In the News

In a major push for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Skill India’ mission, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella launched “Project Sangam” to help the government not only train but also assist people get jobs via professional networking website LinkedIn and will commence from Andhra Pradesh. “The company will allow people to enroll through Aadhaar cards and later utilise LinkedIn to manage their profiles,” Nadella said during Microsoft’s prestigious “Future Decoded” event.

Microsoft started testing its Outlook Premium service, the ad-free premium version of Outlook.com, with a limited number of users earlier last year and then made the service available as a preview for public later.

Digital technology isn’t a substitute to brick-and-mortar businesses, but merely the means to transform the way in which traditional enterprises conduct business. This was the conclusion of the sixth and final edition of Forbes India LeaderSpeak—The Digital Transformation Series, organized by Forbes India in association with Microsoft, during which a diverse set of professionals came together to deliberate on the way forward for India’s digital transformation agenda.

Months after Microsoft advocating community developments, Progress has finally released an open source version of its UI library for Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Called Telerik UI, the library is already touted be popular within the 2.1 million strong Progress developer community and is designed to ease the development of Windows apps.

HDFC life has announced the completion of Hackathon, the first of its kind event in the Insurance Industry in India, in partnership with IBM and Microsoft. Narendra Bhandari, GM, Developer eXperience and Evangelism, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd. commented, “Artificial intelligence holds the key to a new era of innovation. Microsoft is deeply committed to democratizing AI capabilities and making it easy to implement for developers.”

Microsoft introduced Mixed Reality Capture (MRC) to allow sharing of HoloLens experiences, by letting users record videos of what they were seeing through their perspectives. Microsoft has bettered this experience with the introduction of Spectator View.

A study conducted at a top UK school has demonstrated that Microsoft’s OneNote, a digital notebook has helped dyslexic children to improve on their reading and spelling abilities. Microsoft teamed up with British Dyslexia Association (BDA) to lend school children Surface laptops in a Surrey school that specializes in teaching children with language related conditions.

An innovation Hub (iHub) was inaugurated at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) here on Monday. To enhance and strengthen the strategic vision for iHub, a high level advisory council has been set up which includes Telangana’s Principal Secretary, Information Technology Jayesh Ranjan, Microsoft India Managing Director Anil Bhansali, T-Hub Senior Vice President Rama Iyer, Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University Vice Chancellor Praveen Rao, Principal Secretary, Agriculture, Parthasarathi, ICRISAT Director General David Bergvinson.

Grand Theft Auto 4 is playable on the Xbox One, thanks to backward compatibility. GTA 4 has seen sales jump more than 7,000 percent in the last couple of days.

The Redmond-based company is going to celebrate two decades of Visual Studio by rolling out Visual Studio 2017 on March 7. Julia Liuson, Corporate VP, Visual Studio at Microsoft wrote in a blog post, “Today, I’m proud and humbled that Visual Studio is turning twenty – we’re celebrating two decades of Visual Studio! As we hit this great milestone, I’m also excited to announce that Visual Studio 2017 will be released on March 7.”