In the News

After recently revamping the MSN portal, rebranding its Bing apps and refining its content offering to users, Microsoft has now signed an agreement with micro-blogging site Twitter to display tweets from major news publications on its home page. Announcing the tie-up on its blog, Twitter said visitors to MSN will now see tweets from big news organizations such as New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and many more, on the home page.

A new app, created by Microsoft, allows anyone to share photos with their friends, whether they own iPhones, Windows Phones or prefer Android. The app in question is called Xim and is the latest idea to come from Microsoft Research’s Fuse Labs. What makes it so newsworthy is that it’s a tiny attempt to break down the walled gardens that are different handsets, different apps and different ecosystems for the sake of greater social interaction.

An educational application called Treefinder, identifying the use of foreign languages and references in books or online platforms through Curiosity Cat, and learning aids from StuddyBuddy—these are some of the innovative applications Microsoft employees have come up with for students in a week-long ‘Oneweek’ hackathon, held recently across Microsoft at 114 locations globally. Micro¬soft CEO Satya Nadella described ‘Oneweek’ as an effort to reinvent the way the company does business and encourage the rise of brilliant ideas regardless of its origins.

Microsoft and a group of leading industry players in the US are pledging to restrict the use of information collected on students from elementary to high school. The participating companies assured parents that “no one is going to sell your kids’ data, nobody is going to track your child around the Internet, no one is going to compile a profile that is used against your child when they apply for a job 20 years later.”

Multinational software company Adobe has partnered with Microsoft to make Photoshop, their popular image-editing app, more user-friendly for touch screen devices running on Windows 8. Adobe showcased a feature called Playground, which allows users to swipe through multiple layers and pick specific layers and move them into view. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said this tie-up was only the beginning of a long partnership that demonstrates “what the next-generation of hardware-software combination can be”.

The Microsoft partners in the country are smiling. Satya Nadella’s announcement of setting up three local data centers in India has fueled hopes of cloud services getting bigger with the verticals such as government, BFSI and Hospitals embracing it. Kamal Nath, CEO, Sify Technologies added, “Our bouquet of services for datacenter transformation, cloud and managed IT solutions demand future ready, reliable and highly efficient business solutions. With the early adopter initiative, we look forward to building such solutions, integrating Microsoft Azure platforms and devising hybrid cloud ecosystems for the enterprise customers.”

Microsoft will radically revamp which Windows updates customers receive starting with Windows 10, a move analysts said was the biggest-ever change in the firm’s update practices. “Windows 10 will be delivered in a way that gives more choice and flexibility to businesses,” wrote Jim Alkove, the head of Microsoft’s Windows enterprise program management team, in a Microsoft Windows blog. “As a result, a business can pick the speed of innovation that is right for each group of its users, rather than apply a one size fits all solution.”

Microsoft will offer its commercial cloud services—Azure and Office 365 by the end of 2015 from local data centers in India, where the company sees a $2 trillion business opportunity. “One thing you can be sure of is that for every con¬nected smartphone, you need to have a cloud infrastructure. We want to enable the growing entrepreneurial experience of Indians. There can be no mobile-first without a cloud-first world,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Microsoft Devices is preparing for the festive season with three new Lumia devices. The Lumia 730, priced at Rs 15,299 and the Lumia 830, priced at Rs 28,799, will attract buyers in the affordable device segment, while the flagship Lumia 930 will have a Rs 38,649 price tag. Ajey Mehta, MD, Nokia lndia Sales, says that the two affordable devices will pack in premium Microsoft services like Skype, OneNote and Cortana, available mostly in high-end Lumia phones—a clear USP for these devices.

NIIT will partner with Microsoft India on its significant ‘Women in Tech’ initiative designed to inspire, attract, and retain one million women in the IT industry. As a learning partner, NIIT will utilize its nationwide network to train and certify girl students and women in the latest Microsoft technologies across 5,000 schools, colleges and centers across 200 cities. “Through this initiative, we aim to double the number of women professionals in the Indian IT industry over the next few years,” said Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik.