Blair Hanley Frank
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Blair Hanley Frank
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Microsoft’s NFL partnership enters next generation with new apps
With the start of the U.S. professional football season around the corner, Microsoft unveiled the new tech it’s going to be providing coaches and fans this season as part of its ongoing partnership with the National Football League.Fans get an updated NFL app for the Xbox One and Windows 10 that provides them with video content, stats, replays and fantasy football information about their favorite teams, while coaches and players will be using new Surface Pro 3 tablets that help them strategize on the sidelines.The Xbox One app is designed to be a command center that fans can open up to get information about their favorite teams, fantasy leagues and all things NFL right from their couch. It’s an update to the app Microsoft released last year that provided fans with videos from their favorite teams, information about their fantasy teams and access to live video from the NFL if they pay for the right TV channels. Starting this year, users can now pick out two favorite teams instead of one, so they can easily follow their hometown favorites along with a local franchise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft updates program to encourage diversity in partner law firms
Microsoft has overhauled a program for promoting diversity at the law firms it works with, to promote higher representation for lawyers of different minority groups in the firms’ leadership ranks.The company’s Law Firm Diversity Program has been changed to offer bonuses to 15 law firms it works with, based on how many attorneys in positions of power are female, from racial and ethnic minorities, openly LGBT, people with disabilities or military veterans.Microsoft started the program 7 years ago and originally offered firms a 2 percent bonus on their billings if a set percentage of the hours they billed to the company were worked by diverse attorneys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft reports first quarterly loss since 2012 after Nokia write-down
Microsoft has reported its first quarterly loss in three years, largely as a result of a $7.5 billion write-down for its acquisition last year of Nokia’s devices and services business.Microsoft’s net loss for the quarter, the fourth of its fiscal year, was $3.2 billion, compared to $4.6 billion in profit during the same period a year earlier, the company announced Tuesday. That translated into a loss of $0.40 a share. Microsoft’s quarterly revenue declined more than 5 percent year over year to $22.2 billion. The news comes after a few tumultuous weeks for the company. Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it was cutting 7,800 jobs to streamline its smartphone hardware business. The company also transferred technology and employees from the Bing Maps team to Uber and sold part of its display advertising business to AOL.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The grim reaper approaches for Windows Server 2003
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 has its Windows XP moment coming very soon, and that’s bad news for IT leaders who have been dragging their feet.The company will end extended support for the 12-year-old operating system on July 14. That will leave users without security patches and other updates for any applications still running on the OS, which went out to manufacturers just weeks after the start of the second Iraq war. Microsoft says there were almost 24 million instances of Windows Server 2003 running in July 2014, though it hasn’t released more recent numbers as the end-of-support date has loomed.According to Mike Schutz, Microsoft’s general manager of cloud platform marketing, the good news is that most of the customers Microsoft has spoken with have moved “the vast percentage” of their server workloads off Windows Server 2003. But that still means that there are holdouts who will be left to protect their own servers as Microsoft cuts off security improvements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft shrinks smartphone ambitions with mobile restructuring
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just unveiled the latest of the “tough choices” Microsoft is making to streamline its business, and it’s a doozy: the company is significantly cutting back its smartphone ambitions almost two years after announcing it would acquire Nokia’s Devices and Services business in an attempt to play a greater role in this market. In an email to employees, Nadella said that the company was moving away from being a phone manufacturer and towards creating a “vibrant Windows ecosystem” that includes a group of first-party devices. As a result, the company will be dismissing around 7,800 employees, with the majority of job cuts impacting people in Microsoft’s phone hardware business. The restructuring also included another aftershock from the Nokia acquisition: Microsoft will take a massive $7.6 billion write-down on the acquisition itself along with a restructuring charge of between $750 and $850 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft shrinks smartphone ambitions with mobile restructuring
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just unveiled the latest of the “tough choices” Microsoft is making to streamline its business, and it’s a doozy: the company is significantly cutting back its smartphone ambitions almost two years after announcing it would acquire Nokia’s Devices and Services business in an attempt to play a greater role in this market. In an email to employees, Nadella said that the company was moving away from being a phone manufacturer and towards creating a “vibrant Windows ecosystem” that includes a group of first-party devices. As a result, the company will be dismissing around 7,800 employees, with the majority of job cuts impacting people in Microsoft’s phone hardware business. The restructuring also included another aftershock from the Nokia acquisition: Microsoft will take a massive $7.6 billion write-down on the acquisition itself along with a restructuring charge of between $750 and $850 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s new Tossup app tries to simplify getting friends together
Tossup, a new Microsoft app for Android and iOS, aims to make it easier for users to poll their friends and get together.Tossup lets people create quick polls and share them with their friends. The polls can be simple, consisting of a single yes or no question, or they can be more detailed, for example providing a list of local businesses to choose from for a meeting. After creating a poll, users are prompted to send it out to their friends as a link either via text message or email. After that, the people invited can answer the poll questions inside the app and add comments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft offers researchers $500K to work on HoloLens
Microsoft is offering academic researchers in the U.S. a chance to get their hands on its HoloLens augmented reality headgear later this year with a new program that will award funding and hardware to a handful of projects that will put the new gear to use.The company put out a request for proposals Monday seeking projects that will help “to better understand the role and possible applications for holographic computing in society.” Microsoft will pick “approximately five” proposals and give the researchers behind them a grant of up to $100,000 and two HoloLens development kits. In particular, Microsoft said it’s interested in seeing its technology used for things like data visualization, new forms of collaboration, interactive art and new teaching tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft buries hatchet with Kyocera, ending litigation
Microsoft and Kyocera have put an end to a patent spat that began earlier this year by expanding a patent cross-licensing deal between them.In a tersely worded, four-sentence press release Thursday, the companies said the licensing deal would enable them to use “a broader range of each other’s technologies in their respective products.” Beyond that, the terms were not disclosed.It’s another win for Microsoft’s ongoing practice of seeking patent licenses from Android manufacturers. Earlier this year, the company sued Kyocera because of components that are part of Android that Microsoft says infringe on its patents. Licensing patents related to Android is a big business for the company, which revealed last year that Samsung paid more than $1 billion from July 2012 to June 2013 as part of a patent licensing deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Skype for Business preview adds support for massive meetings, cloud-based phone administration
Businesses that use Microsoft’s Skype for Business communication product have some new beta features to play with that make the enterprise messaging and calling product more useful.The features, which were first announced earlier this year when Microsoft officially rebranded its Lync service as Skype for Business, allow businesses to create large-scale meetings and better integrate Skype for Business with traditional phone lines. It’s all designed to make the service more appealing for enterprises when those features enter general availability later this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple loses e-book antitrust appeal
An appeals court ruled against Apple’s challenge of a lower court’s decision which found the company liable for illegally conspiring with ebook publishers to jack up prices.A 3-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit voted 2 to 1 against Apple. Writing for the majority, Judge Debra Ann Livingston said that Apple illegally orchestrated a conspiracy between book publishers, upholding a district court ruling from 2013. The lawsuit was filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.Additionally, she said that the injunction imposed by District Court Judge Denise Cote was appropriate and left it in place. It’s the latest strike against Apple in this long-running case, which stems from agreements the company set up with publishers around the launch of its online ebook marketplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft hands some of the reins for its display ad business to AOL
Microsoft will be handing over its display advertising business to AOL in nine markets as part of a new partnership between the two companies that was announced Monday.Under the deal, AOL will use Bing to power search through its website, and will operate display advertising, including mobile and video ads, for Microsoft’s portfolio in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, U.K. and the U.S. That means AOL will be powering all the display ads that run in those countries, including on MSN, Xbox, Outlook.com and Skype.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft parental control update lets kids browse more than they should
A new version of Microsoft’s parental control product is ready for the Windows 10 launch, but users are complaining about a serious bug as well as features they don’t like.The free service, known previously as Family Safety, has been rebranded as Microsoft Family and redesigned. The changes are supposed to help families more easily control their kids’ activities on Windows and Windows Phone devices. However, parents are complaining on Microsoft’s support forum about a bug that loosens browsing restrictions.The bug affects accounts that should have their browsing limited to a handpicked “whitelist” of websites. Instead, children can browse beyond the walled garden their parents set up. Unsurprisingly, parents are upset, and they can’t return to the previous version.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Samsung will stop blocking Microsoft software updates ‘within a few days’
Owners of Samsung PCs will begin receiving automatic software updates from Microsoft again soon, after Samsung said it will end its practice of blocking automatic Windows Updates on its computers.“We will be issuing a patch through the Samsung Software Update notification process to revert back to the recommended automatic Windows Update settings within a few days,” Samsung said Friday.It said it was committed to providing “a trustworthy user experience” and that it values its partnership with Microsoft.It’s a quick turnaround from earlier this week, when researcher Patrick Barker reported on an auspiciously named application called “Disable_Windowsupdate.exe” that runs on Samsung PCs as part of the company’s SW Update service. As its name implies, the program disables automatic updates from Microsoft’s software patching service, and requires people to manually install individual patches if they want to update their PC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AppleCare+ offers easier battery replacements for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and more
Owners of iOS devices that aren’t holding a charge are in luck, thanks to a change Apple has made to its support policy.Apple has changed the terms of its AppleCare+ extended warranty to allow replacements for iPhones, iPads, iPods and Apple Watches with batteries that hold less than 80 percent of their original capacity. That’s an upgrade from the previous plan, which only offered free replacements for devices that dropped below 50 percent of their original capacity.The change was noticed Friday in a post by MacRumors, and appears spurred on by Apple’s expectations for its smartwatch. The company has said that it expects the Watch’s battery will take about 1,000 full charge-discharge cycles before it drops below 80 percent capacity, which means that it will last for about two-and-a-half to three years. The changed policy only applies to devices purchased after April 9, so iPhone and iPad owners who got new hardware for the December holidays are still subject to the plan’s previous 50 percent requirement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Satya Nadella’s new mission for Microsoft: help people ‘achieve more’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out his new mission for the company in an email sent out Thursday to all employees.“Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” he wrote.It’s a much briefer mission statement than the one he unveiled when he took over the top job last year, and indicative of the changes Nadella has made since he took Microsoft’s helm. During his tenure, Microsoft has focused on broadening the reach of its services and applications across platforms and has pushed ahead with a new version of its Windows operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft testing new Office 365 features to entice educators
Microsoft announced a private beta for a pair of new services Wednesday aimed at making its Office 365 service work better in schools.The new Classroom Hub is a website that brings together content from different Office applications into a single, central location that teachers and students can use to stay on top of what’s going on in their classes. The service can pull in notes, assignments, calendars and class materials to provide a digital home for all of the information that students need to know. Teachers will also be able to track progress on assignments and provide students with feedback and grades through the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft testing new Office 365 features to entice educators
Microsoft announced a private beta for a pair of new services Wednesday aimed at making its Office 365 service work better in schools.The new Class Dashboard is a website that brings together content from different Office applications into a single, central location that teachers and students can use to stay on top of what’s going on in their classes. The service can pull in notes, assignments, calendars and class materials to provide a digital home for all of the information that students need to know. Teachers will also be able to track progress on assignments and provide students with feedback and grades through the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Snowflake Computing opens data warehouse to the masses
Snowflake Computing announced Tuesday that its cloud-based data warehouse service is available to all users.Called the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, the service allows companies to pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. The warehouse is designed to handle administrative tasks for many of its users, like automatically scaling to match a company’s demands and handling hardware provisioning by itself so that administrators don’t need to spend as much time managing it.In addition, Snowflake’s service is capable of taking in both structured and semi-structured data, without requiring users to ensure that it’s all in one format before uploading to the warehouse. The data warehouse will also automatically optimize itself based on data usage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple takes a greater role in Bluetooth development
Apple will be playing a larger role in the development of Bluetooth as the company pushes into wearable technology, home automation and more.The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which oversees the development of the wireless communication standard, announced Tuesday that Apple has become a “promoter member” of the group, giving the company new power to guide Bluetooth’s development. Promoter members are given a continual seat on the group’s board of directors, and are also the only membership class that can vote on its corporate matters.Apple has been an associate board member of the group since 2011, and the company’s senior wireless architect, Joakim Linde. currently serves as the board’s secretary. In the past, Apple’s board membership was term limited. The current promoter members—Ericsson, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nokia, and Toshiba—voted unanimously to have Apple join their ranks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here