease and tests a mathematical model that predicts its spread has been developed. The video game, named Project Sanitarium, lets players battle tuberculosis, treating individual patients across the globe with limited resources. The game is powered by Microsoft mobile and cloud technology so players can receive real-time updates on the virtual patients they are treating.

Less than a month after rollout of Windows 10, Microsoft has shared that its new operating system had already been installed on 75 million devices. And, interestingly nearly 1.5 million of those systems are running Windows 10 Enterprise. Business customers have always been Microsoft’s biggest revenue generator. Enterprise uptake is critical to the success of Microsoft’s new operating platform, and if numbers are anything to go by then 1.5 million in just a month is encouraging.

India is aiming to build 100 smart cities in 5 years. This requires a comprehensive development in Economic Structure. All are important in improving the quality of life. Neeraj Gill, GM, Public Sector, Microsoft India said, “One of the things we need to look at is what essentially are the challenges which sit before the city planner in setting out build what is a smart city. According to me the major challenges are Time, Funding and Technology.”

Microsoft has announced a new app that makes taking screenshots on touch-enabled Windows 10 computers a lot easier. Microsoft Snip, available as beta app, presents an easier way to take screenshots, annotate them and even add audio to them. It is touch-friendly so it is easier to select than a desktop app and has full pen support so the users can write or draw directly on the screenshot.