Microsoft today launched Stream, a new business video service that aims to give businesses that want to share video internally the same kind of tools and flexibility that YouTube offers to consumers — but with the added benefits of the security tools enterprises expect from their document management services. The service is now available as a free preview.
As James Phillips, Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Business Intelligence Products Group, told me, all it takes to get started with Stream is an email address. The user experience in Stream does take its cues from consumer services like Vimeo and YouTube, and includes a number of social features, including likes and comments, as well as recommendations.
“We’ve all been trained as consumers to understand what beautiful and fully featured software looks like,” Phillips told me. “And we are now delivering on those experiences in business software.”
Some of the basic use cases for using video in a company include training and employee communications.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft already offered a business video service in the form of Office 365 Video. “Microsoft Stream builds upon the learnings success of Office 365 Video and over time the two experiences will converge with a seamless migration to ensure a consistent experience both within and outside of Office 365,” Phillips writes in today’s official announcement and also notes that current Office 365 Video users will not see any differences in the service for now.
Compared to Office 365 Video, Microsoft Stream will leverage more of Microsoft’s existing technologies to offer a more consumer-like experience. Phillips tells me that team is looking at work being done in Microsoft Research and by the Azure Machine Learning teams, for example, to bring features like speech-to-text, automatic translations, and support for face recognition to future versions of Stream. Phillips tells me the team is also looking at adding support for live streaming in the future.
What’s even more important for enterprises and their IT admins, though, is that Stream treats videos like every other enterprise document. For them, a video is just like any other digital artifact in the enterprise and they can assign rights to videos, set access groups, remove access, and ensure that videos aren’t shared outside of the company.
Developers will also be able to take the Microsoft Stream API and build new applications on top of it. In this first stage, this mostly means they will be able to embed videos, but over time, the team will likely add more features to the API.
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Google Announces Plan To Put Wi-Fi In 400 Train Stations Across India
Today, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai shared details on a new plan to bring more Indian residents online. He notes that there’s still over a billion of them in his native country that aren’t connected.
The key? India’s train system. And a plan to bring Wi-Fi to its 10 million rail passengers a day. And it’s free (to start). Pichai shared Google’s plans, while sharing his own story about his days using Chennai Central station to get to school.
We’d like to help get these next billion Indians online—so they can access the entire web, and all of its information and opportunity. And not just with any old connection—with fast broadband so they can experience the best of the web. That’s why, today, on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to our U.S. headquarters, and in line with his Digital India initiative, we announced a new project to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India.
All of the big tech companies have been getting a visit from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with Facebook being one of them. Each company seems to have its own ideas on how to expand Internet availability and Google’s is definitely unique.
Microsoft acquires Adxstudio Inc., Web portal and application lifecycle management solutions provider
Organizations today are looking for new and different ways to better connect, support and engage with their customers. People increasingly rely on channels like Web portals to make sure their voice is heard – in fact this year, Forrester research uncovered that for the first time, Web self-service is now the most popular channel customers use to find help. Microsoft is committed to delivering intelligent customer engagement solutions to empower people and organizations to use these new channels to more effectively connect with their customers online.
Today we took another step toward fulfilling this commitment. I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has reached a definitive agreement to acquire key product and technology assets of Adxstudio Inc., a provider of Web portals, online engagement solutions and application lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With this acquisition of our long-time partner, our customers will immediately be able to take advantage of new and exciting ways to engage with customers online.
Packed with compelling features that extend Dynamics CRM to the Web, Adxstudio Web portals are built natively on Dynamics CRM, allowing our customers to easily connect and extend their key sales and customer services business processes online. These portals work with the CRM application easily and naturally for both online and on-premises customers, who can take advantage of this offering right away. Adxstudio portals can also be used along with our Parature Service thanks to native integration with Parature’s rich knowledge management solutions.
This acquisition also delivers pre-built engagement solutions including partner relationship management for organizations who sell through partner channels; technical support solutions for high tech and software development organizations; and online citizen engagement for public sector organizations. Each of these solutions will be available for all Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers and can be used both on-premises and in the cloud.
Finally, this acquisition will empower our own customers as well as our strong partner ecosystem as it will accelerate our efforts to enable customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build their own CRM Web engagement solutions on Microsoft technologies. These Adxstudio capabilities enable any business process to become Web-facing.
We are dedicated to giving companies intelligent customer engagement solutions so they can deliver customer experiences that are personalized, proactive and predictive. We’re constantly looking at ways to deliver value to businesses and organizations around the world. Adding Adxstudio team members and technology components is another important step in this effort to deliver great value for our customers.
Today, Microsoft is introducing the Nokia 222 and Nokia 222 Dual SIM–two new Internet-enabled feature phones designed to connect more people to the Internet and allow them to capture and share their world in new ways.
Connect
The Nokia 222 and Nokia 222 Dual SIM open up a world where the Web is easily accessible from a mobile device that’s built to last the test of time.
With the Internet-ready Nokia 222, you can browse through your favorite sites using the Opera Mini Browser, or explore what the rest of the Web has to offer using Bing Search.
Dressing for the day or planning ahead needn’t be a gamble when it comes to the weather. MSN Weather is on hand to give you an accurate forecast of the day or for up to five days ahead.
Capture and share
Boasting a 2-megapixel camera, the Nokia 222 helps you to simply capture your world–just point and click.
Not only that, but thanks to Internet connectivity, those photographic moments can be shared with your friends and family using apps such as GroupMe by Skype, Facebook, Messenger, and Twitter.
Another way to share your photos would be to take advantage of the built-in SLAM technology. Just bring two SLAM-enabled devices together to send or receive files.
Explore and stay entertained
In terms of battery life, you’ll get up to 29 days of standby time for the Nokia 222 Single SIM and 21 days for the Nokia 222 Dual SIM, with a talk time of up to 20 hours talk time for both.
Love your music? The FM radio and built-in MP3 player will keep you entertained for days with the FM radio playback of up to 45 hours, and MP3 playback of up to 50 hours.
Gamers, rejoice! You’ll be able to download one free Gameloft game per month for a year and stay entertained with titles such as “Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood” or “Midnight Pool 3.”
When it comes to storing your photos, videos, or music files, the Nokia 222 supports MicroSD cards of up to 32 GB.
Incorporated into the Nokia 222 is also a flashlight, which is ideal if the power goes out or if you find yourself in an environment surrounded by nothing but total darkness. Let the Nokia 222 light the way!
Discover how Intermountain Healthcare uses Skype for Business to connect patients with their physicians
Patients can now have face to face conversations with physicians when they normally would not be able to. The power of Skype allows patients to connect from the comfort of their home without having to make an office or hospital visit.
The new Skype Developer Platform provides opportunities to customize and extend the capabilities not only with Skype for Business but also through Skype. Developers don't have to think anymore in "silos" for business and allows for more consumer customization opportunities. Find in-depth developer resources, how-to documentation, SDKs and references, and code samples for Skype developer platform verticals. Learn more
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It’s worth noting that Microsoft already offered a business video service in the form of Office 365 Video. “Microsoft Stream builds upon the learnings success of Office 365 Video and over time the two experiences will converge with a seamless migration to ensure a consistent experience both within and outside of Office 365,” Phillips writes in today’s official announcement and also notes that current Office 365 Video users will not see any differences in the service for now.
