Recent News

Microsoft announced a private beta for a pair of new services Wednesday aimed at making its Office 365 service work better in schools. The new Classroom Hub is a website that brings together content from different Office applications into a single, central location that teachers and students can use to stay on top of what’s going on in their classes. The service can pull in notes, assignments, calendars and class materials to provide a digital home for all of the information that students need to know. Teachers will also be able to track progress on assignments and provide students with feedback and grades through the site.

Microsoft has a new mission statement that goes straight to the point. The software maker’s new official goal is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” CEO Satya Nadella wrote in an email to employees. The message was first obtained by GeekWire and Microsoft confirmed its authenticity to CNET News.

The Indian software market registered a stable year-on-year growth of 10 percent in the second half of 2014 owing to the steady double-digit growth of top vendors, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). It stated that some of the reasons for the stable growth include a steady double digit growth for the top vendors such as SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and the likes.

Microsoft has announced the official launch of Office for Android phones. According to the Techcrunch.com, the services released includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint designed for the Android smartphone, follows earlier efforts of Microsoft at bringing Office to Android tablets, in addition to support for Office on iOS devices, Windows and OS X.

Microsoft followed through on a promise to release versions of its widely used Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs for smartphones running on Google-backed Android software. The apps, which hit shelves of Google’s online Play Store, build on a Microsoft strategy to make its applications accessible from a broad array of devices as services in the Internet cloud. The US software titan has applications tailored for use on Android-powered tablets as well as on Apple iPhones or iPads.

With Forza – Microsoft’s premier racing franchise celebrating its 10th year, the Redmond-based company stepped celebrations up a notch by announcing a limited edition Forza 6 console. It’s decked up in blue much like the game’s cover car, the Ford GT. Sporting a 1TB hard drive, it also has racing stripes and sound effects that resemble what a sports car engine might make when starting up and shutting down for powering on and off the console respectively. Ejecting a disc has its own auto engine themed sound effect as well.

Microsoft Ventures in India has announced the launch of a new corporate engagement initiative. The new program called Innovation for Corporates (ICI) was introduced at Think Next 2015. The new initiative from the company aims at working with enterprise businesses. Through ICI, Microsoft Ventures will develop and implement different models to attain innovation- driven growth by engaging with startups.

Microsoft Mobile on Wednesday unveiled its first retail store in Hyderabad under the new brand name. The Microsoft Priority Reseller Store, as it is called, has been opened at Forum Mall. T.S. Sridhar, director, south, Nokia India Sales Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Microsoft Mobile, said 8,872 stores and 119 care centres across the country will be transformed.

Microsoft Ventures has signed a three-year partnership with the Indian School of Design and Innovation (ISDI) to set up a ‘ISDI Creative Accelerator’. This would be a pan-India initiative to facilitate technology a start-up ecosystem with design and innovation expertise. The MoU was signed by ISDI Founder and Executive Director Radha Kapoor, ISDI Academic Council Chairperson Indu Shahani as well as Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik.

Microsoft said it will commission three “hyper-scale” data centres in India before the end of this year. Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, said, “Microsoft has already started a private preview of these data centres with over 100 existing customers on board across different segments such as banking and financial institutions, government, manufacturing and start-ups. They will be allowed to test it out over a three-month period. We will formally launch the services by the end of the calendar year.” On the much-anticipated Windows 10 launch by next month’s end, Pramanik said, “If you think about the coming year, for us it is going to be about the cloud, and it is going to be about Windows10.”