Recent News

Microsoft Corp. has launched a new fund to cultivate companies with solutions that bring affordable Internet access to underserved markets. The fund is part of Microsoft’s Affordable Access Initiative, which invests in new last-mile access technologies, cloud-based services and applications, and business models that can reduce the cost of Internet access and help more people affordably get online.

After the terrorist Paris attacks recently, everyone is trying to their bit to help. To help communicate with friends and family, tech companies such as Microsoft and Google have made Skype and Hangout calls free for a few days, respectively. In a Skype blogpost, it stated, “In light of the devastating events that have taken place in Paris, we want to help people stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues. So, with immediate effect we are making all domestic and international calls to landlines and mobiles in France free of charge* for the next few days.”

Good news for IT professionals who were excited by the news back in April that Microsoft was launching a dedicated Windows Store front for Business – as of today, the Windows Store for Business is open in 21 markets around the world. Now, IT managers can sign up their business via the Store’s official website. Doing so will allow business decision makers to “acquire, manage and distribute Windows Store apps” easily across an entire organization.

Microsoft finally dropped its first big update to the Windows 10 operating system.Nestled away behind new features like colored titlebars and upgrades to Cortana are a handful of features that will finaly make Windows 10 way more usable to the business customers who generate most of Microsoft’s sales.”With this free update we have reached the point in the platform’s maturity where we can confidently recommend Windows 10 deployment to whole organizations,” said Microsoft Windows Boss Terry Myerson.

Esteemed scientist and Microsoft Research lead Chris Bishop has launched a set of free machine learning Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) – including one that can tell if a person is happy or sad. Bishop, who is head laboratist at Microsoft Research Cambridge, revealed that developers and businesses can get their hands on tools based on Microsoft products to bring AI like speech recognition, vision and language understanding into their apps.

Microsoft launched a new preview program for consumers who subscribe to Office 365 that will give them a sneak peak at new features slated to be added to the subscription service in the next one to three weeks. Office Insider was opened to subscribers of Office 365 Home, Personal and University — the third is a four-year deal available only to college students — who are running Office 2016 on a Windows device.

Microsoft has released a project called DMLT (Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit). It simplifies machine learning work across distributed systems by allowing models to be trained (a core component of machine learning) on multiple nodes at once. Microsoft wants DMLT to make it easier for data scientists to perform model training across multiple machine nodes without having to worry about the nitty-gritty of managing threads or workloads. It simplifies interprocess communication, too, as two different libraries for that (MPI and ZMQ) are available and can be used interchangeably.

As promised at E3 2015, backwards compatibility has finally hit the Xbox One. What this means is that you can now play Xbox 360 games on your Xbox One. Here are five Xbox 360 games you should definitely play on your Xbox One: Assassin’s Creed 2, Battleblock Theater, Gears of War 2, Shadow Complex and South Park: The Stick of Truth.

Microsoft India launched ‘Create to Inspire’ at the RBM Upper Primary School in Daba Garden. About 30 science teachers from 30 schools of the district were provided hands on training under Andhra Pradesh Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan department. The education department is in the process of implementing the above programme in Nellore, Kakinada, Vijayawada and Kurnool district in the next fortnight.

Microsoft joined hands with INFOCOM, an ABP initiative to present a special SME forum. Meetul Patel, General Manager, SMS&P, Microsoft India, said, “Actually there is so much potential for SMB’s to grow the revenues in India and I think we have to trust three things to make that happen; Awareness, Affordability and Administration.”