Author: azeeadmin

Microsoft used its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, today to announce a number of new features that are coming to Office 365. Given the company’s current focus on AI, it’s no surprise that most of these new features are powered by AI in one form or another. That means all of your Office apps, on- and offline, will soon become a little bit easier to use and offer you more assistance.

The most interesting of these new features is called Ideas. With Ideas, Microsoft is rolling out a unified experience in tools like Excel and PowerPoint (with others to follow), that aim to help you save time on everyday tasks. That may be figuring out a specific design and layout in PowerPoint, or finding images for your presentation. In Excel, Ideas may suggest which charts to use or help you discover outliers in your data. This feature is now generally available in Excel and coming to PowerPoint Online as a preview in the near future. Chances are we’ll see it pop up in other Office apps soon. And yes, feel free to insert your own favorite Clippy joke here.

Excel is getting a few additional new AI features, too. Microsoft previously announced data types in Excel at Ignite 2017 — and launched into preview earlier this year. Now this feature, which helps you turn references to stocks and geographies into rich data that you can easily extend and manipulate in a spreadsheet, is generally available. The company is also bringing image recognition to Excel. This nifty new tool lets you convert a picture of a data table into… you guessed it… an Excel file. The name of this tool? Data from Picture. It’s now available in public preview.

Microsoft also notes that it is making Excel faster by speeding up lookup-type functions.

There’s another new feature here, too, that isn’t directly about AI but will still make using Office easier. Microsoft Search is a new search capability that will soon roll out to Bing and Office.com (and later to Microsoft Edge, Windows and Office) and use data from the Microsoft Graph and AI tech from Bing to offer a better and more cohesive search experience.

Microsoft notes that these new search features will also be able to index internal documents so that you can now ask questions like “Can I bring my wife and kids on a work trip?” and see an HR document that tells you that you can’t.

If you’ve ever attended a video meeting and wished that the speakers used really expensive cameras and lenses that allowed for that soft classy background blur of a portrait photo, then Microsoft wants to make that wish come true. The company announced a number of updates to Microsoft Teams today, and one of those is a feature that automatically detects faces and blurs the background behind a speaker. You have to be an Office 365 commercial customer to get this, though. If you use Teams through one of Microsoft’s recently launched free accounts, you’re out of luck.

While background blur is nice (or at least we have to assume it will be because we haven’t been able to try it yet), the more useful new feature in Teams is intelligent recordings. Teams can now automatically generate captions and provide time-coded transcripts for the replays. This feature is coming to Office 365 commercial customers now.

Microsoft first demoed these new transcription capabilities at its Build developer conference earlier this year. In that demo, the transcription service was able to distinguish between speakers and create a real-time transcript of the meeting.

If you want to create live streams and on-demand video for a wider audience inside your company, Teams is also getting that capability next month, together with Microsoft Stream and Yammer (which seems to be lingering in the shadow of Teams these days).

It’s time for the next version of SQL Server, Microsoft’s flagship database product. The company today announced the first public preview of SQL Server 2019 and while yet another update to a proprietary database may not seem all that exciting at first glance, Microsoft is trying to do a few rather interesting things with this update.

What’s at the core of all of the most interesting updates is an acknowledgement that there are very few companies that only use a single database product. So what Microsoft is doing with SQL Server is adding new connectors that allow business to use SQL Server to query other databases, including those of Oracle, Teradata and MongoDB. This turns SQL Server into something of a virtual integration layer — yet the data never needs to be replicated or moved to SQL Server.

But there is more! SQL Server 2019 will come with built-in support for Spark and the Hadoop File System. That’s an acknowledgement of the popularity of these open-source tools, as well as the importance of big data workloads that SQL Server, if it wants to say relevant, has to be able to support, too, and it has to do so in a way that many companies are already familiar with.

There’s another open source aspect here, too: SQL Server will support these big data clusters with the help of the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration system. Every cluster will include SQL Server, the Hadoop file system and Spark.

As for the name, it’s worth noting that many pundits expected a “SQL Server 2018,” but Microsoft opted to skip a year after SQL Server 2016 and 2017. So SQL Server 2019 it is.

It’s a big day for Microsoft today, which announced a slew of updates across virtually all of its product lines at its Ignite conference today. Unsurprisingly, one theme this year is artificial intelligence and machine learning. Microsoft is launching new tools to bring its Cortana assistant to the enterprise, but there is also a number of other developer-centric updates and products that are launching today.

One of those is an update to the Azure Machine Learning services, the company’s platform for letting anyone build and train machine learning models with a focus on prediction. With today’s update, this platform is getting a new tool that automates much of the time-consuming selection, testing and tweaking necessary to build a solid model. Like many of Microsoft’s AI initiatives, the idea here is to allow any developer to build and use these models without having to delve into the depths of TensorFlow, PyTorch or other AI frameworks.

In addition to this automation service, Microsoft is also making more hardware-accelerated models for FPGAs available on Azure Machine Learning, as well as a Python SDK that will make the service more accessible from a number of popular IDEs and notebooks.

Azure Cognitive Services, which plays home to most of Microsoft’s pre-built and customizable machine learning APIs, is also getting a few updates. The Cognitive Services speech service for speech recognition and translation is now generally available, for example, and Microsoft argues that the voices its deep learning-based speech synthesis system generates are now nearly indistinguishable from recordings of real people. The same, of course, is true of Google’s and AWS’s speech synthesis engines, so we’ll have to hear them ourselves to see how true to life these voices are.

Microsoft’s Bot Framework SDK is also getting an update that promises to make human and computer interactions more natural. Version 4 of this framework is now generally available, and Microsoft specifically highlights that building a first bot is now easier. Since the hype around bots has died down significantly, though, we’ll have to see if developers still care now that most consumers tend to shy away from interacting with these systems.

Given that the term ‘AI’ doesn’t always have the most positive connotations (and not just because developers prefer a more precise terminology), it’s maybe also no surprise that Microsoft is launching a new program today that aims to “harness the power of artificial intelligence for disaster recovery, helping children, protecting refugees and displaced people, and promoting respect for human rights.” This new AI for Humanitarian Action project is a $40 million, five-year program that is part of the company’s AI for Good Initiative.

At its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft today announced a plethora of new Internet of Things-focused updates to its Azure cloud computing platform. It’s no secret that the amount of data generated by IoT devices is a boon to cloud computing services like Azure — and Microsoft is definitely aiming to capitalize on this (and its existing relationships with companies in this space).

Some of today’s announcements are relatively minor. Azure IoT Central, the company’s solution for helping you get started with IoT, is now generally available, for example, and there are updates to Microsoft’s IoT provisioning service, IoT hub message routing tools and Map Control API.

Microsoft also today announced that the Azure IoT platform will now support Google’s Android and Android Things platform via its Java SDK.

What’s more interesting, though, is the new services. The highlight here is probably the launch of Azure Digital Twins. Using this new service, enterprises can now build their own digital models of any physical environment.

Think of it as the virtual counterpart to a real-world IoT deployment — and as the IoT deployment in the real world changes, so does the digital model. It will provide developers with a full view of all the devices they have deployed and allows them to run advanced analytics and test scenarios as needed without having to make changes to the actual physical deployment.

“As the world enters the next wave of innovation in IoT where the connected objects such as buildings, equipment or factory floors need to be understood in the context of their environments, Azure Digital Twins provides a complete picture of the relationships and processes that connect people, places and devices,” the company explains in today’s announcement.

Azure Digital Twins will launch into preview on October 15.

The other major announcement is that Azure Sphere, Microsoft’s play for getting into small connected microcontroller devices, is now in public preview, with development kits shipping to developers now. For Azure Sphere, Microsoft built its own Linux-based kernel, but the focus here is obviously on selling services around it, not getting licensing fees. Every year, hardware companies ship nine billion of these small chips and few of them are easily updated and hence prone to security issues once they are out in the wild. Azure Sphere aims to offer a combination of cloud-based security, a secure OS and a certified microcontroller to remedy this situation.

Microsoft also notes that Azure IoT Edge, its fully managed service for delivering Azure services, custom logic and AI models to the edge, is getting a few updates, too, including the ability to submit third-party IoT Edge modules for certification and inclusion in the Azure Marketplace. It’s also about to launch the public preview of IoT Edge extended offline for those kinds of use cases where an IoT device goes offline for — you guessed it — and extended period.

There are plenty of third-party solutions for running a Windows desktop in the cloud, but until now, Microsoft itself seemed hesitant to offer the same kind of user experience. Today, however, the company announced Windows Virtual Desktop, a new Azure-based service that provides a full virtualized multi-user Windows 10 experience, together with Office 365 ProPlus, on Azure .

The details here are still a bit sparse and Microsoft refused to provide any addition information ahead of the announcement. We will update this post once we hear more, though.

What Microsoft did say, however, is that the service will also include free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates. Why it’s throwing this in here with a virtualized Windows 10 desktop isn’t quite clear to me, but it is what it is.

Microsoft also says that deploying and scaling Windows on Azure with Office will only take a few minutes and that the desktops will feature all the built-in security and compliance features that its users would expect.

We all have more passwords than we can count — or remember. Unless you have just one, in which case, please get yourself a few more. But passwords alone are far from the ideal way of keeping our accounts safe. That’s why most enterprises now bet on two-factor authentication to keep their networks secure. Microsoft, however, wants to join the ranks of those who are doing away with passwords altogether.

As the company today announced at its Ignite conference, it’ll now support password-less logins via its Microsoft Authenticator app for hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory-connected apps. “No company lets enterprises eliminate more passwords than Microsoft,” the company proudly writes in its announcement today.

The company has written about this in the past and with Windows Hello, it’s already offering a version of this for Windows 10 users. For Azure Active Directory, the Windows Authenticator app essentially replicates the functionality of Windows Hello and it lets users use their fingerprint, face or PIN to log in to their enterprise applications. The overall idea here is that you are still providing two factors of authentication: something you own (your phone) and something you have (your fingerprint or face).

Here is what that looks like for personal accounts. The process for enterprise accounts is quite similar.

For enterprise users, Microsoft also made a number of additional security announcements at Ignite. The first of those is the launch of Microsoft Secure Score, the evolution of Office 365 Secure Score. This service provides organizations with a report card for their security posture, allowing them to quickly assess where they need to make changes. Those changes could be turning on multi-factor authentication or turning off email forwarding.

Building on this theme, Microsoft is also launching Microsoft Threat Protection today, a new solution for Microsoft 365 subscribers. Since Microsoft 365 combines a range of services that span both online and offline, the company can now offer security solutions that do the same. Threat Protections looks at email accounts, PCs, documents and a user’s infrastructure to detect and mitigate attacks.

“Cybersecurity is the central challenge of the digital age,” writes Microsoft’s corporate VP for security Rob Lefferts, today. “Without it, the most basic human rights like privacy cannot exist. Every day organizations take precious time and resources away from their core business mission to defend against and recover from cyber attacks. They operate dozens of complex disconnected tools, yet the gaps between those tools remain and threats get through. Their security teams struggle to keep up and skilled expertise is scarce.”

French startup Qonto has raised a $23 million funding round for its fintech product. The company is trying to make business banking cheaper, faster and more efficient.

Existing investors Valar Ventures and Alven are once again leading the round. The European Investment Bank Group is also participating.

If you are running a small company or work as a freelancer, Qonto wants to replace your professional bank account. When you sign up, you get a French IBAN, one or multiple debit cards and the ability to send and receive money.

And then, it works pretty much like any challenger bank. You can create virtual cards, order more cards for your team, get real time notifications and freeze cards. This is a breath of fresh air compared to traditional business banks and their time-consuming processes.

You can then sync your transactions with accounting and invoicing services, and grant access to your accountant. Premium plans let you select multiple administrators and create a validation workflow to approve expensive transfers for instance.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to double the size of the team and create its own payment infrastructure. Qonto currently relies heavily on Treezor for the back end. The startup also plans to expand to Germany, Italy and Spain in 2019.

Qonto now has 90 employees and 25,000 clients. The company has managed $2 billion in total transaction volume so far. The fact that the same VC funds keep investing more money into Qonto is a great vote of confidence.

India is the new tech outsourcing destination for ride-hailing companies.

Southeast Asia’s Grab and Go-Jek both have sizable engineering teams in the country, and now that duo is joined by another billion-dollar company. Careem, which is based in the Middle East and valued at over $1 billion, has entered the fray after it snapped up the talent behind bus-shuttle service Commut.

The deal is a talent acquisition — ‘acquihire’ — and not Careem entry’s into India. The deal will see the team at Hyderabad-based Commut join up with Careem to work on “complex local problems” in its markets in the Middle East. Commut’s service — which the startup says served some 70,000 consumers — will be folded into rival company Shuttl .

“As Careem expands across its technology platform, we will continue to acquire and invest in high impact, relevant and values driven technology businesses and start-ups that can accelerate growth,” the company said in a statement.

Commut had raised just $200,000 from investors, according to Crunchbase. Shuttl, meanwhile, has pulled in over $30 million from investors that include Sequoia India and Amazon.

Go-Jek first got into India through four acquisitions in 2016 that helped build out a tech and engineering team. It was rumored to be considering an India expansion, but instead it has stuck to Southeast Asia with an initial move into Vietnam. Go-Jek is rolling out its service in Thailand, with further expansions to both Singapore and the Philippines planned.

Grab, meanwhile, opened an engineering center in India in 2017 and it added to its presence when it acquired Indian startup iKaaz earlier this year in a deal to grow its mobile payment chops. Grab, which is valued at $11 billion, also has engineering centers in China, the U.S, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

While Grab, and to a lesser extent Go-Jek, forced Uber from the Middle East, Careem has been linked with an acquisition from Uber. Despite some media reports suggesting a deal could happen, investors told TechCrunch that “everyone is talking to everyone” in the ride-hailing space. Regardless, Careem is ploughing on with plans to scale its business, it seems.

Careem hasn’t raised since a $500 million round last summer. A Bloomberg report in May suggested that it is considering another $500 million raise that could push its valuation past $1.5 billion.

Following widespread criticism of the way its service is used to spread false information and news in India, WhatsApp has hired a “grievance officer” for the country.

U.S-based Komal Lahiri is the lead who handles complaints about the service from users, law enforcement and other government officials, according to Mint.

WhatsApp did not respond to a request for comment on Lahiri’s hiring and her role. Her LinkedIn account, however, states that she has been “Senior Director, Global Customer Operations & Localization” at WhatsApp since March. Prior to that, she spent over three years with Facebook and Instagram in the U.S.

WhatsApp claims over 1.5 billion active users per month, India is its largest market and it accounts for an estimated 200 million of that figure. Despite the many benefits of a more connected society, information on WhatsApp has led to a number of troubling incidents. That includes the killing of five people who visited a rural village but were beaten to death after being falsely accused of being child kidnappers due to the spread of rumors on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has tried to advise people by taking out full-page advertisements in an assortment of daily newspapers as well as educational camps, but the Indian government has pressured WhatsApp to do more. The IT minister met with WhatsApp COO Chris Daniels after it had sent two letters to the company asking it make its service more accountable and enable law enforcement agencies to use it.

The company has instead said it is impossible to track messages since its service is end-to-end encrypted. It has added features in India — one indicates when a message has been forwarded, and another limited the number of times messages can be forwarded on — but that hasn’t solved the problem. WhatsApp is at least stepping up its efforts with this hire, but it remains to be seen how adequate a job Lahiri can do from the U.S.

More widely, WhatsApp does seem to be struggling make hires in India.

While this role is located in the U.S, the company is still trying to fill the position of ‘head of India’ and its head of policy in the country, too. Facebook itself is also hiring for a managing director for its India business.