imageWe released an awesome bracket builder for March Madness this year, and it leverages the power of machine learning & our intelligent cloud to help you with your picks… and impress folks in your pools, of course.

WHY USE BING BRACKET BUILDER?
For the 1st time ever, Bing has partnered with the NCAA® to gain unprecedented access to over 10 seasons worth of Division I basketball data – and we’re putting that knowledge to work for you. Combined with the industry-leading predictions of our Bing Predicts team, we’re giving bracket builders the ultimate March Madness® experience.

From the announcement:

We know that as much as we all love basketball, we don’t have time to follow all 68 teams. In fact, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by Bing, most of us only follow 1-2 teams in the regular season. That means we can’t all be experts and nearly 40 percent of us simply guess when filling out a bracket. Don’t worry, Bing is here to level the playing field for the average fan and make you look like that smart sports analyst.

Beginning today, on Selections Sunday™, we are launching the Bing Bracket at www.bing.com/bracketbuilder with a slew of features to help you build the best bracket, including:

  • Intelligent Predictions: We’ve built Bing predictions right into our bracket builder. So as you hover over a team, we give you all the data you need to make an informed decision on a matchup. Of all the features of our bracket, few are more exciting than our predictions. Once the bracket is announced, our servers need a couple hours to run through all possible 9.2 quintillion outcomes of the bracket, stay tuned to @Bing for updates on when the NCAA bracket builder goes live after 3pm PT! To learn more about how Bing Predicts works, click here.
  • Auto-Fill: Only 1 in 5 people follow more than five teams, so how do you fill out an entire bracket with 68 teams when you really only care about whether your team makes the Final Four? Use the auto-fill function and Bing will help you fill out the rest using smart predictive capabilities and accounting for your favorite teams.
  • Search within your bracket: If you don’t want to take Bing’s predictions for granted, we give you the next layer of team stats to help you make the most informed decision on the possibility of an upset. If you’re one of the 44 percent of us that do research online as we fill out our brackets – the Bing Bracket is for you!
  • Interactive Highlights: With the Bing Bracket you can follow along during the tournament and watch highlights, research teams and players, check scores and engage with your picks directly. Miss a game in your matchup? Visit your bracket and see key highlights post game.
  • Detailed game matchups: Kentucky v Duke? Gonzaga v UNC? Get detailed matchup stats, pulling in historical data and even Bing’s predictions on who’s favored to win and why. Want to know what it will take for the underdog to pull off an upset? You’ll find it here.
  • Export: Four out of 10 March Madness fans will fill out more than one bracket. With Bing we’ll make it easy for you to export directly to the Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge and compete against Bing.
  • Print, save, share: Bing makes it easy to share your success with friends. Easily share on Facebook and Twitter with Bing – and let the games begin!
  • March Madness hub: With 68 teams playing throughout the tournament, that’s a lot of games to keep track of. Bing has you covered. Keep your pulse on the games with a complete tournament schedule, links to watch the live games, matchup predictions, tournament stats, and the latest news from across the web – all within the bracket experience

So get online and give it a try!

imageTomorrow on March 14, 2015 (3.14.15), we are making 12-Month Xbox Music Passes available for purchase for $31.41 (usually $99).

From the Fire Hose:

Every March 14, I get an irresistible craving for pie. But really, it’s Pi Day – an homage to the mathematical constant of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday. And this year, the sequence is even cooler: 3.14.15. Mind. Blown.

To celebrate this auspicious day, you can pick up new digital gift cards with the Pi Day theme your recipients can redeem for apps, games and music. Download the Digital Gift Cards app for free from the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store.

Also on the 14th – and for the day only – you can buy a 12-month Xbox Music Pass for $31.41 (regularly $99) from the Microsoft Store. This subscription gives you access to millions of songs to play on your Xbox, the Web, or your Windows Phone, PC and tablet. This offer is good for new subscriptions and renewals of existing subscriptions.

Finally, exercise your noggin with the new Einstein Brain Trainer HD app. It comes with 30 activities to stimulate your mind. It’s on sale for half-off at the Windows Store for $2.99 and $1.49 at the Windows Phone Store.

Check these out as you eat your pie in honor of Pi Day, and read more about these promotions on Blogging Windows and the Lumia Conversations blog.

Unlimited music for a year for just $31.41.  Yes, this is a total steal.  Get this while you can! 

Robert Downey Jr, Albert Manero, Microsoft OneNote & #CollectiveProject put their heads together to make a 7yo boy very happy.

Check out the smile on that kid. Smile

The Collective Project: Robert Downey Jr. Delivers a Real Bionic Arm

Visit the Microsoft OneNote Facebook page for more works from the #CollectiveProject:
http://facebook.com/OneNote

imageWe just announced the availability of a new option for Azure Media Services called, “Premium Encoding”. 

It now enables complex workflows & tuning for transcoding media into different formats using some automation that can dynamically adapt to the content.

Among other things, it also provides users with the ability to output their content in 4x the number of formats using a large number of audio & video codecs.  It also provides the ability to ingest 2x the number of audio/video formats.

Video encoding can be a complex and complicated space. I often get requests from customers asking for ways to transcode formats that are used primarily in broadcast studios, or in the movie industry. Accompanying these formats are also complicated ‘recipes’ to process the videos that requires custom logic to make decisions about what encoding steps are required.

This week, I am excited to introduce a new technology in Microsoft Azure Media Services that allows our more experienced customers to solve such workflow problems. This premium encoder offers superior quality and flexibility suited for broadcast industry/professional media transcodes. This includes automated decision-making logic that can adapt to a variety of input and output file formats such as MXF, support for additional input and output codecs such as DNxHD, support for higher output resolutions – up to 4K in AVC, support for closed captions,  and much more.

In this blog, I will provide you an overview of the new capabilities of the premium encoder. Please click here to find out more about pricing and visit our documentation center to learn more details about how to use this encoder.

imageAnother release of the Microsoft Products Portfolio has been released. 

I actually don’t have the release notes for this document so I can’t tell you what changed between 3.4 and 3.6.  I can tell by looking at the document, a lot of Azure services appear to be newly added.

Download it below:

imageEarlier, we released a new version of the "Outlook for iOS and Android_Info for IT Pros" Word document.

<taken from the introduction>

This document provides a deeper look into Outlook for iOS and Android for IT professionals including information from Microsoft engineers and answers to frequently asked questions we’ve received from customers. If you have additional questions, please reach out to your Microsoft Account Manager or contact our product team directly by posting in the Exchange IT Pro group on the Office 365 Yammer network.

imageWe just released a new .MSI that contains all the most current firmware and Driver Updates for Surface Pro 3 as of January 30th, 2015.

The .MSI was created for customers that can’t or don’t use Windows Update and for customers that need to do a mass deployment.

Cumulative and current firmware and drivers for the Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 2, and Surface Pro. This firmware and driver package contains drivers for all of the components in the Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 2, and Surface Pro devices, as well as updates to the system firmware that have been released via Windows Update. These drivers and firmware are compatible with Windows 8.1 (Pro and Enterprise). The Surface Pro driver pack contains drivers and firmware that are compatible with Windows 8.0 (Pro and Enterprise). The Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 2 drivers and firmware are not compatible with Windows 8.0 (Pro and Enterprise). These drivers and firmware are not compatible with Surface RT and Surface 2.

For more details, read the announcement here:

imageWe’ve made a new eBook available that focuses on adapting to the world of mobility.

Separate the fact from the fiction around mobile, and understand the factors to consider in adopting a mobile strategy.

Read Unplugged: How mobility changes the way we work to learn how to:

  • Bring innovation to business with low-cost devices
  • Deliver exceptional customer experiences using the latest mobile technologies
  • Choose the right device for specific business needs
  • Assess the total cost of ownership

Visit the link below to download the book:

image

We’re made available a free eBook from O’Reilly on Azure Machine Learning.

The Microsoft Azure Machine Learning cloud platform provides simplified yet powerful data management, transformation and machine learning tools.

R language scripts integrate with built in Azure ML modules to extend the platform. Additionally, models running in Azure ML can be published as web services.

You will be provided information on how to perform data science tasks including, data management, data transformation, and machine learning in the Azure ML cloud environment.

You will learn:

  • Data management with Azure ML.
  • Data transformation with Azure ML and R.
  • Data I/O between Azure ML and the R Scripts.
  • R graphics with Azure ML.
  • Building and evaluating machine learning models with Azure ML and R.
  • Publishing Azure ML models as a web service.

Free tier Azure ML accounts are now available with a Microsoft ID at: https://studio.azureml.net/Home/Free.

Posted by: kurtsh | March 5, 2015

BETA: Office 2016 for Mac Preview

imageWe finally released the preview of Office 2016 for Mac.

For those of you who’ve been using the Office 365 release of Outlook 2016 for Mac, you know that big changes are in store. 

The product is demonstrably modern & tremendously improved over the 2011 release.

Read on for more info.

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