Instagram app now available for Windows PCs and tablets

Instagram app for Windows 10 is expanding beyond mobiles with the launch of PC and tablet friendly versions. Back in April,Facebook had announced collection of apps including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram for Windows 10. The apps were built on Microsoft’s Windows 10 universal platform with support for features like live tiles and cross platform scaling. Back then, Instagram was made available only to mobile device users and now Facebook-owned Instagram is bringing the app to PCs and tablets. With the new app, Windows 10 users can use the app right from their Windows 10 tablet or PC. The app also offers other Windows only experiences like Live Tiles, with live preview of new photos and notifications.
Top Instagram features available with Windows 10 tablet and PC app:
1.Post and edit photos: With the new app, Instagram users can share pictures with their followers and fellow Instagrammers right from the PC or tablet. The app on Windows 10 PC and tablet primarily offers speed and ease of access.
2.Stories: Stories is the latest from Instagram app. The app allows users to see Stories people you follow in a row at the top of the Feed.
3.Instagram Live Tile: Live Tile has been the single most differentiator about Windows 10 since the debut of Windows Phone. With Instagram app, user can find out what their friends and family are up to at a glance.
4.Rich, native notifications: The new app sends rich and native notifications about recent updates.
5.Instagram Direct: With Instagram Direct, Windows 10 PC and tablet users can exchange threaded messages with one or more people, and share posts from their Feed as a message.

Microsoft HoloLens now available for preorder in the UK and five other countries

Microsoft HoloLens, the mixed reality headset is now available for preorder in the UK, Australia, Ireland, France, Germany and New Zealand. Microsoft is pitching HoloLens as a tool to communicate, create and colloborate more easily than ever before. The HoloLens is available for pre-order in each of these countries starting today.
HoloLens is the most craziest thing from Microsoft in the recent times. While most consumers are yet to get acquinted with virtual reality, the HoloLens projects objects on a real world instead of projecting objects on a virtual world.
As Microsoft’s Alex Klipman calls it, “HoloLens is a more personal way of interacting with technology.” Microsoft is now allowing developers and commercial enterprises in UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand to preorder HoloLens and develop contents for its holographic computer.
Microsoft HoloLens was first introduced in January 2015 as the world’s first self-contained holographic computer. With HoloLens, Microsoft brought holograms into real world as a communication tool.
In March 2016, Microsoft shipped HoloLens to developers in the United States and Canada. Since then, Microsoft’s HoloLens has been used innovatively by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, Volvo, architectural firm Trimble, Cleveland Clinic, Autodesk, etc.

Nokia’s comeback Android smartphones

Nokia is all set to launch two new Android smartphones later this year. Nokia’s non-competitive deal with Microsoft ends this year, and the company has already agreed to bring back its brand in collaboration with HMD global. If rumours are anything to go by, Nokia will launch two new smartphones with flagship specifications and a design that we have come to associate with Nokia brand. The leaked images earlier hinted at Nokia announcing smartphones with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 processor and colourful polycarbonate shells like Lumia smartphones launched before. HMD Global, Nokia’s contractor licensing the brand, has already promisedto deliver that trademark build quality and Nokia-esque design.

Microsoft announces GA of Dynamics 365 with AI features

Microsoft is the latest to trumpet its AI capabilities for sales people with the general availability of Dynamics 365 coming on November 1st.
Microsoft announced last summer that it was going to be combining its ERP and CRM into a unified solution, and this is the culmination of that announcement. Like many large organizations, Microsoft tends to deliver the news in waves — it’s coming, it’s in beta, it’s here.

While the news smacks Microsoft points out it has been working on AI long before its biggest competitors like Salesforce and Oracle, which recently announced their own AI capabilities at their respective customer customer conferences, Dreamforce and Oracle Open World.

Microsoft has built in a couple of intelligence features into the release designed specifically for sales and service personnel. First, there is Customer Insights, a stand-alone cloud service, which enables users to bring in a variety of internal and external data sources. Companies can integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. The solution includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don’t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).

It’s been designed as a stand-alone service that can work with any of the Dynamics 365 CRM components — sales, customer service or field service — and can also work with any external CRM tool with open APIs. This last point is particularly telling because it’s giving customers who might not be using Dynamics 365 (but are using other Microsoft tools like Outlook) access to this feature.
The second piece is called Relationship Insights, which as the name suggests gives sales people information about the status of their customer relationships at any given moment. It’s built on the on the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which Microsoft introduced in 2015 and uses tools like sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of the deal closing and the next best action to take.
Microsoft brings new AI-powered features to Office 365 and Dynamics 365
Microsoft gives Salesforce a shove with new Dynamics 365 integrated cloud platform.
A new sales technology stack is coming
Salesforce Einstein delivers artificial intelligence across the Salesforce platform If this sounds familiar, it should because it’s very similar to what we’ve been hearing over the last month from a variety of CRM vendors. While you might legitimately wonder why sales and service people are the recipients of all the wonder that is AI in the enterprise, it seems like a reasonable starting point to improve the likelihood of making sales and understanding your customers better, an increasingly important capability in the mobile-social-cloud age.

It’s important to remember that we are really just at the rudimentary beginnings of where this type of technology could eventually take us. Over time we will see this intelligence added to bots (and other delivery methods) to hide the complexity of the underlying software and guide users to an answer or solution. The idea is to increase our productivity over time, although we are a long way from achieving that goal just yet.

For now, know that Microsoft has consolidated its artificial intelligence tools into a single, coherent division and just about every vendor — not just those selling CRM — is trying to build some level of intelligence into its products. Dynamics 365 is just the latest manifestation.