Recent News

As Microsoft attempts to transition to a services company, mobile devices have become critical to its plans. “The big shift that we are making when it comes to phones is to not think about phones in isolation,” said Ajey Mehta, Managing Director, Microsoft Mobile Devices (India). “Now with Windows 10, we are looking at providing users value with good apps as well as a personalized and productive experience. We are looking at providing one unifying platform, one unifying experience (across devices).”

Microsoft said it was buying a startup that specializes in analyzing email, meeting schedules and other work data to increase people’s efficiency on the job. I am excited about this big step forward in our company ambition to reinvent productivity and business process, and how it will deliver new value to our customers with organizational analytics,”said Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Outlook and Office 365, Microsoft.

Windows 10 in August set a record for a one-month increase in user share for any operating system, an analytics firm said. According to California-based Net Applications, Windows 10’s user share — a measure of the number of unique users who used the OS to go online — grew 4.8 percentage points in August to 5.2% for the month.August was the first full month that Windows 10 was available to download and install free of charge by those with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 personal computers and 2-in-1s.

Microsoft has been making strides to change its focus to be a “mobile-first, cloud-first” company, as the Redmond giant understands that it can no longer rely on its PC dominance with Windows. Last year, Microsoft made editing documents free on Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android, but that was only the first step – it has now started offering apps bundled on select Android devices. Microsoft is clearly stressing on ubiquity of its services rather than taking Android head-on.

Domestic handset-maker Intex said it was partnering with Redmond-based IT giant Microsoft to provide 50 GB of cloud storage space for two years via Microsoft’s OneDrive in smartphones sold in India. “OneDrive will come pre-installed in Intex Smartphones with a memory configuration of 16GB ROM and 2GB RAM, namely Aqua Speed HD, Aqua Power Plus, Cloud Power Plus and Aqua Star II (16GB) and all future models matching the said configuration,” the company said.

Microsoft has announced that its Upgrade Your World initiative will start in India. As part of the initiative, the company will partner 10 NGOs in India, and support them with a donation of $50,000 each and technical support from Microsoft, apart from varied services and promotional activities. For now, five non-profit organisations have been chosen, namely Aga Khan Rural Support Program, Enable India, Magic Bus, Smile Foundation, and Udayan Care.

NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group, announced today it will greatly expand Microsoft Dynamics AX on Enterprise Cloud, the cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution provided on NTT Com’s Enterprise Cloud service. New features will be available by October 1 and include additional templates for five types of industries/purposes, strengthened support for deployment in 12 Asian countries/regions, and compatibility with hybrid clouds.

Amazon and Microsoft just won a huge contract with the FAA, led by IT consultant CSC. This contract will consolidate the FCC’s data centers, moving data to both Amazon’s cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s cloud, Azure. CSC says the contract is worth $108 million out of the gate, and because its a long-term contract, could be worth as much as $1 billion over the next 10 years.

Among some of the best and the most trending apps with different features that people were looking for on a Smartphone is the Microsoft Translator. If you feel the Google translator is not helping you, here is a Microsoft version of the app you can try. It supports over 50 languages and synchronizes all your conversations between your phone and your smart watch. It has most of the features that the Google translator offers with large full screen translation cards to make it easy to display it to others.

Microsoft is finally bringing its much-awaited digital voice assistant Cortana to India. The software giant announced new regions including India, Japan, Australia, and Canada where the digital assistant will now be made available. The feature will be rolled out as an optional download to Insiders (early testers) on the Windows 10 Insider Preview builds 10532+.