Amazon launched a new tool on Thursday aimed at helping developers build applications that offer insights from a firehose of data in real time. Kinesis Analytics will let users set up SQL queries that run on data that's constantly updating, expanding the reach of the popular data analysis language beyond traditional database applications. Once a user has set up a Kinesis Analytics stream, the results can then be routed to up to four different services, including Amazon S3, Redshift, and Elasticsearch Service.It's a service that's useful for bringing in data from sources that are rapidly shifting in real time, like sensor information from the internet of things, or live data from a stock market. That's key as more and more companies start leaning on big sets of live data to help drive business applications. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Satya Nadella isn't stopping the job cuts train at Microsoft any time soon. The company revealed Thursday that 2,850 people will lose their jobs by the middle of 2017, on top of the 1,850 cuts announced earlier this year.According to a regulatory filing, those impacted will primarily be in its phone hardware business, which has already been hit hard by layoffs, and in global sales.The cuts are more fallout from Microsoft's decision to downsize its smartphone business, which it acquired from Nokia in 2015. Putting that acquisition in motion was one of the last things that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did before announcing that he would be leaving the company's top job. His successor hasn't taken the same shine to the phone hardware business that Microsoft bought.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon reported another surge in revenue for its cloud business last quarter, though the growth is slowing as the division gets bigger.Amazon Web Services revenue for the second quarter was $2.87 billion, up 58 percent from the same period in 2015, Amazon announced Thursday. Operating profit was $863 million, up from $391 million a year earlier.It's another positive sign for AWS, which is still the leader in public cloud services, even as IBM, Microsoft and Google step up their efforts to complete.The growth at AWS is slowing, however, which is typical for a company as its business gets bigger. The gain was 64 percent in the first quarter, and 69 percent the quarter before that.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is using third parties to make its productivity apps more useful on Android. The company announced Thursday that it's now possible to bring functionality from apps like Scanbot, DocuSign, and ProsperWorks into Docs and Sheets on its mobile operating system.The third-party add-ons will let users do things like access CRM data, start to electronically sign a document, and create mobile apps based on data they have stored in a spreadsheet. The new add-ons are aimed at making it easier for people to get work done within Google Docs and Sheets while they're on the go.Google is in tight competition with Microsoft to attract users to its productivity suite, and both companies are working to bring the power of third-party applications into the apps people already use to get things done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the biggest issues with collaborative work is sitting around twiddling your thumbs while waiting for someone else to get their work done. Asana announced a new feature on Thursday that's aimed at cutting down on emails asking when a particular task will be finished. Users of the collaboration and tracking software will be able to mark that a task they're assigned to is waiting for someone else to complete their work, using the new Dependencies feature. That way, for example, a designer can say her final layout of a web page is waiting on a marketer to put the finishing touches on the copy and on images that are supposed to be included. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's a new iPhone camera application on the block that's supposed to be better at taking pictures than the one Apple ships with its phones ... and it's built by Microsoft. The company's research arm launched Pix, which enhances the photos that users take in a variety of ways, on Wednesday morning. The app is designed to make photos look better and even improves on Apple's Live Photos ability to capture scenes that have moving elements in them. It's part of Microsoft's continued push to build applications for platforms beyond those that it controls directly, especially iOS and Android. The free app was built by members of Microsoft Research, and released for free on the iOS App Store.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT administrators managing Dropbox deployments are supposed to have an easier time with it soon, thanks to improvements that the company announced Wednesday.The company is rolling out a redesigned interface for examining logs of user activity within an organization, new folders that make it easier to create and manage a shared workspace for teams and mobile access management capabilities.The move is part of Dropbox's push to get its product used by more large organizations, in addition to its strong base of consumer users. The company recently announced that it has more than 200,000 organizations subscribed to its business offering, and improving these capabilities is not only a means of helping existing users, but also a way to prove to new ones that the company is serious about reaching businesses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has reported its second straight quarter of falling iPhone sales, hit by stiff competition in China and the ongoing slowdown in the worldwide smartphone market.The company sold 40.4 million iPhones from April to June, down from 47.5 million in the same quarter last year, Apple announced Tuesday.Revenue for the quarter, the third of its fiscal year, was $42.4 billion, down 17 percent from $49.6 billion a year earlier. Its net profit fell 27 percent to $7.8 billion. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is finally bringing one of the best features of its Outlook mobile app to the desktop. Users of Outlook on Mac and Windows will start seeing their inbox separated out into two tabs: Focused and Other.As the name implies, the Focused Inbox is supposed to hold all of a user's important emails, while Other contains everything else. Users can train the system by moving email to and from the Focused Inbox, and establishing rules about certain senders and subjects.When new messages come into the Other inbox, a banner will show up at the top of the list of focused messages letting users see how many new messages are in that section of their inbox, along with a select list of senders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While there's a lot of talk about Windows 10's new features for consumers, the forthcoming Anniversary Update also adds a pair of advanced security capabilities aimed at helping IT managers better lock down the computers in their organization.Windows Information Protection aims to make it possible for organizations to compartmentalize business and personal data on the same device. It comes alongside the general release of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, a system that uses machine learning and Microsoft's cloud to better protect businesses after their security has been breached.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While there's a lot of talk about Windows 10's new features for consumers, the forthcoming Anniversary Update also adds a pair of advanced security capabilities aimed at helping IT managers better lock down the computers in their organization.Windows Information Protection aims to make it possible for organizations to compartmentalize business and personal data on the same device. It comes alongside the general release of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, a system that uses machine learning and Microsoft's cloud to better protect businesses after their security has been breached.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Small business owners are getting a new feature tailored just for them in Microsoft Office 365 -- a full-service system for scheduling appointments for their services over the internet.Microsoft Bookings is a new service that makes it possible for business owners to create their own scheduling page, and then let potential customers make an appointment online. It's supposed to be a boon for businesses used to running that process through a series of emails, phone calls, or text messages.Customers will be able to look at a list of prices, and then schedule time for an appointment with a list of employees. Bookings will then email the customers a confirmation including an invitation they can put on their calendars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google's intelligent cloud developer tools are expanding with the launch of a new Cloud Natural Language API on Wednesday. The service is aimed at helping developers create applications that understand human language.It's an important move for Google, as public cloud providers are racing to host new applications built with intelligent capabilities. Natural language processing allows developers to build apps that can tackle the challenging task of understanding how humans communicate, and it is key for things like building intelligent assistants and chat bots.This API can provide a bunch of information about a block of text back to an application, including the overall sentiment of a passage and an analysis of the structure of a sentence. The system can also identify entities mentioned, including people, organizations, locations, events, and products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Skype is leaving behind its peer-to-peer roots and going all in on the cloud. While the popular messaging app made it this far by facilitating connections between computers for video calls and other communications, it's moving to a cloud architecture that is supposed to improve performance and expand the service's capabilities.According to Skype Corporate Vice President Amritansh Raghav, the architecture shift has taken three years of work. It is supposed to provide a number of benefits, including improved message syncing across devices. Certain Skype features are already built on top of the new cloud infrastructure, including the mobile group video calling and live translation features that the service introduced recently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's cloud push continued to pay off last quarter, with revenue from its Azure services more than doubling from the same period last year, the company reported Tuesday.Overall revenue for the quarter was down, however, thanks partly to a steep decline in Microsoft's handset business. Total revenue for the three months ended June 30 was $20.6 billion, Microsoft said, down from $22.2 billion last year. Net profit was $3.1 billion.Microsoft's retreat from the smartphone market hurt its device sales significantly. Phone revenue sank 71 percent, after the company back pedaled from its Nokia acquisition to focus on a few models of Windows phone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Here's all the gear you need for a Pokémon go adventureImage by Blair Hanley FrankPokémon Go is hotter than a Charizard right now, but the game asks a lot from players. It’s a huge battery hog, and long sessions require a lot of physical endurance. Here’s what you need in your Go bag to make your time in the field last, based on my year of experience playing Ingress, its predecessor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Skype is bringing a new app to smartphones, computers, and tablets running Windows 10 on Monday, ahead of Microsoft's Windows 10 Anniversary Update launch.People who are beta testing Windows 10 through the Windows Insider Program now get a new version of the Skype Preview App, which will allow them to call mobile and landline phones from their computers, leave and receive voicemails, and put calls on hold.The new Skype app will replace the existing Skype desktop app, along with calling and messaging apps that were bundled with the original release of Windows 10. It's unclear when the app will be released to all Windows 10 users, but this announcement brings that closer to reality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's called Stream, and it's supposed to let people easily work together with one another on videos, and then share that content both inside and outside their company.In the realm of consumer web services, video is ascending. Facebook has been emphasizing video posts on its popular social network, while YouTube is still going strong. Microsoft is trying to take some of that mojo and bring it to the business world with the launch of an open beta for Stream on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last year, Microsoft announced that it planned to have a billion devices running Windows 10 by the middle of 2018. Now, the company is saying that was too ambitious."We’re pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer" to reach the goal, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said in an emailed statement. "In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices.”The missed target is rough news for the company, which has relied on that promise to attract developers to build apps for Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Linux and Chromebook users now have new versions of Skype to play with.Microsoft launched an alpha version of a new client for Linux on Wednesday, in a push to get users of the open-source operating system to make video calls and send messages with Skype.There was a Linux client available for the service previously, but this launch is a move by the company to get users of the operating system on the latest version of Skype. Users will get a new interface, emoticons, and a file-sharing interface.Chrome users will be able to use web.skype.com to make calls from Google's web browser and desktop operating system starting Wednesday, too. Like the Linux client, the new Chrome client is still in alpha, so there are likely to be bugs, along with missing features. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Blair Hanley Frank