Recent News

Qualcomm and Microsoft, at Computex 2017, have announced that HP, Lenovo, and Asus will be the first three companies to launch new devices based on the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile PC Platform. The first wave of devices will all be slim, fanless portables along the lines of laptops and 2-in-1s. No specific time models, prices or time frames have been disclosed, but the companies have previously stated that they will ship products later this year.

Microsoft Azure is gaining ground quickly in cloud services, according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2017 report. The annual report, released at Recode’s Code Conference, shows that Azure is up to 34 percent in 2017 from 20 percent last year.

Microsoft India hosted its first-ever Accessibility Summit aiming to enhance technology access for people with disabilities. The summit was aimed at demonstrating the business value of accessible technology for organizations, the need for a collaborative effort as well as assessing policy’s role in creating an accessible India. It brought together leaders from the government, nonprofits, filmmakers, entrepreneurs and budding technologists to present their views and best practices around accessibility and technology’s potential in aiding inclusion, the statement added.

Cisco has used this week’s IoT World Forum to announce a new IoT platform and an IoT alliance with Microsoft. Cisco’s partnership with Microsoft makes sense for both sides. Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite is also building in edge intelligence with Azure IoT Edge and the two companies are working towards interoperation between Azure IoT Suite and Cisco Fog.

A handful of Microsoft researchers in India started Project Mélange, where they are studying the use of code-mixing among Indians online. They are trying to figure out how virtual assistants might be taught to respond to a user switching between, for example, English and Hindi in a conversation.

Slightly Mad Studios’ Andy Tudor already confirmed a few days ago that the studio does not plan on holding back the Xbox Scorpio version of Project CARS 2, instead look into leveraging the Scorpio the best that they can. The reason they can do so is because of the PC development spec, which allows the detection of different hardware configurations already, and scale the offering accordingly.

Kempinski Hotels has selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV, augmented with nHancedNav from The NAV People, to optimize efficiency within each hotel and increase visibility into expenses across the entire organization. By deploying Dynamics NAV across the entire group, the company will achieve efficiency gains by automating manual processes, reducing headcount costs through improved working practices and optimizing inventory management across its entire hotel portfolio.

The two new data centers that Microsoft Corp. plans to build in South Africa aims to provide cloud computing services to the entire African continent. The power they use, however, will be generated and consumed entirely within South Africa’s grid.