by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Technology
New Delhi : Microsoft and online marketplace Paisabazaar.com on Saturday announced that they have entered into a partnership to develop “industry first” innovations on the tech giant’s Cloud platform using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
As part of the overall partnership, Paisabazaar.com will move its entire infrastructure to Microsoft Azure Cloud, the companies said in a statement.
“This partnership will enable Paisabaazar to utilise the power of Microsoft’s cutting edge AI services to develop novel solutions and deliver greater value to their rapidly growing customer base,” said Meetul Patel, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India.
By building the technology on Microsoft Cloud, Paisabazaar.com would offer customised, tailor-made and secure solutions for each consumer coming to its platform.
“With this partnership, we would delight our consumers through a never-seen-before digital experience and help them save both time and money through more customised solutions,” Naveen Kukreja, CEO and Co-founder, Paisabazaar.com, added.
The collaboration would help Paisabazaar.com identify customer needs more accurately, factoring in their lifestyle and life-stage.
It would help sharpen product recommendations and underwriting decisions. This would also expedite the processes on the Paisabazaar platform through further automation and digitisation.
The companies would also build chat-bots, image recognition innovations, voice analytics and language processing features to enhance the customer experience.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
San Francisco : Microsoft has announced that its Office 2019 suite — to be available in the second half of 2018 — will only work on Windows 10 operating system.
“Office 2019 will ship in H2 of 2018. Previews of the new apps and servers will start shipping in the second quarter of 2018. Office 2019 apps will be supported on any supported Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) release,” the company wrote in a blog post late on Thursday.
“Office 2019 will provide five years of mainstream support and approximately two years of extended support. This is an exception to our ‘Fixed Lifecycle Policy’ to align with the support period for Office 2016. Extended support will end 10/14/2025,” the company added.
However, there was no change announced regarding the support term for existing versions of Office.
This release has no effect on Office for Mac, which is a separate product with a different release schedule.
Last year at Ignite, Microsoft announced Office 2019 — the next perpetual version of Office that includes apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and Skype for Business) and servers (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business).
The company also announced servicing extensions for Windows 10 and changes to the Office 365 ProPlus system requirements.
The support for Windows 10 (versions 1511, 1607, 1703, and 1709) for enterprise and education customers running certain versions of the operating system was extended for another six months to help them move to the latest supported versions of the operating system.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Large Enterprise, Marketing Basics, Markets, Technology
Satya Nadella
San Francisco : Riding on its growing Cloud business especially Azure offerings, Microsoft has reported a revenue of $28.9 billion for the fourth quarter that ended December 31.
This was up 12 per cent from $25.8 billion in the same quarter last year.
The company reported operating income of $8.7 billion – an increase of 10 per cent from last year.
“This quarter’s results speak to the differentiated value we are delivering to customers across our productivity solutions and as the Hybrid Cloud provider of choice,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in a statement late on Wednesday.
“Our investments in Internet of Things (IoT), data, and AI services across Cloud and the edge position us to further accelerate growth,” he added.
Revenue in the Productivity and Business Processes was $9 billion that increased 25 per cent.
Office commercial products and Cloud services revenue increased 10 per cent, driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 41 per cent.
“Office consumer products and Cloud services revenue increased 12 per cent and Office 365 consumer subscribers increased to 29.2 million,” the company said.
Dynamics products and Cloud services revenue increased 10 per cent, driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 67 per cent.
“LinkedIn contributed revenue of $1.3 billion during the quarter with sessions growth of over 20 per cent for the fifth consecutive quarter,” Microsoft said.
In December 2016, Microsoft completed the acquisition of LinkedIn, for which it paid more than $26 billion.
Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $7.8 billion and increased 15 per cent from the same quarter last year.
“Server products and cloud services revenue increased 18 per cent, driven by Azure revenue growth of 98 per cent.
Enterprise Services revenue increased five per cent driven by Premier Support Services.
Revenue in personal computing was $12.2 billion and increased two per cent.
Gaming revenue increased eight per cent, driven by Xbox hardware revenue growth from the Xbox One X launch. Surface notebook revenue increased 1 per cent, the company said.
Microsoft returned $5 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the second quarter of fiscal year 2018.
“We delivered another strong quarter with commercial cloud revenue growing 56 per cent year-over-year to $5.3 billion,” said Amy Hood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
San Francisco : Microsoft has released another security patch against “Spectre Variant 2” bug found on Intel chips.
Intel has reported issues with recently released microcode meant to address “Spectre variant 2” termed as “CVE 2017-5715 Branch Target Injection”.
Intel noted that this microcode can cause “higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behaviour,” adding that situations like this may result in “data loss or corruption”.
“While Intel tests, updates and deploys new microcode, we are making available an out of band update ‘KB4078130′ that specifically disables only the mitigation against CVE-2017-5715 – Branch target injection vulnerability,” Microsoft wrote on its support page on Sunday.
“Our own experience is that system instability can in some circumstances cause data loss or corruption. In our testing this new update has been found to prevent the behaviour described,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft is also offering a new option – available for advanced users on impacted devices – to manually disable and enable the mitigation against Spectre Variant 2 (CVE 2017-5715) independently via registry setting changes.
“There are no known reports to indicate that this Spectre variant 2 (CVE 2017-5715 ) has been used to attack customers,a Microsoft said.
After chip-maker Intel confirmed a potential security flaw in its chips, Microsoft issued emergency updates to supported versions of Windows earlier this month.
Intel Corp had confirmed two security flaws — “Meltdown and “Spectre” — in its Chips that were vulnerable to hacking.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich later allayed fears of any data breach.
Addressing the gathering at his keynote address at the “CES 2018” earlier this month, Krzanich said: “Our primary goal has been to keep our customers safe. We have not received any information that these exploits have been used to obtain customers’ data.
The Intel CEO urged everyone to patch their systems as soon as these are available.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
Washington : Technology giant Microsoft has partnered with Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the genetics of the human immune system, to improve diagnoses of cancers and other diseases.
Adaptive Biotechnologies is a genomics and technology company working to map the genetics of the immune system.
As per the agreement, Microsoft will bring research and large-scale machine learning and cloud computing capabilities to translate genetics of the human immune system, or immunome into simple blood test that can be broadly accessible to people around the world.
“We are very excited and inspired by our collaboration with Adaptive Biotechnologies, as it clearly advances our mission to use cloud and AI technologies to transform healthcare and improve the lives of people around the world,” Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, AI and Research, Microsoft, said in a statement late on Thursday.
“This collaboration combines powerful sequencing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into a revolutionary new capability, and represents the kind of deep collaborative partnership that we live for.
“We are incredibly proud to bring our best people and AI capabilities together with Adaptive in this joint quest.” Lee added.
“Artificial Intelligence represents one of technology’s most important priorities and healthcare is perhaps AI’s most urgent application.
“Partnering with Adaptive Technologies to decode the human immune system,” Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft said in a tweet.
The immune system is nature’s most finely-tuned diagnostic as it routinely scans and reads any signal of disease – such as a cancer cell or an infectious agent – in the body, and holds the genetic code that can give insights into detecting these diseases.
“Some conditions like cancer or autoimmune disorders can be difficult to diagnose, but this universal map of the immune system will enable earlier and more accurate diagnosis of disease, potentially helping physicians to connect the dots to understand the relationship between disease states and eventually lead to a better understanding of overall human health.” said Chad Robins, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies.
The collaboration is a part of Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT initiative, launched in 2017 to maximise the ability of AI and cloud computing to accelerate innovation in the healthcare industry, advance science through technology, and turn the lifesaving potential of next discoveries into reality.
—IANS
