Thank you, PM @narendramodi ji, for an inspiring conversation on India’s AI opportunity. To support the country’s ambitions, Microsoft is committing US$17.5B—our largest investment ever in Asia—to help build the infrastructure, skills, and sovereign capabilities needed for India’s AI-first future. @PMOIndia

https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1998376337938039091?s=20

P.M. Narendra Modi also tweeted about this investment decision on his Twitter account:

“When it comes to AI, the world is optimistic about India!”

Had a very productive discussion with Mr. Satya Nadella. I’m happy to see India as the location where Microsoft will make its largest-ever investment in Asia. 

The youth of India will harness this opportunity to innovate and leverage the power of AI for a better planet

https://x.com/narendramodi/status/1998386413885386847?s=20

Now, let’s see how this investment is going to change the grip of AI technology India currently holds.

In accordance with the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, data science and coding courses are introduced to build next-generation skills in students. The new courses are focused on building critical thinking, problem-solving skills, computational skills, and hands-on exposure to new technologies.

Microsoft has designed supplementary handbooks in both coding and data science, aligned with NCERT patterns and structures and cover real-life examples aimed at building exposure to the ethical dimensions exposure to Microsoft MakeCode– an open-source platform that will enable students to learn better in a gamified manner across all disciplines including mathematics, languages, and social sciences while it builds the foundation for AI-based applications of data science.

The world’s well-known tech company Microsoft has decided to shut down the popular web browser Internet Explorer next year. Over the past few years, Microsoft has allowed Windows users to move from Internet Explorer to Edge Browser. Now Microsoft has officially stated that Internet Explorer will retire in 2022 next year on June 15.

Microsoft Edge Program Manager Sean Lyndersay announced that Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is now using Microsoft Edge. The Internet Explorer 11 desktop app will be shut down and will be out of Windows 10 support from June 15, 2022.

Internet Explorer will run until next year and will be replaced by an entirely new Microsoft Edge. Microsoft designed IE mode for Edge a few months ago for an easy switch from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge. With this mode, businesses can easily transit and adopt a new Chromium-based browser. Microsoft calls for IE mode support in the Edge browser by 2029.

In an official statement, the company stated that IE mode support would work for the life cycle of the window client, server and IoT releases by at least 2029. In addition, Microsoft will give notice a year before the IE mode experience retires when the time comes. Microsoft stopped Internet Explorer 11 support for the Microsoft Teams Web app last year. Now the company is also planning to remove Microsoft 365 from access to the service by the end of this year.

Furthermore, he added, “The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge. We can’t thank everyone enough for supporting Internet Explorer over the years. Many people and organizations around the world have depended on IE to support them as they’ve learned, grown and conducted business online. Microsoft Edge with Internet Explorer mode inherits this important responsibility, and we look forward to supporting you online with Microsoft Edge.

Our goal is to design a Surface for every person, work style, and location. With the new Surface Laptop Go, we want to give every person in the household or organization a laptop that’s not just something you need to use, but something you want to use. The Surface Laptop Go is our lightest and most affordable Surface laptop yet that offers the perfect balance of performance, battery life, and style,” said Rajiv Sodhi, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go features

The Microsoft Surface Laptop Go is the lightest laptop having a 1.11 kg weight, 12.4” PixelSense touchscreen display, large precision trackpad, and all-day battery life.

For brilliant sound effects, Microsoft Surface Laptop Go offers built-in Studio Mics, Omnisonic Speakers and Dolby® Audio and 720p HD camera that enhances video calls. It also offers Windows Autopilot to reduce IT complexity by deploying straight to employees. Surface Laptop Go features USB-C® and USB-A ports for display and accessory support along with the latest 10th Gen Intel® i5 Quad-Core Processor and up to 16GB RAM and 256GB storage, helping users stay productive and connected wherever they are.

Surface Laptop Go will be available in the following configurations:

Surface Laptop Go i5/4/64GB – INR 63,499

Surface Laptop Go i5/8/128GB- INR 76,199

Surface Laptop Go i5/8/256GB- INR 92,999

Surface Laptop Go i5/16/256GB- INR 110,999

Agritech startups are transforming the agriculture practices in India using digital technology to maximize production, improve market linkages, increase supply chain efficiency, and provide greater access to inputs for agri-businesses. The  Microsoft program for Agritech startup is designed to help startups build industry-specific solutions, scale, and grow with access to deep technology, business, and marketing resources.

These startups can also get access to Azure FarmBeats, which can help them focus on core value-adds instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of data engineering. Available on the Azure Marketplace, Azure FarmBeats enables aggregation of agricultural datasets across providers and generation of actionable insights by building AI/ML models based on fused datasets.

Sustainable agricultural technology can transform the global food landscape. Agritech startup innovations are addressing some of our key challenges connected to agriculture and food production. The Microsoft for Agritech Startups program is among the early steps in our journey towards empowering these startups in India and transforming global agricultural practices,” said Sangeeta Bavi, Director, Startup Ecosystem, Microsoft India.

Divided in three tiers, program offers:

All startups: Qualified Seed to Series C startups can boost their businesses with Azure benefits (including free credits), unlimited technical support, and help with Azure Marketplace onboarding.

Co-sell startups: Startups with enterprise-ready solutions can scale quickly with joint go-to-market strategies, technical support, and new sales opportunities with Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

Co-create solutions: Startups that are looking to create digital agriculture solutions have the opportunity to co-build customized solutions with Azure FarmBeats without investing in deep data engineering resources. Using Azure FarmBeats, startups can acquire, aggregate, and process agricultural data and rapidly develop their own AI/ML models.

https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-agritech-startups-program-india-launch/

Microsoft teams will get this updated feature till the middle of this month. It is currently in the feature development process. The company says that sometimes you want to talk on a big project with a large group of people or want to discuss it with the entire staff, in such a situation, it is cumbersome to start a new team again and again. For such meetings, through the new feature of Meet, 250 participants will be possible. This new feature will be provided in all paid plans. Currently, only 20 participants are able to do video conferencing in Microsoft Teams free plan.

Apart from this, paid subscribers will also get facilities like schedule meetings, record meeting phone calls with audio conferencing. In the paid version, each user gets 1 TB of storage while in the free plan, every user gets 10 GB shared storage.

X Box Series X is a highly anticipated project which has been teasing by Microsoft for a very long time. The design of the console is a vertical rectangular shape more like a standing box but it can be used in both vertical and horizontal orientations.

According to Microsoft Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, that Xbox Series X will deliver four times the processing power of Xbox One X in the quietest and efficient way.

According to Microsoft, “The IP and talent acquired through BlueTalon bring unique expertise at the apex of big data, security and governance. This acquisition will enhance our ability to empower enterprises across industries to digitally transform while ensuring the right use of data with centralized data governance at scale through Azure. Together with BlueTalon, we are committed to helping enterprises become data-driven companies in a secure and compliant manner. We’re excited to welcome the BlueTalon team to Microsoft and can’t wait to get started.”

The CEO of BlueTalon has also shared his words on this acquisition, “Today I’m thrilled to announce that BlueTalon has been acquired by Microsoft Corporation. Our technology and team is now focused on building deep data privacy and governance solutions as part of Azure Data. This acquisition is a huge force multiplier on BlueTalon’s mission to make data easily and safely accessible across the enterprise by providing high-quality data governance and compliance solutions”

Microsoft officially announced that they will bring a new feature of passwordless windows 10 in the upcoming update. The new update will have; face authentication, fingerprints and Pin code. The password option will get vanish from the loading screen.

Why Passwordless Windows?

If we talk about smartphones then earlier smartphones also have password options but when fingerprint technology was introduced then the password option is just to become an optional feature. Fingerprint technology made use of smartphones easy. We can now open every app with fingerprint it is safe and unique. No one can see your password or open your phone without your fingerprint. The biggest advantage of this technology is you do not have to remember or change your password in regular a base.

In windows, in accordance to remember the password people set the password easy and do not change it a long time. When the password hasn’t changed in a long time then it becomes easy to hack by the hackers and our data can be stolen.

The windows terminal is a latest and powerful which act as a focal point for command line tools users, Powershell and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

This application is an early preview version of the application. So, it may have some usability issues.

According to the VERGE, you’ll still need a JSON file to edit if you want to get to all the customization options.  It is now available to download at windows store for windows 10.