Want to put Microsoft’s Office software on an iOS or Android device? Soon you won't have to download individual versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to use them. 

In an announcement from its Ignite conference in Orlando, Microsoft revealed that it's beginning to publicly test a new version of the Office app that will combine the three popular apps into one primary, centralized Office app. 

Reviewers have been quite impressed with how much you can do with your phone camera from this app. It’s quite easy to turn one or many pictures into a PDF or a Word document. When scanning a table from a user manual to turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, the text recognition was spot on.

The Lens mode also has special sub-modes for whiteboard and document scanning. So, if you attend a lot of lectures or meetings, this app could make it easier to grab notes without much effort.

Plus, the app also lets you take notes, kind of like you would in Google Keep. You can jot down text, create lists, and attach images. So, even if you’re not immersed in the Microsoft Office world, the app can help you in many situations where you need to send or sign a document quickly.
​
In the new app – which is available now as a public preview on Android or as a beta through Apple's iOS Test Flight program– you'll be able to create new documents, presentations or spreadsheets as well as edit and view existing documents. You'll also be able to "snap a picture of a document" and make it into an editable Word file, create and sign PDFs or "transform tables from a printed page into an Excel spreadsheet."
Microsoft's individual apps have been popular on mobile. All three rank in the top 25 productivity apps on iOS' Top Charts for the category, while each app has been downloaded over 1 billion times on Android. 

The world has been hard at work, trying to find solutions to store the 100 zettabytes of data that are expected to hit the cloud by 2023. 

Microsoft and Warner Bros, for their parts, have just demonstrated why they think they are ahead of the game – in both protecting past archives, and in storing those to come.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella showed off a piece of quartz glass the size of a drink coaster. Within the glass was stored a 143-minute Warner Bros movie – fittingly, the film was Superman. 

The technology is the result of Microsoft Research's Project Silica, which was set up to design new storage systems for the cloud. 

Project Silica's researchers have been working on developing ultrafast laser optics, which they used to encode the entire film in glass.

Using an ultrafast pulse laser, they wrote 'voxels' inside the glass – that is, the three-dimensional equivalent of the pixels that make up an image. Each voxel, therefore, has its own orientation, depth, and size, making it a unique encoder for the movie. 

Because voxels are engraved at the nano-scale level, they can be written in multiple layers throughout the glass. A two-millimeter piece, for example, can contain more than 100 layers of voxels, making for high-density storage. 

According to Microsoft, the glass and the data it contains can resist being boiled in water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, and demagnetized. By permanently changing the structure of the glass, the laser ensures that the information is securely printed for potentially thousands of years.

Ant Rowstron, deputy lab director at Microsoft Research - Cambridge, said: "One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation."

"We really wanted something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it." 

To carry out Project Silica, Microsoft partnered with the University of Southampton in the UK, where scientists had already developed a laser-writing technology to record data back in 2016, which they claimed could have "a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature."

Peter Kazansky, who worked on the project, said at the time that this would open a new era of data archiving. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we've learned will not be forgotten," he said.

For a media company like Warner Bros, this could have huge implications. Storing its 100-year film and television archives is indeed currently causing it some headaches. 

The company keeps three copies of each asset stored in various locations around the world. It has plans in place in case an earthquake, a hurricane or a fire struck one of its storage locations. And every three to five years, it migrates its digital content to stay ahead of degradation issues.

The company's chief technology officer, Vicky Colf, said: "Imagine if a title like The Wizard of Oz or a show like Friends wasn't available for generation after generation to enjoy… That's why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously."

As intriguing as storing data on glass may seem, though, the technology is not made for users to be able to play films at home on a specially made quartz glass DVD player. 

The voxels encoded by the laser in the glass can only be read by a computer-controlled microscope that uses machine learning to decode and reconstruct the patterns that come out when polarized light is shone through the glass. 

So, the data stored in the new technology won't be information that needs to be accessed regularly. Instead, Microsoft spoke of it as 'cold data,' or archival data that companies are required to maintain but don't need to see for months or years. 

Cold data includes media archives like those held by Warner Bros, but also medical data, or legal contracts, or even urban building plans that cities have to retain.

"We are not trying to build things that you put in your house or play movies from," said Rowstron. "We are building storage that operates at the cloud scale."

In other words, Microsoft is interested in technology that exists exclusively for the cloud – something that it previously outlined in its mission statement for Project Silica, in which it said that its research was not concerned with the deployment of information outside the cloud, such as offices, homes, mobile phones or enterprise data centers. 

Microsoft cautions that there is much work ahead before physical quartz-glass archives can be used at scale. To do so, Microsoft engineers would need to speed up data encoding, as well as increase the data density.

Visual search – the ability to initiate a search query using an image captured by the camera lens on a mobile device – has increasingly become a channel that can drive consumers from becoming aware of a product to making a purchase.

Gartner classifies visual search as an emerging technology, which puts it right on par with findings from an eMarketer survey suggesting that few consumers "regularly" use it.

On average, only 3% regularly use visual search, and only 10% have used it in the past, according to the findings. On the other side of the spectrum, 7% are familiar with the technology, according to an eMarketer eCommerce survey conducted in June 2019 by Bizrate Insights and published in August 2019.

Gartner Analyst Mike McGuire points to artificial intelligence (AI), which sits high on the list of transformational trends, as an important technology that supports visual search platforms like Google Lens and Prism.

Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, and other augmented reality vendors continue to invest in visual search. Their platforms use computer vision and AI to identify the image.

ASOS, a U.K. online fashion retailer, already uses visual search. Its search tool, Style Match, integrates into the ASOS mobile app, so customers can zoom in on a man’s suit in a magazine picture, for example, and receive suggestions on similar suits, McGuire explains.

McGuire calls visual search a tool that will enhance the customer experience, benefiting brands most in e-commerce, content marketing, product, and search marketing. Amazon also supports this media.

Recently, Mondo released a study showing that 21% of the 1,000 marketers surveyed cite visual search as an essential marketing strategy for their organizations through 2020. Visual search fell in line behind strategies such as experiential marketing, micro-moments, and motion design.

Gartner rated visual search as an “on the rise” strategy, along with over-the-top TV advertising, consent and preference management, and personification.  
​
At the peak are advanced supply-side bidding, customer journey analytics, real-time marketing, conversational marketing, artificial intelligence for marketing, and customer data platforms.

If you're sick of hearing about dark mode on smartphone apps, I hear you. Now that both Android and iOS have the option to turn your interface darker, not a day goes by without this or that app adding support for dark mode. 

But beyond aesthetics, there's a real-world reason to turn on dark mode: increased battery life. According to a recent test, conducted by PhoneBuff, switching to dark mode can extend your iPhone's battery life by 30%. 

In the test, identical tasks were performed on an iPhone XS Max in Twitter, YouTube, Message, and other apps, first with the phone running light mode, and then with dark mode on.  

The result is quite spectacular. When the battery on the iPhone running light mode died, the other iPhone still had 30% battery life, which should give you several extra hours of service.  

Things aren't that simple, though. The test phones were set to 200 nits of brightness; you might see different results with other settings. Furthermore, during the test a single app was used for several hours at a time, which is (hopefully) not how most users use their phones.
​
And there's a one big caveat: Only smartphones with OLED screens will see the battery life improvement. That’s because on OLED screens, black pixels are turned off instead of being backlit. So, users who are running an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will get the benefit. However, those with an iPhone XR and iPhone 11 won't get the benefits.