Pedro Hernandez

Google’s popular Chromecast media dongle for HDTVs will soon be facing off against a competitor from Microsoft. Like Chromecast, the straightforwardly named Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter plugs into an HDTV, allowing users to pump videos, audio and Web content to their living room televisions. The device “will let you easily share content from any Miracast-enabled […]

The Chinese Xbox One console launch has been pushed back six days, Microsoft announced today. After Sept. 23 came and went without the hardware appearing on stores shelves, the company said that it was targeting a new date, Monday, Sept. 29. Statements made by Microsoft indicate that the company’s regulatory troubles in the region are […]

Microsoft is extending the benefits of gigabytes’ worth of RAM and flash storage to Azure customers who are looking to squeeze more performance out of their cloud workloads. Kenaz Kwa, program manager of Azure Compute Runtime, announced D-Series, a new type of virtual machine (VM) that can help organizations make short work of big cloud […]

Microsoft’s planned Sept. 23 launch of the Xbox One in China has hit a bit of a snag. The Xbox one was to be “the first consoles approved for sale in China through the Shanghai Free Trade Zone” on Tuesday, stated to Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of marketing for Microsoft Devices and Studios in […]

Microsoft is betting that owners of Apple’s new iPhone 6 smartphone and iPhone 6 Plus phablet not only will be making the most of their bigger screens, but also their new cameras. The Redmond, Wash.-based software and cloud services company announced that it is doubling the amount of free OneDrive cloud storage to 30GB, from […]

Bing Image Search is entering its “next phase,” members of Microsoft’s search division teased in a blog post. The planned updates, which will roll out during the coming weeks, include a dynamic site design that is optimized for touch. The Google Images competitor’s user interface poses a challenge to users as it layered added functionality, […]

Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus has been hit with layoffs, leading to the closure of a research lab at the software giant’s Mountain View, Calif., campus. In the latest round of layoffs, the company slashed 2,100 jobs, according to a Reuters report. The layoffs are part of massive cuts Microsoft first announced July 17. Over the […]

Microsoft’s Web development and compatibility testing initiative for Internet Explorer, dubbed Modern.IE, is branching out to a new development environment, Vagrant. Vagrant is a tool that enables developers to create portable, easily distributed virtualized software development environments. The platform has caught on with Web developers, according to Jason McConnell, senior product marketing manager of Microsoft […]

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to attract enterprises to its cloud computing platform, the company has announced four new virtual machine (VM) images optimized to run SQL Server-based online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing workloads on Azure. Meant to cut down on IT administrative overhead and improve performance, the new images can help […]

Microsoft is dipping its toes into wearables again by releasing a OneNote companion app for smartwatches powered by Android Wear. The free OneNote for Android Wear app, published to the Google Play store on Sept. 16, may be fairly low-key in functionality, but it’s a big sign that Microsoft doesn’t plan to get left out […]