Blair Hanley Frank
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Blair Hanley Frank
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New Microsoft beta lets workers build their own apps without coding
Employees that need access to certain business data on the go can now build their own app for it using a tool from Microsoft that went into public beta on Friday.The company has announced that it's opening up its PowerApps app creation service to the world, after a private beta period that began last year. PowerApps allows line of business employees to take data from a variety of sources and create apps that run on phones and tablets without requiring them to do any coding. Developers' time is often constrained, so doing something like creating a mobile expense reporting app might not be a top priority, even if it would save time and money. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Massive growth shows why Amazon is the public cloud leader
Amazon showed off its dominance in the public cloud market on Thursday as the capstone to a better than expected quarterly earnings report.Revenue from Amazon Web Services during the first quarter of 2016 was up 64 percent year-over-year, showing the big money that's still out there as companies invest more and more in the public cloud. Amazon's cloud platform generated revenue of $2.56 billion, putting it on pace to make $10 billion this year, in line with a letter from CEO Jeff Bezos sent to shareholders earlier this month. That's big money to go with Amazon's massive customer base, which includes names like Netflix, Time Inc., and Intuit. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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OneNote gets easy video embedding and many more new features
Microsoft has announced a veritable bonanza of new features for its OneNote note-taking software across multiple platforms, providing added functionality for people who rely on it to organize their thoughts. First and foremost, Microsoft made it easier to save online videos for later use inside OneNote. Users can now add a link to one of a handful of popular video services inside OneNote for Windows 10, Mac, and iOS, and Microsoft's software will automatically embed the linked video into the notebook for easy playback later. Users of Microsoft's note-taking software on the iPad can now rearrange audio recordings, images, text, shapes, and any other item on a page by touching and dragging them. To help with that, Microsoft added a lasso tool so that users can select groups of objects and move them around as one unit. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft is making big data really small using DNA
Microsoft has partnered with a San Francisco-based company to encode information on synthetic DNA to test its potential as a new medium for data storage. Twist Bioscience will provide Microsoft with 10 million DNA strands for the purpose of encoding digital data. In other words, Microsoft is trying to figure out how the same molecules that make up humans' genetic code can be used to encode digital information. While a commercial product is still years away, initial tests have shown that it's possible to encode and recover 100 percent of digital data from synthetic DNA, said Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect, in a statement.Using DNA could allow massive amounts of data to be stored in a tiny physical footprint. Twist claims a gram of DNA could store almost a trillion gigabytes of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google Calendar takes the headache out of scheduling work meetings
Google wants to take some of the pain out of scheduling work meetings with a new feature the company launched for its Calendar product on Wednesday. The new "Find a Time" feature in the Google Calendar Android app helps users pick out a time that works for everyone invited to a meeting without requiring them to spend ages going back and forth over email. Here's how it works: when a user sets up a meeting and adds people to the event, Find a Time will pick out a list of suggested times, along with who will be able to attend. Those suggestions will be built not only on the current state of an invitee's calendar, but also their historical scheduling trends. Once the organizer has picked a time, Google Calendar will send out invitations to everyone. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple stumbles in the world’s biggest smartphone market
Last year, Apple was on a gravy train in China. Sales of the iPhone were booming, and the country looked poised to overtake the U.S. in its contribution to Apple’s business. Suddenly, things don't look so rosy.Apple reported Tuesday that its first quarter revenue from Greater China declined 26 percent from the same period in 2015, a turnaround that contributed to Apple's first year-over-year revenue decline in more than a decade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Skype for Business finally makes its way to the Mac
Microsoft's new business communication product is finally coming to the Mac after the company launched it for PC users last year.The company announced the first technical preview of Skype for Business for Mac on Tuesday morning, giving users of Apple computers an easy way to connect to meetings they have scheduled through Microsoft's professional audio and videoconferencing software. When users sign into the app, they'll see their Skype for Business meetings for the current day and the following one, and be able to easily join them to discuss whatever business things they want to with the other people invited.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Dropbox wants to stretch desktop file storage to infinity
Dropbox has a futuristic vision for how its users will be able to share massive files and have quick access to them on their computers, without their hard drives overflowing.The cloud storage company announced a new initiative at its Open conference in London on Tuesday called Project Infinite. It's a push to create a new Dropbox interface that allows users to see all of the files they've stored in the cloud in their computer's file explorer without requiring them to keep local copies of each document, image, spreadsheet or other file. With Project Infinite, users will be able to manage their files in the cloud by moving them around inside the Mac OS X Finder or Windows File Explorer, just like they would any local files that are taking up space on their hard drives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s weak phone sales drag down its Surface and cloud wins
Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia is proving to be quite the albatross around the company's neck. The company has stepped away from focusing on phones, and its handset sales revenue fell by almost half in the first quarter.Microsoft sold only 2.3 million Lumia phones during the quarter, 73 percent fewer units compared with the first quarter of 2015. That meant Lumia handset revenue fell 46 percent. This dragged down the company's overall device revenue despite major gains in its Surface business. Sales of Surface tablets and the Surface Book touchscreen laptop brought in $1.1 billion for Microsoft during the last quarter, compared with $713 million during the same period last year. That's good news for the company's future, but it's being hurt by the present state of the phone business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AWS focuses on hard disks for new big data services
Amazon Web Services is going retro to help companies deal with big data workloads. The cloud provider announced Tuesday it's launching two new volume types for its Elastic Block Store service that are powered by traditional, spinning disk hard drives. The new Throughput-Optimized HDD and Cold HDD EBS volume types let companies store files cheaply in a way that's still useful for big data workloads like MapReduce and Kafka. the Throughput-Optimized service is aimed at frequent use cases, while the Cold HDD service is built for those same uses, but for applications that reference the items stored less frequently. To get all of that data into AWS, customers can now call on a new 80TB Snowball storage appliance. That joins the existing 50TB Snowball, which was already available for users to order from AWS and get delivered to their data center for data transfer. Using the Snowball, users can ship their data securely from on-premises servers to Amazon's. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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New AWS service helps companies to move their apps to the cloud
A new Amazon cloud service announced Tuesday could help companies with legacy applications have an easier time taking the leap to the cloud. Amazon Web Services General Manager Matt Wood announced the new Application Discovery Service, which will allow companies to easily analyze legacy applications running on their data centers. It will help companies start the migration of their application data up to the cloud, and then work with one of Amazon's partners to get their applications running in AWS.The service lets users identify their applications and the infrastructure dependencies of those applications and then measure a performance baseline of those applications operating on-premises before companies consider moving them to the cloud. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Chrome extensions will soon have to tell you what data they collect
Google is about to make it harder for Chrome extensions to collect your browsing data without letting you know about it, according to a new policy announced Friday.Starting in mid-July, developers releasing Chrome extensions will have to comply with a new User Data Policy that governs how they collect, transmit and store private information. Extensions will have to encrypt personal and sensitive information, and developers will have to disclose their privacy policies to users.Developers will also have to post a "prominent disclosure" when collecting sensitive data that isn't related to a prominent feature. That's important, because extensions have tremendous power to track users' browsing habits and then use that for nefarious purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Chrome extensions will soon have to tell you what data they collect
Google is about to make it harder for Chrome extensions to collect your browsing data without letting you know about it, according to a new policy announced Friday.Starting in mid-July, developers releasing Chrome extensions will have to comply with a new User Data Policy that governs how they collect, transmit and store private information. Extensions will have to encrypt personal and sensitive information, and developers will have to disclose their privacy policies to users.Developers will also have to post a "prominent disclosure" when collecting sensitive data that isn't related to a prominent feature. That's important, because extensions have tremendous power to track users' browsing habits and then use that for nefarious purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft sues US government over secret requests for user data
Microsoft has sued the U.S. government in an attempt to strike down a law allowing judges to gag tech companies when law enforcement agencies want access to their users' data.The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, argues that a section of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is unconstitutional for requiring tech companies to keep requests for data under wraps. Microsoft argued the law is unconstitutional under the First Amendment, by limiting the company's freedom of speech, as well as under the Fourth Amendment's due process protections. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Box goes international with AWS and IBM-powered Zones feature
Box is trying to make it easier for companies outside the U.S. to comply with regulatory requirements on where their data is stored with a new feature that lets them pick a variety of new countries in which they can house their data.Starting next month, companies will be able to pay for a new Box Zones feature that will let them store data in Germany, Ireland, Japan and Singapore, while using Box's content and management services as though they had kept that information in the company's U.S. datacenters.That's important for companies that have to meet data sovereignty requirements in order to comply with their country's laws. Depending on the specific requirement, they may be prevented from storing some or all of their data in another country, which would until now have precluded them from working with Box.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s ‘blue screen of death’ is getting more descriptive with QR codes
The Windows Blue Screen of Death isn't known for being particularly descriptive, but Microsoft may be looking to change that in a future version of Windows 10. A Reddit user posted a picture last week that shows a new version of the dreaded blue screen, one with a QR code and a link where users can get more information about the error that caused their computer to crash. Right now, the code and the link take users to a webpage that discusses generic fixes for errors that might cause a crash. In the future, though, Microsoft could provide a QR code that leads to more specific information about what caused the computer freeze up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to get Bash running on Windows
Unix command line users around the world rejoiced when Microsoft announced recently it would be bringing the popular Bash shell to Windows 10 with a forthcoming update. Last Wednesday, the company released a beta build of its operating system that finally had support for the new functionality.To get it working, users have to jump through a few hoops. First, the system is only available right now for users who have build 14316 of Windows 10. To get it, a PC has to be a part of the Windows Insider Program's Fast ring. After installing the beta, users have to toggle Developer Mode on in Settings > Updates and Security > For Developers. From there, they have to open up another settings pane, check the "Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta)," restart their computer, and open a DOS command prompt and run the bash command.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft brings Bash to Windows with new beta build
One of the major announcements from Microsoft's Build developer conference last week was that the company was bringing the popular Bash command line interface to Windows 10 with a new Linux subsystem. Now, developers can give it a shot with a new beta build of the operating system, which Microsoft released Wednesday morning.People on the Windows Insider Program's fast ring will get access to the build, which includes a wide variety of other new features, too. Foremost among them are a set of new Cortana features that link their Windows or Android phones with users' PCs in a variety of ways.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google brings calendar reminders feature to desktop web
Google Calendar users now have the ability to add reminders from their desktop browsers that will follow them around to other Google services, thanks to a feature the company introduced Tuesday. People can now set reminders in other services like Google Now, Keep and Inbox, and have them show up in their calendar, informing them of what they have to do during the day. Reminders are meant to help people take care of what they need to do, and will follow users around at the top of their calendar until completed. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Amazon disabled encryption on its tablets and phones because nobody used it
Amazon caught flack on Wednesday for disabling the encryption capabilities of its Fire phones and tablets with a software update. The company says its reasoning was simple: people didn't use it."In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using," Amazon spokeswoman Robin Handaly wrote in an email.Those "enterprise features" included one that allowed users to encrypt their entire device with a PIN that would erase all their data if not entered correctly 30 times in a row. The issue surfaced recently because Amazon just allowed older tablets -- the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the Fire HD 6/7 -- to upgrade from Fire OS 4, the previous version of the company's Android fork. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here