Recent News

Microsoft has launched Cortana, its personal digital assistant, in India for Windows 10 users. The company said Cortana was customized to reflect the local accent, idioms and speech patterns of India, where it, for example, knows cricket and Sachin Tendulkar. Cortana can work with many apps. It can organize trips, search PNR status and book tickets using BookMyShow. It can track, manage and pay users’ post-paid phone by integrating with the popular payment apps in market like Paytm, but only Airtel and Vodafone in first phase.

Microsoft says Project Oxford, which can already determine your age by looking at your photo, can now also read your emotional state. The company says that Project Oxford, among other things, can identify the following qualities: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, or even the “neutral” state. At the Future Decoded conference in the UK. The company also demonstrated several new capabilities for speech recognition, which as it says, can identify the person speaking in a noisy environment, like a stadium. But perhaps the biggest attraction was Project Oxford’s ability to look at a picture and tell how a person is feeling, and identify their emotion.

Microsoft will deliver Azure and Office 365 cloud services from data centers in the U.K. by late next year, CEO Satya Nadella told customers in London. The move comes less than a week after Amazon Web Services unveiled its plans to open a U.K. data center cluster by early 2017. In addition to Azure and Office 365, Microsoft plans to host its Dynamics CRM Online service in the U.K. data centers, aiming the services at government organizations, regulated industries and other businesses.

MasterCards Ajay Banga and Microsofts Satya Nadella have been named among the top 50 global business leaders by Fortune magazine, a list that is topped by Nikes Mike Parker. Both Banga and Nadella are India-origin CEOs. While global payment solutions provider MasterCards Banga is ranked at the fifth position, software giant Microsofts Nadella is placed at the 47th spot. The rankings are based on ten metrics including financial results along with stock performance and total shareholder returns over the same periods and factored in eachs ratio of debt to capital, Fortune said.

As part of its massive November update cycle, Microsoft on Thursday pushed a smorgasbord of new features to its OneNote notetaking software across a wide variety of platforms. Users of OneNote Online and OneNote for iOS can now record audio into a note straight from the web and mobile app. It’s an extension of similar capabilities already available on OneNote for Mac and OneNote for Windows.

Microsoft releases its first major update to Windows 10, bringing performance and stability improvements and some notable new features for business. The mammoth patch will be just under 4GB in size for some users and, according to Microsoft, will significantly boost Windows 10’s boot times over Windows 7. “There’s a bunch of things under the hood that we’ve improved with this update to make it an even better experience,” said Jeremy Korst, General Manager of the Windows and Devices team at Microsoft.

Microsoft announced that it has made a deal to acquire Secure Islands, an Israeli company that focuses on protecting companies’ data. The acquisition will help Microsoft level up its Azure Rights Management Service, which lets companies protect files individually and in bulk with tools that ensure they aren’t opened or modified by people who are unauthorized to do so. Secure Islands’s services include data classification technology that automatically detects the creation of new files from a variety of sources and then applies a protection policy to it.

Mcrosoft Dynamics AX, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that consolidates business operations into a single, familiar Microsoft technology platform, now supports the unique requirements of automotive manufacturers. A new solution, the Crowe Automotive Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics AX, was developed by Crowe Horwath LLP.

Gesture-based data analytics, as depicted in science-fiction thriller movie Minority Report, could soon become an everyday reality. The future of computing as we know might transform completely into something in which users could browse through mountains of data by using simple gestures. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice-President, Cloud & Enterprise Group, Microsoft, spoke to BusinessLine about how the company is building that future with the combination of cloud, analytics and its futuristic virtual reality gadget HoloLens.

icrosoft launched Cortana in India via Windows 10 Insider Preview builds 10532+ Windows phone 8.1 for users in India. Microsoft India director (Windows Business Group) Vineet Durani had had annonced in July that Cortana will be made available to Insiders (developers with Microsoft) first, and later to consumers. The users would be able to use ‘virtual assistant’ Cortana to find data, track information, set reminders, etc.