Bangalore/ Delhi February 22 2017: Back in India again -- and for the first time in Bangalore, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella,  found time to chat on stage  with Infosys co-founder and first CEO of the Universal Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani at  an  Intelligent Cloud conference event plugged as *.ai. 
"Data is the new Natural resource", said Nadella  and lauded the Indian Aadhaar programme -- the world's largest digital ID  rollout with over a billion registrants.  As an outflow from this visit, Microsoft will use Aadhaar IDs to authenticate users of Skype in India.   He pointed to three areas  of exciting possibilities in the run time arena:  the confluence of  Cloud and AI; the advances in Speech apps like Cortana andAugmented Reality, the ultimate computer.  But human learning understanding was   far away -- we are  doing with AI is as yet only parlout tricks, Satya said.
In 2 months, 20000 Indian startups were leveraging the  Microsoft Accelerator programme, he added.  Microsoft was involved in helping  call centres in Punjab with  data analysis using deep nueral networks -- the Hyderabad -based crop research institute, ICRISAT with internet of Things tools to improve  farming productivity.  He was open to the idea using  Aadhar to log in to a Microsoft tool like Windows
Nilekani  pointed at Aadhaar as an exemplar of mimimalistic technology  which had the capacity to unbundle the innovation of a million developers.
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Microsoft and Flipkart, India’s leading marketplace, announced
a strategic partnership to provide consumers in India with the
best online shopping service. As a first step in the broad
collaboration between the two companies, Flipkart will adopt
Microsoft Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform. Microsoft
CEO Satya Nadella and Flipkart Group CEO Binny Bansal
announced the news today at an event in Bangalore.
“At Microsoft, we aim to empower every Indian and every Indian
organization with technology and key to this is forging strategic
partnerships with innovative companies like Flipkart,” said Satya
Nadella, . “Combining Microsoft’s cloud platform and AI capabilities
with Flipkart’s existing services and data assets, will enable 
Flipkart to accelerate its digital transformation in e-commerce and
deliver new customer experiences.”
“Flipkart has always been committed to its vision of transforming
commerce  in India through technology. Given Microsoft’s strong
reputation in cloud computing, coupled with scale and reliability,
this partnership allows us to leverage our combined strength and
knowledge of technology, e-commerce and markets to make online
shopping more relevant and enriching for customers,” said Binny
Bansal, Group CEO and Co-Founder, Flipkart.
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