Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Microsoft today announced a new set of features designed to help Office 365 users save time and increase productivity. The cloud services bring new capabilities and insights to three of Microsoft’s most popular business applications: Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.

“Editor,” a new feature in Word, for example, is designed to help you improve your writing by suggesting changes beyond simple misspellings and grammatical errors. The digital writing assistant will provide more advanced proofing and editing suggestions over time, and it will eventually explain why specific words or phrases may not be accurate, according to Microsoft. The feature will also zero-in on changes in tone, inconsistent language, slang, clichés, passive voice and other common writing errors. Office 365’s new Word Editor will become available next month, according to Microsoft.

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Twitter’s hunt for major sports programming hit a new high today as the company struck deals to live-stream some out-of-market games from Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Hockey League (NHL). During the past three months, the company signed live-stream deals with all of the “Big Four” major sports leagues, and July has been particularly busy. Twitter also inked partnerships with the National Basketball Association (NBA), Pac-12 Conference, Bloomberg Media and CBS News earlier this month. 

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The equally vaunted and ridiculed blue checkmarks on Twitter are no longer exclusive to elites or those with connections who have an “in” at Twitter. The company this week opened the verified account designation up to all users and put some rules in place for consideration. Many of Twitter’s 310 million monthly active users don’t qualify for verification, but the company is opening the secretive and invite-only process up to anyone.

Accounts of public interest, particularly those maintained by individuals and organizations in “music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas” are all up for consideration, according to Twitter. “We hope opening up this application process results in more people finding great, high-quality accounts to follow, and for these creators and influencers to connect with a broader audience,” Tina Bhatnager, Twitter’s vice president of user services, said in a prepared statement.

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When Microsoft inked a deal with IBM last week to develop new business applications for Surface tablets, it felt like a case of deja vu. Details of the partnership closely resemble those agreed to almost exactly two years earlier by Apple and IBM. The difference, experts say, is how Apple and Microsoft are tackling the ‘next phase in enterprise productivity.’

IBM and Microsoft have been closely aligned on many business deals for decades, making it somewhat surprising that it took so long to bring this particular partnership to fruition. Apple’s deal with IBM, by comparison, was considered a watershed moment because it heralded a new era of cooperation between the longtime competitors

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Land O’Lakes has inked its second major partnership with a cloud vendor in as many months. As the company moves its agriculture tech (or AgTech) into the cloud, it’s investing in a mix of public cloud providers including Google and, most recently, Microsoft.

Land O’Lakes this week tapped Microsoft Azure to run its WinField R7 application, which helps farmers analyze and pick the best seeds for their land to maximize yield and profit. The migration of R7 marks the company’s first major cloud partnership with Microsoft, but it comes on the heels of a larger agreement that began about 18 months ago with a wide-scale Office 365 rollout and Surface tablet deployments in the field, according to CIO Mike Macrie.

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LinkedIn today announced three major updates to Sales Navigator, the company’s product designed to connect sales professionals with qualified buyers or prospective leads based on specific criteria. The social networks says it’s the first major update to the product since it launched almost two years ago.

LinkedIn is looking to expand the appeal of Sales Navigator by focusing on key improvements designed to make salespeople more productive and successful. Sales Navigator will now integrate automatically with your CRM application and identify the most important leads and accounts, according to LinkedIn. You will no longer have to manually select the CRM data most relevant to your active projects.

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Facebook added 54 new projects to its open-source initiative during the last six months. The company is on a mission to open source its code for software and hardware to encourage ongoing development from outside companies and engineers. 

“We build tools that enable engineers to work more easily across platforms, automate testing to catch problems sooner, and help improve the overall performance of our products,” wrote Christine Abernathy, a developer advocate with Facebook’s open source team, in a blog post. “We know from experience that collaborating with the open source community surfaces new ideas and solutions to the challenges that we face.” 

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A new report from video advertising company Mixpo details how today’s publishers place their futures in the hands of Facebook and its algorithms. Every time Facebook changes its policies, as it did last month, publishing companies are reminded of the potential perils that come with relying on Facebook for their audiences. However, the data suggests publishers have little choice. 

Publishers overwhelmingly cite video as the biggest trend in digital media today, and video makes them even more dependent on Facebook, according to Mixpo. “While social distribution helps publishers grow mobile [video] traffic, and perhaps even exposes their content to new audiences, it has also left publishers vulnerable and eliminated significant money-making opportunities,” Mixpo wrote in the report.

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Facebook and Google have a deepening duopoly of apps adult U.S. smartphone owners use, according to the most recent monthly “Mobile Metrix” report from web metrics company comScore. The two giants own and operate every one of the eight most popular apps, based on the number of adults who used them in May 2016. 

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