At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today put a strong emphasis on machine learning. But in addition to plenty of new tools and features, the company also highlighted its work on building more responsible and fairer AI systems — both in the Azure cloud and Microsoft’s open-source toolkits. These include new tools for differential privacy […]
Microsoft today announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, an industry-specific cloud solution for healthcare providers. This is the first in what is likely going to be a set of cloud offerings that target specific verticals and extends a trend we’ve seen among large cloud providers (especially Google) that tailor specific offerings to […]
Microsoft today announced that Azure Quantum, its partner-centric quantum computing platform for developers who want to get started with quantum computing, is now in limited preview. First announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019, Azure Quantum brings together the hardware from IonQ, Honeywell, QCI and Microsoft, services from the likes of 1QBit, and the classical computing capabilities […]
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that it has teamed up with OpenAI, the startup trying to build a general artificial intelligence, with — among other things — a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, to create one of the world’s fastest supercomputers on top of Azure’s infrastructure. Microsoft says that the 285,000-core machine […]
Microsoft today announced a major new initiative that will finally alleviate some of the persistent confusion around Windows app development. Project Reunion, as it is called, is meant to unify the Windows developer platform, which is currently broken up between Win32, which was long the standard way of building Windows app, and the Universal Windows […]
Microsoft’s Edge browser is getting a bunch of new features soon. Some of these are for casual users while others are aimed at business users, IT admins and developers, but they all demonstrate that after releasing the first stable version of the browser only recently, the team is now starting to build in new features […]
At its (virtual) Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced a slew of updates for its Teams collaboration and communications platform. Given that Microsoft now sees Teams as its hub for teamwork and collaboration through calls, chats, and audio and video meetings, it’s no surprise that it would highlight Teams across today’s announcements. For the most […]
It wouldn’t be a Microsoft Build without a bunch of new capabilities for Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s cloud-based AI tools for developers. The first new feature is what Microsoft calls the “personalized apprentice mode,” which allows the existing Personalizer API to learn about user preferences in real time and in parallel with existing apps, all […]
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced Azure Synapse Link, a new enterprise service that allows businesses to analyze their data faster and more efficiently, using an approach that’s generally called ‘hybrid transaction/analytical processing’ (HTAP). That’s a mouthful, it essentially enables enterprises to use the same database system for analytical and transactional workloads on […]
Chaos engineering is about helping companies set up worst case scenarios and testing them to see what causes the operating system to fall over, but up until now, it has mostly been for teams running Linux servers. Gremlin, the startup that offers Chaos Engineering as a Service released a new tool to give engineers working […]
Microsoft today launched Lists, a new “smart tracking app” for Microsoft 365 users. That may sound a lot like a todo list app and since Microsoft already offers Microsoft To Do, you may wonder why it would bother with Lists, but it seems like Lists goes well beyond a basic to do app. Indeed, Lists […]
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that Azure Arc, its service for managing cloud resources anywhere, including competing clouds like AWS and GCP and platforms like Red Hat’s Open Shift, is now in public preview. Microsoft first announced this Kubernetes-based solution at its Ignite event in Orland last September. One feature that makes […]
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that Project Bonsai, its new machine teaching service, is now in public preview. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you remember that Microsoft acquired Bonsai, a company that focuses on machine teaching, back in 2018. Bonsai combined simulation tools with different machine learning techniques to […]
Fluid Framework was one of the sleeper hits of Microsoft’s 2019 Build developer conference. The idea behind the Fluid Framework is to provide developers with a new platform for building low-latency collaborative experiences around documents — and Microsoft itself is using it to do just that by rethinking some of the workflows in its own […]
Visual Studio Live Share is Microsoft’s tool for real-time collaborative code editing in the Visual Studio IDE and the Visual Studio Code editor. Earlier this year, the company also launched a preview of a browser-based version of the tool. While a shared real-time code editor is great, though, users always had to rely on additional […]
One vote. That’s all it needed for a bipartisan Senate amendment to pass that would have stopped federal authorities from further accessing millions of Americans’ browsing records. But it didn’t. One Republican was in quarantine, another was AWOL. Two Democratic senators — including former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — were nowhere to be seen and […]
The Extra Crunch Live series continues today with two venture capitalists: Alexia and Niko Bonatsos. The two investors don’t work for the same firm, but they each have an interesting perspective on the world of investing. Alexia is a former journalist — and a former co-editor of TechCrunch — who now runs Dream Machine, her own venture […]
EasyJet, the U.K.’s largest airline, said hackers have accessed the travel details of 9 million customers. The budget airline said 2,200 customers also had their credit card details accessed in the data breach, but passport records were not accessed, a company statement said. EasyJet did not say when the security incident happened or how the […]
A livestreamed “debate” yesterday between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a European commissioner shaping digital policy for the internal market, Thierry Breton, sounded cordial enough on the surface, with Breton making several chummy references to “Mark” — and talking about “having dialogue to establish the right governance” for digital platforms — while Zuckerberg kept it […]
YouTube is announcing a new way to buy advertising, which it’s calling YouTube Select. The announcement — made ahead of the now-remote digital advertising NewFronts next month — doesn’t reflect a broader change in who gets to monetize their videos (something that’s been a fraught topic at the Google-owned video service), but it is part […]
