Pedro Hernandez

May 19 was Ransomware Info Day, a campaign launched by the Swiss Internet Security Alliance to help raise awareness about this particularly nasty type of malware. Microsoft, one of several backers of the outreach effort, is sharing some data about the spread of ransomware and some tips on how to avoid it. Once ransomware worms […]

Aiming to gain a leg up in the challenging market for wearable devices, Microsoft is layering an increasing amount of functionality onto its own health and activity tracker. This week, Microsoft is rolling out updates that expand the capabilities of its Band wearable and the Health companion app. Among them is a new Explore Tile […]

For enterprises operating in industries that are heavily regulated or attract a lot of litigation, e-discovery is a necessary evil. This week, Microsoft released new updates to its Office 365 Security & Compliance Center e-discovery features that are designed to help reduce the time it takes to conduct investigations, putting legal and regulatory matters to […]

Kinect’s heyday may have come and gone, but Microsoft still stands behind the low-cost sensor. In the upcoming Anniversary Update for Windows 10, the company plans to help developers who have jumped aboard Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application model to exploit Kinect’s capabilities and integrate them into their software. UWP apps are code-once, run-anywhere […]

Microsoft Azure has supported SAP HANA applications for nearly two years. HANA is an in-memory database that speeds up business application workloads, keeping data readily available to server processors using system memory rather than comparatively slower storage subsystems and arrays. On May 17, during SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Orlando, Fla., the companies announced a […]

Power BI, Microsoft’s cloud-based business intelligence (BI) software offering, is finally allowing users to derive business insights from their on-premises data sources by simply asking. The product’s Q&A feature, which enables users to conduct natural-language queries, is now available for on-premises data sources linked by Power BI Enterprise Gateway, starting with SQL Server 2016 Analysis […]

AtScale, a San Mateo, Calif.-based business analytics software maker, announced May 16 that it raised $11 million in a Series B round of financing led by Comcast Ventures and backed by AME Ventures, Storm Ventures, UMC and XSeed Capital. To date, the firm has attracted $20 million in financing. AtScale plans to use the funding […]

Members of Microsoft’s Windows Insider early access program can now test the new Windows Store-powered Edge extension model and expanded Bash functionality ahead of this summer’s highly anticipated Windows 10 Anniversary Update. A new preview build released this week (number 14342) includes a new method for installing Edge browser extensions. When Edge, Internet Explorer’s successor, […]

Elastic database pools, an Azure SQL option that automatically scales cloud databases up or down as conditions dictate, is now generally available. The feature, announced during last year’s Build developer conference, is aimed at helping enterprises avoid the high cost of overprovisioning resources in anticipation of spikes in application usage. Conversely, it can help improve […]

This month, Microsoft is rolling out an update that will provide Mac users a more full-featured email authoring experience in Outlook 2016. The email client is getting a new editor that allows for more fine-grained control over the content that users wish to include in their emails, announced Microsoft. For example, new resize and rotation […]