Daily Tech Briefing: July 2, 2014

Samsung is introducing a smaller version of its Galaxy S5 smartphone, just three months after rolling out the new flagship device. The 4.5-inch Galaxy S5 mini is less expensive than its larger counterpart, and it’s part of the company’s aggressive program of new product releases in the highly competitive smartphone market.

The release of the S5 Mini comes one day after Samsung expanded its Galaxy portfolio of smartphones with four new devices that officials said were more affordable than other offerings.

JK Shin, CEO of Samsung Electronics and head of IT and mobile communication at the company, explained that Samsung’s goal is to offer devices that can meet a wide range of consumer demands.

Amazon Web Services is releasing a new set of small-scale compute instances that have been designed to deliver lower-cost levels of capabilities for workloads that don’t require a lot of CPU power over a sustained period of time.

The instances will be available for customers that need quick access to them when unexpected demands arise. These new T2 compute instances are the lowest-cost option Amazon Web Services offers and are designed for such uses as Web servers, development and small databases.

Microsoft’s cloud-based business email, calendar and contact management platform, Exchange online, experienced an extended outage last week. In response, IT managers flooded the Office 365 support forums with messages and Microsoft restored the service after eight hours.

Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Office 365 Engineering apologized on behalf of the Office 365 team and said that the damage was “contained to a small set of customers.” He added that Microsoft has learned from the experience and continues to work on improving its cloud services.

In light of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Google is getting inundated with search requests from people who are looking to get more connected to the games.

Jenise Araujo, a Google spokeswoman, explained that Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar are the most searched-for players, and the most searched for matches have been England vs. Italy, U.S.A. vs. Ghana and Brazil vs. Mexico.