At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced updates heading to Teams, its ever-evolving videoconferencing and workplace collaboration app. New avatars are available, and more details were announced around Teams Premium, a paid set of Teams features including AI-generated tasks and meeting guides, which is set to arrive in December in preview. Teams Premium is…
Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab are expanding their launch capacities as each company gears up for inaugural missions from countries that they have never flown from. For Rocket Lab, that’s the United States; for Virgin, that’s the United Kingdom (which has never seen an orbital launch, ever). Rocket Lab said Wednesday that the Electron rocket…
Power Automate, Microsoft’s Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI’s Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural…
Two years ago, Microsoft debuted SharePoint Syntex, which leverages AI to automate the capture and classification of data from documents — building on SharePoint’s existing services. Today marks the expansion of the platform into Microsoft Syntex, a set of new products and capabilities including file annotation and data extraction. Syntex reads, tags and indexes document…
When Azure OpenAI Service launched in 2021, the service — a part of Azure Cognitive Services — provided enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation and text autocompletion. That’s not changing. But after expanding the service in May with fine-tuning features, Microsoft is today introducing invite-only access to…
It’s Microsoft Ignite this week and while a lot of the announcements this week target the kinds of IT professionals and admins who really need more deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Service through Azure Arc, the company is also announcing a few user-facing updates to its Edge browser. The most important of these is likely…
At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced Defender Cloud Security Posture Management and Defender for DevOps, two new offerings within the company’s Defender for Cloud service (previously Cloud App Security) aimed at managing software development and runtime security across multicloud, multiple-pipeline environments. Currently available in public preview, they work with GitHub and Azure DevOps to…
TripActions, a corporate travel and expenses company, has raised a combination of equity and debt at a post-money valuation of $9.2 billion, up from its prior valuation of $7.5 billion. The funding is a $154 million equity round from investors including returning investors Andreessen Horowitz and Premji Invest, and a $150 million structured financing deal…
Confession: I’ve finished a startlingly low number of books since I finished high school. It’s not that I dislike books or struggle with comprehension or anything like that. Instead, my particular brand of ADHD makes it difficult to find motivation to start and focus when I do, plus I just don’t like holding books in…
Champions League, the soccer competition in which winning (and almost-winning) soccer clubs from around Europe compete for continent-wide glory, is available to stream live in the US on Paramount+. Gone are the days when your only hope of catching these prestigious Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) match-ups was to hope and pray that your…