Amazon and Microsoft Aids Cloud Startup Databricks to Boost its Valuation

A cloud-software vendor, Databricks, is illustrating how modern computing is changing. The startup has raised $1.6 billion in funding, increasing its valuation by a humungous 35 percent. It is now placed in the fourth position as the largest privately held, venture-backed US company. The other three companies in the first three positions are Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Google parent Alphabet Inc.

The San Francisco-based company, which started in the year 2013, is providing robust software services that let customers use and analyze their data in various cloud sectors. The cloud implementation rate accelerated during the pandemic as companies and individuals adopted new services. The businesses and governments also increasingly started signing up for a mix of providers to meet their needs. Databricks successfully leveraged this advantage, and now it's placed among the largest cloud-based ventures.

Databricks is one of the best examples of a startup rapidly shifting to private markets with a giant leap in valuation than other companies based in Silicon Valley. Many big companies are investing in Databricks as its market size is growing bigger in the data analysis sector. Besides, it has won favor with cloud vendors because of its unique operating style.

 

 

 

Microsoft to Officially Roll Out Windows 11 on October 5

In a recent press meet, tech giant Microsoft has announced that it will officially be rolling out its most anticipated Windows 11 from October 5 this year. Windows 11 is currently available in the beta version and only to those a part of the Windows Insider program. But the all-new Windows 11 will have new changes with the latest updated version.

The latest version of Windows 11 will include several elements like the new center-aligned taskbar, and other additions include new sounds, Microsoft 365 integration, and much more. Microsoft has also announced the critical requirements for running Windows 11 on a PC. The users will require a processor with two or more cores and a clock speed of 1GHz or higher. The RAM size should be 4GB or more, and with storage up to 64GB storage. The PC will require a TPM 2.0 security version and SecureBootCapable support.

Microsoft has also said that there will be no new additions for AMD CPUs. It has carefully analyzed the newly built AMD Zen processors in partnership with AMD. The users can very soon use Microsoft's PC Health Check app to find out the compatibility of their PC with Windows 11.

 

Microsoft Plans to Expand Azure API Health IT and Cloud Computing Offerings

planning to expand its Azure API (application programming interface) for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) while providing customers with additional data management and cloud computing health IT tools. Also, the existing customers can continue using the product without service disruption or pricing changes.

Azure Healthcare predominantly APIs aims to help care organizations manage protected health information (PHI) data at scale by streamlining the health-based workloads and improving healthcare analytics. Microsoft stated that the company would be offering health data across patient outputs in the cloud sector to make PHI data sharing easier.

The new service aims to support the rapid exchange of data using the latest APIs in compliance with health data standards like FHIR and Digital Imaging Communications in Medicine (DICOM). The customers can manage imaging files in the cloud through APIs uniquely designed for DICOM. Also, the users can manage enterprise data workloads with high availability and disaster recovery support. Azure Healthcare APIs allow customers to manage their data regulations with certifications for ISO, HITRUST, FedRAMP, SOC, and in scope for the Azure BAA.

 

Microsoft to Use the Ethereum Blockchain to Prevent Piracy

Tech giant Microsoft in a recent announcement has stated that it is planning to use the Ethereum blockchain to combat digital piracy by relying on the network's transparent and decentralized nature. The Redmond-based company is now concentrating on new concrete system named Argus, which Microsoft dubbed as the "first public anti-piracy system."

Microsoft along with other researchers from Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University has recently laid out the design, implementation, and evaluation of the new system. Microsoft has said that Argus will be running on a public blockchain to allow digital piracy informers to remain anonymous while maintaining a great level of transparency for the wider public at the same time.

Argus will be protecting the identity of the informers and it will also allow the firm to backtrack the source of the pirated content. Furthermore, by optimizing various cryptographic operations, the cost for piracy reporting will be "reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions," the company added, contrary to the typically transaction fees for which Ethereum is known for.

 

 

Microsoft Enhances Neural Network Model to Improve the Bing Searches

In a recent announcement, Microsoft has stated that it has detailed a large neural network model in order to improve the relevance of Bing searches. The company has said that the model, called a "sparse" neural network, will be complementing the currently existing large Transformer-based networks like OpenAI's GPT-3. Transformer-based models have been gaining a lot of attention in the machine learning world. These models excel at understanding semantic relationships, and thereby they have been used to enhance Bing search.

Microsoft's new Make Every feature Binary (MEB) model is used to improve the Bing Searches. The sparse model has 135 billion parameters and space for over 200 billion binary features. Microsoft has stated that this new MEB can map single facts to features, which allows the model to gain a more nuanced understanding of individual facts.

The company also added that the MEB, trained on more than 500 billion queries for over three years of Bing searches, runs in production for 100 percent of Bing searches in all regions and languages. It's now the largest universal language model the company is serving to date. The model occupies 720GB when loaded into memory and sustain 35 million feature lookups during peak traffic time.