Microsoft
Microsoft has benefited substantially from the rise of AI. Its partnership and close relationship with OpenAI has continued through 2024, as it looks to establish its Copilot chatbot as a go-to tool across its software and hardware offerings, even dedicating a button to it on future Windows device keyboards. TechCrunch covers those developments, and its other recent moves like unbundling Teams and Office and successfully defeating an antitrust challenge against its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
In a sign that big tech companies are ready and willing to shell out cash for database tech, Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres,…
A fireside chat between Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg at SIGGRAPH 2024 took some unexpected turns. What started as a conversation about the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Zuckerberg’s vision…
Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long-term partnership. As part of the deal,…
Bing is the latest search engine to introduce generative AI into its results, with Microsoft announcing that it’s making Bing generative search available to a…
Backed by Microsoft, AWS and Meta, the Overture Maps Foundation launches its first open map datasets
The Overture Maps Foundation is today releasing data sets for 2.3B building “footprints” globally, 54M notable places of interest, a visual overlay of “boundaries,” and land and water features such…
Employees at Bethesda Game Studios — the Microsoft-owned game developer that produces the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises — are joining the Communications Workers of America union. Quality assurance testers…
Around 8.5 million devices — less than 1 percent of Windows machines globally — were affected by the recent CrowdStrike outage, according to a Microsoft blog post by David Weston,…
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Faulty CrowdStrike update causes major global IT outage, taking out banks, airlines and businesses globally
Security giant CrowdStrike said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack, as businesses anticipate widespread disruption.
The Designer app features “prompt templates” that are designed to help jumpstart the creative process.
Microsoft faces UK antitrust probe after hiring Inflection AI founders and employees
U.K. authorities have until early September to decide whether the hiring is tantamount to a merger.
Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is packed with deals, antitrust musings, AI and…
Microsoft emails that warned customers of Russian hacks criticized for looking like spam and phishing
Cybersecurity experts are criticizing Microsoft for data breach notification emails that are confusing customers.
The core issue relates to a 2019 licensing change whereby Microsoft made it more expensive to run Microsoft’s enterprise software on rival cloud services.
This likely rules out reports of Apple gaining an observer seat.
Here are the hottest product announcements from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others so far in 2024
We’ve poked through the many product announcements made by the biggest tech companies and product trade shows of the year, so far, and compiled them into this list.
Microsoft’s AI CEO has a cozy relationship with the man who used to be his rival, he said on Tuesday.
Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources, is used by more than 90% of all Fortune 1000 companies and many more besides. So it’s no…
A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts look credible and more likely to trick their targets. As of this…
FTC Chair Lina Khan on startups, scaling, and ”innovations in potential lawbreaking”
FTC Chair Lina Khan was the youngest person appointed to her position when she assumed the job in 2021. But once her term ends in September — after which she’ll…
For centuries, people chewed willow tree bark to relieve pain, but scientists at chemical firm Bayer didn’t isolate its active ingredient until the 1800s and eventually patented its modified version…
LinkedIn has confirmed it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on data gleaned from their participation in LinkedIn Groups. The move comes more than three months after…
Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…
Microsoft, Meta, Intel, AMD and others have formed a new group to design next-gen interconnects for AI accelerator hardware.
Microsoft’s Copilot, a generative AI-powered tool that can generate text as well as answer specific questions, is now available as an in-app chatbot on Telegram, the instant messaging app. Currently…
Bing’s API was down, taking Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search feature down too
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it…
AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known…
A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup…
Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday during its annual Build conference that it’s bringing “Windows Volumetric Apps” to Meta Quest headsets. The partnership will allow Microsoft to bring Windows 365 and local…
Microsoft wants to put its Copilot everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft renames its annual Build developer conference to Microsoft Copilot. Hopefully, some of those upcoming events…
