Microsoft has committed $500 million for a new programme to help nurture start-ups, offering resources such as Azure credits and sales support. “Microsoft for Startups” will deliver access to technology, go-to-market and community benefits to help startups grow their customer and revenue base.

Microsoft today reported a hefty loss in the past quarter, as it set aside billions of dollars for taxes on profits it expects to bring back to the United States following passage of a major tax overhaul.

The technology giant said its loss for the quarter to December 31 was USD 6.3 billion — as it took a charge of USD 13.8 billion to pay its taxes.

Microsoft has acquired gaming start-up PlayFab for an undisclosed sum and will integrate its services into Azure platform to help developers build better games. PlayFab powers more than 1,200 live games and has served over 700 million players. “Together, Azure and PlayFab will further unlock the power of the intelligent cloud for the gaming industry, enabling game developers and delighting gamers around the world,” Kareem Choudhry, Corporate Vice President of gaming at Microsoft, said in a blog post.

Microsoft has released another security patch against “Spectre Variant 2” bug found on Intel chips. Intel has reported issues with recently released microcode meant to address “Spectre variant 2” termed as “CVE 2017-5715 Branch Target Injection”. Intel noted that this microcode can cause “higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behaviour,” adding that situations like this may result in “data loss or corruption”.

As India celebrates its 69th Republic Day, Microsoft on Thursday announced to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Neural Networks to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali and Tamil.

With Deep Neural Networks-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and the sound more natural.

Education is one of the foremost areas where most of the tech giants of the world are dedicatedly working. One of the tech colossuses Microsoft has upped its efforts by launching affordable laptops that are focused on education. In an association with Lenovo and JP, Microsoft on Monday unveiled low-cost Windows 10 and Windows 10 S education-centric laptops. Starting at $189, which roughly translates to Rs 12,050, Microsoft’s education-centric laptops pack all the basic features of Windows 10 at an affordable price point.

Thomson Reuters Corp on Wednesday published its debut "Top 100 Global Technology Leaders" list with Microsoft Corp in the no. 1 spot, followed by chipmaker Intel Corp and network gear maker Cisco Systems Inc .

The list, which aims to identify the industry's top financially successful and organisationally sound organizations, features US tech giants such as Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc, International Business Machines Corp and Texas Instruments Inc, among its top 10.

Microsoft researchers have created a technology that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to read a document and answer questions about it about as well as a human. “It’s a major milestone in the push to have search engines such as Bing and intelligent assistants such as Cortana interact with people and provide information in more natural ways, much like people communicate with each other,” Allison Linn, senior writer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. The team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the “Stanford Question Answering Dataset”, known among researchers as “SQuAD”.

Technology giant Microsoft and consulting firm Accenture have partnered to focus on business to business (B2B) startups in India. Under this partnership, both the firm will support growth-stage technology B2B startups to boost their enterprise readiness and go-to market. While Microsoft is running a global Accelerator program, whereas Accenture Ventures partners with and invests in growth-stage companies that create solution for enterprise. “Microsoft Accelerator and Accenture Ventures will support growth-stage technology B2B startups in India specialising in artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, augmented, virtual reality, blockchain, fintech, big data, security and customer experience solutions, and provide access to Accenture’s global clients and Microsoft’s global network,” said a statement from Accenture.

Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday that software patches released to guard against microchip security threats slowed down some personal computers and servers, with systems running on older Intel Corp processors seeing a noticeable decrease in performance. The comments in a blog post were the clearest signal from Microsoft that the microchip flaws for Intel and other chipmakers described last week could meaningfully degrade performance.

Inviting Real Estate Agents, Job Placements Agents, Educational Institutes, Software Service Providers, Real Estate Builders, Marriage Bureaus, Travel Agents, Restaurant Owners, Health & Fitness Centers and other Local Businesses to Post a FREE Classified Advertisement on Cootera.com Classifieds Website.