GeekwithEnvy

Microsoft

Microsoft Drops Hotmail

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Hotmail Logo

Microsoft is looking to “Re-Imagine email” in a transition of Hotmail into Outlook.com, a web based version of outlook that boasts a simpler and more connected email service.
Hotmail has been successful for Microsoft and still has millions of users worldwide. However, Microsoft felt that Hotmail needed a major update. Hotmail will now become something familiar, Outlook.

Many of us use email less then we used to mostly because of the recent popularity of social media sites like Facebook. Microsoft understands this trend and has responded by allowing you to connect to Facebook and Twitter.
Connecting Outlook.com with your Facebook or Twitter account will automatically update your address book to include all of your friends and family. You will also be able to instant message anyone who is also online with Facebook or Outlook.com, right from your inbox. Getting the latest update from a contact, as well as being able to see their profile picture, can be done just by opening an email from them.

An innovative feature that looks appealing is Sweep, a scheduled clean up of your inbox that will remove spam and other bulk emails for you on a regular basis. Outlook will also automatically categorize newsletters,social updates and photos for you.

Outlook.com will also contain free Word, Excel and PowerPoint web apps to better tie in with Office. You will also get 7 GB of storage with SkyDrive, which is Microsoft’s cloud application.

Aside from all of the nice features, the new Outlook is very clean and has a nice feel to it. I think Microsoft is taking steps in the right direction here as this will better integrate with Windows 8 when it becomes available.
For more information and a preview of the new Outlook.com, follow the link below.

Outlook

Bill Gates Gets Involved With Toilets

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Bill Gates has decided to get involved with a re-invention of the toilet. “No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet, ” said, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global development program.

She mentioned that the toilet only reached about one-third of the world. Over a billion people defecate out into the open which causes major health impacts in many places around the world. Over a million children die each year from diarrhea due to contact with human feces. The foundation is helping the effort to solve this issue by putting $42 million in grants to find better ways of capturing and containing waste. Some ideas included turning human waste into fuel and having waterless toilets that don’t need a large sewer system to operate.

Even though he has stepped down from Microsoft, Bill Gates continues to be very actively involved in using his resources to help solve global issues.

Microsoft Surface

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Microsoft

Microsoft is getting ready to release its new tablet PC to the world. With an elegant design that is entirely built around Microsoft’s new OS release Windows 8.

What makes this more interesting is how this will work on the market considering Microsoft will be competing against many of its own partners. It really is kind of an odd idea to have Surface in competition with other devices that run Windows 8.

The impact of Surface will remain to be seen, more specifically the impact with other partners like Acer, who is one of Microsoft’s largest OEM partners. Either way Microsoft is moving forward with Surface and creating it’s own unique mark in the tablet hardware world.

I personally think this could be a solid move in the right direction but I can’t help but think about Microsoft Zune in this situation. Zune was an overall large failure for Microsoft when they tried to compete in the mobile music device world. I think that clearly much if not almost all of Surfaces’ success will depend on a good Windows 8 experience. Either way you look at it I still think it is refreshing to see some bold moves by Microsoft and hopefully they pay off in the long run.