Microsoft’s Sway app is now generally available for Windows 10, as well as for iPhone and iPad. Sway, which has been called a ‘digital presentation tool’, was first released on October 1st 2014, and later updated in December that year.

Microsoft has reported how the new app exceeded its own expectations in terms of popularity, although it’s not surprising that it is a hit with students and businesses

While Sway is in some ways familiar with OneNote Microsoft has said that the two are different, with Sway being more about presentations than collecting ideas.

astleOS Software, LLC announced that its CastleHUB will be one of the first smart home hubs to support Windows 10, and will add voice-control assistant Cortana and far-field control with Microsoft’s motion-detecting Kinect.

 Also featured in this roundup is the change in leadership at Quirky, Inc., as well as August Home, Inc.’s addition of Apple Watch support to its iOS app.

GE’s Industrial Internet heads to the Cloud

General Electric officially announced Predix Cloud, the company’s Cloud-based machine data analytics software. The Predix Cloud is designed specifically to handle industrial data between various industries, such as aviation, healthcare, transportation and oil/gas utilities.

Radius Intelligence Inc. raised a hefty $50 million from investors to support the development of its business-to-business targeting service. The funding caps off a record year that saw its revenue quadruple thanks to an influx of new clients drawn to the prospect of being able to better identify future opportunities.

Radius facilitates that with a segmentation engine that not only provides insight into different subsets of an organization’s existing customer base but also outside groups that might be interested in its offerings. The company claims that its automated approach has enabled some users to increase their sales severalfold through targeted expansion into new segments.

Microsoft will offer a new premium Office 365 Enterprise Suite which will include Skype for Business, analytics and new security features, later this year.

Phil Sorgen, Microsoft worldwide partner group corporate vice president, says the new suite, dubbed E5 ‘will provide a significant new opportunity for partners to build new service offerings around real-time communication and analytics, and to reach new customers with important new security features.

Sorgen says E5 will encompass the core value of Office 365 productivity and collaboration capabilities as well as ‘significant new innovations’.

Business analytics software market in India is forecast to grow at 9.6% year-on-year through 2019, reaching US $583 million, as compared to 6.8% across Asia-Pacific region, a report said today.

According to the report by IT firm Tableau and research company IDC, organisations are addressing pain points in areas like processes, risk management, optimisation of resources and customer management using next generation analytics software."This helps them in outperforming their peers while simultaneous reducing the data review time significantly," IDC Asia Pacific Associate Vice President (Big Data, Analytics and Software) Craig Stires told reporters here.

There’s bad news for shareholders of Teradata Corp., which has lost $265 million in Q2 2015 thanks to a $340 million “goodwill impairment charge” that sucked away its profits. Meanwhile the company’s bottom line isn’t being helped by longer sales cycles and the continued deferrals of large transactions, it said in a statement.

According to the company, Teradata’s second quarter revenues fell by 8 percent compared to the year before, to just $623 million. Net income also fell, with the company reporting a $265 million loss compared to $96 million in profits one year ago. The quarter represents Teradata’s first loss since it became a publicly traded company.

Microsoft Corp. is reported to have acquired Software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud cybersecurity company Adallom, Inc. for $320 million.

Founded in 2012 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, former members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200, Adallom offers a cloud access security platform which delivers visibility, governance and protection for cloud applications.

Available as a SaaS-based or on-premises solution, the company’s solutions are said to offer an innovative platform, that in their own words, means that “you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand risks and threats.”

 After serving as a virtual assistant on Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 10 OS, Cortana is gearing up to provide enterprises with big data-derived business insights.

 As an accessible and user-friendly technology, Cortana is the perfect embodiment of Microsoft's goal of placing advanced, contextually aware data analytics and machine learning technologies and tools in the hands of developers and, ultimately, everyday users, according to Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. Cortana Analytics Suite is a fully managed set of cloud services that tie together information management, machine learning, and big data storage and processing, along with vision, face and speech analysis.