Electronic Arts had a successful fourth quarter with strong financials and numbers. As per the earnings report, EA is the top publisher for PlayStation and Xbox One in the “Western world for the fiscal year 2016 as per EA estimates”. During their latest earnings report, the company also highlighted that Star Wars Battlefront is a highly successful new franchise, selling over 14 million units in fiscal year 2016, which was way ahead of company’s expectations. So, it makes sense for the developer to think about a successor to the popular game.

The company confirmed during the earnings call that Star Wars Battlefront 2 is in development and is expected to launch sometime in 2017 (via Gamespot). EA CFO Blake Jorgensen confirmed it will have “bigger and better worlds” and will make use of the content from the “new movies” — although he didn’t name which ones. Jorgensen further said that the company plans to release on new Star Wars game every year for the next three to four years, which sounds great.

If you’re not one of the 14 million, you can get Star Wars Battlefront from the Xbox Store.

Colorwave has launched a beautiful yet expensive Xbox One controller known as “Xbox One Elite Titan Controller“. The controller carries a whopping $299 price tag, which is way more than the standard controller which ships with the console itself (via Windows Central).

The controller’s front is made of gold carbon fiber graphics with a gloss finish while rest of the controller are painted jet black gloss, giving it a premium look compared to the standard controller. The company mentioned that it’s a limited edition piece and the initial run is only of 50 pieces which means that you may have to act fast if you want to get this controller.

Colorwave said on the product page:

Carbon fiber is a man-made material that has revolutionized the aerospace industry, auto racing and artificial limbs. Although carbon fiber is incredibly strong and lightweight, it also has a distinctive woven pattern that makes it appealing to the masses. Because of its appeal, ColorWare created a custom gold carbon fiber graphic for the Xbox One Elite Controller. This limited edition custom Xbox one controller with the gold carbon fiber graphics is called Titan.

The Xbox One Elite Titan Controller is heavier than the standard controller, has three sets of thumbsticks and two d-pads — one looks like the original while theo ther one is designed for cross-directional movements. Additionally, there are four detachable paddles which can be controlled by an app specifically designed for the Elite Controller. Users can use the app to “program back paddles, and remap any of the 14 digital inputs from the controller.”

Here’s a video showing Colorwave’s Xbox One Controller:

Included in the box are carrying cases, a set of 4 paddles, a set of 6 thumbsticks, 2 D-pads: faceted and standard, a USB cable, AA batteries and a quick set up guide and product manual. The case is compatible with Windows 10 and Xbox One console.

Microsoft has pulled the torrent app, Torrenty, from the Windows Store after it was found to prompt the download of apps infected with adware.

ZNET’s Ed Bott was one of the first to discover the suspicious app after opening the current version on his PC and noticing a rather strange button that prompted him to update. “That “1 Update(s) Pending” message doesn’t look like an ad; it appears to be part of the user interface,” he describes. “Clicking that button opened a web page that immediately tried to download a program called Setup.exe. With Microsoft Edge set as the default browser, the software downloaded in a matter of seconds, with a Run button appearing at the bottom of the browser window.”

The app’s endgame was apparently to install a browser add-on that enables a variety of unwanted popups and ads on top of a user’s internet browser.

In addition to pulling the app from the Windows Store, Microsoft also responded with the following statement: “Microsoft has a thorough review process for app submissions, based on a strict set of certification requirements. No approach is perfect, so we encourage people to report any issues they may encounter with Windows Store. For most issues, customers can use the “report concern to Microsoft” link in the Store. For infringements concerns, people can use our online tools or email [email protected] directly.”

In addition to being one dodgy Windows 10 app, Torrenty’s main purpose was to download and upload files via the popular BitTorrent file sharing method. While there are some legitimately legal files that can be shared via BitTorrent, the method is mostly known for being notoriously popular for spreading illegal copies of TV shows and movies. Part of the reason for its popularity is due to the fact that with BitTorrent, there is no one download location, parts of the shared file are hosted by other users who have already downloaded the file themselves.

Have you downloaded any untrustworthy apps from the Windows Store? Share your experiences with the community in the comments below.

Xbox Live has always been a Microsoft service that I’ve loved and appreciated. The Xbox Achievements add an extra layer of content to games, the leaderboards are great for creating a more social experience, and the seamless cloud saves and backups mean gamers can delete games from their Xbox console, Windows phone, or PC and reinstall them at a later date to pick up where they left off. Well, this is what I thought until today when I found out that my assumptions concerning Xbox-branded games were completely wrong.

While I love my Windows phone (It’s a Lumia 930 for those that are curious), ever since I got it it’s had this bug which prevents it from making system backups to the cloud. For a year and a half I’ve spoken to a variety of in-store, on the phone, and online chat support and have tried every possible solution but nothing seems to squash the bug. The only way to fix it apparently is to do a hard reset to return it to its factory settings. This seemed like a hassle though and, to be honest, the lack of backups has never bothered me too much because all of my apps such as Evernote, Dropbox, etc all save data to the cloud and all of my Windows phone games support Xbox Live, which means cloud saves for them too, right?

Due to a separate bug which has been causing my Windows phone’s System memory to expand exponentially to the point that it now fills up around 28 Gig out of the 35 Gig total memory, and fills up any space that I free up immediately, I decided that I should probably do that hard reset that I had been putting off for so long.

Still unable to make a backup to the cloud, I connected the Windows phone to my Surface Pro via USB to make a local backup of files but discovered that there was no way to backup apps this way. Wanting to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, I began chatting with Lumia and Xbox support staff on Twitter. While the Lumia support promised that any game with the Xbox branding would have its own cloud save, they admitted to not being sure and suggested I talk to the Xbox support who informed me that while my copy of Age of Empires: Castle Siege would be fine (I assumed it would because I use cloud save-based crossplay with the game to play it on my Surface Pro as well), all of the data from Angry Birds Star Wars 2 would be completely lost.

Despite being branded as an Xbox Live Windows phone game and having Xbox Achievements and Xbox Live leaderboards, Angry Birds Star Wars 2 does not support Xbox Live cloud saves.

I was given the phone number for North America’s Xbox Live customer and business support and, after a friendly chat with a genuinely friendly staff member, was asked to wait while they confirmed what I had told them with their gaming expert. Moments later, the staff member returned and explained, quite clearly, that Microsoft treats Xbox 360 and Xbox One console games differently than their phone and PC games and that while the console games are given full access to Xbox Live’s features, proper Xbox Live functionality on phone and PC titles is limited to games published directly from Microsoft.

In short, Age of Empires: Castle Siege is published by Microsoft so it enjoys full Xbox Live functionality while Angry Birds Star Wars 2 is published by Rovio and doesn’t.

This really surprised me as obviously there are a variety of video games on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One which are published by other companies yet still support cloud saves and all of the other Xbox Live functionality. This news also conflicts greatly with Microsoft’s recent efforts to merge phone, PC, and console into one system with Windows 10.

Microsoft treats Xbox 360 and Xbox One console games differently than their phone and PC games

It’s also incredibly misleading as the Xbox Live branding is promoted in such a way that implies that all games with the Xbox label use all of Xbox Live’s features. If games are just slapping on the Xbox green banner and not using the features players have come to expect, what’s the point?

Wanting to learn more from this experience, I asked if there was possibly a list of the Windows phone and PC Xbox games that did or didn’t support cloud saves but was told that for information on individual games, I should contact the game developers directly as the cloud saves for non-Microsoft published Xbox games actually use the developer’s own servers and not Microsoft’s.

This made me think that perhaps they had misunderstood me and that they thought I was referring to the numerous non-Xbox-branded Windows phone games on the marketplace but they confirmed that they were indeed talking about the Xbox games.

I’m not sure what to do now. With Windows phone’s inability to make local backups and the glitch that’s preventing me from making a cloud backup, I may just have to say goodbye to the app I had invested hours in and opened daily for the past year and a half. There is the possibility that when my phone gets the Windows 10 Mobile update (whenever that is) that the new operating system will fix the cloud backup and System memory bugs but that requires waiting for that to rollout and weeks, possibly months, of using a phone doesn’t even have enough space to take a single Instagram photo.

Xbox Live branding is promoted in such a way that implies that all games with the Xbox label use all of Xbox Live’s features

Of course, the easy solution is to just say goodbye to that one game, but it’s hard to do that to a game you’ve been opening on a daily basis to claim the daily prize (My collection of weird-looking Star Wars bird characters is massive now!). There are also several Xbox Achievements I have yet to unlock as well and the thought of starting over is frustrating beyond words.

Update: In the 24 hours following the writing of this article, my phone’s System memory became so full that even opening apps became impossible. I performed the hard reset and, as expected, all progress in Angry Birds Star Wars 2 was lost. Leaderboard scores remained, but all unlocked levels were locked again and my entire library of birds was deleted.

This whole situation really surprised me and I honestly wouldn’t have believed the Xbox Live service was so fractured if I hadn’t heard it from a variety of Lumia, Xbox, and Xbox Live support and staff members directly.

So, what’s the takeaway from all this? If your Xbox-branded PC or Windows phone game is published by Microsoft, it will have full Xbox Live functionality and you can delete and reinstall to your heart’s content. If it’s published by someone else however, contact the developer or publisher directly and ask for specific details. While my particular situation may be unusual, the practice of deleting games and other apps from devices to free up space is very common and a cloud backup won’t restore game data if the game has been deleted manually by the user.

Have you experienced something like this? Will it affect which games you download in the future? Let us know in the comments below.

The Windows App Team has written up yet another blog post to inform developers about their options when it comes to storing app data. The team has been focusing on building knowledge on the building blocks of app development and encouraging developers to build on and convert their applications to the Universal Windows Platform. A month ago, we even saw Microsoft’s porting guide for apps to convert from Silverlight to UWP.

The blog series has already covered roaming data and utilizing cloud providers, but this post specifically focused on the local types of data storage. What that means is the data that is stored directly in the device’s files instead of being shared multiple installations.

Developers will need to decide which type works best with their application. There are two types of app data: Files and settings. Files include the data that the application needs to store binary and custom types of data. The settings is best used for saving the app status and user preferences through a variety of data types:

• UInt8, Int16, UInt16, Int32, UInt32, Int64, UInt64, Single, Double
• Boolean
• Char16, String
• DateTime, TimeSpan
• GUID, Point, Size, Rect
• ApplicationDataCompositeValue — a set of related app settings that must be serialized and deserialized atomically

As most developers know, the data can be stored in three possible locations on the device: Local, LocalCache, and Temporary. The best part about data stored in the Local folder is that the information can be backed up with the App Data Backup just in case. This also means, however, that security isn’t guaranteed. Developers using the Local folder should avoid storing personal information, credentials, and data that are tied to a specific device.

Local folders can hold both files and settings. The best part about data stored in the Local folder is that the information can be backed up with the App Data Backup just in case. This also means, however, that security isn’t guaranteed. Developers using the Local folder should avoid storing personal information, credentials, and data that are tied to a specific device. Furthermore, the blog states that using the Credential Locker feature is recommended to ensure the safety of information that should remain private.

LocalCache folders will hold the data after suspension or closure of the application, but will not remain through the backup assistant. This is where developers should store authentication, credentials, and any other data that is needed across app sessions but shouldn’t be saved otherwise.

Temporary folders serve exactly the purpose of being temporary. Data in the temporary folder is best used for files that won’t be needed anymore after the application’s use. It’s also good practice to clear the temporary files when an app is initialized to minimize any storage issues.

With these options in mind, developers will be able to make a more informed decision on how exactly to store the data locally on devices. To read more into the detail of how to implement data storage, check out the official blog written by Hector Barbera from the Developer Ecosystem and Platform.

Microsoft Azure is becoming the most available major cloud provider globally. Today, Microsoft Cloud celebrated a new milestone announcing that they are expanding with two new datacenters in the South Korea regions. With availability to the cloud, South Korea will be able to expand digitally and perhaps even break into more innovations.

“The core of cloud service is security. Microsoft Azure is perceived as the trusted cloud service as it has numerous certifications from many international organizations. I hope the Microsoft announcement today provides Korea with an opportunity to increase awareness of the need for security in cloud services.” – Chun Shik Park, Professor of Information Security of Seoul Women’s University and the former Chairman, KIISC (Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology)

But South Korea isn’t the only one celebrating a release today! It’s been nearly a year since Microsoft had made the statement addressing all of the concern for data residency in Canada. But that won’t be a problem with the newly constructed and now generally available data centers in Toronto and Quebec City. Finally, Canadians will have no need to be concerned about the legalities tying data to a center stored beyond their local laws. Canadian business customers are also able to store and transfer their data to various other areas of the world where an Azure datacenter is stored for efficiency and continuity as well as making their connection to the public cloud privately via Azure ExpressRoute.

The blog noted that Canadian customers are going to have the opportunity to benefit from Dynamics CRM Online that will release in the next quarter.

“Working with Microsoft is a tremendous opportunity for Nova Scotia. We encourage innovation and we are excited to be taking advantage of the newly opened Microsoft Canadian data centre where we will begin moving more than 35,000 users to the Microsoft Canadian cloud over the coming years. Nova Scotia continues to be an innovative leader in Canada in many areas and this solution supports this visionary type of thinking.” – Labi Kousoulis, Minister Internal Services, Province of Nova Scotia

Over $15 billion has been put into the building of the cloud and expanding its reach across the globe providing cloud services such as the industry-leading security, privacy, control, compliance, and transparency. The Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM Online have been ISO 27001 certified and kept up to the SSAE 16/ ISAE 3402 SOC 1 and SOC 2 expectations.

That makes an impressive total of 32 Azure regions across the world, 24 that are available currently and not likely to stop anytime soon.

Microsoft just dropped a cumulative update for Windows 10, and it includes quality improvements and security fixes. While not widespread, since the release, though, some Windows 10 users on Reddit have complained that the update makes their computer slow. Microsoft has responded to such complaints, and a Microsoft employee has posted a workaround for the issue to the Windows 10 subreddit.

Posted by johnwinkmsft, the Microsoft employee notes that, “if your PC is abnormally slow after installing the update, you may be seeing a problem that I’ve been trying to track down for a couple of weeks.” To try and alleviate the slowness, though, the employee recommends to do the following:

•  Click in the Cortana search box to bring up Cortana
• Click the Notebook
• Click Settings
• Move the slider under “Cortana can give you suggestions, ideas, reminders, alerts and more.” to “Off”

So, what do you think? Have you tried this trick? Has this trick worked for you? If so, please let us know by dropping us a comment below.

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of a new Office 365 datacenter region in Canada. The new Canadian datacenter region will help Canadian corporations and government agencies meet strict security and compliance standards now that their Office 365 data is being stored within their national borders, while providing to all of the other security certifications Microsoft has garnered for Office 365 in general.

In an Office 365 blog post, an Office 365 spokesperson wrote:

The new datacenter region adds in-country data residency, failover and disaster recovery for core customer data at rest to customers in Canada. Canadian customers continue to have access to the full breadth of productivity and collaboration services available in Office 365 today.

The datacenter region is actually comprised of two datacenters, one in Toronto and one in Quebec City. Today’s news also comes on the heels of Microsoft expanding datacenter regions in Japan, Australia, and India. The increasing number of international datacenter regions will help make the case of continued Office 365 growth among foreign governments and corporations who follow strict compliance guidelines.

Part of Microsoft’s evolved branding of empowerment has been at the center of many of its recent endeavors that include a revamped operating system with Windows 10, making the cloud more accessible with Azure, getting Office into as many hands as possible with Office 365 and Web apps.

Microsoft’s march of empowerment has also extended to support small business, non-profit aid, and education. Today, the Office 365 team is carving out another empowerment niche that involves connecting Microsoft employees with teachers and students from classrooms around the world.

The new Microsoft initiative is called Meet the Microsofties and includes:

Using our Skype in the Classroom program through the Microsoft Educator Community, your students’ voices can shape the future of Microsoft technology for the classroom. Over Skype, connect with the teams that build the tools you use every day. Tell them how you use our technology right now, what you like and don’t like and what features you dream about. This is also a great opportunity for your students to learn about the importance of STEM and hear firsthand what a career in tech looks like.”

A meeting with a Microsoftie is expected to last roughly 20 to 30 minutes and includes conversations about product feedback, students and teacher’s experiences with Microsoft technology, suggestions on fixes and features, and career advice. While much of the conversations will revolve around Microsoft technologies in the classroom, students and teachers are encouraged to discuss whatever suits them such as recent technology news, opinions, or general questions about related topics.

Meeting a Microsofties is a relatively easy five-step process that involves:

1. Determine, which Microsoft group your classroom, would like to connect with over Skype. We have an initial kickoff list of teams and products, but this will be expanding every day.
2. Have the teacher register at the Microsoft Educator Community. If already registered, then just sign in.
3. Head over to the Meet the Microsofties area of the Skype Classroom area of our community and find a team you like—as an example, here is the Sway team’s landing page.
4. Find a time and date on the calendar and submit it.
5. The Microsoft team will get back to you, and you can set up the Skype call from there.

With the introduction of the Meet the Microsofties program, it would appear that Microsoft is looking to get even more direct feedback about its products and how they can be improved for teachers and students in classrooms around the world. In a crowdsourcing kind of way, educators and students will help shape the future of Microsoft’s products in the classroom and beyond.

The list of Backward Compatible Xbox titles is always growing, and today four new titles have been added to the list. In two separate tweets, Larry Hryb has announced that Final Fight: Double Impact, Faery: Legends of Avalon, Frogger 2, and Puzzelgeddon are all now available on Xbox One through Backward Compatibility.

Also, Frogger 2 & Puzzlegeddon are available on Xbox One Backward Compatibility https://t.co/qPMRNrLoTQ pic.twitter.com/cPa5tjDLvl

— Larry Hryb ????????☁ (@majornelson) May 10, 2016

Final Fight: Double Impact & Faery: Legends of Avalon are now avail. on Xbox One Back Compat https://t.co/qPMRNrLoTQ pic.twitter.com/PtmJTVVH0q

— Larry Hryb ????????☁ (@majornelson) May 10, 2016

You can find the full details, and download links to each of these titles below.

Frogger 2: $9.99

Hop along with Frogger® 2 as you travel through more than 15 challenging levels filled with new enemies and obstacles. Each of the 5 exotic environments provides a new set of challenges but beware of the bosses that try to thwart your progress. Compete with up to 4 friends in 2 online multiplayer modes – Race Mode and Jewel Duel.

Puzzlegeddon: $9.99

Set in an array of galaxies, Puzzlegeddon™ features a clever mix of puzzle, action and strategy in a game that is fast-paced and addictive! Compete for the top spot on the planet by creating multiple combos for the quickest way to gather enough resources to blast your enemies out of this world!

Final Fight: Double Impact: $9.99

Final Fight: Double Impact takes you on a hard-hitting journey through Capcom history with the ultimate versions of arcade classics Final Fight and Magic Sword. Double Impact slams into your home with seamless online and local co-op multiplayer, new music by acclaimed remixologists, HD-filtered graphics, a host of unlockables to discover, and an integrated online leaderboard to prove your mettle!

Faery: Legends of Avalon: $7.49

Faery: Legends of Avalon is a big role playing game with a very distinctive ambience and graphic style. Create your character, embark in a great adventure and discover the fantastic world of Avalon. You will have to understand why this magic world is dying, and save the kingdom from certain disappearance. In a thrilling adventure where your choices will shape the story, develop your character, his abilities and special powers, as well as his equipment through the victorious battles and accomplished quests! Numerous dangers await you and the battles against some of the creatures and monsters of the game promise to be formidable. Gain power and experience, and assure the support of friendly companions you will meet through your journey. Carefully select who will fight at your side, and live the incredible experience of being accompanied by a dragon, a troll, fairies and other fantastic creatures!

So, what are your thoughts on these titles? Do you think you will download any of these titles? If so, be sure to drop us a comment below and let us know why!

A few weeks ago we delivered you the news that Windows gamers would get to give Fallout 4’s mod tools a beta test. Today, we can report to you that the same mods will be heading to Xbox One in a closed beta once the next Fallout 4 expansion pack hits the Xbox store on May 19th.

We’ve hit 1 million Mod downloads already on PC! Console coming soon, closed Beta for #Xbox Mods after #FarHarbor https://t.co/Mvp2BID8Pn

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) May 9, 2016

The announcement was first made on the Bethesda Game Studios Twitter account, but tweet also mentions a milestone from the PC version of the mods, which have hit 1 million downloads in just two weeks.  As per IGN, though, players on the PS4 will have to wait another month for mod support, when they will be given the ability to create the own mods or download them from Bethesda.net.

The mods system has always been a very important part of the Fallout 4 experience, and after releasing a mods creation kit on PC, the team over at Bethesda have kept that principle in mind over the last few months.

Last night in the fourth game of the playoff series between the Golden State Warriors and the Portland Trailblazers, Stephen Curry had an incredible performance in overtime. And the results of his 17-point overtime show wasn’t just a 3-1 series lead for the Warriors, but Portland Trailblazers owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen became a new internet meme with #PaulAllen.

https://twitter.com/Jason/status/729915455574446080

Pictures of Paul Allen’s open mouth and shocked look made their way around the internet as his team fell further behind in the playoff series. Twitter users, as can be expected of course, started getting more and more creative.

https://twitter.com/AndyCole84/status/729912087527362561

https://twitter.com/crying_jordan/status/729911372981612544

But Allen’s response is understandable. Stephen Curry returned unexpectedly from the injured list last night. And at first he was rusty and it looked like he might not have much impact on the game. But as the game went on he had an incredible performance, including a tough 3-pointer in the last minute when the Trailblazers were behind by 5. In the end, the Warriors beat Portland 132-125.

Given other news regarding Paul Allen’s yacht in the Caymen Islands, this meme is probably the last thing he was hoping for last night.

Smart car seems to have become the new hot trend for big technology companies, which makes it understandable, but no less surprising, that Microsoft is developing, or at least collaborating on, one of its own.

The project – part of Microsoft’s new “platform for the Intelligence Revolution” was mentioned by CEO Satya Nadella during his keynote at Hannover Messe 2016, the world’s largest industrial technology fair this April. Thanks to CNN, we can get a glimpse of  the Microsoft-powered self-driving car in action.

A cooperative project between Microsoft and engineering firm IAV, first shown off during the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2016), the smart car’s first striking feature is how ordinary it looks. The sentiment is founded, since unlike Google’s self-built roundish creation, the car is more like a normal vehicle filled with connected technology (the highly-visible Volkswagen logo seen from the front betrays its heritage). Nevertheless, from the video, it seems to be pretty capable of most things you can imagine a smart car can do, including driving by itself, slowing down when pedestrians are close, stopping at red lights, and much more.

The car accomplishes all these through what is referred in the video as a “hyper-connected world” where everybody is tied to a connected device, and every device is connected in some way – almost like a spider web with the car being the spider that relies on the web to tell its ways.

Take the pedestrian example: the smart car knows when it’s nearing one and slows down due to the connected Microsoft Band she is wearing. While not everyone is expected to have a Band on their wrist even in Microsoft’s imagined future, the theories behind the technology should work for any other mobile devices, with the smartphone being a prime target due to their increasing ubiquity. The traffic light in the video is also WiFi-connected to be able to tell the car to stop.

What should be more interesting to Microsoft enthusiasts is how the company’s technology is integrated into the car. Nadella mentioned in his speech that Windows 10 can be streamed directly to the car’s dashboard, and while it’s not clear what other functions users get to use, at least Cortana seems to work swimmingly. Microsoft’s virtual assistant is seen used in the video to get weather info, and even send an email.

We can only imagine that as Cortana gets more powerful, so will the smart car experience. In fact, Microsoft seems to be going beyond self-driving for its smart car vision, stressing what users can do with the car once the driving part is automated, as the most important.

While the Microsoft-powered smart car works well in the video, it still relies on many external factors to function correctly, like other devices’ connectivity. As mentioned in the video, it will take a while yet before the world becomes “connected” enough for such a solution to work properly. Nevertheless, the car is an interesting approach to a trending topic in technology, and we are excited to see what Microsoft will come up with in the field in the future.

Just a few months ago at BUILD 2016, Phil Spencer revealed some new and exciting updates for PC gamers on the Universal Windows Platform on Windows 10. Today, Microsoft has announced that those updates are now going live for developers who have games in the Windows Store.

Overall, the updates will roll out the ability for PC gamers to disable V-Sync and also add in support for NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync. Additionally, the update also adds in the ability for unlocked framerate refresh for UWP games. It will, however, be up to the developer to release an update for their respected games in order to integrate today’s UWP updates.

For PC gamers, the updates mean that UWP games will now support these technologies just as Win 32 games currently can. The support for unlocked frame rate, and the NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync, meanwhile will eliminate lag, screen tearing, and stutter.

From Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Quantum Break, and Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, there are already many UWP games in the Windows Store. Microsoft is clearly slowly proving that Windows 10 will soon be the place to game.

It’s that time of the week again when Xbox Live Gold subscribers are given the chance to purchase a selection of Xbox 360 and Xbox One video games for a significantly discounted price.

Way up the top of the Deals with Gold list with a huge 60% discount are Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Edition, EA SPORTS Rory McIlroy PGA TOUR, Payday 2: Crimewave Edition, and WWE 2K16 Digital Deluxe Edition on the Xbox One while Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 get the 60% discount on Xbox 360.

Video games with a 50% discount include Albedo: Eyes from Outer Space, Elite Dangerous Standard Edition, and No Time To Explain on Xbox One and Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty Classic, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, GRID 2 All-In Pack, and The Crew Season Pass on Xbox 360.

Xbox One title, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Digital Pro Edition is currently discounted by 45% and WWE 2K16 is 40% cheaper. Both NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM 4 and NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM 4 – Deluxe Edition received a 35% discount as part of the Deals with Gold campaign.

Deals with Gold is a list of discounted video games that are updated weekly for Xbox Gold Live subscribers to purchase. It’s mostly used as a way to encourage Xbox One and Xbox 360 owners to pay the monthly or annual Xbox Gold Live membership fee and is very good value as normally just buying one discounted game will cover the price of membership.

Microsoft also gives Gold members a variety of free games to play each month with this month’s titles being Defense Grid 2 and Sunset Overdrive on Xbox One and Grid 2 on Xbox 360 (playable on Xbox One).

Have you downloaded any of these games this month? Let us know your recommendations in the comments below.

While some Windows users may still have issues with Microsoft’s Windows 10 upgrade process for various reasons, the company is still sitting firm behind its intentions and in doing so, it’s helping a largely unspoken group of individuals.

Through Microsoft’s Upgrade Your World program, designed to encourage nonprofit organizations to help make a difference in their neighborhoods, the company is sourcing, discovering, and partnering with talent from around the world and contributing to the lives of millions.

Most recently, the Upgrade World Program joined forces with CARE, a crisis response organization serving individuals and families in some of the poorest communities seventy years in the making. With the help of CARE’s sprawling global community, Microsoft hopes to help support ant deliver tools that help “educate pregnant women, mothers, and their infants during the 1,000 critical days from conception to age two.”

Supported by Windows PCs and Microsoft Excel at CARE’s local office, 550 community healthcare workers were set up and provisioned with mobile devices to aid them in registering, tracking and delivering timely care to pregnant women, mothers and newborns. The phones included an app custom-built by CARE, the Gates Foundation and the Indian government, which allowed for the real-time collection of health information on each client, and synced through the cloud to create a digital health record for each client. And then the magic began…”

Much of Microsoft’s support appears to be behind providing the technology to CARE workers to help make their lives more convenient with up-to-date tools and productivity options. Where some might see Windows 10 and some of Microsoft’s mobile apps irrelevant or cumbersome, the men and women of CARE helping others can now gain access to technology that “gave these health care workers more confidence to do their jobs and engender more trust from those they visited.”

More specifically, as an Upgrade Your World partner, Microsoft will invest $500,000 cash into CARE with an additional $2M worth of software to support the organizations advocate work with improving basic education, ending gender-based violence, increasing healthcare, clean water, and nutritional accessibility for women and others.

To find out more or help with CARE’s global initiative, visit the website here.

The Indian-based global telecommunications service company Bharti Airtel just made a significant investment in its cloud infrastructure and future according to the Economic Times. Joining forces with Microsoft, Airtel’s new business platform titled Connexion and powered in part by Azure Express Route will offer “a more secure, scalable and seamless private connection between enterprises, cloud service providers, and data center partners.”

As Airtel operates in 20 countries across South Asia, Africa and the Channel Islands with over 325 million subscribers, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has once again proven to be enticing in both scale and performance for larger business partnerships. Airtel’s director and CEO of global business Ajay Chitkara explains:

…with Connexion, we are confident of helping customers seamlessly and more securely connect to Microsoft Azure, by bringing down their network cost substantially and improving performance.

The specifics of Microsoft’s and Airtel’s partnership enables Airtel’s customers to create private connections between their infrastructures and Azure date centers. The result of allowing such singular pathways exemplifies Microsoft’s expansion of services in India and its other global audiences through its continued focus on strategic partnerships and reducing the complexity of its service stacks.

Microsoft’s Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer of networking for Microsoft Azure on the company’s expansion:

Enterprises are increasingly leveraging the power of the cloud to empower their workforces and Microsoft is expanding its services for India and global customers. Our partnership with Airtel, the third largest global carrier, is a major step in this direction, and we hope to bring in an integrated and seamless experience for our mutual customers.”

As of now, a few specifics on the matter still present some unanswered questions such as when the new Connexion service will exactly be available for customers or how the new agreement affects Airtel’s previous 2015 announcement of Amazon Web Services powering its private network solutions.

This will help Airtel’s enterprise customers across the globe leverage the power of AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection between customers’ premises and Amazon’s data centers – thus helping them reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and experience a more consistent network connectivity.”

While smart businesses shop the best solutions for a wide array of topics and issues, it seems reasonable that neither AWS or Microsoft’s Azure teams want to share space as Airtel’s cloud and hybrid solutions for its customers.

While Chromebooks may be sucking up the news air regarding education and technology, Microsoft has been plugging away at its still considerable presence in schools and universities. With tools such as OneNote, Office 365, and Surface hardware, Microsoft appears to be revamping its brand with regard to teachers, faculty, and academic administrations.

On that note, the Office 365 team just announced its Education Roadmap via a new website that is easily accessible and viewable to all educators. A previous iteration of Office 365 Roadmap was made available for Enterprise customers that listed key developmental milestones for the suite of Office tools such as Yammer, Skype for Business, Exchange, etc. Now, the same detailed status updates and milestone marker listings are being offered for educators interested in Office 365 deployment.

We’re pleased to share the Office 365 Education Roadmap, which lists updates currently planned for applicable subscribers. Updates for the various stages—from in development to rolling out to customers, to being generally available for applicable customers worldwide—are easily accessible in the Office 365 Roadmap.”

Visiting the site, anyone interested in investing in technology for schools or colleges will find information about what’s being “Envisioned” by the Office team as well as transitioning and management tools for current Office users. By following the path below, users can gain further information on the development process of Office 365.

• Go to roadmap.office.com.
• 2.Open Filters.
• 3.Under Services, select Education.
• 4.Click the launch status (i.e., in development) to see product/feature items.
• 5.Click the item for a description and other information available.

Once filtered, customers will see a listing of milestone updates for the following sections of development from the Office 365 team.

Launched: Fully released updates that are now generally available for applicable customers

Rolling out: Updates that are beginning to roll-out and are not yet available to all applicable customers

In development: Updates that are currently in development and testing

Cancelled: Previously planned updates that are no longer being developed or are indefinitely delayed.

The addition of the Education Roadmap is another piece of a larger puzzle that is becoming Microsoft’s Office 365 platform, rather than only the company’s productivity suite. Microsoft is actively engaging with its communities and education is a enormous community that will help guide the company’s plans moving forward.

Microsoft UK’s chief envisioning officer Dave Choplin made some strong statements at an artificial intelligence conference last Thursday. Sam Shead of Business Insider wrote about Choplin’s claim that AI is “the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today.”

Currently, most people’s interactions with AI are limited to asking Cortana or Siri to help with simple tasks like scheduling appointments or making phone calls. Those small incremental improvements to our digital assistants might make AI seem like something other than the game changer that Choplin envisions.

But as AI improves with advances in deep neural nets and machine learning algorithms, the technology stands the chance to amplify virtually everything in life. Choplin went on to say,

[AI] will change how we relate to technology. It will change how we relate to each other. I would argue that it will even change how we perceive what it means to be human.

Of course, many also are suspect about the promise of artificial intelligence and worry about its impact on everyday life or even its misuse by malevolent actors. Stephen Hawking has worried AI could be an existential threat and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gone on to create an open source AI after worrying about its misuse.

In his statements, Choplin also stressed that as more and more companies try to create AI, “We’ve got to start to make some decisions about whether the right people are making these algorithms.” Choplin went on to ask questions about AI such as:

What biases will be inferred by those people, by those companies? These are things we don’t know about. This is new. We talk about unchartered territory.

Ultimately, Choplin is an optimist regarding how AI will impact humanity, but he doesn’t take it for granted. As an increasing number of thought leaders become more concerned about the advancement of AI, it will be interesting to see how companies like Microsoft respond in creating the AI-based tools of the future.

When Microsoft reported their earnings for the most recent fiscal quarter the neglected to mention that the company had reached a milestone for cumulative revenue. Technologist and writer Jeff Reifman stumbled upon the realization that over the course of its existence Micrsoft has made $1 trillion in revenue.

Riefman notes that Microsoft is not the first technology company to reach this milestone. According to his data, Apple achieved $1 trillion in cumulative revenue sometime last year. His graph of cumulutive revenue for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple illustrates how Apple’s revenue skyrocked with the iPhone, leading the Cupertino based comapny to surpass Microsoft in cumultive revenue around 2013.

However, Reifman dived into the data even further to find that Microsoft still has a slight edge over Apple for now in the tally of cumulative profits. Over its existence Microsoft has made a cumulative $265.2 billion in profit while Apple has made $261.6 billion.

Reifman’s data shows that Amazon has passed the $500 billion cumulative revenue mark but Google has not. And while Amazon has achieved half a trillion in cumultive revenue, the other Seattle based technology company has not been nearly as profitable – only taking in a lifetime total of $3.31 billion in profit.

Cumultive revenue and profits are not the most pertinent financial measures of a mature company. Stringing together the cumulative earnigns over four decades does not help project future earnings or asses present levels of performance. But the figures do stand out as noteworthy to get a sense of gravity and scale to Microsoft and other technology comapnies.

Riefman uses this data to draw attention to the state of Washington’s tax laws. He notes that combined Microsoft and Amazon have made more than $1.5 trillion in revenues while headquartered there, but in his state the wealthy pay the lowest share of taxes compared to the entire country. Riefman goes on to say that while so much tax revenue is not collected from the wealthy and these profitable corporations, the state of Washington has gone onto suffer from a lack of public funds with social problems in education, traffic, homelessness, a heroin epidimic, violent crime, and more.

Because the United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, many companies have sheltered their revenues overseas in countries with low tax rates, such as Ireland, for years. And those years of sheltering profits have added up to massive amounts of cash on hand, which for the most part, sits idle.

Concern has been growing over these considerable off shore piles of cash. Notably, Tim Cook was called before the Senate in 2013 to speak about his company’s decision to hold so much cash off shore. And the more recent revelations found in the Panama Papers has increased the public discourse over tax havens. As the off shore cash reserves of companies like Microsoft and Apple continue to grow into 12 digit figures, something has got to give.