Microsoft Azure gets into ag tech with the preview of FarmBeats – TechCrunch

At its annual Ignite event in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft today announced that Azure FarmBeats, a project that until now was mostly a research effort, will be available as a public preview and in the Azure Marketplace, starting today. FarmBeats is Microsoft's project that combines IoT sensors, data analysis and machine learning. "The goal of FarmBeats is to augment farmers' knowledge and intuition about their own farm with data and data-driven insights," Microsoft explained in today's announcement. The idea behind FarmBeats is to take in data from a wide variety of sources, including sensors, satellites, drones and weather stations, and then turn that into actionable intelligence for farmers, using AI and machine learning. In addition, FarmBeats also wants to be somewhat of a platform for developers who can then build their own applications on top of this data that the platform aggregates and evaluates.