Author's entries

In the late 1800s, the guanaco, a close relative of the llama, was hunted to near extinction. As we mark this year’s Earth Day (April 22), I want to share my excitement about a new tool that looks to make the future a little brighter for the guanaco and other threatened species in Latin America. That new tool is LiveANDES (Advanced Network for the Distribution of Endangered Species).

It took a year for the artist Léonore Mercier to create Damassama, a unique installation of its kind. Trained for a year at the national studio of contemporary art Le Fresnoy, the young woman has managed to transcend tradition and modernity in her creation.

Paris is known for its broad boulevards, its picturesque side streets and its heavy traffic. Autolib’, an innovative car-sharing service, is helping make the traffic more manageable through a fleet of compact electric cars and an array of flexible services designed to help drivers reduce their reliance on privately owned cars — all connected and managed through an intelligent system based on...

To all skiers out there! Here is a new app that is taking skiing and snowboarding to a new altitude. The Winter Ski & Ride app for Windows Phone gives skiers a wide range of new ways to get more from their favourite sport.

Back in the early days of Microsoft, our mission was to put a PC on every desk and in every home — an ambitious goal for the time. Behind that was the conviction that computer technology had the innate capacity to enrich peoples’ lives. The trick was applying it in a way that made sense, solved a problem, or generally made life better.

In its 13th year, TechFest, is an annual event that brings together for a couple of days, our researchers with people from our various business divisions. It’s one of the processes we use at Microsoft to foster connection between research and product development. Our European research labs have a strong presence with many great projects.

The EU and its Member States investment in R&D is a vital, long-term investment in our collective future. In coming years, Europe’s prosperity, competitiveness and social cohesion will depend far more on its intellectual capital than on any other form of wealth; to starve its education, research or innovation base now will set back Europe’s global competitiveness by years.

On 18 June, we have unveiled Surface: a new family of PCs built to be the ultimate stage for Windows. You can view here, company executives presenting two Windows tablets and accessories. They explain the significant advances in industrial design we made and demonstrate the attention to detail.

No need to say more. The consumer preview of Windows 8 is available for download now. But before you do so, be sure to read the Introducing Windows 8 Consumer Preview post. This post gives a great overview of the benefits of Windows 8 for consumers and of the novelties we have introduced.

The first Innovation Convention and the publication of Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – last December were an essential part of the Innovation Union flagship initiative, as well as an important milestone in the development of the Europe 2020 strategy. The Innovation Convention brought new energy to the discussion of how Europe can become even more...

The internet is developing at a tremendous pace as more businesses and people worldwide gain access to a vast range of online services. Increasingly, those services are built using cloud computing technologies which provide companies with an opportunity to save money on ICT infrastructure, and software developers with an advanced interoperable platform to create, test and deploy new services faster.

In the current, rather pessimistic climate of discussions about Europe’s difficulty to innovate, I was very pleased to see that 48 (nearly 40%) out of 124 student teams selected to attend the Imagine Cup finals are from the European continent (see full list)!  Imagine Cup is the world's premier student technology competition run by Microsoft. European countries like Denmark and France, also took...

The European Commission has placed innovation at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy, encouraging large companies to play a key role through investing in research and development (R&D), as well as through public-private partnerships. 

Since the launch of the Innovation Union flagship by Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn last October, instruments and policies to improve the performance of the research and innovation systems in Europe have never been so much in the spot light.

During the decade I spent at Microsoft Research in Cambridge I’ve witnessed numerous technology transfers from our basic research facility to various business units in the company (for instance F#, TrueSkill, Kinect). There was certainly no unique recipe to make them happen but at high level, there are few principles we can extract.

Benjamin Cohen of Channel 4 News in the UK visited Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, recently and my colleague Steve Clayton took him on a tour to see the people who are building the future and the places where they're building it.   

The new EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science is starting her term with a strong statement; at a time when many European governments struggle with debt, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn announced the biggest package ever for European research: €6.4 billion!

In few years, they will be creators of innovative start-ups, recognised researchers, or, why not, even heads of large IT corporations. In the meantime, 400 students battled it out in Warsaw this July, during the worldwide finals of the Imagine Cup competition organised by Microsoft.

For the second year Microsoft Research in Cambridge opened its doors to an audience of press, academics, industry and policymakers for an event called “Enabling Innovation Through Research”.