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Microsoft buys a company enabling the Internet of Things
If it wasn't already evident that Microsoft is serious about becoming a big player in the Internet of Things, it is now. The tech pioneer has bought Solair, a company focused on Internet of Things services for businesses -- say, making sure that factory machines are running smoothly. Microsoft isn't divulging exact plans yet, but it expects to fold Solair's tech into Azure's IoT Suite. You may not witness the fruits of this acquisition first-hand, but don't be surprised if the gadgets you buy arrive sooner and with fewer flaws.
Apple reportedly designing its own secure servers
Apple's track record for online services like iCloud has been shaky at best. According to The Information, the iPhone maker has spent years trying to come up with an internal solution that can handle the amount of data that the company needs to keep iMessages, photos, iTunes, Apple Music, the App Store and others running smoothly. More importantly it's also trying to keep hackers and spies out of its network by designing its own hardware.
Bernie Sanders shuns Microsoft's vote-counting app
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is taking matters into his own hands. Rather than use the Microsoft-provided tools to tabulate the results of the upcoming Iowa caucus, the Vermont senator's campaign has (rather impressively) built its own measurement tools, according to MSNBC. Why is the campaign so leery? It's concerned about impartiality seeing as how Microsoft employees have donated more than $200,000 toward his party rival Hillary Clinton's career over the years. Pete D'Alessandro is running the Iowa campaign for Sanders and told MSNBC, "You'd have to ask yourself why they'd want to give something like that away for free."
Microsoft wants to make Bitcoin easier for banks
Microsoft no longer solely counts on Windows 10 to pay the bills. With CEO Satya Nadella at the helm, it's also betting heavily on cloud services, and just revealed an interesting new one: Bitcoin-style encryption. Redmond joined forces with startup ConsenSys on a platform called Ethereum to help business to play around with the blockchain tech used in crypto-currency. The move is well-timed, as banks are starting to get seriously interested in BItcoin-style currency. However, Microsoft said that Bitcoin applications are "just scratching the surface of what can be done when you mix cryptographic security [with the] reliability of blockchain."
Microsoft pours money into undersea data cables
For many internet giants, undersea fiber optic cables are a lifeline. In some cases, it's the difference between delivering fast services overseas and watching people give up in frustration. Microsoft knows this all too well, it seems, as it just poured money into three subsea fiber projects (Aqua Comms, Hibernia and New Cross Pacific Cable Network) that should speed up connections to Asia-Pacific and Europe. The Redmond crew sees this as a small investment that could pay off big in the future. As it explains, online products like the Azure computing platform and Office 365 are booming -- it only makes sense to have those moneymakers running as smoothly as possible. This isn't really an altruistic gesture, then, but it could go a long way toward improving your internet access as a whole. [Image credit: US Pacific Fleet, Flickr]
Microsoft thinks it can guess your age using facial recognition
Since we're right smack in the middle of Microsoft's BUILD dev conference, the company's showing off one of it's Azure APIs with a site you can put to the test. How-Old.net allows you to upload a picture before the site recognizes faces and analyzes them to determine their age. No, I'm not 41... I'm 31, and that picture is from over two years ago. Other folks here at Engadget received results closer to their real age, but it made us wonder: why not use a web cam to snap a picture under current conditions. You know, after I've had a chance to apply my daily dose of wrinkle remover. Perhaps that option on the way.
Microsoft still powers Ford's in-car tech behind the scenes
Ford may have ditched Microsoft for the next generation of its Sync interface, but that doesn't mean Microsoft no longer has a place in Blue Oval's cars. If anything, it's more important than ever. Ford has unveiled the Service Delivery Network, a cloud-based platform that uses Microsoft Azure to put internet services in your car, whether they're app-based remote controls (like telling your car to warm up in the morning) or Sync updates. The two companies hope that this will deliver connected car tech worldwide, and at a faster pace than you're used to -- you may not have to wait months or years for a feature to turn up in a vehicle you can buy. The first models relying on the Service Delivery Network should hit dealerships later this year, so you'll soon know how well this collaboration works on the open road.
Microsoft's Surface tablet business is booming
Microsoft appears to be well past the days when it was writing off unsold Surface tablets and struggling to match Sony in game console sales. The Windows developer reports that its Devices and Consumer group's revenue grew 8 percent year over year in the last calendar quarter of 2014, thanks in no small part to healthy Surface and Xbox sales. It's not revealing shipment numbers for the Surface, but it notes that revenue for the slate computers shot up 24 percent versus a year earlier, thanks in no small part to the Surface Pro 3.
GameStop stores going Azure to stream promos to mobiles
GameStop plans to use Microsoft's Azure cloud computing technology to enhance its retail locations, allowing customers to stream "video game and promotional content" to mobile devices. While not offering a timetable for when the services would be offered, the retailer revealed examples of ways it would use Azure, such as giving customers the opportunity to view game trailers on their smartphones while browsing the store shelves. GameStop will also shift its checkout process to in-store mobile shopping carts that "can be used by the customer to facilitate a faster checkout." Microsoft's Azure technology was previously used by Respawn Entertainment for the developers' first-person shooter, Titanfall. Respawn's Jon Shiring explained in March 2014 that elements of the game's online multiplayer functions like AI hosting and physics calculations relied on the cloud computing tech. GameStop updated its trade-in policies with a four-tiered pricing structure in August. The retailer showed overall declining sales in November, though sales of new hardware was on the rise. [Image: GameStop]
Report: Microsoft building game-streaming tech, 'Arcadia'
Microsoft has job openings within a new cloud-based Operating Systems Group, and one of the listings says the project is called "Arcadia." ZDNet reports that Arcadia is a new streaming system built on the Azure cloud and is poised to replace Microsoft's Rio game-streaming tech. Arcadia will stream games and apps to Microsoft devices, the site says. Halo 5 on your Windows Phone, anyone? One of Microsoft's job listings reads, in part, as follows: "The new Operating Systems Group (OSG) Streaming team is leveraging the cloud to bring premium and unique experiences to Microsoft's core platforms. These experiences take advantage of a new geo-distributed massively scaling service to redefine what is possible on today's devices. The client team is building the user facing application(s), bridging the service and devices together seamlessly. Our team is a small but growing and dedicated to solving one of Microsoft's biggest business challenges in a creative fashion." Both job listings note that experience with iOS and Android app development is "a plus." As Engadget points out, this technology is most likely a long way off, since the development team isn't even finalized yet. Sony has its own game-streaming system, PlayStation Now, and that's in beta on PS4, Vita and PS TV, well, now. [Image: Microsoft]
Microsoft wants you to stream apps and games
Microsoft has explored software streaming before, but it looks like the company is about to give it a second shot. The company is hiring people to work on "Arcadia," a technology that ZDNet understands will let you stream "certain apps" and games on Microsoft's platforms. It's not clear just what the Redmond crew is building, and it's not necessarily a dedicated service like PlayStation Now. It could just as easily be used for special streaming versions of key apps, or letting users fire up an app before it finishes downloading. You shouldn't expect Arcadia any time soon, whatever it is -- given that the project still has holes in its development team, it could be a while (if ever) before you're streaming the next Halo game on your Windows tablet.
Google and Microsoft are using the cloud to track climate change
Data.gov is getting a whole lot greener thanks to its new section dedicated to climate information. The new channel is the product of President Obama's Climate Data Initiative (PDF), and pulls information that can help predict the effects of climate change and prevent any damage that may result. The raw data comes from the likes of the Department of Defense, NASA and the US Geological Society, but probably isn't easy to grok for the average person. To help with that, Google and Microsoft have stepped in. Mountain View is donating 50 million hours of its Earth Engine's computing power -- the Global Forest Watch's backbone -- and is partnering with academics in the western US to produce a near real-time drought map and monitoring system. Redmond, on the other hand, has developed a tool (dubbed FetchClimate) that can both recall historical climate data and forecast future weather trends based on the stockpiles of information stored in Microsoft's Azure back-end. For example, the software giant says that this could allow state planners to predict extreme rainfall, preventing flood damage to infrastructure and transit lines as a result. These are still early days for the Initiative, but, as times goes on, more applications using its wealth of info will surely surface. For now, though, it's nice to see tech companies exploit government data instead of the other way around.
Respawn: Titanfall's server stability is in Microsoft's azure hands
Titanfall will be propped up by dedicated servers. As much was made known last June, but what may not be so clear to players is that post-launch hiccups are primarily Microsoft's responsibility. Respawn engineer Jon Shiring recently explained to Engadget how Respawn used Microsoft's "Azure" cloud computing technology to handle elements of Titanfall like AI hosting and physics calculations. "One of the really nice things about it is that it isn't my problem, right?" Shiring said of potential server issues at the game's launch. "We just say [to Microsoft], here are our estimates, aim for more than that, plan for problems and make sure there are more than enough servers available -- they'll know the whole time that they need to bring more servers online." Shiring said that during the game's lengthy beta program, the game's European servers filled up, and players were quietly transitioned to East Coast US data centers, indicating the developer's contingency plans in the event its launch is wildly popular tomorrow. Titanfall, a multiplayer-only game, is so reliant on the Azure servers that Respawn opted to not launch the game in some regions, such as South Africa. Shiring also noted in late January that server-side updates for the game won't cause downtime for players. Our review of Titanfall will be supplemented with our first of many State of Service reviews, so expect to hear more about how the game's online play holds up after it launches. [Image: Electronic Arts]
Respawn Entertainment's Jon Shiring on Titanfall and using Microsoft's cloud
Jon Shiring, Respawn engineer When in the development cycle did the relationship between Microsoft and Respawn form? Early on, we were trying to figure out what game we were trying to make. We had a good relationship with people at Microsoft from working on Call of Duty, so we got in touch with them. I was pushing really hard on dedicated servers for all platforms. I talked to Microsoft about that, and I talked to Sony as well. Microsoft got really interested in that idea, and that was pretty early on. I'd say I started to nudge them in late 2010. It was really 2011 when we were coming at Microsoft like, "What can you do? We can't afford this, but we want to have dedicated servers for everything because we're trying to do new and interesting things." Did you get the feeling that this was something it already had in mind? The feeling I got from it is that we kind of brought it up and they came back with an idea of how to do it because they weren't originally planning to do it. At the time, I think they were looking for interesting things to do for the Xbox One; they were trying to get a bearing on what would be a new, interesting way for Live to go. We hit them at the right time. How intrinsic is Azure to Titanfall? Having these servers with a significant amount of CPU power and bandwidth available is absolutely essential to our game: Having these machines that are regional and servers that have good ping -- that's huge. That completely changes the way we make games. Really, the biggest thing with that is that it has uncapped our designers and let them do things that were previously impossible to do. That far back, we were letting the designers run and just do whatever was cool and it was really, really key to making Titanfall what it is right now. What will a player notice that's different between Titanfall and another game that's using dedicated servers? There are other games like Battlefield that have dedicated servers, but they haven't gone in the same direction that we have with them, though. We have all of this AI and things flying around in the world; that has obviously let us build a different game than we would have if we'd have gone in with the constraints of it having to be player-hosted. All of these things that make it a much more lively world are actually the really big win. With all the platforms that are using Azure (PC, Xbox 360 Xbox One), was cross-platform play ever considered? Not really. Mostly, the reason for that is with the 360 version -- we're not developing it. My expectation (and this is an engineering answer) is that we're going to be patching all of these but we're not going to be the ones doing the patching on 360. We could get ourselves into a very bad spot where if we patched all the servers, the 360 people couldn't play for a while until Bluepoint (the studio behind the Xbox 360 version) applies the patch and gets it through cert. Just on a purely practical level with three different methods of getting a patch out there, it's not going to work. Just on a purely practical level with three different methods of getting a patch out there, it's [cross-platform play] not going to work. Then there [are] a lot of other problems you get, like if you were playing against a PC guy and you were looking at his player info. He's not on Xbox; I can't bring up the Origin info for him; you can't add him as a friend and send an invite to him. It's not one huge technical thing stopping us; it's a lot of little ones. What does the connection flowchart look like from a user's network access point to the servers? With Azure coming in, it seems like a chance for more ping or latency. In a traditional player-hosted game, you're still connecting to the player acting as a host, but you have to punch through all these networks to get there. I'm kind of getting into the gears here, but what I've found is that a lot of the latency in consumer broadband is at the edges: Getting to another user is a lot slower than getting to a hub and back again. Since we're talking to these servers in big regional data centers, the latency is a lot lower than what you would get if [the connection] was exactly the same, except it was a consumer on the other end of that pipe. We have somewhere around a 19ms to 20ms ping to this data center and it's up in San Francisco [from LA]. We're talking barely more than one rendering frame to get a message to the server and back again, which is outstanding. It has a lot of wins. Longterm, what kind of benefits do you think consumers will reap with the groundwork that Respawn has laid? Back when we started talking to Microsoft about it, everyone thought it was kind of crazy and a lot of publishers were terrified of even doing it. I've heard that since our beta, they've been pounding down the doors at Microsoft because they're realizing that it really is a real thing right now. We can scale high, and, if you do it right, the experience can be awesome. Working with Microsoft is great, but we're kind of taking a bullet with doing the pain of proving that it'll scale up, and finding bugs that every system has at launch. After Titanfall comes out, we're just going to have a lot more confidence that the early system-type problems are solved. From then on, it's probably a simpler solution than building something yourself. My expectation is that within a few years, this will be the new normal. Not necessarily Azure specifically, but a centralization of the hosting so it'll be big systems that are being used rather than all of these homegrown things that people have done in the past. At the Xbox One's reveal, Microsoft said the new Xbox Live has 300,000 dedicated servers, how many does Respawn have access to? We're trying to figure out how many people will be playing and trying to make sure the servers will be there for that. One of the really nice things about it is that isn't my problem, right? We just say [to Microsoft] here are our estimates, aim for more than that, plan for problems and make sure there are more than enough servers available. To go back to your development experience, how has Respawn's approach to multiplayer changed since Call of Duty? We're still client/server, but we re-approached every problem and solved it in a new way. Some of the high-level stuff matches up, like the client/server and the service that connects the clients, but everything else is very different from a network architecture standpoint. I've been making multiplayer games (Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2) for a long time. A lot of it is just people here and even people at EA having faith in us that we know what we're doing. That has led us to things that were new, different and crazy. What's the contingency plan in case the servers start melting? This is one of the things we made ourselves deal with during the beta. The way it ends up working is that peak time in Europe is going to be much ahead of the US. We moved some Europeans over to East Coast US data centers, which is not ideal, but it at least let them play. We don't look forward to doing that at all, but if we have a bunch of people sitting unable to play the game, then we're going to make sure that the experience is good enough -- maybe not ideal -- to get them playing. We do have capacity at these other data centers that are a little bit farther away. If we have a situation like that, that's going to be my fault. If we fill up every data center out there, then we'll be there at Microsoft -- they'll know the whole time that they need to bring more servers online. When Forza Motorsport 5 launched, it used Azure for the Drivatar system. By all accounts it shouldn't have worked: It was a brand-new feature running on new software using then-unproven Azure tech. If Titanfall launches successfully too, it could galvanize Azure's reputation. What I actually think will happen, is if we come out and it works great and people play the game and see that it's a really good experience, [developers] will have a lot of serious discussions about "my publisher has their own system for hosting, but I don't know if it will work. We have a lot of confidence in Azure because Titanfall did." Suddenly, the publisher solution becomes more risky than the cloud solution.
A closer look at Titanfall's not-so-secret weapon: Microsoft's cloud
While you were busy running along walls and throwing missiles back at your opponents during the Titanfall beta, countless data centers across the world were making sure that each AI-controlled Titan bodyguard had your back. Much of the frenetic action in Respawn Entertainment's debut game rests on one thing: Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure. Up until last November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's baby was mostly used for business applications, like virtualization and acting as an enterprise-level email host. With the Xbox One, though, the company opened up its global server farms to game developers, giving them access to more computing power than could reasonably be stuffed into a $500 game console. Since the Xbox One's debut, Microsoft has been crowing about how Azure would let designers create gaming experiences players have never seen before. Now it's time for the product to speak for itself.
Respawn Entertainment talks Xbox Live Cloud, praises its multiplayer servers
Microsoft's been quick to point out how it's beefing up the Xbox Live Cloud in preparation for its next wunderconsole, and now Respawn Entertainment is stepping in to detail just what Redmond's architecture means for multiplayer on Titanfall. The firm's Jon Shiring, who works with the game's cloud computing integration, says that the next-gen title boasts vastly improved online play since it leans on Ballmer and Company's cloud hardware instead of users to host sessions. By taking advantage of Microsoft's servers, the futuristic shooter benefits from more reliable bandwidth, snappier matchmaking times, extra CPU power and the elimination of latency-based host advantage and hacked-host cheating, to boot. Naturally, using dedicated servers can cost a ton, but Respawn says Microsoft managed to keep things comparatively inexpensive for developers, in part thanks to its Azure tech. For the dev's comprehensive write-up on just what this revamped Xbox Live architecture may mean for gaming, click the source link below.
Titanfall dev explains why it's using Xbox Live Cloud
Respawn engineer Jon Shiring has posted a lengthy article explaining how Titanfall will benefit from using Microsoft's Xbox Live Cloud servers, contrasting the experiences found using player-hosted online games – featured in many console games today – versus expensive dedicated servers. Speaking with both Microsoft and Sony to find an inexpensive way to have "potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers," Respawn found a solution with Microsoft's Azure servers. "The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers and that lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that," he wrote. "With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don't have to worry about estimating how many servers we'll need on launch day. We don't have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don't have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server," explained Shiring. "That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter." Recent changes to Xbox One's digital rights management plans aside, the company is going ahead with a $700 million expansion of its Iowa data center, which will be used to support Xbox Live and other services. To read all the technical and business reasons Respawn is going with Microsoft's Azure system, head on over to the company site.%Gallery-190953%
Microsoft: Xbox One isn't always online, but requires internet connection
Xbox One, Microsoft's next-gen console, does not require users to be constantly connected to the internet, but it does require an internet connection, a Q&A post on Xbox Wire said. The post itself has since been removed. The answer said the Xbox One "does not have to be always connected, but Xbox One does require a connection to the Internet." Developers are able to use Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service with Xbox One – this could potentially shift certain computations to the cloud and require players to be online, even for single-player runs, Wired reports. For pre-owned games, the Xbox One is designed "to enable customers to trade in and resell games," Microsoft said in the same Q&A post, promising more details later. All games can be installed to the Xbox One's 500GB hard drive, removing the need for a disc entirely after the initial load-up, Microsoft tells Wired. If a second account wants to play that game the player will be asked to pay a fee and install the game on his own console. Whether this is a mandatory installation for every game, Microsoft says, "On the new Xbox, all game discs are installed to the HDD to play."
Microsoft reportedly working on Mohoro, an Azure-hosted remote desktop service
Microsoft is plumbing the depths of cloud computing yet again with the development of what could be a pay-per-use desktop virtualization service called Mohoro. According to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, Mohoro is essentially Azure's answer to Remote Desktop, but as a hosted service. Intended for "companies who want thin clients or to run legacy apps on new PCs," her source states that, "With Mohoro, you click a few buttons, deploy your apps, use Intune to push out configuration to all of your company's devices, and you're done," thus skipping the need for server infrastructure. As Foley points out, however, Azure-hosted virtual machines aren't currently set up to run Windows clients under Microsoft's licensing terms. What's more, Mohoro development is reportedly in its early days, and as such, Foley speculates that it won't be a reality until much later -- she's guessing the latter half of 2014.
Microsoft posts Build 2012 session videos for eager Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 coders
Not every developer had the luxury of putting a flight to Redmond on the corporate tab so that they could attend Microsoft's Build 2012 conference in person. Much to their delight, they won't have to. The company has posted streaming video for every session addressing Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and beyond, ranging from the two keynotes through to nuts-and-bolts framework talks. Be warned: most programmers will want to know Visual Studio and similar tools like the back of their hand before tackling some of these sessions. If they emerge unscathed, though, they'll be well-equipped to live in Microsoft's Windows Store world.
