Stories by Blair Hanley Frank

IBM-Salesforce deal will bring Watson data into applications

Watson and Einstein are teaming up, and IBM and Salesforce hope the pairing proves as smart as it sounds. The two companies are working together to bring information from IBM systems into Salesforce’s products through a series of integrations announced Monday.

Microsoft's budget Windows VR headsets roll out to developers soon

A lucky few developers will be able to get their hands on a low-cost Windows virtual reality headset starting this month. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset will start rolling out to a handpicked batch of software makers starting the end of March, with more coming later.

Azure Stack's third technical preview arrives

Azure Stack, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud system, is getting close to release. On Wednesday, the tech giant unveiled the third major public beta for customers that want to test it out.

AI scheduling startup launches subscription for businesses

Setting up meetings can be a pain, since they often require folks to send emails back and forth figuring out a time before finally sending off a calendar invitation to block everyone’s schedule. A New York startup called x.ai wants to simplify that with a helpful bot, and they just launched a product aimed at serving businesses.

Redfin CTO says machine learning needs human help

Machine learning can automate the handling of huge troves of data to help companies make and save money. However, they’re not without pitfalls, as the real estate tech company Redfin learned.

Kubernetes is now generally available on Azure Container Service

Kubernetes is generally available for use with Azure Container Service, Microsoft’s managed cloud container hosting offering, as of Tuesday. ACS support for Kubernetes comes along with the service’s preexisting support for the Apache Mesos-based DC/OS and Docker Swarm.

Microsoft expands developer features for its Teams chat app

Third-party developers have new tools to play with when it comes to building integrations with Microsoft’s Teams group chat app . The company announced a pair of new developer-oriented features on Thursday, aimed at giving greater utility to services that work with Teams.

Amazon's Alexa gains support for Outlook calendars

Users of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant can now ask her questions about the contents of their Microsoft-hosted calendars. On Wednesday, the assistant gained the ability to interact with calendars from Outlook.com and Office 365, similar to how it works with Google Calendar.

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