Pedro Hernandez

Microsoft has tweaked its Google Maps competitor, making it harder for users to get lost. Bing Maps has been updated to include new “rendering and styling improvements” for its Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) services. The enhancements not only make the maps look better, they help users navigate their surroundings […]

Microsoft announced on July 11 that it had acquired cloud data protection specialist InMage for an unspecified amount. “Microsoft is now working to integrate the InMage Scout technology into Azure Site Recovery service, in order to give customers a simple, cost-effective way to ensure business continuity with the power and scale of the Azure global […]

Why pay extra for an in-memory performance boost? That’s the question posed by Microsoft as the company announced the release of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) 6.0 for Oracle. The free tool enables organizations to migrate existing Oracle databases to SQL Server 2014, letting customers leverage “proven in-memory technology without costly add-ons” for responsive applications […]

IBM and Google aren’t the only tech giants that have set their sights on quantum computing. Redmond, Wash-based Microsoft is also researching the potentially game-changing field. Microsoft is peeling the curtain back a bit on Station Q, a decade-old quantum computing lab situated on the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. The lab exists to […]

A month after Microsoft released its “remastered” Skype 5.0 app for the iPhone, the company has turned its attention to Android smartphones. The new version blurs the line between an Android device’s native contact list and Skype’s own friends list, announced Skype senior product marketing manager, Pierre-Eric Jacoupy, in a company blog post. “Starting with […]

Microsoft may be taking a step back from content streaming after announcing that it is shutting down Xbox Entertainment Studios. Its partners are picking up the slack, however. Nearly a month after making its debut on Wall Street, San Mateo, Calif.-based GoPro announced the availability of its namesake app for the Xbox One. Dubbed the […]

Amazon and Salesforce may be the poster children of the cloud computing era, but Microsoft is quickly catching up. Yesterday, the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker reported fiscal 2014 fourth-quarter revenue of $23.38 billion, just above Wall Street estimates of $23 billion. Profits disappointed at $4.6 billion, or $0.55 per share, below the 60 cents financial […]

Microsoft chalked up $23.38 billion in revenue during its fiscal 2014 fourth quarter, slightly above Wall Street estimates of $23 billion, on strong sales of cloud services and business software. Profits failed to meet analyst expectations, however. The company reported net income of $4.6 billion, or $0.55 per share, for the quarter ended June 30. […]

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute now covers more markets, expanding from just three locations to 10 just two months after the offering was launched on May 12 during the company’s TechEd conference in Houston. Azure ExpressRoute enables businesses to link their on-premise IT infrastructures to Microsoft’s massive cloud data centers. Since they bypass the public Internet, the […]

Xbox One has caught the social media bug. Microsoft revealed that the company is gearing up to release new social features for the company’s Xbox One video game and media streaming console. While the company’s Xbox division has long provided users with community-driven experiences, the company has been particularly bulking up the platform’s social features […]

Days after Microsoft announced that it was kicking off a massive round of layoffs, the company has issued new policies pertaining to contract workers. The changes will limit the time “external staff” in the United States can access Microsoft buildings and internal networks to 18 months before a mandatory six-month break kicks in. In short, […]

Microsoft earlier this year teased that the company’s innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) are inching closer toward commercialization. Now, the company is offering a glimpse of that future in the form of Project Adam. Making its debut at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Project Adam is a “deep-learning” system patterned after the human brain’s network […]