Recent News

US President Barack Obama plans to honour Microsoft’s Indian-origin CEO Satya Nadella with the ‘Champions of Change’ award for bringing about change within his company to support working families. “Microsoft recently announced that over the next year it will make changes to ensure that a wide variety of suppliers that do business with Microsoft in the US provide at least 15 days of paid leave each year to their employees who handle Microsoft work,” the White House said as it announced the names of recipients of the Champions of Change Award.

Microsoft is partnering with startup accelerators and other shared working spaces across the country to offer free hands-on training and access to products and services for small businesses. The outreach program is part of Microsoft’s effort to enable growing technology businesses, particularly in the software space. Chief Technology Strategist Dan Stolts said Microsoft is offering a variety of tools “including cloud services free to businesses, startup businesses.”

Halo: Spartan Strike, developed by 343 Industries and Vanguard Games, is now available for Windows 8, Windows Phones and iOS. This is the twin-stick, top-down successor to Halo: Spartan Assault. Windows 8 players will be able to earn an exclusive emblem, avatar and nameplay by topping the leaderboard and earning achievements. These can then be used in Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

Coimbatore city police have begun a trial, for the first time in Tamil Nadu, using Microsoft’s Guardian App to identify and rescue women and girls in distress situations. A senior police officer said the trial run began on Thursday and that it would go on for about six weeks before it was offered to the public.

Manufacturer of high-end domestic appliances Miele & Cie. KG has announced a partnership with IT giant Microsoft to leverage IoT technologies and create smarter home appliances. Microsoft Azure Internet of Things (IoT) services will help usher in the next generation of smart appliances and home cooking.

Microsoft released Skype for Business replacing its older Lync service. The new software will roll out as part of the April release of Skype for Business. “Skype for Business is based on the familiar Skype experience that more than 300 million people use every month to connect with friends and family,” Microsoft said in a statement. “It is built right into Office, so features like presence, IM, voice and video calls, and online meetings are an integrated part of the Office experience.”

After launching the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640XL, Microsoft has now released the Lumia 540, priced at $149 (approximately Rs 9,500), which will arrive in India by early May. The Lumia 540 flaunts a 5-inch HD (1280×720 pixels) IPS LCD display with pixel density of 294ppi. It is powered by a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 quad-core processor paired with 1GB RAM. Microsoft is also offering 15GB of free OneDrive cloud storage, and a further 15GB after activating auto-upload to OneDrive.

Fujitsu Limited and Microsoft Corp. have collaborated to bring innovative operational excellence to manufacturing with the help of Fujitsu devices powered by Windows 8.1 Pro, the Internet of Things (IoT) services of FUJITSU Cloud A5 for Microsoft Azure, and the Fujitsu IoT/M2M (machine-to-machine) platform.

Microsoft is presenting a vision of how industrial robots could work more closely with people by harnessing IoT (Internet of Things), cloud networking and 3D sensing technologies, linked through Windows platforms. In a demonstration at Hanover Messe, an industrial fair in Germany this week, Microsoft and industrial robot maker Kuka Robotics are showing an industrial robot arm that can stream movement data to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform for human staff overseeing production.