Pedro Hernandez

The blockbuster LinkedIn deal may have overshadowed all of Microsoft’s other moves this week, but the company still had another busy week in cloud updates. Microsoft announced on June 16 that Azure Backup’s data protection capabilities have been extended to Premium Storage virtual machines. Azure Premium Storage employs solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of traditional hard […]

Before blockchain revolutionizes banking, health care records management and countless transaction-based businesses, enterprises first have to jump aboard. With Project Bletchley, Microsoft aims to accomplish just that. Project Bletchley is not a new blockchain stack, but rather the software giant’s architectural approach to creating a so-called “Enterprise Consortium Blockchain Ecosystem,” Microsoft said. In short, it […]

Microsoft’s acquisition train isn’t slowing down. Following Monday’s $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the software giant revealed June 16 that it has snapped up Foster City, Calif.-based messaging app startup Wand Labs. Financial terms were not disclosed. Wand Labs specializes in integrating services such as Yelp, Spotify and dozens of others with chat. The company’s […]

Windows Insiders have a new mission this week: finding and reporting bugs affecting the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Set to arrive this summer, presumably around July 29 to commemorate a year since Windows 10 launched, the Anniversary Update will bring several highly anticipated features to the operating system, including support for the Bash Unix […]

With software like Skype for Business and its Surface Hub hardware offering, Microsoft is already a part of a video conferencing market long dominated by Cisco and Polycom. But where is the software giant planning to go next? A new blog post from the Office team hints at Microsoft’s product strategy as the company works […]

Microsoft is trimming down its gaming console this summer with the release of the Xbox One S, announced Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Xbox, on June 13 during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Clad in a “robot white” enclosure, the Xbox One S is 40 percent smaller than the original and includes […]

Microsoft has updated its Office 365 Admin app for Android and Windows Phone, the company announced June 14. Apple iOS users will receive the update within the next two weeks. The focus this time around, according to Anne Michels, senior product marketing manager for Microsoft Office 365 Marketing, was on helping users navigate the app […]

Microsoft dominated technology headlines on June 13 by announcing that it is in the midst of a deal valued at $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn, the Mountain View, Calif.-based social network for professionals. In his letter to Microsoft employees, CEO Satya Nadella remarked on the potential synergies between his company’s business and productivity software and […]

Microsoft announced June 13 that is acquiring LinkedIn in an all-cash deal valued at $26.2 billion or $196 per share, the largest deal under Satya Nadella’s watch as CEO of Microsoft. The companies expect the transaction to close before the end of 2016. Based in Mountain View, Calif., LinkedIn employs 9,700 full-time workers worldwide. The […]

Microsoft’s Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) 1.5, announced June 10, features a new method of wrangling the parallel-processing power of multiple graphical processing units (GPUs), such as those from Nvidia, to improve the software’s deep-learning capabilities. Microsoft originally released CNTK in late January on GitHub, the popular online code repository. CNTK is an open-source software toolkit […]