Microsoft news – Page 121

Posted on April 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Teams at 3: Everything you need to connect with your teammates and be more productive

This week marks the third anniversary of Microsoft Teams. It’s been an incredible three years, and I’m inspired to see the way organizations across the globe are using Teams to transform the way they work. Today, I’m going to share some new Teams capabilities across a few different aspects of the Teams experience, many with a tie to meetings.

But first I want to talk to you about the moment we all find ourselves in. And I want to recognize the organizations, employees, and students across the globe who have been thrown into remote work and remote learning in an effort to keep themselves and the people around them healthy and safe.

Adjusting to remote work and learning

Around the world, millions of people have been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. It has affected how we work, how we socialize, our family life, and our community life. Here in the Puget Sound, we’ve asked about 50,000 Microsoft employees not to commute to work, and they are joined by tens of thousands of Microsoft employees worldwide who are now working remotely. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes it’s been downright disorienting. But our team is still connecting. Still collaborating. Still getting our work done.

In the face of COVID-19, there are countless stories from customers who are using Teams to connect and thrive in inspiring ways. A professor at University of Bologna in Italy shared on Twitter how the school moved 90 percent of courses online to Teams within four days, which is definitely a first in the university’s 900-plus year history. Doctors at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania will use Teams for videoconferencing with patients, especially those who are most vulnerable to coronavirus, as a way to protect both patients and healthcare providers. And the City of Osaka in Japan is using Teams to conduct orientations and trainings for hundreds of new incoming employees in April.

Stories like these are playing out in countries the world over. We believe that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work will be a turning point in how we work and learn. Already, we are seeing how solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way we work. We have seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users,* a figure that has grown by 12 million in just the last seven days. And those users have generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams each day this week.

It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak. We are committed to building the tools that help organizations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.

Transforming the way people work

Over the last three years, thousands of organizations, small and large—including 93 of the Fortune 100—have discovered how Teams can be their hub for teamwork, helping them to stay connected and engaged. Industry leading organizations are rolling out Teams enterprise-wide. In fact, 20 customers have more than 100,000 employees actively using Teams, including Ernst & Young, SAP, Pfizer, and Continental AG, as well as Accenture, which has 440,000 employees actively using Teams.

What’s new in Teams

We continue to invest in experiences that will make it easier for teams to communicate and collaborate. The new capabilities we are announcing today reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers; and bringing technological solutions to traditionally underserved professionals, including Firstline and healthcare workers.

We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression helps to minimize distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.
In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in when they have something to say. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

Conducting B2C virtual appointments is a common requirement for situations like healthcare patient visits, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.
Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and move more easily between ongoing conversations.
Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.
We are also expanding the Teams devices ecosystem, with new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, is the first collaboration bar certified for Teams, and brings together speakers, microphones, a camera, and a native Teams experience to deliver a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that is simple to install and easy to manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphone 700 UC is available for purchase in late spring.
We’re pleased to introduce Microsoft 365 Business Voice in the U.S., a new offering for small-and mid-sized businesses that makes Teams a complete phone system, as well as a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that will include additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.

Unless otherwise stated above, the new capabilities will be available later this year.

Since we launched Teams three years ago, it has evolved to become the hub for teamwork—a place where you can meet, chat, call, and collaborate all in one place. We will continue to improve and expand experiences for all workers to be as productive and connected as possible. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to push people everywhere into remote work and learning, enabling remote work and remote learning has never felt more important, and we are grateful for the opportunity to stand by our customers at such an extraordinary time.

*We define daily active usage as the maximum daily users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. Passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app are not included.

Posted on March 31, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft President Brad Smith: Finally, progress on regulating facial recognition

Amid the current need to continually focus on the COVID-19 crisis, it is understandably hard to address other important issues. But, this morning, Washington Governor Jay Inslee has signed landmark facial recognition legislation that the state legislature passed on March 12, less than three weeks, but seemingly an era, ago. Nonetheless, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the importance of this step. This legislation represents a significant breakthrough – the first time a state or nation has passed a new law devoted exclusively to putting guardrails in place for the use of facial recognition technology.

In 2018, we urged the tech sector and the public to avoid a commercial race to the bottom on facial recognition technology. In our view, this required a legal floor of responsibility, governed by the rule of law. Since that time, the issue has migrated around the world with a wide range of reactions, with some governments banning or putting a moratorium on the use of facial recognition. But, until today, no government has enacted specific legal controls that permit facial recognition to be used while regulating the risks inherent in the technology.

Washington state’s new law breaks through what, at times, has been a polarizing debate. When the new law comes into effect next year, Washingtonians will benefit from safeguards that ensure upfront testing, transparency and accountability for facial recognition, as well as specific measures to uphold fundamental civil liberties. At the same time, state and local government agencies may use facial recognition services to locate or identify missing persons, including subjects of Amber and Silver Alerts, and to help keep the public safe. This balanced approach ensures that facial recognition can be used as a tool to protect the public, but only in ways that respect fundamental rights and serve the public interest.

While regulation in this field will clearly evolve, Washington’s new law provides an early and important model. Some of the new law’s features are especially important.

Testing requirements

First, the law will accelerate market forces to address the risk of bias in facial recognition technology. Beginning next year in Washington, a state or local government agency can deploy facial recognition only if the technology provider makes available an application programming interface (API) or other technical capability to enable “legitimate, independent and reasonable tests” for “accuracy and unfair performance differences across distinct subpopulations.” In addition, vendors must disclose “any complaints or reports of bias regarding the service.”

In our view, this approach is both necessary and pragmatic. The risk of bias is real. Recent NIST research demonstrated that some facial recognition technologies have encountered higher error rates across different demographic groups. As documented in the “Gender Shades” research, this problem arises when trying to determine the gender of women and people of color. As we’ve found, no customer wants to purchase a facial recognition service that is flawed. But, without the ability to subject these services to third-party testing, it is impossible to know the accuracy of the available technologies. Thus, market forces cannot work effectively to push tech companies to improve their technology as quickly as they should. Washington’s new law shows how regulation and market forces can move forward together in a way that advances innovation to meet public needs.

Transparency and accountability

The new law also advances two other ethical and human rights principles that are fundamental for all aspects of artificial intelligence (AI): transparency and accountability. Before a state or local agency can begin to use facial recognition, it must first file a public notice of intent and “specify a purpose for which the technology is to be used.” This ensures that the public is informed at the very beginning of the technology adoption process.

Perhaps even more important, the new law also establishes a thorough accountability model for public adoption of facial recognition technology. Agencies that use facial recognition must establish “a clear use and data management policy” (including detailed protocols that control how the technology will be deployed), data integrity and retention policies, and strong cybersecurity measures. They must also provide the public with information about the facial recognition service’s “potential impacts to privacy” and the service’s “rate of false matches, potential impacts on protected subpopulations, and how the agency will address error rates, determined independently, greater than 1%.” This is all subject to public consultation requirements, including notice and comment processes, and community consultation meetings.

The law also requires that humans, not machines, be responsible for decisions using facial recognition technology, which is an important check on how these systems can be used. For example, if the use of facial recognition would result in a potential denial of service, a human must verify the individual’s identity to avoid decisions based on false results. This obligation to ensure “meaningful human review” naturally requires well-trained personnel. The new law therefore requires that agencies must conduct periodic training for everyone who operates a facial recognition service or who processes personal data obtained from it. This training must cover both the capabilities and limitations of the service, as well as how to interpret facial recognition output.

Protection of civil liberties

Through some of the new law’s most important provisions, Washington state has become the first jurisdiction to enact specific facial recognition rules to protect civil liberties and fundamental human rights. While the public will rightly assess ways to improve upon this approach over time, it’s worth recognizing at the outset the thorough approach the Washington state legislature has adopted.

First, there is protection against mass surveillance. Under the new law, a public authority may not use facial recognition to engage in “ongoing surveillance, conduct real-time or near real-time identification, or start persistent tracking” of an individual except in three specific circumstances. These require either (1) a warrant; (2) a court order “for the sole purpose of locating or identifying a missing person or identifying a deceased person;” or (3) “exigent circumstances,” a well-developed and high threshold under state law.

Second, there is added protection for specific human rights. For example, the authorities may not use facial recognition to record any individual’s exercise of First Amendment rights. In addition, an agency may not use facial recognition based on a person’s “religious, political or social views or activities” or “participation in a particular noncriminal organization or lawful event.” Similarly, they may not use the technology based on a person’s “actual or perceived race, ethnicity, citizenship, place of origin, immigration status, age, disability, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or other characteristic protected by law.”

Third, there are procedural safeguards for criminal trials. For example, authorities must disclose their use of facial recognition technology to criminal defendants in a timely manner prior to trial. This will provide defendants with the right to challenge the use of the technology if it’s flawed or was used unlawfully.

Fourth, there are detailed transparency requirements relating to civil liberties. The new law details public reports on the warrants that were sought and granted for the use of facial recognition. These reports include information on the number and duration of any extensions of the warrant, the agencies that sought the warrants and the nature of the public spaces where surveillance was conducted.

Putting Washington’s new law in context

Finally, it’s important to consider Washington’s new law in the context of the broader developments in AI that are both advancing the public’s needs and putting the world’s timeless values at risk.

First, a new law in no way absolves tech companies of their broader obligations to exercise self-restraint and responsibility in their use of AI. As of today, only one U.S. state out of 50 provides the public with the specific protection they deserve when it comes to facial recognition. The first question for the rest of the world is whether tech companies will step forward voluntarily to adopt and implement responsible AI principles. We should all hope that more tech companies will do so – and that customers will reward those who act responsibly.

Second, the new law is a testament to what legislative leaders can accomplish when they focus not just on whether facial recognition should be used, but how. Many facial recognition debates, including one that took place last year in Washington state itself, have foundered in gridlock over whether to ban this new technology. But, as this new law so clearly illustrates, there is so much to be gained from more thorough consideration of ways to protect the public from the risks of facial recognition by regulating its beneficial use. We owe a special thanks to the legislative leaders who led the legislature’s consideration of these issues, including Representative Debra Entenman and Senator Joe Nguyen, who also works as a Microsoft employee when not spending time in our state capital when the legislature is in session.

Ultimately, as we consider the continuing evolution of facial recognition regulation, we should borrow from the famous phrase and recognize that Washington’s law reflects “not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.” Finally, a real-world example for the specific regulation of facial recognition now exists. Some will argue it does too little. Others will contend it goes too far. When it comes to new rules for changing technology, this is the definition of progress.

Posted on March 31, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Improve virtual meetings and bring consultations online — here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in March

What a month it’s been. In just a few weeks, the way we work and live has changed. Our customers’ needs have never been clearer, or more urgent, than they are right now. And our top priority is to help you meet those needs by building the tools that help you enable your employees to work remotely; helping you find the right digital tools to transform your in-person events into virtual ones; and securing organizational assets to help you protect your business, even in challenging times.

This month, we have new features and capabilities designed to help keep your business moving during COVID-19 and beyond. New capabilities in Microsoft Teams, for instance, help you host more effective, inclusive, and focused online meetings and offer virtual solutions for one-on-one consultations. A crisis management site in SharePoint helps your organization quickly share information during emergencies. And an improved search experience in Outlook allows you to quickly find what you need in your email and calendar.

Below, we will get into all the Microsoft 365 news this month. But before we do, I want to once again point you to the monthly Modern Workplace podcast. This time, host Alex Bradley and I chat about what we’ve learned about remote work, both from our experiences at Microsoft and the experiences of our customers. Have a listen.

Host more inclusive, focused, online meetings

This month, we announced a host of new Teams capabilities that reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers, and bringing technological solutions to Firstline Workers and healthcare employees.

We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression minimizes distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.

In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

Conducting virtual meetings is a common requirement for situations such as healthcare patient consults, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.

Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and navigate more easily between ongoing conversations.

Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.

We’re also adding new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, delivers a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that’s simple to install and manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones 700 UC will be available for purchase in late spring.

Finally, Microsoft 365 Business Voice in Teams is now available in the U.S., enabling small and mid-sized businesses to make and receive phone calls from anywhere. We also have a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that includes additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.

Check out new Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses

This month, we debuted Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, an evolution from our Office 365 for individuals and families offering. We also announced named changes to several of our small and medium-sized business and Enterprise offerings. Office 365 Business Essentials is now Microsoft 365 Business Basic; Office 365 Business Premium is now Microsoft 365 Business Standard; and Microsoft 365 Business is now Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Meanwhile, Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will be called Microsoft 365 Apps. While today this is a change in name only, we’re excited about the new apps and services we’ve added to our subscriptions over the last few years and the new innovations we’ll be adding in the coming months. These changes reflect our ambition to continue to drive innovation in Microsoft 365 that goes well beyond what customers traditionally think of as Office.

Respond to emergency events

Quickly build an emergency management site to connect people and information—Unexpected events like COVID-19 highlight the importance of establishing and keeping the lines of communication open. A new crisis management site in SharePoint enables your organization to consolidate news, related resources, and topical Q&A in response to emergency events in under two hours. Just head to your SharePoint start page and select Create site > Communication site to start configuring news, links, Q&As, site navigation, highlighted people, and more.

Connect and collaborate with new app updates

We’re announcing new app updates to help streamline conversations, create professional content, and maximize productivity.

Engage with Yammer conversations directly within your inbox—The new interactive Yammer emails in Outlook on the web enable users to interact with Yammer conversations, polls, and questions, and deliver praise. Now you can see the full Yammer thread and reply, like, vote, attach files, share GIFs, and even watch videos right from your inbox. These features are now available to all Enterprise tenants with releases in Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook for iOS and Android coming next quarter.

Create professional-looking content more easily with Office mobile—You can now view and edit data in Excel in a simple, digestible card format, eliminating the need to span across columns that extend beyond the limits of the screen. Also new to Office mobile, PowerPoint Designer helps you create professional presentations with design, formatting, and iconography ideas for your content. These features will be available in the next few months in the Office app for Android and iOS.

Collaborate on documents and assign tasks—Now, users can easily assign tasks to document collaborators in Word and Excel for the web. Simply @mention your teammates in the comments of your online Word or Excel document, check the box to assign it, and they’ll receive an email letting them know a task was assigned to them with a link directly to the document. This feature will be available in April with Tasks in PowerPoint for the web coming in June.

Enjoy a new connection experience in Visio for the web—A new feature in Visio for the web lets users move the connection point on a shape for better alignment. Users can also easily add multiple arrows between shapes to distinctively represent to-and-from relationships, and more. To get started, hover over the edge of the shape until green circles highlight the possible connection points, then click on the desired point and drag the connector to the desired destination point. This feature is now available to all Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users.

Search your email and calendar more easily

We are announcing new innovations in Microsoft Search that recognize natural language as a helpful way to find what you need in Outlook for iOS and Android. Simply find your emails, calendar events, contact information, and files faster and easier by using everyday language to narrow your search. You can either speak it or type it. Learn more in this blog.

Streamline common IT tasks

This month, we’re announcing two new services to help streamline common resources for IT.

Modernize your print infrastructure with a cloud-based print solution—We’re announcing the private preview of Universal Print, a new cloud-based print infrastructure that creates a simple, secure print experience. Now, organizations no longer need to maintain on-premises print servers or install printer drivers on devices, reducing the time and effort needed by IT to maintain the print environment. And users get a straightforward print experience that makes it easy to discover and print to nearby printers. Customers can register for participation in the private preview.

Seamlessly move your cloud files into OneDrive and SharePoint—We’re pleased to announce that Mover, a cloud-to-cloud file migration tool, is now available to Microsoft 365 customers worldwide. Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers—including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive—into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services. Mover makes it easy and inexpensive (it’s free!) to manage files that currently exist outside of Microsoft 365 in other cloud service provider offerings. To get started, sign in with your Office 365 credentials and follow the prompts.

From new meetings capabilities in Teams to updates that make storing files on the cloud easier, the announcements above reflect our ongoing commitment to continuing to improve and evolve the tools you rely on. But we also want to be here for you at this critical moment when so many organizations are adjusting to full-time remote work. In addition to these monthly updates, we are using this blog as a space to exchange remote-work tips, information, and customer stories, so check back here for frequent updates.

Posted on March 31, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Meet the winners of the 2020 Imagine Cup Americas Regional Final

Ten student teams from countries across the Americas virtually pitched their tech solutions at the 2020 Imagine Cup Americas Regional Final this week. Driven by purpose and developed with passion, each team presented a unique project leveraging Microsoft Azure to make a difference. The event culminated with the selection of the final two teams to move forward to this year’s World Championship during Microsoft Build. Congratulations to our Americas World Finalists, Team Deeptector and Team Tremor Vision from the United States!

The Imagine Cup aims to empower student developers to create innovative and inclusive projects that tackle pressing global and societal issues. Our winning teams both developed solutions to make an impact within their communities and beyond. Deeptector created an intelligent tool that uses state-of-the-art deep learning technologies to detect “Deepfake” videos and protect journalists, and Team Tremor Vision created a web-based tool using Azure custom vision that enables physicians to detect early onset Parkinson’s and quantitatively track patient progress throughout a prescribed treatment plan.

Out of hundreds of Americas submissions, the ten regional finalist teams virtually showcased their innovations to a panel of judges to compete for prizes totaling USD20,000, Azure credits, and two spots in the 2020 World Championship. With ideas encompassing solutions in environmental conservation, communication, accessibility, healthcare detection and prevention tools, and more, judges had a difficult task selecting which teams to advance.  

Congratulations to all our winners this year and thank you to everyone who participated in bringing your passion to life. We can’t wait to see how students continue to develop their projects. We’d also like to give a special thank you to our judges for lending their expertise to the competition.   

Meet the winning teams:  

World Finalist – Deeptector, United States

University of Missouri

The team created Deeptector.io, a web app that detects DeepFakes using the same Artificial Intelligence methods that generate state-of-the-art DeepFake. These algorithms are commonly known as deep neural networks and they train themselves to differentiate between real videos and fake ones by looking at thousands of examples of each. DeepFakes are an emerging method for propagating misinformation in the media and Deeptector aims to protect journalists and the public from the damage that DeepFakes can cause.

Prizes: USD8,000, Azure credits, a spot in the 2020 Imagine Cup World Championship   

World Finalist – Tremor Vision, United States

University of Washington

Tremor Vision is a web-based tool that enables physicians to detect early onset Parkinson’s and quantitatively track patient progress throughout a prescribed treatment plan. By simply using a touchscreen device connected to the internet, the user sends clinical results to their physician. The platform empowers patients to save time and money required by routine clinical visits and increases physician’s reach in screening for early signs of Parkinson’s.

Prizes: USD8,000, Azure credits, a spot in the 2020 Imagine Cup World Championship   

Runner-up – Pink AI, United States

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of California, Berkeley

Pink AI’s project is a web platform that uses a Deep Learning model to provide accurate, efficient, and affordable detection for 4 different types of breast cancer in 10 seconds with an accuracy of 99%.

Prizes: USD2,500 and Azure credits   

Runner-up – Synbiolic, Canada

Harbord Collegiate Institute, AY Jackson Secondary School, Port Credit Secondary School

Synbiolic is an AI-powered end-to-end rational drug design platform with a mission of making medicine more accessible worldwide. Researchers are able to choose their targets, the small molecule’s property they wish to optimize and get a tailored list of molecules that could work as a drug, as well as instructions on how to synthesize that molecule.

Prizes: USD2,500 and Azure credits   

Runner-up – TuringCerts , United States

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of California, Berkeley

TuringCerts is a privacy-first certificate validation solution on the blockchain, which guarantees the integrity of records and makes verifying and transferring much more efficient than conventional hiring process.

Prizes: USD2,500 and Azure credits   

Follow the journeys of our winning teams on Instagram and Twitter as they prepare for the 2020 World Championship! They’ll be competing against our Asia World Finalists, team Syrinx and team Hollo, and EMEA World Finalists, team the Knights and team RedWalls.   

Posted on March 31, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft partners with industry to unlock new 5G scenarios with Azure Edge Zones

Cloud, edge computing, and IoT are making strides to transform whole industries and create opportunities that weren’t possible just a few years ago. With the rise of 5G mobile connectivity, there are even more possibilities to deliver immersive, real-time experiences that have demanding, ultra-low latency, and connectivity requirements. 5G opens new frontiers with enhanced mobile broadband up to 10x faster, reliable low-latency communication, and very high device density up to 1 million devices per square kilometer.

Today we’re announcing transformative advances to combine the power of Azure, 5G, carriers, and technology partners around the world to enable new scenarios for developers, customers, and partners, with the preview of Azure Edge Zones.

New 5G customer scenarios with Azure Edge Zones

Azure Edge Zones and Azure Private Edge Zones deliver consistent Azure services, app platform, and management to the edge with 5G unlocking new scenarios by enabling:

Development of distributed applications across cloud, on-premises, and edge using the same Azure Portal, APIs, development, and security tools.
Local data processing for latency critical industrial IoT and media services workloads.
Acceleration of IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and real-time analytics by optimizing, building, and innovating for robotics, automation, and mixed reality.
New frontiers for developers working with high-density graphics and real-time operations in industries such as gaming.
An evolving platform built with customers, carriers, and industry partners to allow seamless integration and operation of a wide selection of Virtual Network Functions, including 5G software and SD-WAN and firewalls from technology partners such as Affirmed, Mavenir, Nuage Networks from Nokia, Metaswitch, Palo Alto, and VeloCloud By VMware.

Building on our previous work with AT&T, we’re announcing the preview of Azure Edge Zones with carriers, connecting Azure services directly to 5G networks in the carrier’s datacenter. This will enable developers to build optimized and scalable applications using Azure and directly connected to 5G networks, taking advantage of consistent Azure APIs and tooling available in the public cloud. We were the first public cloud to announce 5G integration with AT&T in Dallas in 2019, and now we’re announcing a close collaboration with AT&T on a new Edge Zone targeted to become available in Los Angeles in late spring. Customers and partners interested in Edge Zones with AT&T can register for our early adopter program.

“This is a uniquely challenging time across the globe as we rethink how to help organizations serve their customers and stakeholders,” said Anne Chow, chief executive officer, AT&T Business. “Fast and intelligent mobile networks will be increasingly central to all of our lives. Combining our network knowledge and experience with Microsoft’s cloud expertise will give businesses a critical head start.”

These new zones will boost application performance, providing an optimal user experience when running ultra-low latency, sensitive mobile applications, and SIM-enabled architectures including:

Online gaming: Every press of the button, every click is important for a gamer. Responsiveness is critical, especially in multi-player scenarios. Game developers can now develop cloud-based applications optimized for mobile, directly accessing the 5G network at different carrier sites. They can achieve millisecond latency and scale to as many users as they want.
Remote meetings and events: As the prevalence of digital-forward experiences continue to rise in response to global health challenges, we can help bring together thousands of people to enjoy a real-time shared experience. Enabling scenarios like social engagement, mobile digital experiences, live interaction, and payment and processing require ultra-low latency to provide an immersive, responsive experience.
Smart Infrastructure: With the rise of IoT, organizations are looking to create efficiency, savings, and immersive experiences across residential and commercial buildings, or even citywide. With 5G and cloud computing, organizations can reliably connect millions of endpoints, analyze data, and deliver immersive experiences.

With Azure Edge Zones we’re expanding our collaboration with several of our carrier partners to bring the Azure Edge Zones family to our mutual customers later this year.

In addition to partnering with carriers, we’ll also deliver standalone Azure Edge Zones in select cities over the next 12 months, bringing Azure closer to customers and developers in highly dense areas.

Azure Private Edge Zones

We’re also announcing the preview of Azure Private Edge Zones, a private 5G/LTE network combined with Azure Stack Edge on-premises delivering an ultra-low latency, secure, and high bandwidth solution for organizations to enable scenarios, like with Attabotics, accelerating e-commerce delivery times by using 3D robotic goods-to-person storage, retrieval, and real-time order fulfillment solutions. This solution leverages Azure Edge Zones and IoT technologies such as Azure IoT Central and Azure Sphere.

“In collaboration with Microsoft, Rogers is delivering new and innovative solutions with our Private LTE capabilities combined with Azure Edge Zones,” said Dean Prevost, President, Rogers for Business. “Working with Attabotics, we’re enabling Canadian businesses to transform the traditional supply model with a retail e-fulfillment solution that showcases the exciting possibilities of today and opens the door to our 5G future.”

Partnering with the broad industry of carriers, systems integrators, and technology partners, we’re launching a platform to support orchestration and management of customers’ private cellular networks to enable scenarios such as:

Smart Factory/IoT: Off-shore operations or security isolated facilities can now take advantage of the power of edge computing. Connecting everything, from silicon to sensors, leveraging security to AI at the edge, deploying Digital Twins or using mixed reality, with a secure and private connection.
Logistics and operations: Retail customers have high expectations today in online and retail shopping, creating a need for appealing advertising before a potential customer looks away from a product on-line or in an aisle at the store. Wide selection, tailored offers, convenience, and availability are musts for success. The combination of cloud and distributed edge computing, efficiently working together is a game changer for the industry.
Medicine: From remote surgeries to complicated diagnostics that rely on cross-institutional collaboration, efficient compute and storage at the edge, with AI and minimal latency, enables these and multiple other scenarios that will save lives. Private mobile connections will work as smart grids for hospitals, patient data, and diagnostics that will never have to be exposed to the internet to take advantage of Azure technologies.

A consistent Edge Zone solution

Together, Azure, Azure Edge Zones, and Azure Private Edge Zones unlock a whole new range of distributed applications with a common and consistent architecture companies can use. For example, enterprises running a headquarters’ infrastructure on Azure, may leverage Azure Edge Zones for latency sensitive interactive customer experiences, and Azure Private Edge Zones for their remote locations. Enterprise solution providers can take advantage of the consistent developer, management, and security experience, allowing developers to continue using Github, Azure DevOps, and Kubernetes Services to create applications in Azure and simply move the application to either Azure Edge Zones or Private Edge Zones depending on the customer’s requirements.

“By combining Vodafone 5G and mobile private networks with Azure Private Edge Zones, our customers will be able to run cloud applications on mobile devices with single-digit millisecond responsiveness. This is essential for autonomous vehicles and virtual reality services, for example, as these applications need to react in real-time to deliver business impact. It will allow organizations to innovate and transform their operations, such as the way their employees work with virtual reality services, high speed and precise robotics, and accurate computer vision for defect detection. Together, we expect Vodafone and Microsoft to provide our customers with the capabilities they need to create high performing, innovative and safe work environments.” – Vinod Kumar, CEO of Vodafone Business

New possibilities for the telecommunication industry with Azure

For the last few decades, carriers and operators have pioneered how we connect with each other, laying the foundation for telephony and cellular. With cloud and 5G, there are new possibilities by combining cloud services, including compute and AI, with mobile high bandwidth and ultra-low latency connections. Microsoft is partnering with carriers and operators to bring 5G to life in immersive applications built by organizations and developers.

Carriers, operators, and networking providers can build 5G-optimized services and applications for their partners and customers with Azure Edge Zones, taking advantage of Azure compute, storage, networking, and AI capabilities. For organizations that want an on-premises, private mobile solution, partners and carriers can deploy, manage, and build offers with Azure Private Edge Zones. Customers need help understanding the complexities of the cellular spectrum, access points, and overall management. Carrier partners can help such enterprises manage these scenarios including manufacturing, robotics, and retail.

In addition to new business application opportunities, we’re looking to transform 5G infrastructure with cloud technology. Today, most 5G infrastructure is built on specialized hardware with high capital expenditures and little flexibility. Microsoft will be working to help operators reduce costs and build capacity for their network workloads in new and innovative ways. Last week, we announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Affirmed Networks, a leader in fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network solutions. We look forward to building on their great work and technology expertise to do even more to create new opportunities for customers, technology partners, and operators in virtual mobile networks

As we continue to innovate and discover new, interesting ways to provide unique scenarios built with 5G and our Edge Zone platforms we will be sure to keep you updated. Please visit our page to learn more and keep track of the latest news here.

Posted on March 31, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New AI tools help writers be more clear, concise and inclusive in Office and across the web

Putting people at the center of AI design

Mira Lane, the lead of Microsoft’s Ethics & Society team, is charged with ensuring that the principles articulated at the highest levels of the company to guide the responsible use of AI find their way into the heads of researchers conducting user testing and the hands of engineers writing code. It starts with asking the right questions, she said.

Her team of philosophers, engineers, security experts, designers and trainers works closely with product teams to consider what data or models should be used, who might be directly or indirectly affected by a new technology, what kinds of people should be interviewed to identify unintentional harms and how those insights can be folded into product design.

“The thing that we’re trying to do is help people design technology in a really intentional way, so you really understand what the effects of the tech are and can look around the corner to how it might be used or misused,” Lane said.

For teams that incorporate AI into productivity tools, one of the most important principles is to keep people at the center of the process.

“We bring a lot of focus to making sure the experiences we’re delivering are actually valuable,” said Penny Collisson, principal design research manager for Office. “We have lots of conversations with customers where we never even mention AI. We’re talking about understanding the expressed or latent needs or pain points that people have and then we go back and try to think about how AI could fit in.”

Microsoft has developed 18 best practices that researchers and product designers use to guide their work. But a lot of that work involves listening to people with different levels of tech adoption, socioeconomic backgrounds, geography, physical abilities or attitudes about AI and privacy.

If you talk to people with learning disabilities, for instance, some have a fear of starting with a blank page. That insight helped guide improved dictation offerings in Word for the web, which makes it easier to create content with one’s voice and use speech-to-text to get thoughts down on paper.

Creating good user experiences with AI is more complicated than asking people for feedback on whether they prefer one type of control over another, or which interface is easier to navigate, said Jon Friedman, Microsoft corporate vice president for design and research.

“The kicker and power of AI is that everyone’s experience is unique. Before, we were designing for the mean because solutions were closer to one size fits all. And now we are designing each thing to be a special size to fit each individual,” Friedman said.

“So making sure we’re talking to a much broader set of people and hearing everyone’s voice is really important to give people what they truly need,” he said.

In one example, Microsoft designers and engineers who were interested in building a better screen reader for people who are blind or with low vision built a relationship with the Washington State School for the Blind and began interviewing and observing how those students consume information and approach tasks for the day. That work led to Play My Emails in Outlook mobile, which turned out to also be useful for anyone who wants a jump on their day but can’t safely look at a screen while commuting or cooking breakfast for kids.

Through interviews and equipment that simulated the experience of having macular degeneration, the design team began to understand the massive cognitive load that’s required to listen for pertinent information among a sea of extraneous details like dates and time stamps and even punctuation marks that screen readers include as they scan from left to right.

“It was like listening for a needle in a haystack, and the fatigue level was really high,” Friedman said.

So the team used AI to offer the most important information upfront and in a much more conversational way. Having Cortana, Microsoft 365’s personal productivity assistant, tell you that someone sent you an email in the past hour about scheduling a meeting this afternoon is more useful than knowing the precise time stamp, Friedman said.

Play My Emails also provides summary information like how many unread emails are in your inbox and how long it would take to listen to them. That helps people decide if they have enough commute time or brain space while they’re rushing to get out of the house to focus on the task.

“We started on this path because we thought inclusive design was an important philosophy that we needed to start living and breathing in product,” Friedman said. “But the team quickly realized that there’s a lot of instances where people are situationally blind or looking at screens when it’s not safe, and that’s when they realized this is something that could be useful for people in a lot of different contexts.”

Posted on March 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

The top 10 reasons to switch to the new Microsoft Edge

New features provide peace of mind, help you stay in the flow and connect to the information you want

The last few weeks have been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. As a working mom I’m certainly used to having a full schedule, getting pulled in different directions, balancing the needs of my family with those of my job, and generally feeling stretched. But these last several weeks have taken my everyday reality to a whole new level. And I suspect I’m not alone. I’ve found myself at home jumping from Teams call to Teams call while trying to keep things moving forward at work (recognizing I’m lucky in this regard) while also now homeschooling my kids. It feels like the volume of everything has been turned up significantly. There’s more email, more information and news, more screaming (as I write this, my kids are fighting right outside my room), more video chats, more anxiety and frankly, I’ve found it hard to make sense of it all.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the browser – a thing I might not think too much about if it weren’t for the work I do every day – is an even more indispensable tool than ever before. Whether it’s reading the latest COVID-19 news, using Teams online for meetings, collaborating on Word documents with my team online, researching lesson plans for my kids, or shopping for toilet paper – I’m turning to the browser all day long. It’s a tool we all rely on and have for years.

My browser habits have not changed, but the world has, and at an incredible rate. These days we worry about what information online can be trusted. We worry about the safety of our personal data, our identity and the safety of our children online. At Microsoft, we are starting to question the browser status quo. Perhaps it’s time to expect more from the web.

Last year, we started our re-imagining of the web by rebuilding our Microsoft Edge browser from the ground up based on the Chromium engine. This ensured we could deliver world class speed, performance and website compatibility with the sites and extensions you use every day. But we believe that’s not enough. It’s time to expect more from our browsers – more control over our data and our family’s online information, new ways to organize our online research and more value back as we browse.

Today, we announce a set of new consumer services from Microsoft including new consumer features in Microsoft Edge that help you stay organized and save time, protect your online data and identity, and give you value back. If you haven’t tried the new Microsoft Edge yet, now is a great time to check it out.

Here are a few of my favorite new features in the new Microsoft Edge.

1. Organize your research with Collections

If you’re having to suddenly design your child’s academic curriculum, or maybe spending more time at home has you rediscovering your inner chef, Collections can be a big help. Collections allows you to easily collect information from different websites, organize it, export it into various files or just come back to your research at a later time and pick up right where you left off. Today it can be difficult to do this – especially across a large number of different websites and multiple devices.

Just click on the Collections button and a pane on the right of your browser opens, where you can easily drag and drop webpages, text, or images into a group – without having to open another page or application. You can then send your collection to Word or Excel. I use Collections to help me create lesson plans for my kids. I search the web for all kinds of cool ideas, then drag them over to the Collections pane on the right, and when I’m done, with one press it exports the collection to a beautiful Word doc that I can print out for the kids. You can also share your collection by copying and pasting into Outlook or another email service.

Today we announced that Collections will also be coming to mobile later this spring making it easy to create, access and sync your Collections across all your devices. Collections for desktop is in the Insider channels now and will be coming to the Stable channel soon.

2. Work efficiently with vertical tabs

If you are like me when you research online, you find yourself with dozens of tabs open at any given time. When that happens, there’s less space for me to see which tab is which. I find myself losing track or I’ll accidentally close a tab as a result. Utterly frustrating as that is usually exactly the one page I needed.

Today we announced vertical tabs, a feature that helps you easily find and manage many open tabs at once. Microsoft Edge is the only browser that allows you to manage your tabs on the side with a single click. Vertical tabs is expected in the Insider channels in the next few months.

3. Save time with smart copy

My favorite technology features are always the ones that seem the simplest and where I find myself asking, “how did I live without this before?” How often do you cut and paste content from the web into documents only to see the beautiful web content reformatted into an ugly mess of text that you then need to clean up? Smart copy makes it easier to select, copy and paste the exact content you want from the web and preserve the rich web format. You can use your cursor to select any area or type of content. When you paste it will retain the formatting, including any images or links. It’s something that sounds so simple, but believe me, it’s a life-changer. Smart copy is expected in the Insider channels next month.

4. Take back control with tracking prevention

I’ll be honest, I love to shop. So yes, I sometimes do find personalized ads helpful. I’ve found various new products online this way that I may not have otherwise. But for many others and particularly for my kids, personalized ads that follow you around the web can sometimes feel intrusive, if not even creepy. The tracking prevention feature in Microsoft Edge is designed to protect you from being tracked by websites that you aren’t accessing directly, giving you more control over what you see and what you don’t. Whether on mobile or desktop, you can select one of three settings that’s right for you – Basic, Balanced or Strict. Depending on which setting you choose, Microsoft Edge will adjust the types of third-party trackers blocked. When I browse, I like to use Balanced mode which is the default setting. But I set my kids’ browsers to Strict mode. Tracking prevention makes understanding who’s tracking you online easier to see and easy to manage, and it’s available now.

5. Know if your passwords have been compromised on the dark web with Password Monitor

Each year, millions of online personal credentials are exposed in data breaches and end up for sale on the dark web.

Today, we’re announcing Password Monitor in Microsoft Edge to help keep your online accounts safe from hackers. When enabled, Password Monitor is a feature that notifies you if the credentials you’ve saved to autofill have been detected on the dark web. If Microsoft Edge uncovers a match with any of your saved username + passwords, you will receive a notification from within the browser prompting you to take action. Through a dashboard in Settings, you can view a list of all leaked credentials and get routed to their respective websites to change your password. Once the password has been changed, save the new credential to autofill and continue browsing with peace of mind knowing that Microsoft Edge and Password Monitor have your back. Again, such a simple, easy solution that makes me feel SO much better about browsing the web. One less thing to worry about. Password Monitor is expected in the Insider channels in the next few months.

6. Maintain truly private browsing and search with enhancements to InPrivate mode

Sometimes you want extra online privacy. If I’m sharing a device with other members of my family, for example, I may not want them to see the gift I’m researching for their birthday because I want to keep it a surprise! It’s for times like those that I like to use InPrivate because it automatically deletes my history, cookies and site data when I finish a web browsing session. In addition, Microsoft Edge is the only desktop browser that offers built-in InPrivate search with Bing. So, when I’m browsing in InPrivate mode, my searches aren’t tied to me or my account. InPrivate browsing is available now. The addition of InPrivate search in Bing is available in the Insider channels now and is coming to the Stable channel soon.

7. Immersive Reader enables everyone to learn and benefit from the web

Immersive Reader, built into Microsoft Edge, makes reading online easier and more accessible for everyone. Reading is one of the most common activities on the web but it can be difficult to do if you have dyslexia or other reading disabilities. Clicking on the Immersive Reader icon removes distractions on the screen and creates a simplified environment that helps you focus. You can also access a variety of tools that help personalize the experience that works best for you, like the ability to hear the article read aloud or to adjust the text. Immersive Reader is available now with more features like line focus coming soon.

8. Microsoft Edge delivers the best immersive viewing experience in 4K and Dolby Audio

These days, many of us are watching a lot more Netflix than before. Our goal is to provide the best high definition entertainment experience when viewing content on the web. Microsoft Edge is the only browser on Windows 10 that lets you watch 4K on Netflix. It’s also the only browser that supports Dolby Audio and Dolby Vision on Windows 10. Through our partnership with Netflix, you and your friends can stream your favorite movies and shows like “Spenser Confidential,” “Locke and Key” and “Night on Earth” in 4K from anywhere on your Windows 10 PC. There are hundreds of 4K Netflix titles to choose from. This feature is available now.

9. Make a difference: Give with Bing

With everything that’s happening these days, one thing that I am trying to keep in mind and model for my kids is how small things can make a big difference. Whether that’s self-care or looking out for others. Today, we are introducing Give with Bing and the Give Mode feature in Bing, a new way to help you to support the causes you care about. It’s a simple thing but it has the potential for real impact. If you choose to search in Bing you can earn reward points for those searches as part of the Microsoft Rewards program. By turning on the new Give Mode feature within your rewards settings, you can donate your reward points to the cause of your choice. There is no cost to you, just search with Bing. With more than 1 million nonprofits to choose from, you can support a cause that you really care about – including the CDC Foundation and others that are supporting the COVID response. In fact, through the end of June, Microsoft Rewards will match all donations to help make an even bigger impact. Try it. Join Microsoft Rewards, and switch on Give Mode and give with Bing. Give Mode is available now.

10. Microsoft Edge is ready for you (and it’s easy to switch)

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The new Microsoft Edge is ready for anyone to download today by visiting Microsoft.com/Edge. It’s available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. If you’re a Windows 10 customer and don’t have the new Microsoft Edge yet, you can download it today or look for it to come to your PC starting next month as we continue the roll-out. And whether you download it yourself or wait for it to come to your PC, it’s super easy to switch with your favorites, passwords, form fill information and basic settings carrying over to the new Microsoft Edge with just a single click. If you’ve never used Microsoft Edge before, we’re excited to have you give it a try.

We will continue to be quality driven as we release new features. That means that all features will be tested in the Insider channels, starting in Canary and progressing to Stable only when we are satisfied with the level of stability and quality. If you downloaded the new Edge, all you have to do is wait. We’ll update your browser when the features are ready. If you want to use them today, you can join the Microsoft Edge Insiders.

We’ve worked hard to address the evolving needs of today’s savvy web surfers. With the new Microsoft Edge, we hope you’ll see great performance, more control over your data and better ways to connect to and make sense of information. Because it’s time to expect more from the web.

Posted on March 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Introducing the new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions

Introducing the new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions

Today, we offer a powerful set of free applications and services that help you create, share, connect, and collaborate with your friends and family across the web and on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices. Used by more than a half billion people, free Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive apps enable you to coauthor, video chat, organize, and come together. We are committed to improving and innovating on these experiences every day.

Posted on March 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New physics discovery from the Microsoft Quantum team: topology with a twist

We are excited to announce that Science, a leading academic journal, has published a new paper entitled Flux-Induced Topological Superconductivity in Full-Shell Nanowires. This research, born from a cross-disciplinary collaboration on the Microsoft Quantum team, highlights how theoretical physics, experimental physics, and materials science can unite across academia and industry to generate new ideas that lead to breakthrough technologies.

Our approach: topological systems

At Microsoft Quantum, our ambition is to help solve some of the world’s most complex problems by developing scalable quantum technology. Our global team of researchers, scientists, and engineers are addressing this challenging task by developing a topological qubit.

To realize this vision, our teams have been making advances in materials and device fabrication, designing the precise physical environment required to support the topological state of matter. The latest discovery by the team expands the landscape for creating and controlling the exotic particles critical for enabling topological superconductivity in nanoscale devices.

Discovery: a new route to topology

Our qubit architecture is based on nanowires, which under certain conditions (low-temperature, magnetic field, material choice) can enter a topological state. Topological quantum hardware is intrinsically robust against local sources of noise, making it particularly appealing as we scale up the number of qubits.

An intriguing feature of topological nanowires is that they support Majorana zero modes (MZMs) that are neither fermions nor bosons. Instead, they obey different, more exotic quantum exchange rules. If kept apart and braided around each other, similar to strands of hair, MZMs remember when they encircle each other. Such braiding operations act as quantum gates on a state, allowing for a new kind of computation that relies on the topology of the braiding pattern.

A topological qubit is constructed by arranging several nanowires hosting MZMs in a comb-like structure and coupling them in a specific way that lets them share multiple MZMs. The first step in building a topological qubit is to reliably establish the topological phase in these nanowires.

While exploring the conditions for the creation of topological superconductivity, the team discovered a topological quantum vortex state in the core of a semiconductor nanowire surrounded on all sides by a superconducting shell. They were very surprised to find Majorana modes in the structure, akin to a topological vortex residing inside of a nanoscale coaxial cable.

3 people working together at the Microsoft Quantum Computing lab in Copenhagen — Charles M. Marcus, Saulius Vaitiekėnas, and Karsten Flensberg at the Microsoft Quantum Lab in Copenhagen

With hindsight, the findings can now be understood as a novel topological extension of a 50-year old piece of physics known as the Little-Parks effect. In the Little-Parks effect, a superconductor in the shape of a cylindrical shell – analogous to a soda straw – adjusts to an external magnetic field, threading the cylinder by jumping to a “vortex state” where the quantum wavefunction around the cylinder carries a twist. The quantum wavefunction must close on itself.

Thus, the wavefunction phase accumulated by going around the cylinder must take the values zero, one, two, and so on, in units of 2π. This has been known for decades. What had not been explored in depth was what those twists do to the semiconductor core inside the superconducting shell. The surprising discovery made by the Microsoft team—experiment and theory—was a twist in the shell, under appropriate conditions, can make a topological state in the core, with MZMs localized at the opposite ends.

While signatures of Majorana modes have been reported in related systems without the fully surrounding cylindrical shell, these previous realizations placed rather stringent requirements on materials and required large magnetic fields. This discovery places few requirements on materials and needs a smaller magnetic field, expanding the landscape for creating and controlling Majoranas.

Worldwide collaboration

What started as two separate papers – one experimental, the other theoretical – was combined into a single publication that tells the complete story, with mutual support of experiment, theory, and numerics.

Of course, looking back, deep connections to previous ideas and experiments can now be recognized, and results that were first mysterious now seem inevitable. That is the nature of scientific progress: from seemingly impossible to seemingly obvious after a few months of making, measuring, and thinking.

Notes from a team brainstorm over lunch (June 2018)

Saulius Vaitiekėnas, then a PhD student and postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and now a newly minted Microsoft researcher, was the main experimentalist. As he comments, “The paper represents a series of surprises. And it was really exciting to see so many different disciplines come together, all in a united activity.”

Roman Lutchyn, Principal Research Manager and lead of the theoretical effort, reflected on the collaboration process. “Microsoft Quantum started with just a small group in Santa Barbara. Now we’ve grown into a much broader organization with labs all around the world – Copenhagen, Delft, Purdue, Sydney, Redmond, among others. I think this paper is a landmark in our partnership between teams and is a model of how we can work effectively together as one team – around the world – on related ideas in physics, ultimately generating new and potentially important results.”

Charles Marcus, Scientific Director of Microsoft Quantum Lab – Copenhagen and lead for the experimental effort, concurs, “[This paper is an example] where two results – from theory and experiment – help each other to make more conclusive statements about physics. Otherwise, we would have been left with more abstract theory; and experimentally, we would have measurements but may have hedged on interpretation. By merging theory and experiment, the overall story is stronger and also more interesting, seeing the connection to related phenomena in different systems.”

We congratulate the team on their recognition in the scientific community and look forward to further discoveries in moving the world closer to quantum computing making a positive impact on the world.

Posted on March 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How M12 turned its Female Founders Competition into a virtual event, and what they learned along the way

March was always going to be a busy month for M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The team, which funds early stage B2B companies, was hard at work planning their second Female Founders Competition. On the schedule: a two-day pitch session in the Bay Area where 20 entrepreneur finalists would present to a trio of judges. M12, working in partnership with Mayfield and Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, would then choose four winners from the group and award a total of $6 million to seed their respective companies. By the first week of the month, however, the impact of COVID-19 had broken through in the news, and it was clear that the finalists—based in tech hubs across the U.S. and internationally in the U.K., Germany, and Israel—could not travel to the event.

Postponing was not an option. “Early stage Female Founders pitching for capital receive on average $1 million less than their male counterparts,” wrote M12 General Manager and Managing Director Tamara Steffens in a recent LinkedIn post about the competition. “That $1 million deficit ladders up to a much broader systemic issue; if we take a step back, female-founded companies raised only 2.8 percent of venture capital in 2019.” The team was adamant: they needed to deploy this capital as soon as they could. So they decided to hold the event virtually over Microsoft Teams.

Here’s how they did it, and what they learned along the way.

The plan

Customizing the experience

The M12 team carefully considered how moving the event online would impact the presenters as well as the panel of judges: Steffens, along with Priya Saiprasad from Mayfield and Pivotal Ventures’ Julie Wroblewski. They spread the pitch sessions out over two days; judges heard ten 30-minute pitches each day. M12 wanted to make sure each finalist had the judges’ complete attention during their presentations, just as they would if they were presenting in a room. So rather than create a single meeting in which the finalists called in at a given time, M12 scheduled each presentation as an individual meeting. While one finalist gave her presentation, M12 Marketing Lead Colleen O’Brien would jump to the following call to help the next one prepare. By organizing the event this way, O’Brien was able to make sure each presenter had her deck ready to go and could check her audio and video in the “room.” Plus, it never hurts to have a little company when you’re about to deliver a pitch and there are millions of dollars at stake.

Preparing presenters

In the days before the call, O’Brien held office hours so that each founder could call in and practice the pitch over Teams in advance. This way, they could work out any technical glitches in advance, get used to controlling the slides within the digital environment, and time out their presentation in front of a friendly audience. O’Brien even sent the presenters screenshots so they got a sense of what the judges would see during the live event. This was essential for presenters who had not used Teams before, and it gave everyone a chance to get comfortable so that they could perform with focus when it counted.

Another consideration: access to fast and reliable Wi-Fi varies. One founder dialing in from Pakistan forewarned judges that the Wi-Fi might cut out during her pitch. Another, who lives in a Michigan neighborhood full of online video game players, even took the step to contact those neighbors to request that they limit streaming during her presentation time. If they lost connection, presenters were given the option to call into the Teams meeting directly. And the judges were sent copies of every presenter’s slides in advance. If a presentation stalled, they always had a local version to follow along with.

Creating human connection

Typically, when venture funds invest in an entrepreneur, they spend time getting to know the founders behind the startup. And during their pitch, presenters get a sense of the funder’s reaction as well—are they leaning forward and engaged? Are they looking back at the slides to better understand something?—and can adjust based on these cues. The team wanted to enable this human connection as much as possible and kept their video on whenever possible. And because the Teams interface allowed judges to see both the slides and the presenter’s face at the same time, the virtual presentation came alive to judges in a way it could not if they were seeing the presentation deck alone.

Lessons learned

While the M12 team is encouraged by the success of their virtual event, they did learn some things along the way.

For event planners:

Schedule thoughtfully. There’s a certain energy that happens when you gather a group of people in a room. This energy is hard to recreate online and, without it, fatigue can set in earlier. Natural interruptions are fewer, and pick-me-ups like hallway chats and side tables with coffee, water, and snacks are notably absent at home. While the judges took breaks between pitches, hearing 10 pitches over two days proved challenging. In the future, the team plans to spread virtual events out a bit more than they would with in-person events.

For virtual presenters:

Find your light. We are used to presenting in professional conference rooms or from well-lit stages. Home lighting tends to be duller. Play with lighting to create a bright backdrop and enlist a family member to take pictures or video so you have a sense of what your audience will see.

Have fun! Even some of the most dynamic in-person presenters can be tempted to tone it down when presenting virtually. Resist the urge to read from a script. Practice just like you would for a stage performance, and deliver your pitch directly to the audience, as if you were altogether in a room. The M12 team also encouraged presenters to be authentic and embrace the experiment—we are all working through a challenging moment together, and there is plenty of room for humor and humanity.

By quickly moving their competition to Microsoft Teams, M12 is on schedule to announce their winners and deliver essential capital to four extraordinary female founders. They successfully took an important event online by considering how the move to digital would impact the event and its participants; customizing the experience to meet their specific needs; and giving presenters an opportunity to practice within the tool so they could be truly present during their pitch to the judges. They also considered potential issues, including a lack of familiarity with the tool and Wi-Fi quality, and put measures in place to address them. And they embraced a growth mindset, encouraging everyone to be authentic and understanding under challenging circumstances. We hope their experience is helpful to you as you work to bring your own events online. We’ll be sharing more remote-work stories from our customers in the days to come, so please check back here often.