Recent News – Page 182

Posted on March 29, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Leading startups join Microsoft at Hannover Messe 2019

At Microsoft for Startups our goal is to connect innovative co-sell ready startups with our top enterprise and industrial customers and our broader partner ecosystem. As part of our engagement with the manufacturing sector, we are bringing nine highly innovative startups to Hannover Messe – the world’s leading manufacturing event attended by over 200,000 visitors from 75+ countries.

The startups will take part in a Startup Showcase at the event where they can present their highly innovative and disruptive solutions to leading industrial partners and join networking events to meet executives from some of the world’s largest companies.

Hannover Messe brings together a broad cross section of industrial and manufacturing companies that represent “all key technologies and core areas of industry – from research and development, industrial automation, IT, industrial supply, production technologies and services to energy and mobility technologies.”

You can find out more about the participating startups below:

AirMap

AirMap is the world’s leading airspace management platform for drones, supporting more than 100,000 drone flights per day. AirMap connects airspace authorities with the drone ecosystem to unlock safe, efficient, and scalable drone operations.

Current customers include: 3DR, DJI, DroneDeploy, Intel, Matternet, and senseFly.

Crate.io

Crate.io is the developer of CrateDB, an Industrial IOT database technology for enterprise manufacturing and industrial organizations needing to scale the use of machine data to enable advanced real-time analytics and insights. CrateDB is an addition to Microsoft’s IoT suite, delivering a fundamental advantage to companies reliant on industrial time series data to operate and scale production facilities.

Current customers include: Alpla, Tracknamic, RAUCH, Unilever, and BAE Systems.

KrypC

KrypC enables IT leaders to accelerate their company’s Blockchain adoption in short time with rapid and iterative application development capability. KrypC empowers enterprises to adopt blockchain in a seamless manner that integrates their personalized business models with their technological needs.

Current customers include: Maersk, Accenture, and Honeywell.

Markforged

Markforged is an end-to-end 3D printing system that expands the applications for additive manufacturing with purpose-built industrial technologies and a wide range of manufacturing-ready materials. Markforged is transforming manufacturing by addressing 3D printing as a holistic problem.

Current customers include: NASA, ZEISS, Airbus, Bentley, and John Deere.

Prevedere

Prevedere allows companies to enhance the accuracy of their financial, marketing and operations forecasting. Using global data, and the enterprise’s own historical data, Prevedere conducts a robust forecasting analysis with a high degree of accuracy and increases customers’ forecasting accuracy from the low 80%+ to the mid-high 90% range.

Current customers include: ADS, Nationwide, Hershey, RaceTrac, and Timken.

Rescale

Rescale is a cloud simulation platform that helps engineers and scientists build, compute, analyze, and scale simulations with high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud. Rescale’s mission is to provide highly powerful simulation platforms that empower the world’s engineers, scientists, developers, and CIO and IT professionals to design innovative products, develop robust applications, and transform IT into unified, agile environments.

Current customers include: Trek Bicycle, Pinnacle Engines, Boom, MIT, Siemens, and Manor Racing.

Seebo

Seebo develops process-based industrial artificial intelligence, with solutions to predict and prevent disruptions in manufacturing due to process disturbances. Seebo Industrial IoT Platform combines visual, code-free tools for process and data modeling, automated root cause analysis, predictive analytics, and digital twin visualization. These tools enable tailored solutions for clients’ specific needs and easily adaptable solutions after deployment. Seebo was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for IoT in 2017.

Current customers include: Allnex, Hovis, Super Bock, and Nestle.

Syntiant

Syntiant is a new breed of semiconductor company. By combining the best of deep learning and semiconductor design, Syntiant fundamentally advances machine learning capacities in edge devices.

Waterline Data

Waterline Data’s AI Driven Data Catalog solution, combined with the power of Microsoft Azure, helps customer discover, organize, and surface trusted information to Business users for self-service analytics; compliance teams to ensure data is identified and secured; and IT teams so they can rationalize and migrate data.

Current customers include: GSK, Nordea Bank, and CreditSafe.

Posted on March 29, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New to Microsoft 365 in March: tools to enable teamwork, enhance security in the workplace

This month, we released new features in Microsoft 365 to help you boost teamwork, save time, and streamline your IT management.

Here’s a look at what’s new in March.

Collaborate more easily

New features and services give you more ways to collaborate with colleagues and LinkedIn connections across platforms.

Boost meeting productivity and meet compliance obligations with Microsoft Teams updates—Last week at Enterprise Connect, we announced several new features in Teams including the ability to improve the effectiveness of remote meetings by replacing your background during video chats and increasing inclusivity with live captions & subtitles during Teams meetings. We also announced the generally availability of live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365, which enable you to deliver compelling communications to up to 10,000 employees, customers, and partners. We also announced new compliance capabilities in Teams such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations to help you keep information secure and meet your obligations.

Improve whiteboard ideation and collaboration—Two new intelligent inking features in the Microsoft Whiteboard Windows 10 app help improve the collaborative ideation experience. Now, you can easily capture a picture of a physical whiteboard and convert it to digital ink in the Whiteboard app using ink grab. Additionally, the new ink beautification feature can help increase the readability of jotted notes by analyzing handwriting and automatically replacing it with more legible strokes. Together, these intelligent inking features decrease the time spent on managing content, so you can spend more time collaborating on a digital whiteboard. Both are now available in the Whiteboard Windows 10 app.

Work seamlessly with first-degree LinkedIn connections—When you securely connect your LinkedIn account with your Office 365 account, you can now view others’ LinkedIn profiles in Outlook on the web, and in OneDrive and SharePoint in Office 365, and see relevant insights about the people you’re working with, both inside and outside your organization. Now rolling out to Targeted Release customers is the ability to send emails to and coauthor documents with many of their first-degree LinkedIn connections.

To get started, type a connection’s name in the To or Cc field when composing a new message or sharing a document in Outlook on the web, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and Excel Online.

Create more engaging content and get more done

New Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on the web features help you create beautiful content and save you time.

Make your presentations stand out with 3D objects on your Mac—Create stunning visuals and engaging content on your Mac with 3D embedded animations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Improve comprehension and retention, increase engagement, and entertain audiences with content that seemingly comes to life. Select scenes and insert 3D models from a vast library of free content and rotate 3D objects to tell your story from every angle. 3D objects on Mac will start rolling out to Insiders next month.

Prepare for and schedule meetings faster with new intelligent features in Outlook on the web—Powered by Microsoft artificial intelligence (AI), Outlook on the web will now help you prepare for meetings by showing you relevant information you might need. It will also automatically suggest that you create a meeting directly from an email conversation and show you available days and times for people you include in a meeting invite. These features will begin rolling out to Outlook on the web users in the next few weeks.

Enhance security and streamline IT management

New capabilities help you better protect your organization and streamline IT management.

Ensure a healthy security posture with updates to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)—Last week, we announced that we’re extending our endpoint protection platform to support additional operating systems with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, available now in limited preview. With this expansion, we’re also renaming the Windows Defender ATP platform to Microsoft Defender ATP. We also announced that we’re making Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capabilities available in Microsoft Defender ATP to discover, prioritize, and remediate threats and vulnerabilities—preview coming soon.

Access your security and investigation tools in the new Microsoft 365 security center—The Microsoft 365 security center is a new unified security experience that provides your security professionals with a dedicated workspace to manage and take advantage of the comprehensive security capabilities of Microsoft Threat Protection. The Microsoft 365 security center is now generally available. Get started with features and capabilities such as Secure Score, Advanced Hunting, and security alerts by visiting security.microsoft.com.

Manage your Microsoft 365 services with the new Microsoft 365 admin center—Last week, we announced that the new Microsoft 365 admin center will begin rolling out as the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins. The Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to serve as a single entry point for managing services across Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) in a more powerful, efficient, and personalized way.

Other updates

Now, when opening links to Office 365 documents from the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook desktop apps, you will have the option to open them directly in the desktop apps instead of the web.
Teams users can now add a Yammer tab to a Teams channel that loads a specified group or topic feed from Yammer.
Microsoft Forms Pro, our new enterprise survey solution to professionally distribute surveys, is now available in public preview.
OneNote now supports syncing edits of files embedded in your notebooks, eliminating the need to save copies of embedded files.
The custom policies feature in Azure Active Directory B2C is now generally available and gives you more control over identity experiences to help you deliver personalized user journeys in your customer-facing applications.

Posted on March 29, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Enter for a chance to win a pair of custom Xbox One X consoles inspired by new DC movie ‘Shazam!’

When you were a kid, did you ever wish you could be a super hero – or at least be best friends with one? With the upcoming release of New Line Cinema’s new DC movie “Shazam!,” from Warner Bros. Pictures, we’ll get to see this wish come true for Freddy Freeman, whose best friend Billy Batson can turn into an adult super hero by shouting out one word: Shazam!

To celebrate the release of the film, in theaters worldwide starting on April 3, we’ll be giving fans a chance to bring out their inner gaming super hero with custom Xbox One X consoles inspired by “Shazam!.” Starting today, you’ll be able to enter for a chance to win a pair of these custom consoles for you and your best friend! We’re also giving out other prizes like a 12-month membership to Xbox Game Pass that gives you unlimited access to a library of over 100 great games on Xbox One, with new games added all the time. To enter, let us know what super power you think your best friend would have on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. This is a great way to celebrate your friendship and all the gaming challenges you’ve conquered together!

The “Be a Gaming Super Hero” contest is open until April 9, when winners will be selected. See here for full contest terms, conditions and participating markets.

Speaking of challenges, we know “Shazam!” star Zachary Levi will kill it in his role as the titular DC Super Hero, but how will he do at competing in the Xbox Game Pass Super Hero Challenge? Inspired by Shazam’s powers – the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury – Zac will put his gaming skills to the test by attempting to complete challenges in Forza Horizon 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Rocket League and Sea of Thieves, all available right now with Xbox Game Pass! Will he be able to complete all four challenges? Visit Xbox on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to find out!

We are thrilled to be celebrating “Shazam!” and championing the best of friendships, in and out of gaming, from around the world. Enter now for a chance to win a custom Xbox One X console inspired by “Shazam!.” Additionally, Shazam avatars are available now until July 31 on Xbox Live – don’t miss your chance to game in a costume inspired by the titular DC Super Hero himself!

We all have a superhero inside us, it just takes a bit of magic to bring it out. In Billy Batson’s case, by shouting out one word – Shazam! – this streetwise 14-year-old foster kid can turn into the adult Super Hero Shazam, courtesy of an ancient wizard. Still a kid at heart – inside a ripped, godlike body – Shazam revels in this adult version of himself by doing what any teen would do with superpowers: have fun with them! With the help of superhero enthusiast friend Freddy, Shazam sets out to test the limits of his abilities with the joyful recklessness of the child he is inside. But he’ll need to master them quickly to fight the deadly forces of evil controlled by Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, who’s got his eye on Shazam’s powers and wants them for himself.

A New Line Cinema presentation, “Shazam!” hits theaters worldwide starting on April 3, 2019, and will be distributed worldwide in 2D, 3D and IMAX by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Posted on March 28, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy creates a more sustainable future with AI and the cloud

With towers as high as 120 meters (390 feet) and rotor blades that span the height of a 22-story building, industrial wind turbines are challenges to inspect and maintain.

Traditionally, a wind turbine blade inspection required technicians to rappel down a stopped turbine in remote areas – sometimes at sea – to take pictures of cracks and faults in a turbine’s blades. Or it involved someone on land taking pictures with a telescope and camera. The work was often time-consuming and challenging.

But a year and a half ago, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, a global leader in the wind power industry, transformed the process with autonomous drones and a digital solution called Hermes. The aircraft capture high-resolution images quickly, while the solution analyzes images for potential blade damage, all resulting in safer, faster and more accurate inspections.

Based in Spain, the company is now further improving the solution by migrating it to Microsoft Azure and infusing it with Azure AI to process image recognition. The digital enhancements will enable Siemens Gamesa to streamline blade inspections even more, in its mission to make renewable energy more affordable and the future more sustainable.

Wind turbines in a landscape of snow and blue sky — Siemens Gamesa wind turbines in Norway.

“Hermes is taking a huge leap forward with the collaboration with Microsoft,” says Christian Sonderstrup, service chief digital officer at Siemens Gamesa, which has installed wind power technologies in 90 countries. “AI, cloud and big data enable us to move to the next level of performance, in terms of innovation and in lowering the levelized cost of renewable energy.”*

The drones, which will inspect 1,700 turbines this year, are fast, precise photographers, capturing about 400 images of a turbine’s three blades in 20 minutes. The images form an overview of blade condition and needed repairs, but the need to manually sort and stitch them has been a challenge. The laborious task was recently evident in a large inspection project involving 100,000 photos.

“We had someone looking into every one of these photos, and then every finding of a severe fault needed to be evaluated again by an engineer,” says Anne Katrine Karner-Gotfredsen, Siemens Gamesa manager of product integrity and warranty management in the company’s blade program.

Integrating Azure AI services will greatly speed up the process, with image recognition that can stitch images into an accurate model of an entire rotor in 34 seconds. The same job with manual stitching takes four to six hours and could lead to errors. AI tools can differentiate blades from water, sky and other irrelevant elements; distinguish cracks and faults from, say, bird droppings; integrate drone location and camera zoom data for precise stitching; and classify faults by type and severity.

“To review all the photos is a huge task,” says Karner-Gotfredsen. “Before Hermes, it was quite tedious to categorize and store all the data in a place that everyone can access. The more we can make it an automated process, the easier it is for us to work with the data.” Faster, accurate inspections mean less downtime of turbines, earlier detection of faults, better predictive maintenance and fewer costly repairs – all contributing to more affordable wind power.

Offshore wind turbines pictured with a beautiful sunset — Siemens Gamesa offshore wind turbines in the United Kingdom.

For Karner-Gotfredsen, the cloud will also help optimize projects like one she managed last year, involving a customer’s inspection of several wind parks. The data was difficult to share among Siemens Gamesa, the customer and a third-party reviewer, requiring Karner-Gotfredsen to send and receive it on a hard drive several times, along with cumbersome spreadsheets in email.

“The fact that we now can have the data going directly into Hermes with the cloud, without us having to carry hard drives, and having the data automatically sorted and stitched, saves us many people hours,” she says. “AI is augmenting the work our employees are doing, allowing them to focus on their core competencies.”

AI-powered blade analyses are also part of Siemens Gamesa’s goal to provide complete, 360-degree digital coverage of customers’ turbines. And they’re part of a digital strategy that focuses on productivity, digital extensions of current business offerings and new digital businesses. As Siemens Gamesa advances the strategy, it’s using Microsoft 365 and Azure as its IT foundation for developing new innovations that are scalable, robust and insightful.

“We aspire to be the digital leader in renewable energy,” says Sonderstrup. “AI, the cloud and big data are enablers of that journey.”

*Levelized cost of energy is the lifetime cost of an asset divided by the amount of electricity produced.

Top photo: Siemens Gamesa wind turbines in Morocco. (All photos courtesy of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy)

Learn how Microsoft partners are building a sustainable future at Hannover Messe 2019.

Posted on March 28, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Manufacturing a better future with intelligent industry innovations

It’s a time of great disruption but great opportunity in the manufacturing industry, as businesses seek to find novel ways to create new business value, empower and upskill their workforce, optimize their operations and innovate for a sustainable future. Advanced technologies like AI, mixed reality and automation are helping drive Industry 4.0, creating a future where “intelligent manufacturing” is a reality. Today, we are introducing updates that help bring this reality even closer for our customers and partners, to deliver increased security, productivity and efficiency, which will help them achieve new business outcomes.

As we head to Hanover, Germany, next week to join global leaders at the world’s biggest trade show for industrial technology, we are announcing several improvements to our trusted, innovative manufacturing solutions, including:

Azure is now the first major public cloud with end-to-end security for IoT for your devices, hubs and cloud resources. We are adding advanced threat protection for IoT to three key services: Azure Security Center for IoT can now be used to implement security best practices and mitigate threats across entire IoT projects including hubs, compute and data. Azure Sentinel, the first cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) offering, can now protect the entire enterprise from threats including those affecting IoT devices. Azure IOT Hub now integrates with Azure Security Center for IoT to provide IoT security information directly inside the hub portal experience.

The introduction of OPC Twin and OPC Vault in our Azure Industrial IoT Cloud Platform solution, which respectively provide manufacturers a digital twin of their OPC UA-enabled machines and significantly enhance security and certification management. We’re also announcing important enhancements to the Connected Factory solution accelerator, which now integrates with OPC Twin to greatly simplify the process of installing IoT Edge.

An expansion of Azure IP Advantage to IoT, which extends Azure IP Advantage benefits to Azure customers with IoT devices connected to Azure, and devices that are powered by Azure Sphere and Windows IoT. Additionally, qualified startups who join the LOT Network have the ability to acquire Microsoft patents through LOT for free.

You’ll find more details on the Azure IoT Platform updates in this blog from Sam George, and more information on Azure IP Advantage below. We will also share additional business updates including:

Intelligent innovations for industry: Onsite at Hannover Messe we will showcase our wide range of offerings for manufacturers including breakthroughs in AI experiences, mixed reality with HoloLens 2, business-ready solutions with Dynamics 365 and tools to close the skills gap with Microsoft 365.
Customers achieving business outcomes: We’re supporting leading manufacturers including Bühler, Electrolux, Siemens Gamesa and ZEISS as they accelerate their own innovations, as outlined below.

New partner solutions: We continue to grow the ecosystem of partners collaborating with Microsoft to help manufacturers succeed, with several announcing news this week.
The latest in our Future Computed book series: The Future Computed: AI and Manufacturing explores the way manufacturers from across the world are embracing AI. It shares insights from our customers on the importance of creating the right company culture and talent pipeline to realize AI’s potential, and explores the role of public policy in addressing labor market disruption and fostering the ethical use of AI. We’ll preview the book’s key themes at Hannover Messe ahead of its release in May.
More than 25 innovative companies will join us in our Hannover Messe booth to showcase how we are working together to harness IoT, mixed reality, AI and other key technologies that revolutionize manufacturing.

Protecting and connecting the factory of the future

Today we are sharing details about a series of new product and program advancements for the manufacturing industry prior to Hannover Messe:

Azure IoT Security: The complexity and scale of the IoT and Industrial IoT (IIot) challenge is reinforced by leading market research firms estimating there will be over 20 billion installed end-point devices worldwide by 2020 — each of which pose a potential security risk. While some cloud providers address pieces of this puzzle, Azure is the world’s first cloud offering to deliver an end to end, unified approach to IoT security.

Garth Beaumount, CISO for Volpara Solutions and an early adopter of Azure Security Center for IoT said, “The Microsoft Azure IoT Security solution provides us with management and threat protection for the full stack, including IoT devices, IoT hubs as well as the computing and data resources utilized by our solutions. Effectively saving us from ‘rolling our own’ and aligning our IoT security neatly with our other Azure based solutions and line of business application usage.”

With Azure Security Center for IoT, customers can find missing security configurations across IOT devices, the edge and cloud. For example, they can check which ports are open on their IOT devices, confirm their SQL database is encrypted and act to remediate any issues. Azure Security Center for IoT protects from ever-evolving threats, drawing upon the vast threat intelligence information in the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which analyzes six trillion signals per day. This means manufacturers can take advantage of a single view of security across all their Azure solutions — including Azure IoT solutions, from edge devices to applications — using hundreds of built-in security assessments in a central dashboard.

With Azure Sentinel, users can hunt for or respond to active threats spanning the entire enterprise from IOT devices to Azure to Office 365 and on-premise systems.

SecOps teams now have the right tools to reduce the surface attack of IoT solutions, remediate issues before they become serious, prevent attacks with machine learning and gain significant value from simplifying threat detection and security posture management for entire IoT deployments. Combining these new offerings with previously announced device security offerings such as Azure Sphere, customers will have access to IoT innovation with the confidence of end-to-end security that only Microsoft provides – spanning devices, the edge and cloud. You’ll find more information here.

Connected Factory and Industrial IoT: In a connected factory, all machines communicate with each other, leveraging data, IoT and automation to monitor and control all aspects of production. We’ve enhanced our offering for these Industrial IoT scenarios by developing components that simplify and secure our customers’ digital operations. At our booth at Hannover Messe, we’ll be showcasing OPC Twin, which creates a digital twin for your OPC UA-enabled machines and makes the information model of that specific machine available in the cloud. Customers can control and manage their OPC Twins directly from the cloud by using microservices running on Azure. In addition, we’ll showcase our progress in security with OPC Vault. OPC Vault automates security management by creating, managing and revoking certificates for your OPC UA servers on a global scale. Both components provide simplicity and security for your industrial IoT solutions and are fully open source and available on GitHub.

We also understand the importance of simplicity and speed in getting started with a proof-of-concept for Industrial IoT scenarios. For that purpose, we continue to enhance the Connected Factory solution accelerator, which is designed to accelerate proof-of-concepts in Industrial IoT and additionally offers OEE data across customers’ factories via a centralized dashboard. Today, Connected Factory integrates with an OPC Twin dashboard and empowers manufacturers to streamline the process of getting started with Industrial IoT and generating insights from their digital operations.

Supporting business innovation

As businesses become more connected, security remains paramount to success. Microsoft is taking end-to-end security one step further for our customers to protect their data and intellectual property:

Azure IP Advantage: The Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program now includes new benefits for Azure IoT innovators and startups. We first announced Azure IP Advantage in February, 2017, to provide comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks for our cloud customers. We are now expanding the program to customers who are innovating in IoT and at the edge to do predictive maintenance, manage digital and physical assets, and improve overall efficiency, safety and quality of products—all of which create massive volumes of data and unique business innovations. We’re responding to input from our manufacturing customers and delivering greater value to the Azure IP Advantage program, with new benefits focused on the Azure-powered IoT ecosystem and startups, including:

Uncapped indemnification coverage for Microsoft’s Azure Sphere and Windows IoT.
Access to 10,000 patents for customers using Azure to power IoT devices to defend themselves against IP lawsuits.
The ability for startups on Azure to acquire Microsoft patents for free.

In addition to the expanded program, we also joined the Open Invention Network and the LOT (license on transfer) Network last year to help address patent assertion risk for our customers and partners. Taken together, we believe Microsoft offers the most comprehensive, end-to-end framework for addressing IP risks in the cloud. More detail can be found in this Microsoft on the Issues blog.

Manufacturers building on Microsoft technologies

Customers are leveraging Microsoft technology in their manufacturing operations and seeing real business results. Recent examples include:

Bühler, one of the world’s largest providers of food processing solutions, is leveraging Microsoft blockchain technology to improve global food safety standards and reduce food poisoning rates, while increasing production efficiencies.
Electrolux, the Swedish home appliance manufacturer, launched a new Azure IoT smart connected air purifier and app in a matter of weeks with minimal R&D time. The Pure A9 removes ultra-fine dust particles, pollutants, bacteria, allergens and bad odors from indoor rooms.
Siemens Gamesa, the leader in renewable energy, is streamlining and automating how technicians inspect and maintain industrial wind turbines by migrating its autonomous drone-digital process to Microsoft Azure and infusing it with Azure AI. Integrating Azure AI services will greatly expedite the process, with image recognition reduced to 34 seconds, as opposed to 4 to 6 hours using the manual method, which also was prone to errors.
ZEISS teamed up with Microsoft to present a spectroscopy measurement and data sharing solution that connects the compact all-round spectrometer ZEISS Corona process with Microsoft Azure. By uploading production data from spectroscopic analysis to the cloud, clients get invaluable insights about their products and production – whenever and wherever they need it. The solution can be implemented in food production processes to monitor important quality indicators (e.g. fat, moisture, salt content) directly in the production line. This enables production managers to react immediately to process variations and helps to increase quality and productivity, while using raw materials and energy in a more efficient way at the same time.

Partners highlight new offerings

Several of our partners showcasing their solutions at the Microsoft Hannover Messe booth will make news about their latest innovations, including:

Intel is working with Microsoft on a new modern industrial PC reference design for factories and industrial applications. Using the reference design, which will be available later this year, device partners can build fully provisioned and customized industrial PCs that can be connected to a range of devices to discover, manage and analyze data in real time, using AI on the machine or in the Azure cloud.
JDA, a leading global supply chain company, will be showcasing its new Azure-based Luminate solution, which serves as an end-to-end crisis control center allowing companies to see, interpret, and act on real-time information from the entire supply chain and extended third-party digital ecosystem.

Empowering an intelligent manufacturing firstline

From the front office to supply chain to the factory floor, Microsoft solutions can help improve manufacturing operations by streamlining daily work, driving greater efficiency, safety and productivity as well as helping enhance employee performance. For example:

Microsoft 365 is equipping organizations, including Firstline Workers on the factory floor with the skills and tools they need to keep up with digital manufacturing in a secure environment. Microsoft Teams is transforming how today’s manufacturing workforce collaborates and communicates securely. Learn more how Microsoft 365 is being used in manufacturing here.
Customers have a growing need to move cloud computing closer to the edge. Azure Data Box Edge helps meet this need as a powerful, AI-enabled edge appliance that sits within a customer’s own environment – in their data center or on a factory floor – right alongside their existing hardware. It brings Azure computing power to where data originates, eliminating any network latency.
With mixed reality applications Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Layout, companies are using Microsoft HoloLens and HoloLens 2 to dramatically boost productivity, compliance and safety. You’ll find more information about a broad range of Dynamics 365 innovations in manufacturing here.
Available later this year, the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides for HoloLens and HoloLens 2 will empower employees to learn by doing, with step-by-step instructions guiding them to the tools, parts and institutional knowledge they need in real work scenarios.
Delivering a unified approach to financial and business operations across manufacturing, supply chain, distribution and retail is made easier by Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
Intelligent, connected field service through Dynamics 365 Connected Field Service can help manufacturers quickly detect and resolve issues, leveraging connected devices and machine learning and in the process, driving efficiency and reducing costs.

The future of manufacturing is all about applying new levels of intelligence across all aspects of operations, with disruption triggered by AI, mixed reality and IoT, redefining the value chain from engineering design to customer engagements to supply chains. We look forward to meeting with you next week to discuss how we’re empowering intelligent manufacturing around the world. Until then, please visit Microsoft at Hannover Messe 2019 for additional details about what’s planned, how to engage our team and where to find our booth in Hall 7, Stand C40.

Posted on March 27, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New steps to protect customers from hacking

Today, court documents were unsealed detailing work Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit has executed to disrupt cyberattacks from a threat group we call Phosphorus – also known as APT 35, Charming Kitten, and Ajax Security Team – which is widely associated with Iranian hackers. Our court case against Phosphorus, filed in the U.S. District Court for Washington D.C., resulted in a court order enabling us last week to take control of 99 websites the group uses to conduct its hacking operations so the sites can no longer be used to execute attacks.

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) have been tracking Phosphorus since 2013. Its activity is usually designed to gain access to the computer systems of businesses and government agencies and steal sensitive information. Its targets also include activists and journalists – especially those involved in advocacy and reporting on issues related to the Middle East.

Phosphorus typically attempts to compromise the personal accounts of individuals through a technique known as spear-phishing, using social engineering to entice someone to click on a link, sometimes sent through fake social media accounts that appear to belong to friendly contacts. The link contains malicious software that enables Phosphorus to access computer systems.

Phosphorus also uses a technique whereby it sends people an email that makes it seem as if there’s a security risk to their accounts, prompting them to enter their credentials into a web form that enables the group to capture their passwords and gain access to their systems.

Both attack methods employ the use of websites that incorporate the names of well-known brands, like Microsoft, to appear authentic. Websites registered and used by Phosphorus include, for example, outlook-verify.net, yahoo-verify.net, verification-live.com, and myaccount-services.net.

While we’ve used daily security analytics tracking to stop individual Phosphorus attacks and notify impacted customers, the action we executed last week enabled us to take control of websites that are core to its operations. Our work to track Phosphorus over multiple years and observe its activity enabled us to build a decisive legal case and execute last week’s action with confidence we could have significant impact on the group’s infrastructure.

The action we executed last week enabled us to take control of 99 websites and redirect traffic from infected devices to our Digital Crime Unit’s sinkhole. The intelligence we collect from this sinkhole will be added to MSTIC’s existing knowledge of Phosphorus and shared with Microsoft security products and services to improve detections and protections for our customers.

Throughout the course of tracking Phosphorus, we’ve worked closely with a number of other technology companies, including Yahoo, to share threat information and jointly stop attacks. We are grateful for their partnership. We also worked with each domain listing company listed in our suit prior to filing it and are grateful for their support and help in transferring the website domains registered by Phosphorus to us once a court order was granted. Our case against Phosphorus is similar to cases we’ve filed against another threat group called Strontium. We have used this approach 15 times to take control of 91 fake websites associated with Strontium. The legal filings in our case against Phosphorus can be found here.

Posted on March 26, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Check out the first-ever episode of ID@Xbox Game Pass

Today, during the first-ever episode of ID@Xbox Game Pass, we gave fans a closer look at upcoming ID@Xbox program titles set to arrive with Xbox Game Pass the same day as their global launch, as well as shared new details of ID@Xbox and Xbox Game Pass activities at PAX East this weekend. If you missed the show, don’t worry! We’ve put together a recap outlining the top news from today’s episode. Check out what was announced below:

We’re excited to announce three new ID@Xbox titles coming to Xbox Game Pass the same day they release on Xbox One: Killer Queen Black, Outer Wilds and Blazing Chrome. Xbox Game Pass is not only a great way for gamers to find new and unique games, but the service is also an incredible vehicle for independent developers to reach new audiences. We are stoked to see these titles enter Xbox Game Pass at launch! See below to learn more about each title:

Killer Queen Black: From Liquid Bit, Killer Queen Black is an intense multiplayer action/strategy platformer designed for up to eight players. Hop on the snail, hoard berries or wipe out the enemy’s queen to claim victory! Killer Queen Black will be available on Xbox One and with Xbox Game Pass in 2019.
Outer Wilds: Outer Wilds, from Mobius and Annapurna Interactive, is an exploration game about curiosity, roasting marshmallows and unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. It’s coming in 2019 and we’re thrilled to announce that it will be in Xbox Game Pass the same day as its global launch.
Blazing Chrome: From JoyMasher and The Arcade Crew, Blazing Chrome lets you kick some serious metal ass! The world is dominated by machines, that threaten the few humans remaining with total extermination. You get to kick some metal butts and free humankind in this classic run’n’gun, made by and for fans of serious arcade action.

In addition to announcing three upcoming titles to the ID@Xbox program, we also got an early look at both Afterparty and Outer Wilds as well as interviews and insights with the development teams behind those games (Night School Studio and Mobius, respectively).

Finally, we shared new details pertaining to ID@Xbox at PAX East! This year, we will be bringing Void Bastards, Operencia: The Stolen Sun, Supermarket Shriek, The Good Life and Afterparty to PAX East. All five titles will launch with Xbox Game Pass timed to their global release and are playable this weekend, so be sure to stop by the Xbox booth for your chance to experience these games first-hand! At the booth, you’ll also have the opportunity to collect custom pins for each of our ID@Xbox titles and even enter to win a custom-designed Xbox console specifically made for ID@Xbox. You won’t want to miss this!

Thank you for watching today – we hope you enjoyed the show! To stay up to date with the latest news and announcements, be sure to stay tuned to Xbox Wire and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. With our Xbox Game Pass mobile app, you can also get notifications as new games are added and remote install games to your home console as they are available!

Posted on March 26, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Choose Your Own Apocalypse Update comes to ‘State of Decay 2’

Starting today, the ever-growing State of Decay 2 community can take the ultimate zombie survival game to its deadliest level with the launch of the Choose Your Own Apocalypse Update. This update introduces the Dread Zones and Nightmare Zones as two new difficulty modes that challenge players with deadlier zombies, more aggressive and resilient humans, a faster-acting blood plague and fewer resources to scavenge. Along with these two new modes are 16 new Achievements for 275 additional Gamerscore.

Available at no cost for all owners of State of Decay 2 and Xbox Game Pass members, the Choose Your Own Apocalypse Update presents more options for players to define what it means to survive. New players can start their community in Standard Zones (the game’s base difficulty level), and Dread Zones are great place for players who want a challenge with additions like armored zombies, more hordes and a faster acting blood plague infection (from about 3 hours to just about 30 minutes). Nightmare Zones are intended for hardcore players who are ready to test themselves against freak packs like screamer choirs and bloater pods along with NPCs who can headshot you right back.

Earlier this month we gave a sneak peek at what to expect with the Choose Your Own Apocalypse Update, and we’re excited to additionally share that based on community feedback, you can now choose your map when establishing a new community. The team has also continued to make other improvements to the core game based on feedback, which includes an all-new Character Manager, larger loot drops at plague hearts and more. The full list of patch notes is available at stateofdecay.com.

To celebrate the launch of the Choose Your Own Apocalypse Update, we’re also running a MixPot giveaway at mixer.com/undeadlabs from March 26 at 9:00 a.m. PDT until April 2 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Viewers who are logged into Mixer and watching the official Undead Labs Mixer channel will be automatically entered to win all five of the pre-order content packs.

With today’s update, now is the perfect time for new and existing fans to jump into the apocalypse. For those new to State of Decay 2, get started with Xbox Game Pass (whether as a current member or by joining today and get your first month for $1), or by purchasing either the Standard Edition or the Ultimate Edition. We’re excited for players to enjoy today’s release and look forward to continuing supporting the State of Decay 2 community with content like the upcoming return to Trumbull Valley later this year.

Until then, you can Choose Your Own Apocalypse and answer the question: how will you survive?

Posted on March 26, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Julia White: Enabling customers’ hybrid strategy with new Microsoft innovation

Customers who are taking a hybrid cloud approach are seeing real business value – I see this in organizations across the globe. The ability for customers to embrace both public cloud and local datacenter, plus edge capability, is enabling customers to improve their IT agility and maximize efficiency. The benefit of a hybrid approach is also what continues to bring customers to Azure, the one cloud that has been uniquely built for hybrid. We haven’t slowed our investment in enabling a hybrid strategy, particularly as this evolves into the new application pattern of using intelligent cloud and intelligent edge.

Before I dive into what’s new, I want to take a moment to share why Microsoft is so passionate about enabling a hybrid approach. It stems from a deep understanding of our customers and their businesses over the past several decades. We want every organization on the planet to benefit from cloud innovation. Fundamentally, hybrid enables every organization to participate in this technology transformation. Beyond this, we see the leading experiences enabled by tapping into both the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, creating optimized experiences for literally every use case.

Today, I’m pleased to share some new products and updates to our Azure hybrid portfolio that ultimately help address a wider range of customer needs.

Expanding the Azure Stack family

Since Azure Stack become globally available in 2017, it has captivated customers as a unique offering to build and run cloud-native applications with consistent Azure services on premises including disconnected locations. Today, Azure Stack is available in 92 countries with 8 announced hardware partners and customers like Airbus Defense & Space, KPMG Norway, and iMOKO are using it to enable hybrid and edge scenarios. We continue to expand Azure Stack offerings to meet a broader set of customer needs, so they can run virtualized applications in their own datacenter.

Introducing Azure Stack HCI Solutions. When considering their full application portfolio, customers want to upgrade a set of existing applications to run on modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for efficiency and performance gains. And, while this is often an approach for “legacy” applications, in moving to HCI, customers can now also benefit from a hybrid cloud HCI solution. We are bringing our existing HCI technology into the Azure Stack family for customers to run virtualized applications on-premises with direct access to Azure management services such as backup and disaster recovery. Azure Stack HCI solutions feature the same software-defined compute, storage, and networking technology as the existing Azure Stack, and include simplified cloud access via the Azure hybrid services in Windows Admin Center. Azure Stack HCI is the newest solution to join the broad set of hybrid capabilities from Azure. You can learn more about Azure Stack HCI in Arpan Shah’s blog.

More customer options for Azure Stack. The Azure Stack ecosystem is growing in more ways than one today. Dell EMC Tactical Microsoft Azure Stack is now generally available, bringing Azure-consistent cloud to operating environments where network connectivity is limited and/or mobility and high portability are required – in remote and rugged circumstances. This new offering enables Azure Stack to support an even wider range of use-cases, while still delivering a consistent hybrid cloud approach.

Delivering more innovation at the edge

Hybrid cloud is evolving from being only the integration of a datacenter with the public cloud, to becoming units of computing available at the edge, including even the world’s most remote destinations, working in concert with public cloud. You can read more about this new era we call intelligent cloud and intelligent edge in an earlier blog. What’s compelling about the intelligent edge is many of the same patterns and principles for hybrid applications apply to edge applications. That means investments our customers make today in a hybrid cloud, and the skillsets developed from running these hybrid applications, position them to take advantage of edge computing and tools that can yield even bigger benefits in the future. Toward the goal of helping customers tap into this potential, I am very excited to announce some new edge capabilities.

Azure Data Box Edge is now available. Today is the general availability of Azure Data Box Edge. We previewed the Data Box Edge appliance with edge compute and network data transfer capabilities last September. Data Box Edge provides a cloud managed compute platform for containers at the edge, enabling customers to process data at the edge and accelerate machine learning workloads, powered by Azure Machine Learning and Intel Arria 10 FPGA. Data Box Edge also enables customers to transfer data over the internet to Azure in real-time for deeper analytics or model retraining at cloud scale or for long term storage, as does the Azure Data Box Gateway virtual appliance that is also available today. You can read more about both and how customers like Cree and Esri are already using Data Box Edge via Dean Paron’s blog.

This week: Join me for a Hybrid Cloud Virtual Event

You can learn more about Azure hybrid cloud, and in the meantime, I hope you’ll join me later this week as I host a virtual event focused on hybrid cloud for enterprises. I’m looking forward to talking with customers, analysts and technical leaders about how they’re approaching hybrid cloud – including what’s working and what they’ve learned. We’ll cover topics like application innovation, security and governance, migration, edge computing – and more. The event is Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 8:00 AM Pacific Time, and you can register here.

Posted on March 26, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Meeting entrepreneurs on their terms: Why Microsoft doesn’t require any ‘special rights’

Last week in Seattle, leading innovators, entrepreneurs and business minds came together to discuss best practices for startup funding and operations at M12’s inaugural summit. It was humbling to see almost 80 companies in our portfolio gathered from around the world, and to reflect on the progress we’ve made since we started the fund nearly three years ago. Our team has grown to more than 20 people supporting portfolio companies across 11 countries and 38 cities, seen four exits, and created new channels to ensure capital is reaching startups, such as our competitions to find female founded and led businesses and entrepreneurs innovating with AI.

In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, one thing I am particularly proud of is our pulse on the startup community, the relationships we’ve built there and our unwavering focus on doing what’s right for the entrepreneur. We’ve learned some important lessons, including one of the most egregious contributors to the poor reputation of corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) – terms and conditions like “Rights-of-first” (ROF), which we believe favor the corporation and restrict the startup.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. ROF terms restrict that for entrepreneurs. Simply put, ROF terms limit an entrepreneur’s ability to maximize their exit valuation. Stifling those options can be detrimental to a startup’s growth and consequential to the return profile of founders and all the investors. That’s why at M12, we believe ROF and similar terms are neither necessary nor valuable.

While we’ve always believed this, we weren’t following through in practice when other CVCs utilized these rights in companies we invested in, leading us to ask for the same during the first year our fund operated. And while we’ve never asked for these terms if the other investors didn’t have the same, in retrospect, we should have never asked at all. Since then, we’ve stopped asking for any special rights regardless of what other strategic investors held in the company and we’ve started actively educating entrepreneurs to resist these terms and try to remove them if they already exist.

We firmly believe that being fully aligned with founders is the only way to drive value to all stakeholders, including M12 and Microsoft. So, we want to go one step further. Instead of simply thinking, “What’s best for us,” we want to encourage the CVC community to start thinking “What’s best for all,” starting with adopting similar rules of engagement M12 currently employs to benefit the entire startup ecosystem:

M12 will not require any ROF term as part of its investment. Ever. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s good for business.
As part of our due diligence, M12 will evaluate the business upside not only for our fund, but also whether we can meaningfully help you.
If M12 chooses to invest, we’re with you for the long term, for your company’s lifecycle. That may mean different things at different times, but we won’t be driven by artificial milestones or deadlines.
If M12 chooses not to invest, we will explain why. We will also try our best to suggest other ways you can gain funding or other resources to grow your business.

It’s time to reinvent what it means to be a CVC and live up to what makes us an attractive investment partner to begin with – empowering entrepreneurs through investments, insight, and unparalleled access to Microsoft. The next time a founder asks me if we are a strategic investor, I want to be able to say, “It shouldn’t matter because we’re all aligned in fostering your success.”

To learn more about M12, visit its website.