Recent News

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.”

In an interview with CNBC TV18, Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, talked about Windows 10 and the company’s strategy in tablets and smartphones space. Talking about his outlook, Pramanik said, “It is very exciting times in Microsoft. We have a new CEO, there are a lot of new things which are happening. We are announcing considerable number of innovations on a regular basis.”

Microsoft had a damn good E3 this year, and one of the reasons was their reveals of games coming exclusively to the Xbox One, that we could be entirely sure would never be coming to the PS4, thanks to Microsoft doubling down on its first party studios, partnerships, and initiatives. One of the games that comes exclusive to Xbox One is ReCore, an action adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic setting featuring a struggle against robots who have taken over the planet developed by Keiji Inafune, the creator of other great games such as the Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Mega Man and Onimusha series.

The news surrounding the backwards compatibility of the Xbox One just gets better and better. While the list of games that will actually be backwards compatible is still pretty slim, Microsoft says that same list will be growing all the time. Now the company has also announced that any DLC that came along with those Xbox 360 games will also be playable as long as the game itself is eventually added to the list.

The U.S. Navy is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to keep up to 100,000 computers afloat because it has yet to transition away from Windows XP. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which runs the Navy’s communications and information networks, signed a US$9.1 million contract earlier this month for continued access to security patches for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft has launched an update of its Skype Qik messaging app. The update is released for iOS devices. The app added support for captions, music and photos.