Microsoft replaces Hotmail with user-friendlier, more social and smarter Outlook.com

(Credit: The Vine)

Microsoft has launched the preview of Outlook.com, an entirely new and modern mail service for users. By revamping the whole personal email look from the datacenter to user experience, Microsoft has created a new email service for the next billion users.

First highlight of the Outlook.com preview includes modern experience for modern browsers and devices which boast user-friendly interface that is spontaneous to use, works across your devices with Exchange ActiveSync and reduces up to 60 percent of pixels in the header and allows 30 percent more messages visible in your inbox. According to Chris Jones from the Microsoft team, “Email represents 20 percent of the time we spend on smartphones, and is used extensively on tablets as well as PCs. Outlook is designed cloud first, so all of your mail is always available wherever you are”. The best part is, there are no display ads or the large search box which usually take up a lot of space.

Social networks are incredibly popular and Outlook.com takes this opportunity to connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and soon, Skype, in order to stay connected with friends and family. With this new feature, it allows users to handle these social media and communication tools at their best with the ability to view pictures of friends, messages, status updates, chats and call. All these are powered by up-to-date contact list which literally mean users can check emails while staying connected with updates from peers and family.

Second highlight includes Outlook.com being a smart and powerful email service. Engineered to work like a smartphone, it automatically sorts messages from contacts, newsletters, shipping updates and social updates. With Sweep features, users can move or delete them in a matter of few clicks. If that is not enticing enough, Outlook.com has thrown in several free services including Office Web Apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, as well as SkyDrive. Skydrive enables users to attach photos, documents or any files at all with no attachment limit.

Everyone loves to be in control of their own lives and this service allows users to keep their personal mail personal. No one likes to spend their extra time sifting through spam and removing unwanted ads in attachments. This is the final highlight as there are no more ads in person-to-person mails and no scanning of personal mails to serve ads which can really cause wastage of storage space and in some cases, breaching of privacy. It even has great tools for power users who love tweaking and personalizing their personal emails.

Even though many new features have been included, the basics of Outlook.com have not been compromised such as virtually unlimited storage and industry-leading spam protection. The best part is, everything in Outlook.com is free.

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Why Waiting for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 May Be Worth It

[This article is contributed by our guest editor, Frank Yu who is a Social Media Strategist for Symbio.]

We sat down with Olav Nedrelid, Chief of Strategy at Symbio to informally geek out on the implications of the new Windows 8 operating system and the impact it will have in the business and consumer space. Much of this speculation is based on early previews by Microsoft on public websites as well as their own developer communications. Things may still change by the time of the release, but based on what we have read so far, here are some cool new things in Windows 8 and a reason for why it may be a revolutionary product for Microsoft and the whole technology eco-system.

Windows 8 is a complete redo of the stack. It has no .net framework; it supports it but, otherwise, is a totally new type of framework.

Window RT which takes on the role of what WIN32 does, but instead of being an API, its built to be integrated straight into the development environment. In other words, Windows 8 has been created so that the various levels work as an integrated unit as opposed to previous Windows which had legacy layers still embedded within even new versions of Windows.

Yes, the Metro UI looks great and it looks clean and modern, but as a developer, the new arrangement of the stack means a revolutionary change for Windows and performance.

So for the enduser, what are the benefits of Windows 8? We asked Olav.

Well, it is built for mobility which means it will help lower power consumption since background and processes are more streamlined and overhead is reduced. This means it is also faster and boots up faster. The code of Windows 8 has been designed so that the same code base can be used on mobile devices as well as PCs, meaning that we really are working with one code base with slight modifications for form factor for various devices. In the past, WIN CE looked like Windows in terms of UI but in terms of code and memory management it was a different animal. In Windows 8, users should have a seamless experience between desktop, mobile devices and even household products.

In terms of UI, Windows 8 has also been intended for touch interaction which means, other than mobile phones and tablets, we can see Windows 8 being used for embedded devices like automobile IVI’s, appliances and consumer electronics. Instead of having to learn a new UI for each of our devices, you just learn Windows 8 on your laptop. The experience then translates directly into using Windows Phone 8 (Apollo) on your smartphone.

Windows 8 has also been designed to work with the cloud in how it handles data that can be shared, not just with multiple devices of one owner, but with different applications in one device. For example, photography apps and filter apps can share images amongst each other directly, without having first save to a drive. If you do need to save, that data can be available via the cloud to other applications as well as remote access for other users with whom you want connect. In the future we may see SkyDrive, Xbox Live and Azure being integrated into both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 as seamless extensions of data storage.

With Windows 8, we are really starting to see Microsoft seriously migrating out of the desktop and onto the cloud, at least for data. Probably the biggest benefit of Windows 8 is that for developers, the jungle of APIs, UI’s and code bases has now been unified so we have core kernel and UI that can be ported to various devices easier and faster. More efficiency and less overhead means less CPU cycles, less heat and longer battery life. Most of all, for developers, it means less coding headaches for conflicts and kludges to get applications working smoothly.

Another big change in Windows 8 deals with the addition of Charms and Contracts which amplifies the portability of data and creates a layer, making sharing and coordination between different applications and users even easier. Think of it as a kind of XML for data, that enables it to be shared and transferred to various applications in a seamless integrated layer. Charms act as small applets on your sidebar that can allow you to exchange data with other applications and devices. The protocol and format that gets transmitted is one way to describe a contract, since it is an implicit authorization to send or receive data from other users, applications or even platforms.

As Windows 8 has the ability to tag and parse data types better, we can see the potential of automated computing with sensors being a whole new world of computation and real world use cases. Just think of all the ATMs out there and how they use different UI depending on the back and all the input screens of all our devices in our home, cars, office and schools. You can see the great potential of having a smooth and unified kernal code, UI and data portability in our everyday lives.

“In China, where the mobile web will be the primary internet access, this will have a large impact for end users and businesses.” Olav commented.

Related posts:

1. Photo Sharing App Tuding Launched Windows Phone 7 Version
2. Microsoft China Director: Windows Phone Has Chance To Win in 3–5 Years in Mobile
3. Nokia Has the Phone But Now Needs the Apps – like Angry Birds Space

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Carpe Diem, Entrepreneurs!

A lot of us reach a stage in our careers where there is a constant tussle between where we are and where we would like to be. Its not as much about the money or designation or the present job but more to do with the fact that in our heads, we thought we would be at a different place in this stage of life. Lets take an example of a Mr A, who is about 30 years old, has been working at a medium sized company for about 5 years, presently at a senior level and makes good money. Yet every morning his biggest question is why me and why here – for which he rarely finds an answer.

The reality however is not that there are no answers or solutions, but that he kept looking for it at the wrong places. The biggest blessing in disguise when one starts to feel this, is that, you feel it, you know it and now all you have to do is manage and handle it. Easier said than done but it’s atleast a start. Every company in its own way gives a chance to every team member/employee/manager/leader to go beyond what they are supposed to do and what they are capable of doing and achieving. While the former pays your salary and perks and may fall under mundane and regular after a while, the latter is the catapult to not only prove something to your team/family etc but most importantly to yourself. A lot of people usually look outside of their present state also known as a new job and feel that is where they will find, at the cost of sounding dramatic – redemption, while a lot of times this could be very well achieved within your own present job or company. And redemption too doesn’t mean an over the top radical change that makes you the next Zuckerberg but could be anything ranging from helping your customer service team speed up time on calls to helping the logistics guy with tracking or something not official at all like a philanthropic initiative to help the lesser privileged ones.

We are ready to take that leap of faith into a new job/business/consultant/ but maybe all it needs is to take a relook at what you already have and see what more you can do where you are and a lot of answers will flash by. This however doesn’t imply that people don’t move to different jobs or get into entrepreneurship and so on as sometimes you know a true calling when you hear it. But that doesn’t mean you wait for it, all you need to do till then is Carpe Diem.

[Guest article contributed by Krishna Iyer, Vice President - Media Partnerships at iXiGo. He earlier contributed : Head Cook to Bottle Washer : The Journey from Entrepreneur to Employee and Of Sales and The Connect Network. Image credit]

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BliBli Ends Its First Year With Style

BliBli, the Indonesian e-tailer supported by GDP Ventures and also the biggest private bank in the country, BCA, celebrates its first year anniversary today. Marking that milestone, BliBli achievements aren’t to be underestimated with 5 million visitors in total and averaging 15,000 visitors daily.

This upcoming year, the company will focus on gaining revenue as much as possible after spending tons of money to promote itself. At the same time, marketing head of BliBli, Ivan Hudyana, also hinted at making a Square-like device for Indonesian market. This year is interesting indeed for the e-commerce market in Indonesia. Happy anniversary, BliBli!

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Chennai based BrainNook secures seed funding from Silicon Valley incubator, Imagine K12

BrainNook is a massively multiplayer online educational game for US schools (read our earlier coverage) and the Chennai based company has raised seed funding from a Silicon Valley incubator called Imagine K12 which is focused on education startups.

BrainNook contains over a hundred educational games based on important concepts in the critical foundational subjects of Math and English Grammar. The startup started off with a focus on India, but is now solely focused on US market.

“Although we think there is a lot of potential in the Indian education market, at this point we are seeing a lot of interest in BrainNook from US schools and teachers. We sell in the US market through our own website as well as partnerships with education-focused social networking platforms like Edmodo. We were one of the launch partners for the Edmodo App Store earlier this year. We will also have announcements of additional partnerships coming up.” mentions Abhijeet Vijayakar, founder of the company.

Abhijeet also shares a few interesting stats of BrainNook (based on BrainNook usage over the past (2011-12) academic year in the US)

• The number of math and language games played in BrainNook per month increased 5x over the course of the 2011-12 academic year
• The number of monthly active users went up 3x over the year
• The number of assignments set by teachers per month increased by a factor of 10x
• In May 2012, the last full month before school let out, students answered over 2 million math and language-related questions in BrainNook

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Another Hit for NHN Japan with ‘Line Brush’ Drawing App

When NHN Japan published its Line Brush application last week, I was a little hesitant to look at it. I mean, we’ve been hearing so much from the company of late that it’s getting to be a bit too much. But admittedly the application looks very cool and it’s now the top free app in Japan and has been in the top spot for productivity apps since its release [1].

Admittedly, I do have an interest in drawing and painting apps and have always been looking for one that works really well on an iPad. Art Rage is okay, but for drawing enthusiasts out there on a budget, it’s not free. But Line Brush is free, and comes with a pretty extensive set of drawing tools. It can be used in portrait or landscape orientation, which is also a nice option to have.

One feature I like is the ability to draw on top of pictures. I took a picture of my late dog and added a pretty pink bow, for which he will probably never forgive me (Sorry Pepe). Anyway, you get the idea. There are also brushes that apply shorts of filters to photos in select areas, and that’s handy too. Of course if you really want to go crazy glitzing up your photos with decorations like this, you might prefer the Line Camera app, which lets you do lots of wacky stuff like that.

The pictures you create in Line Brush can be shared over the Line app, saved to your iPad’s photo album (where they can then be mailed), or opened in other apps.

The app is available for both iPhone and iPad if you’d like to check it out.

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1. It’s also number one in Taiwan, Macau, and Thailand, and number two in Indonesia. For the productivity category, it has reached number one in 14 countries.  ↩

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Westward Ho to Chengdu, China's Tech Frontier

Best known as a place to see pandas, sample spicy Sichuan food, and trek to Tibet, Chengdu is aiming high, trying to take on a new identity as a tech innovation hub in western China, following the lead of Silicon Valleys in Shanghai and Beijing.

This surprisingly modern city today sports software parks, incubation labs, science universities, few bicycles, and yes, plenty of young entrepreneurs who still idolize Steve Jobs and are eager to make their mark with a successful IPO of their techie startup. Multinational corporations including Intel, Lenovo and Texas Instruments have landed in Chengdu to do research and development -- not to mention that Apple makes iPhones and iPads here.

The rapid growth of Chengdu's software and technology businesses -- revenues were up 64 percent in 2011 to $48 billion -- makes worries about a China economic slowdown seem ridiculous.

So too does the bubbling consumer economy. Work crews and cranes are putting up a theme park and shopping mall in one gigantic complex that is also supposed to house two 7-star (!) hotels. (Only in China.) Then on another major thoroughfare a brand-new Louis Vuitton store stands out -- one more shopping option for newly minted Chinese millionaires.

In recent years, Chengdu has set out to transform its economy from a manufacturing and logistics base to a tech innovation capital that could hold a candle to Silicon Valley. It's what every city planner worldwide dreams of today.

From my recent explorations in Chengdu, this formula is beginning to show some results. The startup trend was particularly noticeable among the switched on technopreneurs I recently interviewed in Chengdu.

Take, for example, Kevin Yang, the founder of Tap4Fun, which makes games for iPhones and iPads. It's his third startup and Kevin acts and talks like a Valley boy, even though he's only been outside of China once, to Tokyo for a meeting with big-time venture investor Masayoshi Son of Softbank Capital.

Kevin says he has read all the books about Steve Jobs and has monitored on-line courses from Stanford and MIT. His computer science degrees come from Chengdu's top computer science school (USETC), where he cranked up his first mobile gaming startup while an undergrad. His second startup was a made-in-China Twitter application called TwitBird that proved popular in Korea and Japan but has been sidelined, Kevin says, because there was no revenue model for the app. Sound familiar?

I got a tip that Kevin is now on to a good thing (he wants to take his current startup public) when I happened to run into a leading Shanghai venture capitalist at Tap4Fun's office. So much for Tap4Fun remaining in stealth mode!

Other venture investors including Chengwei, Gobi, Morningside, Matrix and Ceyuan are looking to Chengdu as a next, lower-cost frontier in China as entrepreneurs in China's major cities have gotten greedy about deal terms. Angel investors have arrived too such as Maipu Ventures, a spin-off of Chengdu-based networking equipment company Maipu Communication.

Several other startups caught my attention during my tech tour of Chengdu. Pinguo Digital Entertainment makes a social app for sharing photos (like Instagram) and claims 30 million users. Then there's a very localized startup named the Institute of Care-Life that makes earthquake detection and protection equipment, a reminder of the massive earthquake that struck nearby in 2008.

It's still early days for Chengdu but the potential is there. Chengdu is home to 1,400 IT companies, including 200 of those in the Fortune 500 big leagues. The ultra-modern and sprawling Tianfu Software Park aims to be a second city rival to Beijing's Zhonguancun district, the heart of tech in China. Christine Du, the president of the software park, talks up the city's Silicon Valley culture and spirit and its carefree style.

Chengdu does have a friendly and relaxed culture. But it reminds me more of the U.S. Midwest than the San Francisco Bay Area. Chengdu's flat open plains and largely nondescript buildings signal big city Chicago to me but without the lake, extreme temperatures and the wind.

Promoters of Chengdu struggle to get the right message to tourists and to corporate investors alike about its attractions beyond pandas and assembly lines. Chengdu has put a major ad agency to work on crafting its brand and the city has hired a savvy social media strategist who tweets out chirpy messages on Twitter and China's Twitter-like Weibo.

Getting people to think of Chengdu for chips and bytes could really begin to happen as more and more tech majors move west in China and deal makers find the gems here.
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2,082 Chinese Group Buy Sites Bit the Dust in the Last Nine Months

Group buy sites over the past year

What goes up must come down, and China’s group buy sector has been busy learning that the hard way for the past nine months. According to the latest data from group buy site tracker Tuan 800, China’s group buy sites are down 2,082 since last September, the high point in group buy fever, when the total number of sites was more than 5,000. That’s a more than 40 percent drop.

At the same time — and certainly not unrelated — consumer interest in the group buy model has also dropped. Income from transactions for the sites that still exist has dropped more than 50 percent compared to the first half of last year. The number of transactions has also dropped more than sixty percent. So group buy sites today, on average, are making less money from fewer transactions than they were last year. No wonder more than 2,000 sites are gone.

How many group buy sites will be left a year from now? The trend does not look good. Like many other sectors of China’s internet, the market seems to be consolidating, and the end result is going to leave an awful lot of people out in the cold.

(Readers will be pleased to know, though, that TuanBao is somehow still operating despite or perhaps because of its shift to an all-free model earlier this year and its CEO’s rather bizarre antics.)

[via TechWeb]

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GM of Music Entertainment at Baidu Resigned, and Amazon Might be Her Next Stop

Catherine Leung, GM of Music Entertainment at Baidu, will be leaving Baidu soon, reported by 163.com. Catherine used to be the General Manager of Universal Music, China, and joined Baidu to lead its digital entertainment department in 2008.  She has done a great job helping Baidu sort out the long-time licensing dispute between Baidu and the digital music publishers, and she’s also the lead of Baidu’s music service, Baidu Ting which was launched in May 2011.

And according to a friend from digital music industry, we’ve been told that Catherine’s next stop might be Amazon.

It was reported that Amazon recently signed licensing agreements with hundreds of music publishers and distributors, including Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. Yesterday, Amazon also unveiled its music matching service to rival Apple’s. Obviously, Amazon is really working hard on something in the digital music industry.

We are very curious about Catherine’s role if she joins Amazon. Catherine used to speak at our TNT event sharing her insight and opinion on China’s digital music industry. She once said,

For the music entrepreneurs, China is still in a “Wild Wild East” state.

But given her impressive background on both digital music and internet service, whether Catherine is to lead Amazon’s online music service in China will be an interesting question to answer.

163 also reported that BeiNi ZHANG, the product manager of Douban Music and ex-Baiduer back in 2004 will re-join Baidu as the new lead of Baidu’s music service.

 

No related posts.

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ChinaJoy 2012: Big Numbers, But is This Show About Games or Girls?

China’s biggest gaming convention, ChinaJoy, wrapped up this week, and although we didn’t get a chance to attend this year, it appears the convention is only growing. This year, the show attracted 162,000 attendees over its four-day span, and counting exhibitors and other participants, more than 197,000 people were there at some point during the show. Web games were a major focus (not surprising given that PC web games took in 23.5 billion RMB, or about $3.7 billion, in the first half of this year in China) and domestic original games were on the rise (also not surprising since the domestic game market share has risen ten percent since last year, to 71.6 percent). It has been a good year so far for gaming.

As big as the games were, a lot of discussion has centered around the role that “showgirls” — models hired to help promote games — are now playing in the convention. Many attendees say they’re visiting the convention for the girls, not the games, and models at ChinaJoy can apparently earn 2500-3500 RMB ($396-$555) per day. That’s more than what the average Chinese college grad makes in a month. QQ Games has a special section where gamers can rate and vote for their favorite showgirls. In a blog post by Meng Hong that has since run on Sina Tech, TechWeb, and a number of other Chinese tech news portals, the author talks to a showgirl to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on the lucrative but difficult gig of game convention modeling.

But should there even be showgirls at a game convention? On the one hand, lots of people enjoy looking at attractive women, and sex is certainly an effective means of advertisement. Gamers are likely to leave with a favorable impression of a convention game if a number of sexy ladies are flirting with them while they play it, so it’s not too hard to understand why game companies hire models for shows like this. But has ChinaJoy gone too far? Has it become a model convention with games on the side as opposed to a gaming convention with a few models?

The answer, of course, is subjective, but the debate is being played out in comments forums across China’s gaming web. For example, one commenter on Sina Tech wrote: “Who would go to ChinaJoy without the showgirls? If you just want to play games, can’t you just find everything by searching Baidu?” “ChinaJoy isn’t a gaming convention anymore,” wrote another commenter.

As the market for games grows in China, ChinaJoy becomes more important as China’s foremost gaming convention. But does it need a change in direction? The answer to that is still up for grabs.

[Via QQ Games, Sina Tech]

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