LinkedIn Learning arrives to build out your ‘skills’ section
With the ink still drying on Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, the social network everyone loves to hate is now looking to break into the online education with today’s launch of LinkedIn Learning. After all, what could be better for your career than adding a couple new skills and areas of expertise to your online resumé?
As TechCrunch reports, LinkedIn Learning offers 9,000 courses built on top of content from online learning portal Lynda.com, which LinkedIn actually bought for $1.5 billion in early 2015. The courses currently cover everything from coding and programming to writing and accounting.
While employees or individuals can select and sign up for classes on their own, employers and HR managers can also recommend courses and then track their employees’ progress through LinkedIn’s analytics. For now, LinkedIn Premium subscribers can get 25 new courses every week, but there’s also a forthcoming enterprise tier that will allow larger corporations to recommend courses for their entire workforce.
In other LinkedIn news today, social network also announced it will be releasing an updated design for the desktop version that includes a revamped newsfeed and new messaging features with support for the increasingly ubiquitous chatbots. There’s no release date for these features yet, just a promise that they’re coming soon.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: LinkedIn Learning
Windows 10 Maps will show the traffic on your route home
Fans of the Maps app on Windows 10 will have something to look forward to with its latest update. Now, you can see what the roads are like either to home or work (or whatever locations you’ve labeled as such) and even take a gander at realtime traffic from recently viewed roadside cameras. Just hit the traffic icon from the app’s menu, according to the Windows 10 blog, and you’re there. What’s more, the app will follow your preferences for a night or day mode within the app and apparently change themes wholesale. Sure, Google Maps has had most of these features for a bit, but it’s good to see that the Windows faithful have a few new toys to play around with.
But wait, there’s more. The operating system now offers native support for USB Audio 2.0 too. It isn’t quite finished yet, though. “This is an early version of the driver that does not have all features enabled,” according to Microsoft. For example, you can’t record with it yet, only playback is available. There are a handful of other (minor) system-wide updates too, so hit the source link for more info on those.
Source: Windows 10 blog
‘Minecraft: Education Edition’ officially arrives in November
After a summer of test runs, the full version of Minecraft: Education Edition will officially launch on November 1st. When it goes live, the service will require a $5 yearly membership per user or a district-wide license, but the Early Access edition is still free until November.
According to the MinecraftEdu team, over 35,000 students and teachers around the world have been playing around in Minecraft’s sandbox since the program went live at the beginning of the summer. With the official release, the team has built out a few new education-focused features like a “Classroom Mode” that offers a top-down look at the Minecraft world via a companion app. In the app, teachers can manage world settings, talk to students in-game, give out items or teleport their kids around the map from a single interface. As the main Minecraft world evolves and gains new features, so will the education edition, and educators are encouraged to submit feature ideas and feedback.
Finally, for any teachers who haven’t stepped into Minecraft’s blocky world yet, education.minecraft.net offers some starter worlds, tutorials, free lesson plans in subjects ranging from storytelling to city planning, and a mentoring program to connect them with other educators. At launch, Minecraft: Education Edition requires OS X El Capitan or Windows 10, plus a free Office 365 account to use.
Source: Minecraft.net
The first Xbox One S bundles in the UK are really cheap
Microsoft’s Xbox One S is just the right kind of mid-generation hardware update. The neater console, with a better bundled gamepad and 4K Blu-ray drive, is tempting enough without feeling like a big ol’ middle finger to OG Xbox One owners. When it launched in the UK towards the beginning of last month, though, its £350 price tag wasn’t exactly accessible. But today, the first One S console bundles (with FIFA 17 included) have launched, lowering the cost of entry to dangerous, impulse-buy territory.
Whereas the standalone console has a 2TB HDD, the bundles include boxes with only 500GB or 1TB of storage. But if that’s not a deal-breaker, then you’re in for a treat. With retailers — namely Amazon and Tesco — egging each other on in a race to the bottom, you can get yourself a 500GB FIFA 17 bundle for £224, or the 1TB bundle for as little as £274. Tesco, for a limited time, is offering £25 off a £150 spend with its eCoupon TDX-HTNK, bringing the price down below £200. Considering FIFA 17 is £37 from Amazon on its own and the cheapest original Xbox One is typically around the £225 mark, these new bundles are basically steals.
They should retail at £250 and £300 respectively, remember, so there’s no telling how long these discounts will last. But, even if you do end up paying the RRP, the launch of these cheap bundles is a clear message that the original Xbox One is all but obsolete.
Source: Amazon, Tesco Direct
Google and other tech titans pledge to help refugees
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and other big tech corporations have joined hands with the White House to help refugees across the globe. They were among the members of the private sector that answered the president’s Call to Action back in June. Now, the administration has published the complete list of participants, along with a short description of what they’re doing for the cause. Google has promised to fund and lend its technical expertise to non-government orgs providing free education to 10,000 out-of-school Lebanese kids. If you’ll recall, the big G also donated $5.3 million worth of Chromebooks to European refugees earlier this year.
Facebook plans to provide free WiFi connection in 35 locations across Greece, as well as to continue working with the UN to give people in refugee camps free access to the internet. Plus, the company will use its website to raise funds for them and to donate funds to NGOs catering to their needs. As for Microsoft, it plans to help NGOs provide wider access to education and training. The company also wants to build an Innovation Hub, where refugees can develop their technical and entrepreneurial skills.
HP has a similar plan, with the aim to build six Learning Studios in Lebanon and Jordan for kids and adults. The same goes for Coursera, which will team up with NGOs to give refugees access to over 1,000 courses offered by universities. Since some refugees still need to learn English or to brush up on their vocabulary before they can jump into learning skills, Zynga is making an educational version of Words with Friends. The social video game-maker will also provide experts to mentor the finalists of a competition that aims to create an app that can teach Syrian children to read in Arabic.
Uber’s and LinkedIn’s projects, on the other hand, will benefit those looking to start working ASAP the most. The former will team up with resettlement agencies in the US to offer refugees work opportunities, while the latter is expanding its refugee initiative called Welcoming Talent to countries outside of Sweden. The other familiar companies in the list are IBM, Twitter and TripAdvisor. IBM promises to continue supporting European refugees and migrants any way it can, while TripAdvisor has already earmarked $5 million for humanitarian organizations. Finally, Twitter is giving NGOs in the US and Europe a $50,000 “Ads for Good” advertising grant.
In the White House’s Call to Action months ago, the administration stressed refugees’ potential to contribute to the countries they fled to if given the opportunity. The companies that decided to pitch in could open those windows of opportunity that might remain close otherwise.
“There are more than 65 million displaced people in the world today, the highest number on record since the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) began collecting statistics. More than 21 million of these people have crossed international borders in search of safety and are registered as refugees. The despair that drives these people to flee their homes is heartbreaking, but their resilience is awe-inspiring. Refugees are a valuable, untapped resource and, if given the opportunity, can thrive and contribute wherever they reside.”
Via: Mashable
Source: White House
Microsoft hopes AI will find better cancer treatments
Google isn’t the only tech giant hoping that artificial intelligence can aid the fight against cancer. Microsoft has unveiled Project Hanover, an effort to use AI for both understanding and treating cancers. To begin with, the company is developing a system that would automatically process legions of biomedical papers, creating “genome-scale” databases that could predict which drug cocktails would be the most effective against a given cancer type. An ideal treatment wouldn’t go unnoticed by doctors already swamped with work.
Microsoft is also teaming with the Knight Cancer Institute on AI that would personalize those drug mixes on a patient-by-patient basis. They’re primarily focused on acute myeloid leukemia, where you might end up battling multiple leukemias at once — machine learning could identify just what you’re dealing with and treat it accordingly. Another effort would lean heavily on computer vision to understand how a tumor is reacting to treatments. Human doctors can easily identify tumors, Microsoft notes, but they can’t always tell how tumors are changing or how they’re affecting the health of nearby cells.
The Redmond crew is even more ambitious than that. It’s embarking on a “moonshot” that would rely on AI to program cells for fighting cancer and other diseases. You could create a “molecular computer” that could watch out for diseases and trigger a response, tackling the illness only when it reaches a given part of the body. Many current cancer treatments are indiscriminate, killing healthy cells alongside cancerous ones.
It’s a far-reaching initiative, and it may well help by making both sense of once-overwhelming amounts of data as well as developing more precise responses to cancer. However, it’s easy to understand if you’re skeptical. As cancer researcher Dr. Brooke Magnanti observes on Twitter, this comes across as the classic example of a tech company thinking that it can solve major societal issues by throwing enough data at the problem. Cancer is a “group of diseases” that you can’t easily fix, she says. She adds that modern computers are only faster at accomplishing tasks, not smarter — they aren’t likely to discover things that humans don’t already know. This isn’t to say that Microsoft’s efforts are a waste, just that it may be overly optimistic about its ability to thwart diseases that have stymied the medical field for decades.
Cancer is a group of diseases not one thing to be miracle-cured. Also, Big Data will not save you. That is all.
— Dr Brooke Magnanti (@belledejour_uk) September 20, 2016
Via: Bloomberg
Source: Microsoft, Project Hanover
This might be the last Microsoft Nokia phone
Microsoft’s association with the Nokia brand has been especially turbulent, but it appears the company has one last hurrah for its feature phone business. Today, it announced the Nokia 216, a Series 30+ handset that can browse the web and lasts up to a month on standby. It’s as basic as Nokia feature phones get, but it’s notable in that it’s probably the very last Nokia-branded handset Microsoft will ever produce.
You see, when Microsoft acquired Nokia in 2014, it bought both the feature phone business and Lumia brand. This gave the Redmond company access to Nokia’s manufacturing plants, patents and feature phone brand for 10 years. Microsoft quickly dropped the “Nokia” from Lumia smartphones and hoped that interest in the Finnish company’s budget handsets would “on-ramp” users to Windows Phone.
That never materialized. Microsoft, with next to no interest in its phones, then decided to sell the feature phone business to Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile for $350 million and the naming rights to Finnish company HMD Global, which was founded by ex-Nokia employees with the purpose of creating Nokia-branded Android smartphones and tablets.
Confusing, right? Don’t forget that Nokia Oy, the company that sold its phone businesses to Microsoft in the first place, is still successful in its own right. It operates a multi-billion dollar cellular networking business, makes a $45,000 VR camera, bought wearable maker Withings and recently sold its mapping business to a group of German car makers for a tidy sum.
Microsoft’s feature phone deal is still undergoing regulatory scrutiny but both companies expect it to complete by the end of the year. With October almost upon us, it’s safe to assume that the Nokia 216, with its 0.3-megapixel camera and all-important headphone jack, will be the last new model out of the door before Microsoft can finally wash the unsuccessful Nokia venture out of its hair.
Via: The Verge
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft’s ‘Project Scorpio’ games will run in native 4K
You’d be forgiven for doubting that Microsoft’s Project Scorpio could really deliver on the promise of 4K gaming. Most PlayStation 4 Pro games won’t run in true 4K, and the current wave of 4K-capable PC video cards cost more than whole consoles. However, Microsoft vows that there won’t be any trickery involved with its own titles. In an interview with USA Today, the company’s Shannon Loftis says that all first-party games arriving “in the Scorpio time frame” will run in native 4K — you’ll have at least a few games to show what your new TV can do.
Loftis doesn’t say which games those are, although that isn’t surprising when Scorpio is roughly a year away. All the same, the 4K commitment could be crucial to giving the new Xbox hardware a strong start. Even if many third-party games resort to upscaling instead of real 4K, you’ll have some incentive to buy the new system. It won’t necessarily make you forget about the PS4 Pro (game selection, as always, is a crucial factor), but it might just tempt you to upgrade from an original Xbox One instead of holding out a little while longer.
Via: GamesRadar
Source: USA Today
Windows Preview build prevents Edge tabs from piling up
The latest Windows Insider Preview build for PC and mobile comes with an extensive list of bug fixes and improvements, but one feature in particular has the potential to become a procrastinator’s BFF. Microsoft has armed Edge’s tabs with an experimental “Snooze” action that you can use to set a Cortana reminder. Once time’s up, the reminder will pop up as a notification and in Action Center. You don’t even have leave that tab open, since clicking on the reminder automatically loads the website.
Microsoft says people are inclined keep their tabs open indefinitely with the intention of going back to it later. Think about it — when you suddenly become too busy to fill out a website’s registration page or to read an interesting long-form story you find, you tend to leave the tab open. Sometimes you even forget about it until it gets buried under dozens of other tabs. The snooze button sounds like a much better option than leaving multiple websites open or digging for URLs in your History.
Besides the snooze action, the new build also introduces new Edge extensions, including a smart shopping cart that you can use to set price alerts for products you save. More importantly, if you’re running an older Preview build on your PC, expect to get a notification to upgrade once a day. If you still don’t update by October 1st, your computer will reboot every three hours. And if you insist on putting it off, your PC won’t even be able to boot up by October 15th. You should probably set a snooze reminder to make sure it doesn’t get to that point.
Source: Windows
Windows Insiders can send and receive texts on Skype for PC
Windows Insiders who still miss the experimental Messaging everywhere feature may want to get the latest version of Skype Preview for PC and Mobile. Microsoft has updated the app to be able to send and receive text messages on Windows 10 computers, so long as Skype Preview is the default messaging application on their Windows 10 Mobile devices. The new version shows both IMs and text messages in a single view for each contact to prevent clutter, as well.
Microsoft started testing the Messaging everywhere feature back in April, which allowed early adopters to text from their PC. However, Redmond decided not to ship the feature with the massive Windows 10 Anniversary update and even pulled it from the platform’s preview builds. Back then, the company said the decision came from the belief that it can deliver a better experience through Skype. While only Insiders can get the update for now, Microsoft says it will roll out the feature to all Windows 10 users who have the universal app in the coming months.
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