Pedro Hernandez

Microsoft’s efforts to integrate Skype across practically its entire consumer-facing product portfolio are gathering steam. The software giant announced April 29 that it had launched a preview of Skype for Outlook.com. The feature allows users of the Outlook.com email service—Hotmail’s successor for all intents and purposes—to initiate Skype video calls or text-based chats directly from […]

Microsoft’s IllumiRoom technology is gaining renewed attention in the weeks before the company releases details on its next-gen Xbox console. The tech first made its debut at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013). The proof of concept from Microsoft Research showed how the combination of a Kinect sensor, a commodity projector and some software […]

Want the best Windows experience? Get a Mac. That’s the advice being dished out by Soluto, a provider of cloud-based PC management and support services. The company revealed in a report that the 13-inch MacBook Pro, released during the mid-2012 refresh, is the best-performing Windows laptop. Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina model also ranked high, […]

Things may not be as dire for Microsoft’s tablet-friendly Windows 8 operating system as analysts have indicated, according to new market data from Boston-based Strategy Analytics. The research firm announced on April 23 that Microsoft notched a 7.5 percent share of the global tablet market during the first quarter of 2013. In total, tablet makers […]

Microsoft announced another big Android patent-licensing agreement just a week after announcing that it had inked a similar deal with Hon Hai, parent company of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer. Late in the day on April 23, the Windows software maker revealed that ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications equipment provider and a producer of smartphones, […]

Microsoft may soon be facing renewed pressure to deliver its Office productivity suite on competing platforms like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems. Describing ValueAct Capital as an “activist investor,” Reuters reported on April 22 that the hedge fund’s CEO, Jeffrey Ubben, disclosed that his firm had taken a $2 billion stake in […]

This Earth Day, Microsoft is outlining some of the steps the software company is taking in achieving carbon neutrality across all of its operations in the current fiscal year. On April 22, Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, said the company has made big strides in accomplishing its goal. One major contributor to the company’s […]

Mini Windows 8 tablets are in the works, but it may be a while before it joins the Surface in retail. Coming off another round of record-settings earnings, Microsoft finally revealed on April 18 that the company is, in fact, working on building an ecosystem for small, Windows 8 tablets. The disclosure came after news […]

Hon Hai, Foxconn’s Taiwanese parent company, and Microsoft announced April 16 that they have entered into a patent-licensing agreement covering devices that run Google’s Android mobile operating system and Chrome OS. Specifics are being kept under wraps, but Microsoft did reveal that Hon Hai would be paying royalties to the software titan. To date, Microsoft […]

Microsoft’s answer to Amazon’s Linux-friendly, sprawling cloud services platform officially launched on April 16 following months of work and previews since it first publicly debuted. As its name suggests, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) play that pits the software giant against market leader Amazon Web Services in a bid to lure enterprises […]

Pebble, one of biggest crowd-funding successes on Kickstarter, helped catapult wearable IT back into the limelight last year. Now, Microsoft is reportedly eyeing a smartwatch of its own. The e-paper-based, Bluetooth-enabled Pebble smartwatch, which can link with iPhone and Android handsets, hauled in over $10 million by its May 18, 2012, deadline. Among its many […]

Microsoft is giving Excel users a new way to explore data: GeoFlow. The technology, which sprang from a stargazing project at Microsoft Research, is capable of generating animated 3D visualizations on a globe or map powered by Bing Maps. GeoFlow allows data analysts to embark on eye-catching flyovers and flythroughs, where data points can sprout […]