The Windows App Team announced the release of a Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime, enabling developers to integrate text-recognition capabilities in Windows Phone 8/8.1 and Windows 8.1 apps. Optical character recognition (OCR) software converts images containing text into a digitally readable format. The technology’s inclusion in Windows Runtime, Microsoft’s Windows 8/8.1 application architecture, allows … continue reading
Wolfram launches Tweet-a-Program Stephen Wolfram has announced a new Wolfram Language program, Tweet-a-Program, which allows users to compose a tweet-length Wolfram Language program. Once it’s composed and tweeted to @WolframTaP, the company’s Twitter bot will run the problem in the recently announced Wolfram Cloud and tweet back the result. “In the Wolfram Language, a little … continue reading
Microsoft releases WinJS 3.0 with multiplatform support, nixes developer fees Microsoft has released version 3.0 of WinJS, the Windows library for JavaScript, adding cross-platform and cross-browser support, JavaScript modularization, and improved universal control designs. The update adds support for popular Web and mobile browsers, as well as HTML-based app environments, including Apache Cordova. According to … continue reading
After several days of reports and speculation, Microsoft and Minecraft developer Mojang officially confirmed their US$2.5 billion deal. Most of the staff of Mojang, the Stockholm-based developer of the popular gaming franchise, will join the Microsoft Studios team, which includes companies behind games such as Fable and Halo. Microsoft will continue to make Minecraft available … continue reading
HP acquires cloud startup Eucalyptus HP has revealed plans to buy cloud startup Eucalyptus Software, with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos joining HP to manage the company’s cloud business. The deal is expected to close in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2014, and Reuters reported the acquisition will be for less than US$100 million. Eucalyptus offers … continue reading
When was the last time you dropped off a roll of film to be developed at the local drug store or supermarket? Walgreens software developers were sure there was a way to get people to come back in to pick up pictures again. But the competition was removing its photo development in the face of … continue reading
Microsoft releases Visual Studio and TFS 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 Keeping up its accelerated update pace, Microsoft has released the first community technology preview of Update 4 for Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013. Microsoft TFS product unit manager Brian Harry announced Update 4 CTP 1 in a blog post, detailing primarily … continue reading
It’s been almost two month since Microsoft announced plans to work with Google and Docker to bring support for Kubernetes to its Azure platform, and today the company is following through on those plans. Microsoft has announced that Azure developers can now use Kubernetes to manage their Docker containers. “The Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. engineering … continue reading
IBM opens its supercomputer to scientist IBM wants to accelerate the pace of scientific breakthroughs. The company has announced Watson Discovery Advisor, a cloud-based tool designed to scale and speed up discoveries by research teams, according to IBM. “We’re entering an extraordinary age of data-driven discovery,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM … continue reading
RethinkDB 1.14 released Version 1.14 of the RethinkDB open-source distributed JSON database has been released with more than 50 new enhancements. RethinkDB ecosystem engineer Josh Kuhn announced the release in a blog post, explaining that 1.14 is the first RethinkDB release that doesn’t require data migration. Some of the main upgrades and new features include: … continue reading
“Mobile First, Cloud First” is the new Microsoft mantra. You can’t read anything about their strategy under new leader Satya Nadella without reading or hearing those words. A large part of this “Mobile First, Cloud First” world is Office 365. Now, for several dollars a month, the common man (or woman) has access to Exchange, … continue reading
Microsoft announces DocumentDB and Azure Search-as-a-Service Microsoft has announced several services for its Azure cloud platform, including DocumentDB, a fully managed NoSQL document database service. Blog posts from Microsoft Azure product marketing director Vibhor Kapoor and Azure senior program manager Ryan CrawCour detail the new services, which in addition to the NoSQL service feature Azure … continue reading
