Microsoft gives 500 patents to startups

Microsoft today announced a major expansion of its Azure IP Advantage program, which provides its Azure users with protection against patent trolls. This program now also provides customers who are building IoT solutions that connect to Azure with access to 10,000 patents to defend themselves against intellectual property lawsuits. What’s maybe most interesting here, though, […]

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Microsoft launches Game Stack, brings Xbox Live to Android and iOS

Microsoft today announced a new initiative that combines all of the company’s gaming-related products for developers like Xbox Live, Azure PlayFab, Direct X, Mixer, Virtual Studio, Simplygon and Azure under a single umbrella. That umbrella, Microsoft Game Stack, is meant to give game developers, no matter whether they are at a AAA studio or working […]

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BMW continues to bet on the (Azure) cloud

Earlier this week, at MWC Barcelona, BMW announced its newest in-car AI initiative: BMW Natural Interaction. The idea here is to use cameras, microphones and other sensors in the car to allow you to have more natural interactions with the car, either through voice or gestures. The marquee feature here is the ability to point […]

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Microsoft announces an Azure-powered Kinect camera for enterprise

Today’s Mobile World Congress kickoff event was all about the next Hololens, but Microsoft still had some surprises up its sleeve. One of the more interesting additions is the Azure Kinect, a new enterprise camera system that leverages the company’s perennially 3D imaging technology to create a 3D camera for enterprises. The device is actually […]

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Microsoft Azure sets its sights on more analytics workloads

Enterprises now amass huge amounts of data, both from their own tools and applications, as well as from the SaaS applications they use. For a long time, that data was basically exhaust. Maybe it was stored for a while to fulfill some legal requirements, but then it was discarded. Now, data is what drives machine […]

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AWS and Microsoft reap most of the benefits of expanding cloud market

While it appears that overall economic activity could be slowing down, one area that continues to soar is the cloud business. Just this week, Amazon and Microsoft reported their cloud numbers as part of their overall earnings reports. While Microsoft’s cloud growth was flat from the previous quarter, it still grew a healthy 76 percent […]

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Microsoft acquires FSLogix to enhance Office 365 virtual desktop experience

Back in September, Microsoft announced a virtual desktop solution that lets customers run Office 365 and Windows 10 in the cloud. They mentioned several partners in the announcement who were working on solutions with them. One of those was FSLogix, a Georgia virtual desktop startup. Today, Microsoft announced it has acquired FSLogix. It did not […]

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Chef launches deeper integration with Microsoft Azure

DevOps automation service Chef today announced a number of new integrations with Microsoft Azure. The news, which was announced at Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, focuses on helping enterprises bring their legacy applications to Azure and ranges from the public preview of Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure to the integration of Chef’s InSpec […]

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Microsoft Azure gets new high-performance storage options

Microsoft Azure is getting a number of new storage options today that mostly focus on use cases where disk performance matters. The first of these is Azure Ultra SSD Managed Disks, which are now in public preview. Microsoft says that these drives will offer “sub-millisecond latency,” which unsurprisingly makes them ideal for workloads where latency […]

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Microsoft wants to put your data in a box

AWS has its Snowball (and Snowmobile truck), Google Cloud has its data transfer appliance and Microsoft has its Azure Data Box. All of these are physical appliances that allow enterprises to ship lots of data to the cloud by uploading it into these machines and then shipping them to the cloud. Microsoft’s Azure Data Box […]

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Microsoft stands up Azure Stack for government as JEDI contract looms

Microsoft announced today that it’s released Azure Stack for Azure Government at a time when it’s battling rivals at Amazon and other cloud companies for the massive winner-take-all $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract known as JEDI. Azure Stack provides customers with a similar set of cloud services that they would get in the public cloud, […]

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Amazon’s AWS continues to lead its performance highlights

Amazon’s web services AWS continue to be the highlight of the company’s balance sheet, once again showing the kind of growth Amazon is looking for in a new business for the second quarter — especially one that has dramatically better margins than its core retail business. Despite now running a grocery chain, the company’s AWS […]

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