Microsoft to Integrate MS Office with the Dropbox for Increasing the Cloud Productivity

In the recent times, we have seen many market giants and rival companies collaborating for increasing the quality of their product or even their service. One of the latest additions in this is the approach from Microsoft.

Microsoft is coming together with one of their major competitor and has struck a deal with the DropBox Company; this will allow enhanced interoperability between the Dropbox’s cloud storage and Microsoft Office and further improve the file sharing services offered to the businesses as well as consumers.

This partnership was announced on Tuesday and took the entire industry by surprise as it was being terms as a “coopetition” relationship which indicated co-operation as well as competition. This was due to the fact that Dropbox’s name sake consumer service as well as Dropbox for Business was competing against the Microsoft’s OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

What is the motivation behind this deal? 

The main motivation behind this step is to make the life much easier for the company’s vast number of customers who are currently storing 35 billion Office files in the Dropbox. Although in Microsoft, almost all the Office users completely rely on the OneDrive for Business and OneDrive, Dropbox has managed to amaze people with 300 million people using their service and on the other hand Microsoft Office has about 1.2 billion users.

The driving force behind this deal is one the same line with the other motivations which has encouraged Microsoft to get into partnerships in the recent times. The Company has made a deal with IBM about cloud computing and tie with Salesforce.com.

According to Satya Nadella, CEO, they will keep on looking for possible partnership deals as long as it will yield a considerable amount of benefit for their existing customers by ensuring they are developing products that work together more efficiently and being offered by the teaming up of Microsoft and the other companies.

What in-stored in the future? 

According to Nadella, they will keep on looking for all possible partnerships in the coming months. They understand that at the moment we have “heterogeneous mobile-first cloud-first world” environment and partnerships are becoming the best way to provide excellent services and products to the customers.

With this new partnership of Office and Dropbox, the users will be able to access Dropbox from their office interface and this is being achieved by focusing on the Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Users will be able to make changes to their office files in Dropbox interface and the updated file can be synched between many devices.

In the coming weeks, this updated is expected to be rolled out on Office apps for Android and iOS. The company is hoping to release the web version of the same during the first quarter of 2015. According to this deal, Dropbox will be required to develop a mobile app for the windows platform in the coming few months. This most recent feature will be available to office users having access to Dropbox account as well.

Different Means of Taking Screenshots on Any Smartphone or Tablet

If you are the person who is looking to show off your new wallpaper, your amazing desktop screensaver in front of their friends or even if you want to show off of your new games and Android widgets that you have experimented with, then what to do you do? No need to think of high end ways to achieve this, you simply need to take a screenshot of the things and be ready to show off. The following steps will help you achieve your aim depending on the type of device you are using:
The users of laptops and desktops:

If you are among the people who still rely on and use any one of the versions of the Microsoft windows, then the easiest option they have is to take the complete screenshot share it with your friends. The user just needs to follow the following steps:

1.  The user just needs to click on the print screen tab on your keyboard of on your laptop 
2.  Open the Microsoft paint and just press the Ctrl+V option. 
3.  You will have the entire screenshot of the desktop and you should be able to save the file at your desired location.

If you are looking for more control over the screenshots then you might want to download IrfanView. This will allow the users to capture take the screenshots by following the below mentioned steps:

1. On a regular desktop the user needs to press the C tab and then you will get the option to select the type of screenshot that you are looking for. The users will get a lot of details and options for better experience. The users will be able to move their mouse over the area they want to be captured as the screenshots, click on start and save your screenshot.

2. Mac users will have to follow 2 commands to take screenshots. They can capture the screenshot by pressing the command as cmd + shift + 3 and if you are looking for, capturing only a part of your screen then just press the “cmd + shift + 4 and it will direct you to, drag and select the area that you might want to capture and save the on the desktop.

The users of tablets and Smart phones

Irrespective of what device you are using, Windows Phone, Android phone or even any apple series, the user just has to press the power button and ensuring that the home button is also pressed at the same to time to get a screenshot of the entire screen. But if you have an older version of Android (less than 4.0) then you can follow the below steps:

 Holding the power button for a long time might give option to take a screen shot apart from reboot and shut off.

If not, then when pressing the power button, press the volume button and you might get the option to take screenshot. This feature has been enables in Samsung Galaxy and Sony Ericsson Xperia phones.

Ultrasound-On-A-Chip Can Make Medical Imaging So Cheap?

Medical Imaging Device 

Entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg has begun the creation of what seems to be like a scanner, the size of an iPhone that can be held up to a person’s chest to see a moving 3D image of what is inside. Rothberg has raised a $100 billion for the development of the medical imaging device which is as easy as a stethoscope and will help doctors in the most amazing way.

 The technology according to patent documents is dependent on a new type of ultrasound chip which would eventually lead to ways in destroying cancer cell with heat or deliver information to the brain cells.

Marrying semiconductor technology to problems in biology is a knack which Rothberg has and he had created and sold two DNA sequencing companies, a `454 and Ion Torrent Systems’ and `A Semiconductor DNA Sequencer’, for over $500 million.

The imaging system is being developed by Butterfly Network which is a three year old company that is far advanced on several ventures which according to Rothberg would be coming out of 4Combinator, an incubator which he has created to begin and finance companies that combine medical sensor together with a branch of artificial intelligence science known as deep learning.

Versatile New Ultrasound Scanners 

Rothberg has not commented on how exactly the Butterfly’s device would work or what it would like, but states that the details would only come up when on stage selling it which would probably be in the next 18 months.

However, he guarantees it to be small, which would cost a few hundred dollars and would be connected to a phone as well as be capable to do things like diagnose breast cancer or even visualize a foetus.

Butterfly describes its aim in the patent application as a means of building compact, versatile new ultrasound scanners which could create 3D images in real time.

This could be held up to a person’s chest and one could view through `what seems to be a window’ in the body, as per the documents. Butterfly seems to be betting on the largest bet ever, that any company could have placed on an emerging technology in which ultrasound emitters are etched directly on a semiconductor wafer, together with circuits and processors and the devices are known as `capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducers or CMUTs

Ultrasound – Type of Imaging Test 

Ultrasound is often used by doctors than other type of imaging test which includes viewing a baby at the time of pregnancy, to locate tumours in soft tissues like the liver as well as a recent development in treating prostate cancer by heating up cells with the help of sound waves.

Several of the ultrasound machines tend to use small piezoelectric crystals or ceramic in order to generate and receive sound waves though they have to be carefully wired together and attached through cables to a separate box in processing the signals.

Those who are capable of integrating ultrasound elements directly on a computer chip can manufacture them in a cheap manner in large batches and also create a kind of arrays which can produce 3D images.

This vision of the product was around for several years and it is perhaps a matter of time to wait and watch to see if the product will make its ways into a market validated reality.

Malware Might Use a Voice Synthesizer to Bypass Security Controllers

Development in Voice Control Features

According to researchers, malware could use a voice synthesizer to sidestep some security controllers. Voice control features have been developed in order to provide PCs as well as smartphones with the ease of use especially for users with disabilities which could also provide hackers to bypass security issues and access data stored on devices.

Features which can be accessed could be good to a certain extent and can make it easy to control what could happen on the graphical user interface without the need of editing though if they are not designed properly, these features could also be misused.

At Georgia Tech, researchers have identified that they could sidestep security protocols with the use of voice controls in order to enter text or click buttons. The researchers have described in a paper on the work, on twelve ways in which to attack phones with Android, Ubuntu Linux and iOS operating systems which includes some that would need physical access to the device. This paper would probably be presented next week at the conference of the CCS’14 in Scottsdale, in Arizona.

Malware Attack on Smartphones


One such attack portrays how a type of malware could use Windows Speech Recognition in order to talk its way in running commands which would normally need a higher level of privilege. A demonstration portrayed indicate how malware can attack a smartphone and exploits the fact that Google Now, which is a voice controlled assistant which comes with an Android operating system could use a voice print instead of a typed pass code.

With Google Now you could do a lot of things like performing web searches, obtain translation, call and text messages, plan events and reminders, locate addresses and obtain directions, get sports updates, check out the weather forecast and much more. For voice control users, this is one of the greatest features of Android.

The researchers have also portrayed how an attacker would record the authentication phrase on a Moto X phone and also use a generic text to speech program for other commands as though it were the user.

Hackers Remotely Invade on Vulnerabilities 

According to the director of the National Security Institute, Radu Sion, at Stony Brook, University, he states that `this is an important wake up call for major OS vendors, Microsoft, Linux and Apple community while the Georgia Tech computer scientist, Wenke Lee, who led the work states that the issue appears to be the result of incorporating speech recognition along with other features in the phone being late in the development cycle.

According to him, the fundamental issues here are difficult to fix and these features were added only after the OS was implemented. Hence these features do not have the same kinds of security checks’.

According to Lee, hackers could invade on the vulnerabilities in a remote manner to initiate an attack on any device and though the phone which speaks to itself could be obvious to the user, a malicious app could keep track of motion data as well as wait till the phone does not move for some period of time indicating that the user was probably not nearby.

Echo, a Stunning Piece of Technology Brought about by Amazon

Amazon’s Echo is like your personal Siri stuffed into this amazing portable speaker, except it is so much more. This insanely clever little item is the solution to all your technological problems. It is almost like your personal genie which can grant (most) of your wishes.

Whether you need information or are just in the mood for some relaxing fun and music, it is capable of adapting itself to the best of all worlds. And the best part? The device does not compromise on any front. Priced at $199, this device is well worth the extra bucks.

As a limited period offer, Amazon offers a whopping discount for its premium members who can save $100. It is available only by invitation.

How does Echo work?

Echo works by voice recognition technology. It stays on continually and processes all the information you need as soon as you say the word that makes it work, “Alexi”. The uppermost part of the cylinder has a set of seven microphones which uses a beam forming technology and noise cancellation that adapt to you voice and gives you any information you desire.

The microphones are so powerful that it can even catch your words over any song that it plays. It can process a variety of queries, like setting alarm, playing songs, and answering any question from Google or Wikipedia.

The cylindrical box has a volume panel to alter the volume levels with two buttons, one for switching it on or off and the other for turning the microphones off.

How is the sound system? 

The interior of the cylindrical base has a long reflex port that deepens the bass of the woofer without distorting the sound output quality. The2.5 inch woofer is insanely powerful and produces deep sounds.

Often woofers forget the higher notes, which distorts the music on a whole, however, the Echo solves all those problems effectively using the 2 inch tweeter which hits all those high notes with superb precision.

The result? Crystal clear sound capable of matching any of its contenders in the same size. Listening to your favourite songs will be a treat owing to this small 9.5-inch baby. The cylindrical shape also allows for 360 degrees surround sound, which immerses you in the experience totally.

How is the voice recognition feature? 

Since Echo operates on Amazon’s web services, it continually improves its dictionary and becomes more suited to your accent and the searches you regularly perform to give you results based on your needs.

Additional features

Echo has an app compatible with android, iOS and desktops so that you can manage your searches and alarms even when you are not at home. Echo works with an active Wi-Fi connection or on your home network if you are using the app. Echo can also play any song via Bluetooth and use services like Google Music and Spotify.

Echo promises a lot but it is only time that will prove the performance of the gadget. It sports a sleek black colour and can be a good gift for a loved one. So request that invitation today and enjoy this smart piece of technology.