Recent News

Microsoft has revealed the first 104 Xbox 360 games that will be backwards compatible on the Xbox One once the feature goes live with the New Xbox One Experience. The full list includes Mass Effect, Mirror’s Edge, Halo: Spartan Assault, Gears of War 1 to 3 and Judgment, Beyond Good & Evil HD, Assassin’s Creed II, Sonic CD, Shadow Complex, Just Cause 2, Kameo and many more.

Microsoft and Red Hat has announced a partnership that will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. As a key component of today’s announcement, Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition, Microsoft and Red Hat are also working together to address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.

Zoho Corporation the parent company of Zoho.com, ManageEngine, and WebNMS, announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to contribute towards Microsoft’s O365 Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, and the mobility of Windows at Microsoft’s Future Unleashed event, held in Mumbai, India, last week. Zoho Corporation will work together with the Microsoft local cloud to enhance customer experience and redefine productivity.

India’s largest direct seller Amway is working with technology major Microsoft to digitise its brick-and-mortar stores. Stores here imply outlets, where Amway distributors can place orders and collect their goods from the company.There are 154 such Amway stores located in 150 cities in the country, with the company now looking to introduce a digital wall in each of these physical stores that will allow distributors to directly place orders, make payments and pick-up their goods without human intervention.

Halo 5: Guardians has had a rather incredible and successful launch and some of the top execs at Microsoft have been spending the week making sure 343 Industries gets a loud round of applause. Halo 5: Guardians raised more than $400 million in revenue from and hardware sales in the short period since the game was released.

Microsoft has acquired Mobile Data Labs, creator of the MileIQ app and maker of productivity solutions for mobile professionals. The Mobile Data Labs team will continue to build and offer mobile productivity solutions and look to take advantage of insights from Office 365 and the Office Graph.Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Outlook and Office 365 explains that Mobile Data Lab’s MileIQ app takes advantage of sensors in modern mobile devices to automatically and contextually capture, log and calculate business miles, allowing users to confidently claim tax deductions.

Major IT infrastructure and hosting service providers such as Tata Communications, Net-magic, Sify and NxtGen have joined hands with Microsoft to offer hybrid cloud services to their customers. Existing users of IT infrastructure services from these providers will now be able to extend to Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Gartner predicts that 50 percent of the enterprises will use hybrid cloud by 2017. “As the first hyper scale public cloud provider to offer services from data centres in India, we are excited to see the rapid growth in usage driven by the digital innovation of our customers and partners,” Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice-President, Cloud & Enterprise Group at Microsoft, said.

In an interview, Karan Bajwa, MD, Microsoft India, said, “Microsoft is the only global multinational company that has set up local cloud datacenters in India, which is a very important move from our side. We have already made that investment and today those 3 data centres are alive in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. We are going to continue scaling those people who wanted to have local data centres before they adapt the cloud. There is no connectivity in remote villages, so we have created a technology ‘TV White space’ through Microsoft research which will provide internet to everyone.”

Windows 10 hit a milestone in the PC gaming world last month: The operating system is now installed on more than a quarter of all computers running Steam. Valve’s monthly Steam hardware and software survey shows that 26.63 percent of users were running 64-bit Windows 10 in October. Another 1.01 percent were running “Windows 10,” which presumably refers to the 32-bit version, for a grand total of 27.64 percent. The survey was first spotted by WinBeta.

Microsoft’s Skype team on Wednesday introduced a new share button for websites, which would make it easier for users to “engage in richer conversations about the content immediately.”The Skype blog post adds that they have teamed-up with MSN.com website, where the Skype share button would reach first in the world. In India, Skype has collaborated with Sify.com for its share button. It can be seen on the two websites. The share button would reach other websites soon.