Stories by Blair Hanley Frank

Okta has acquired Stormpath, a company that provides authentication services for developers. The deal should help the identity provider improve its developer-facing capabilities.

Everyone makes mistakes. But working at Amazon Web Services means an incorrectly entered input can lead to a massive outage that cripples popular websites and services.

A lucky few developers will be able to get their hands on a low-cost Windows virtual reality headset starting this month. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset will start rolling out to a handpicked batch of software makers starting the end of March, with more coming later.

Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality headset Wednesday, and an early look at a prototype version of the hardware shows promise, along with room for improvement.

Azure Stack, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud system, is getting close to release. On Wednesday, the tech giant unveiled the third major public beta for customers that want to test it out.

Google appears to have accidentally revealed its new group videoconferencing service for businesses on Tuesday, a week before a big user conference.

HTC is giving users of its Vive virtual reality headset access to a Netflix-like subscription service. Everyone who currently owns a Vive will get a free trial for a month, and the service will cost $6.99 a month thereafter.

Setting up meetings can be a pain, since they often require folks to send emails back and forth figuring out a time before finally sending off a calendar invitation to block everyone’s schedule. A New York startup called x.ai wants to simplify that with a helpful bot, and they just launched a product aimed at serving businesses.

Google and Jigsaw (an early stage incubator at Google parent company Alphabet) are working on a project called Perspective that aims to curb online abuse through Artificial Intelligence

There’s a growing population of Skype users in India, and Microsoft wants to capitalize on that with the launch of Skype Lite, a new app that’s designed to be more useful in that market.

Machine learning can automate the handling of huge troves of data to help companies make and save money. However, they’re not without pitfalls, as the real estate tech company Redfin learned.

Kubernetes is generally available for use with Azure Container Service, Microsoft’s managed cloud container hosting offering, as of Tuesday. ACS support for Kubernetes comes along with the service’s preexisting support for the Apache Mesos-based DC/OS and Docker Swarm.

Third-party developers have new tools to play with when it comes to building integrations with Microsoft’s Teams group chat app . The company announced a pair of new developer-oriented features on Thursday, aimed at giving greater utility to services that work with Teams.

Users of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant can now ask her questions about the contents of their Microsoft-hosted calendars. On Wednesday, the assistant gained the ability to interact with calendars from Outlook.com and Office 365, similar to how it works with Google Calendar.

Amazon Web Services got off to a slow start in January, taking its time to sleep off the New Year’s festivities. But the cloud provider got up to speed by the end of the month, launching a handful of new products for its customers to work with.