In the News

Underscoring three bold ambitions for Microsoft, the tech giant’s India-born CEO Satya Nadella today said the company will focus on personal computing, reinvention of productivity and business process and building an intelligent cloud platform. Nadella, was addressing over 12,000 Microsoft partners, senior company executives, technology experts and analysts during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2015.

Microsoft says its newly-developed White-Fi technology can provide free WiFi connectivity to a large section of the Indian population, thus, giving a boost to the Prime Minister’s Digital India initiative. “White-Fi or TV White-Space technology has potential to provide free connectivity to large sections of the Indian population through wider coverage and economical deployment and licence-free access,” says, Prashant Shukla, National Technology Officer at Microsoft India.

India will be one of the 13 countries to host the launch of Windows 10 on July 29. “We will celebrate the unprecedented role our biggest fans — more than 5 million Windows Insiders — played in the development of Windows 10 at special events in 13 cities around the world… Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, New Delhi, Dubai, Nairobi, Berlin, Johannesburg, Madrid, London, Sao Paolo, and New York City,” Microsoft said.

In a talent survey by Universum, the top-ranking companies among engineering students are Google, Microsoft, Apple, BMW Group and General Electric. The survey indicates that storytelling is critical for millennials as they want to learn about employees who embody the organisation’s values and communicate authentic stories about their working life.

Microsoft Research is aiming to help you teach your machine how to learn. The new machine learning tool lets anyone show computers the way to learn things about which you hold knowledge about. With the new tool Microsoft aims to democratize machine learning and bring the ability to solve everyday problems with artificial intelligence into the hands of consumers.

Power BI, Microsoft’s cloud-based suite of data analysis tools, is getting a few key additions. New capabilities will be added to the current preview version throughout July until it enters general availability on July 24 and preview accounts are converted to Power BI free accounts.

Microsoft has officially launched Office 2016 for Mac. New features include new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote which is available in 139 countries and 16 languages. Besides the familiar ribbon interface and task panes, the company has included features designed for Mac users like Full Screen view, multi-touch gestures and Retina support. In addition, the updated suite will receive quarterly updates.

Microsoft isn’t leaving any stone unturned to ensure that is meets its target of 1 billion downloads of Windows 10. To ensure that a substantial number of apps are found on Windows 10, Microsoft has now announced Project Westminster. Kiril Seksenov, and Engineer on the Microsoft Edge Web Apps team said, “Project Westminster makes it simple for you to bring existing Hosted Web Apps to Windows 10. Project Westminster embraces “the way of the web” by giving you the opportunity to publish an app while continuing to use your tools, developing your code and deploying to the host you desire.”

If you do subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription service, obtaining the new software should be a snap: just surf to Microsoft’s Office account page and follow the instructions. Students can also check Office.com/student to see if they qualify for a free or discounted copy.

With versions for all three major desktop platforms, and for the main three mobile platforms, Skype is the leader. It’s easy to pickup your mobile and make a video call to a friend on their PC, phone or tablet. With the ability to share files as well as talk to people, Skype has become a major collaboration tool over the past few years, its main rival in this space being Google Hangouts. As a cross-platform solution, Skype is unmatched.