Daily Update, Feb. 28th – Surface Rollout Continues, Yammer Adds Translation Capabilities, Bing Maps Takes You to the Top of the World & More

Microsoft announced today that the rollout of Surface will continue beginning in late March, bringing Surface RT with Windows RT to Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan, and Surface Pro with Windows 8 Pro to Australia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Read the press release to learn more.

Also today, enterprise social network Yammer announced plans to add message translation capabilities, which will allow users to instantly translate Yammer conversations into their native languages.

“Removing language as a barrier to cross-company collaboration can be a competitive game changer for multinational organizations. It opens a world of possibilities,” said Adam Pisoni, Yammer co-founder and general manager of Engineering, Microsoft Office Division, in a press release this morning.

“); // ]]>

“This is another example of Yammer’s accelerated innovation following the Microsoft acquisition — we’re able to use Microsoft Translator to quickly deliver additional value to customers,” Pisoni added.

Bing is using new satellite imagery and bathymetry data to add new detail and coverage to the “top of the world” views within Bing Maps and the Windows 8 Maps App, and the Bing Maps Blog has some stunning visuals. Also at Bing, the Bing Fund has announced that social discovery app Sonar will be the fifth start-up to join its incubator program. A post on Bing’s Search Blog has more.

Microsoft has been talking big data this week at the O’Reilly Strata Conference. Get the latest, including how big data helped build Halo 4 and some must-read big data myth busting, over on the SQL Server Blog.

Posted by Steve Wiens
Guest Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

Tags: , , , , ,