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Tech

What is the Clarity Tool? A New Analytics Tool by Microsoft

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Introduction:

Recently, Microsoft had announced the release of its latest web analytics tool, called Clarity. Microsoft Clarity is an analytics product that is built to help website managers improve their websites.

It is a free tool that gives them a clear understanding of the users visiting their websites. All the while giving value to the privacy of users.

What do developers say about this tool?

According to the developers, they have created a tool that will help website owners to know about the modifications they should be doing on their website that will result in higher traffic on their sites.

It will show you which part of the website has the highest and lowest engagements. It also provides debugging of sites.

Benefits Of Using Microsoft’s Clarity Tool:

The following are the main advantages of using this tool developed by Microsoft.

1.    Convenient and fast:

The Clarity tool is user-friendly and will not be heavy on your websites. Even if you are not a tech geek who doesn’t know how to use the latest technologies, you can still understand how to use this tool.

This tool won’t cause unnecessary load on your page to make sure that users don’t have to wait for a long time to see your entire website.

2.    Heatmaps and session-replays:

Clarity gives wide knowledge about user behavior as it provides key tools such as heatmaps and session-replays.

Heat maps give a visual about how users interact with your website. It generally comes in two types.

  1. Click maps
  2. Scroll maps

Session-replays is capable of recording and replaying the whole journey of the user that came to your website.

It helps in understanding the pattern of upcoming traffic to your site.

3.    Insight Dashboard:

With the help of an insight dashboard, you can easily monitor the website and can manage the traffic routes.

You can see how many people visited the site and whether they got the relevant information through your website or not.

It will eventually help in managing the websites professionally.

Conclusion:

Thus we can say with clarity that the “Clarity tool” will help you in growing your business digitally while bringing traffic to your website and increasing your customers rapidly.

Every year Microsoft releases updated features for its market share to boost.

Tech

Why Did Microsoft’s Income Increase in Pandemic?

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On 27th October, Microsoft released the first-quarter financial results that ended on 30th September 2020. In the report, it was stated that Microsoft’s revenue was increased by 12% than last year with $37.2 billion. Also, the net income was increased by 30% with a total of $13.9 billion. Even in these tough times when the economy of the world is shifting, Microsoft managed to boost its growth. The aim of the company during Covid-19 was to ensure the safety of employees and providing technology and better resources for its customers.
The major profit which Microsoft secured was in the lockdown period. People weren’t going outside and to entertain themselves, they were playing video games, working from home, and connecting through video conferencing. This gave enormous benefit to the company.

Cloud Services and Microsoft Office 365:

There is no doubt in saying that Cloud services played a key factor in increasing the revenue of the company. Microsoft Office 365 consumers increased rapidly which directly increased the Office 365 revenue growth by 21%. Due to the deal with SpaceX, the revenue of Azure also increased by up to 48%. More businesses started to depend upon the cloud services which Microsoft provides to its consumers. Microsoft consumers subscribers increased to 45.3 million which is a jump of 27%.

Surface:

In addition to Cloud services and Microsoft office, Surface also played a critical role in increasing the earnings of the company. The revenue of Surface alone increased up to 37% which is a giant leap that gave Microsoft a huge boost of $1.5 billion. Even though Microsoft didn’t release any new surface products this year but they still managed to make an enormous profit from it.
Surface laptop Go device and an updated version of Surface Pro X were launched earlier in October but they will be count in the next quarter’s revenue.

Xbox:

With the increase in the gaming side, Xbox services have also increased greatly by 30% compared to the last year. Enormous numbers of gamers have used these services for entertainment purposes and to kill boredom. The company is also planning to launch its upgraded version of the Xbox Series on November 10th.

LinkedIn and Search revenue:

The revenue of LinkedIn also increased by 16% throughout these years although search revenue has decreased by 10%. The company has categorized its businesses into three types, buckets, intelligent cloud, and personal computing.

Conclusion:

Within the intelligent cloud revenue, Microsoft has managed to make a profit mainly from the Azure cloud. In business and buckets, Microsoft office 365 and LinkedIn helped a lot. In conclusion, the minds of this company knows how to benefit even in tough times and is working hard to ensure great customer satisfaction.

Business, Tech

Microsoft And SpaceX Collaboration

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On Tuesday 20th October 2020, it was announced that Microsoft is partnering with SpaceX to connect the Azure cloud network with Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service. If you don’t know what these terms mean then let me make it easier for you to understand.


What is Starlink?

Starlink is a broad program initiated by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. The main goal of this program is to create an interconnected network with hundreds and thousands of satellites which will be designed in an exclusive way to deliver fast internet all over the planet.

What is Azure Cloud?

Azure Cloud is the latest service that is developed by Microsoft. Through the Azure cloud, they can easily connect satellites directly with the Cloud. This service has deepened the roots of Microsoft into space technology.

A partnership between SpaceX and Microsoft:

Space X President and COO, Gwynne Shotwell in an interview said, “The collaboration that we’re announcing today will allow us to work together and deliver new offerings for both sectors of public and private to deliver connectivity through Starlink for use on Azure”
SpaceX has launched about 800 Starlink satellites. These satellites are not enough to provide global coverage but they are giving services to some regions of the world.

Giving tough competition to Amazon and Blue Origin:

This partnership came to being as both, Microsoft and SpaceX want to give tough competition to their rivals that is Jeff Bezo and Kuiper. Amazon is currently providing a service that can connect its AWS cloud to satellites and is also working with the Kuiper which is a big competitor of Starlink. Jeff Bezo’s who is the CEO of Amazon has also personally invested in Blue Origin to tests flight and different operations done for exploration of space.
The battle of space exploration is an ongoing battle between these giant companies. In recent months, SpaceX and Microsoft have been testing different software that was required to connect Azure and Starlink.

Azure Modular Data Center:

The azure modular data center is a product that is a mobile unit with the size of a semi-trailer. With the help of Starlink’s global coverage, these modular data centers can connect with it providing cloud computing capabilities for the customers who need it under challenging environments or in remote areas where network coverage is impossible.


Tom Keane, Vice President of Azure Global said, “SpaceX is the name which people think of when they think of innovation and the evolution that’s happening to bring space technology into the 21st century”.

Microsoft’s Business Growing in Space Technology:

In addition to collaborating with SpaceX, Microsoft is also partnering with Luxembourg satellite operator SES. The company is working to connect its O3b satellite to the Azure cloud. Microsoft plans to construct Azure Global a key platform for helping scientists in space expeditions and its missions.

As Keane said, “We intend to make Azure a platform and ecosystem of choice for the mission needs of space community”.

Tech

Microsoft partners with OpenAI to develop artificial general intelligence

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Image by Efes Kitap from Pixabay

Tech giant Microsoft recently committed a US$1 billion investment into OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, becoming the company’s exclusive cloud provider as they work to build new Azure artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing technology.

Under the terms of the deal, which was announced on 22 July, Microsoft will also serve as OpenAI’s preferred partner to commercialise its inventions.

Through the partnership, the two companies hope to further extend Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems, accelerate breakthroughs in AI and power OpenAI’s efforts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is typically understood to mean he intelligence of a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. In short, it’s the type of AI that we’re used to seeing in science-fiction movies; a computer with a consciousness that can think and feel in the same way as a flesh and blood human.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service intended for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centres.

The agreement will see Microsoft and OpenAI focus on building a new computational platform within Azure that will “rain and run increasingly advanced AI models”, include hardware that builds on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology.

The companies hope that the results will “create the foundation for advancements in AI to be implemented in a safe, secure and trustworthy way and is a critical reason the companies chose to partner together”.

Advancements in the application of deep neural networks coupled with increasing computational power have led to AI-focused breakthroughs in vision, speech, language processing, translation, robotic control and gaming.

These systems work well for the specific problem they’ve been trained to solve but getting AI to address more complex problems that the world faces today – such as climate change – will require “generalization and deep mastery of multiple AI technologies”, Microsoft said.

OpenAI and Microsoft’s vision is for AGI to work with people to help solve currently intractable multidisciplinary problems.

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement. “Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.”

OpenAI believes that it is “crucial” that any such AI should be used “safely and securely”, and that the economic benefits should be “widely distributed”, Altman added.

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, described AI as “one of the most transformative technologies of our time”, which he believes has “the potential to help solve many of our world’s most pressing challenges”.

“By bringing together OpenAI’s breakthrough technology with new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, our ambition is to democratize AI — while always keeping AI safety front and center — so everyone can benefit,” he said.

Altman started OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk, although the latter is no longer involved in the business. It currently operates as a capped-profit entity, from which investors can only expect up to 100x in returns, but it unclear what the terms of the Microsoft investment will be other than making it an exclusive provider of cloud services to OpenAI and working together on new technologies.

HoloLens inventor and Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman tweeted that he was very excited about this new partnership, which suggests that we might possibly be seeing some mixed reality AI crossovers later on down the line.

Gadgets

Microsoft launches AI Digital Labs in India

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Image by Efes Kitap from Pixabay

American multinational technology company Microsoft said on 13 June that it would partner with colleges and universities across India to open AI (artificial intelligence) digital labs in an effort to boost technology infrastructure and educator capability, and help students to acquire skills in the field.

As part of the three-year program, Microsoft will collaborate with ten higher education institutions in India, including BITS Pilani, BML Munjal University, ISB, Kalpataru Institute of Technology, KL University, Periyar University, Karunya University, SRM Institute of Science & Technology, SVKM (NMIMS) and Trident Academy of Technology.

Microsoft plans to give the selected institutions support with infrastructure, curriculum and content, alongside access to cloud and AI services, and developer support. The company said it would facilitate the setting up of AI infrastructure and an Internet of Things (IoT) hub at the institutions as well as access to its AI developmental tools and Azure AI Services.

Training programs for the faculty of the institutions would include workshops on cloud computing, data sciences, AI and IoT, and faculty would receive assistance in strategizing content and curricula for project-based and experiential learning, the company said.

Microsoft believes that the program will serve almost 1.5 lakh (a lakh is a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand) students as part of its commitment to building a “future-ready workforce”.

It said it hoped that with the edge of the company’s Intelligent Cloud Hub program, the selected institutions will become “learning centers of intelligent technologies and innovation hubs of path-breaking solutions”.

Citing a recent Microsoft and IDC Asia/Pacific study, the company suggested that “lack of skills, resources and continuous learning programs emerged as one of the top challenges faced by Indian organizations in adopting AI to accelerate their businesses”.

Microsoft’s goal with this program is to “amp up institutional setup along with educator capability, and provide relevant educational choices for students, helping them acquire the skills needed to fill the wide skills gap emerging across India and the global economy”.

“As AI becomes mainstream, organizations will require talent with skillsets that are very different from what exist now,” Anant Maheshwari, President of Microsoft India, said in a statement. “Educators and institutions are integral to the skilling revolution taking root in the country. With the right technology infrastructure, curriculum and training, we can empower today’s students to build the India of tomorrow.”

Tech

Sony and Microsoft to “explore strategic partnership”

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Image by Efes Kitap from Pixabay

Japanese multinational technology corporation Sony Corporation and American multinational technology company Microsoft said on 16 May that they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to “partner on new innovations to enhance customer experiences in their direct-to-consumer entertainment platforms and AI solutions”.

The two companies said they would explore joint development of “future cloud solutions” in Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. These solutions would “support their respective game and content-streaming services”.

In addition, Sony and Microsoft said they planned to “explore the use of current Microsoft Azure datacenter-based solutions for Sony’s game and content streaming services” and to collaborate “in the areas of semiconductors and AI [artificial intelligence]”.

For semiconductors, this includes potential joint development of new intelligent image sensor solutions, the companies said, integrating Sony’s image sensors with Microsoft’s AI technology in a “hybrid manner across cloud and edge”. By leveraging this combined technology, they hope to “provide enhanced capabilities for enterprise customers”.

In terms of AI, they said they would “explore incorporation of Microsoft’s . . . AI platform and tools in Sony consumer products” to provide what they described as “highly intuitive and user-friendly AI experiences”. They did not offer any details of what these products and experiences might practically look like or how they might function for users.

By working together, the two companies aim to “to deliver more enhanced entertainment experiences for their worldwide customers”, which they said would “include building better development platforms for the content creator community”.

“Sony is a creative entertainment company with a solid foundation of technology,” Kenichiro Yoshida, president and CEO of Sony, said in a statement. “We collaborate closely with a multitude of content creators that capture the imagination of people around the world, and through our cutting-edge technology, provide the tools to bring their dreams and vision to reality.”

“PlayStation® itself came about through the integration of creativity and technology,” he added. “Our mission is to seamlessly evolve this platform as one that continues to deliver the best and most immersive entertainment experiences, together with a cloud environment that ensures the best possible experience, anytime, anywhere.”

He noted that – although they have competed in some areas – the two companies have been business partners for “many years” and said he believed their “joint development of future cloud solutions will contribute greatly to the advancement of interactive content”.

“Additionally, I hope that in the areas of semiconductors and AI, leveraging each company’s cutting-edge technology in a mutually complementary way will lead to the creation of new value for society,” he concluded.

“Sony has always been a leader in both entertainment and technology, and the collaboration we announced today builds on this history of innovation,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, added. “Our partnership brings the power of Azure and Azure AI to Sony to deliver new gaming and entertainment experiences for customers.”

The two companies said that they would share additional information about the partnership when it becomes available.

Tech

Microsoft plans new “sustainable” data centers in Sweden

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Image by Efes Kitap from Pixabay

American multinational technology company Microsoft had announced that it is planning to build two new data centers in the Swedish cities of Gävle and Sandviken, just north of Stockholm, that will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources . It is also aiming for the two centers to achieve zero-waste operations.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said that, by the end of this year, the company intends to be powering its datacenters with 60 percent renewable energy, and will aim to reach 70 percent renewable energy by 2023, on the path to 100 percent. The company has operated as carbon neutral since 2012 and “is continuously increasing the amount of energy the company uses from renewable sources – wind, solar, and hydropower”.

It plans to collaborate with Vattenfall –  a state-owned Swedish power company that also generates power in Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom – on the sourcing and supply of renewable energy for the two planned datacenters.

The two companies said they planned to collaborate to develop solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of the datacenters and construct new power infrastructure to provide stable power for the facilities and the surrounding areas in Sweden in the coming years”. They anticipate that, over time, the new power infrastructure will help further reduce the carbon footprint of the datacenters.

Microsoft and Vattenfall previously announced “the largest wind energy deal in the Netherlands in 2017”, in which Microsoft purchased 100 percent of the wind energy generated from a 180-megawatt wind farm adjacent to its local datacenter operations in the Netherlands. The wind farm is being constructed and operated by Vattenfall in the Wieringermeer Polder, north of Amsterdam.

“We intend for our datacenters in Sweden to be among the most sustainably designed and operated in the world with the ultimate ambition of achieving zero-carbon operations,” Noelle Walsh, CVP of Cloud Operations & Innovation at Microsoft Corp, said in a statement. “The datacenter design we’re developing will further Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to transition to a sustainable, low-carbon future.”

Vattenfall’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Development, Andreas Regnell, said the company was “fully committed” to help its customers to live “fossil fee” within one generation and that the partnership with Microsoft would fit “very well” with Vattenfall’s overall strategy.

The new datacenters in Sweden are “in anticipation of future needs for cloud and internet services as demand in Europe continues to grow”, Microsoft said. In its recent Q3 2019 earnings report, Microsoft told investors that demand for its cloud offerings drove commercial cloud revenue to $9.6 billion in its most recent quarter, up 41 percent year-over-year.

The datacentres in Sweden will add to the company’s existing European datacentre footprint, joining the ranks of its other planned datacentres in Norway and Switzerland, and already available datacentres in Austria, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

As part of a drive to focus on research and development for greater efficiency and increased renewable energy across its global infrastructure, Microsoft said it plans to launch a new data-driven circular cloud initiative using the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor performance and “streamline the reuse, resale and recycling of datacentre assets, including servers”.

Tech

Microsoft announces partnership with US Department of Veterans Affairs

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On 30 April, multinational technology company Microsoft Corporation announced that it had entered into a collaboration with the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to “enhance opportunities for education, recreation and therapy for Veterans with mobility limitations”.

The partnership, which was formalised on 18 April, will introduce the Xbox Adaptive Controller — a video game controller designed for those with limited mobility — into select VA rehabilitation centres around the country as part of therapeutic and rehabilitative activities aimed at “challenging muscle activation and hand-eye coordination, and greater participation in social and recreational activities”.

The VA and Microsoft said they jointly “identified an opportunity” at 22 VA medical centres across the United States “to introduce or reintroduce gaming to Veterans with spinal cord injuries, amputations, and neurological or other injuries”.

Microsoft is donating its Xbox Adaptive Controller, game consoles, games and other adaptive gaming equipment as part of the collaboration. Designated VA staff will engage with veterans using the equipment, and share feedback with Microsoft on “therapeutic utility” and veterans’ experiences using the technology.

The company has a “long-standing strategic partnership” with the VA, having worked with them for over 20 years to provide care and service to veterans.

According to Microsoft, gaming is a popular pastime of military personnel. The company opined that across to the Adaptive Controller for the Xbox, Microsoft’s flagship games console, provides veterans with the “opportunity . . . to experience gaming’s various benefits”.

These allegedly include staying in contact with friends and family around the world, building esprit de corps through competitive or cooperative gameplay, and providing stress relief.

Controllers will not only be available to veterans at the facilities participating in the project, alongside other equipment, they will also be accessible at events hosted by the VA’s Office of National Veterans Sports Programs and Special Events, such as the National Veterans Wheelchair Games.

Sixteen centres have confirmed their participation in the programme to date, including the Central Alabama VA Health Care System (HCS) and the James A Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Florida,  with at least six additional centres projected to join the project in the future.

“This partnership is another step toward achieving VA’s strategic goals of providing excellent customer experiences and business transformation,” VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement. “VA remains committed to offering solutions for Veterans’ daily life challenges.”

“We owe so much to the service and sacrifice of our Veterans, and as a company, we are committed to supporting them,” added Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Our Xbox Adaptive Controller was designed to make gaming more accessible to millions of people worldwide, and we’re partnering with the [VA] to bring the device to Veterans with limited mobility, connecting them to the games they love and the people they want to play with.”