Friday, May 31, 2013

Software : Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium races past one million users

Software : Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium races past one million users

Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium races past one million users

Posted:

Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium races past one million users

Office 365 Home Premium has skipped past the 1 million subscribers mark 100 days (or three-and-a-half months) after launching, Microsoft has claimed.

While it took slightly longer than Instagram's 2.5 months to reach seven digits, Microsoft has used a company blog post to point out that it arrived at the milestone faster than Hulu Plus (which took five months), Spotify (five months), Dropbox (seven months), Facebook (10 months), and FourSquare (13 months).

The software giant claims one subscription of the cloud-based productivity suite has been snapped up every second since January 29, earning it the accolade of being the best selling "new" Office edition to date.

That includes Office 365 University and Office 365 ProPlus, in addition to the locally-installed Office 2013, though Microsoft chose not to share sales figures for to such editions.

Office 365 Home Premium provides access to the full Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Onenote, Access, and Publisher) on up to five devices for £79.99 a year.

Crucial clouds

While Microsoft has yet to disclose sales figures for ProPlus, the business-flavoured edition of Office 365, it recently released the results of a study by analyst house 451 Research, which found that more than 52% of organisations see the cloud as beneficial to growing the business.

The study, which surveyed 1,500 customers from small, midsized and large organisations in 10 countries, also found that 68% of respondents plan to adopt 'hybrid' cloud models in the next two years, up from 49% today.

Nuance CEO predicts cross-platform virtual assistants within 2 years

Posted:

Nuance CEO predicts cross-platform virtual assistants within 2 years

Current virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now are far from perfect, but they could evolve within the next two years to be something much greater.

Nuance CEO Paul Ricci predicted at the D11 conference this week that virtual assistants will be lending a hand across multiple platforms and mediums, providing full control of everything from phones to TVs, within two years.

"I think we will see virtual assistants within two years that are quite robust," Ricci said.

"I also believe that within two years we will see that virtual assistants will work across platforms."

Nuanced control

Nuance is the company behind the Dragon dictation and speech recognition software.

Last year it debuted a virtual assistant SDK for iOS and Android called Nina that can recognize individual users by their voice.

The U.S. company is also involved with Siri, Samsung's S Voice, similar technology on HTC phones, and Amazon.

It is also working on in-car speech recognition systems, Ricci revealed.

"The car does need work but the problem must be solved," he said.

Google Play Music All Access hitting iOS in 'a couple of weeks'

Posted:

Google Play Music All Access hitting iOS in 'a couple of weeks'

Google Play Music All Access will head to iOS in the next couple weeks, the company has revealed.

Google's Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome and Google Apps Sundar Pichai broke the news at the D11 conference this week.

"In Google's DNA, we wanted to be universally accessible," Pichai said, speaking with tech journalist Walt Mossberg. "The goal with search was to make it work for everyone in the world, and I think that philosophy extends today."

"We brought Google Now to iOS. A couple weeks from now we will launch Google Play Music All Access for iOS, the teams are working like crazy to do it."

All Access, for everyone

Google unveiled its Google Play Music All Access subscription streaming service during its Google IO keynote earlier in May.

All Access will compete with services like Spotify, Xbox Music, and Pandora.

During the event, Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga called it "radio without rules."

Google Play Music All Access is available now in some countries and will head to others soon.

The privacy question: Android guest accounts?

When asked how Google can innovate in privacy, Pichai responded that Android guest accounts could be in the cards for the future.

"When we did Chrome, we did a full incognito mode. That's one example [of Google's innovations in privacy]," he explained.

"But we do want more things like that. There's a lot of things from a security standpoint, from a perspective of children and parents. There's no reason we can't do something like guest accounts on Android."
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)