Microsoft’s recently launched, A.I.-powered bot Tay may have embarrassed the company when Twitter users taught the machine how to be racist, but Microsoft hasn’t given up on the future of bot development. It’s just getting started. At Microsoft’s annual Build conference in San Francisco today, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the company’s plans to bring the world of […]
With Strata + Hadoop World kicking off, it’s always fascinating to step back and look at the contents of the sessions as a way of understanding what’s happening in the world of Big Data. For those of you who have attended this conference for the more than five years that the event’s been kicking, you’ve […]
Popular OS X and Linux BitTorrent client Transmission is coming to Windows. It’s not quite ready for prime time — gHacks spotted the first Windows build on the official repository — but it’s already better than any other Windows BitTorrent client out there. This isn’t the first build for Windows, as there was an unofficial […]
Microsoft today launched a preview of the next version of Skype for Windows 10. This preview, which is now rolling out to Windows Insiders, is the first full Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version of Skype (UWP apps are “universal” because they will be able to run on any Windows platform, from desktops to mobile phones). The new version […]
The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft’s Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these […]
If you’re in the market for a giant 84-inch 4K touchscreen computer (and have about $22,000 set aside for that), today is a good day. After numerous delays, Microsoft today started shipping its Surface Hub to business customers. Surface Hub comes in both the giant 84-inch version and a smaller 55-inch HD edition for a relatively affordable […]
Investor, entrepreneur, billionaire and Bill Gates’ other half in the founding of Microsoft Paul Allen has announced a $100 million investment in the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a fund focusing on the future of biotech research. Allen, who is worth about $15.3 billion, announced the investment today at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. The purpose […]
Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation — the open source group that’s probably best known for its Eclipse IDE, but which also offers a number of other developer tools. With this, Microsoft is joining other Eclipse sponsors like Google, Novell, IBM, Debeka, and Oracle. Given that Microsoft offers its own IDE […]
Skype, the Microsoft-owned video calling service, has quietly announced that it will no longer offer an app for smart TVs starting in June. Confirmation of the shutdown comes via a support page — first spotted by the BBC — which explains that smartphones and tablets have proven to be a more popular platform for Skype users. Over […]
Salesforce announced today that its SalesforceIQ intelligence product now integrates with Microsoft Outlook, which happens to be the most used business email program on the planet with over 400 million users on Outlook.com alone. The product being released today is called SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the point is that […]