Displaying items by tag: Gmail

Outlook.com was launched in June last year, but what was available to users was a beta version of the service. Microsoft has announced that the period of beta testing for their e-mail service is now complete.

The General Manager of Microsoft's applications for large companies, Julia White, told the New York Times that Google has not yet proven that it is really serious with their business applications. According to her words, Google is still mainly an advertising company and that 96% of its revenue comes from ads, while only 4% comes from services to business users.

We have already told you that Google is pulling their free version of Google docs/apps for groups. This move has upset more than a few small businesses that were using the free service as an alternative to paying the licensing for Microsoft Office or even Office 365. Now Google is removing something else from their free offering that not only has end users upset, but is earning them some criticism from Microsoft. Google is pulling the support for Active-sync from their free version of Google Apps and Gmail.

After releasing a new version for Android smartphones and tablets, Google has released a new version of their Gmail application for iPhone and iPad. Beside the new design, the biggest news is the ability to use up to five different Gmail accounts on one device. In the older versions user were able to use only one. Integration with other Google applications has been improved, for example, if you receive an invitation to an event from Google Calendar to you Gmail inbox, you no longer need to open another application to confirm the attendance because you can do it directly from Gmail now.

It looks like Google will be improving on the connection between two of their prime services; Gmail and Google Drive. Although it is not a revolutionary feature it makes it easier to use Gmail, or send a (large) file via e-mail. The files from Drive can be sent as "attachments" e-mail (not actually a word about attachments, but the links to the files on the Drive), access to files from Google Drive in the future will be available in Gmail via special buttons “Insert files using Drive.” The mentioned button should appear in the interface of Gmail over the next few days.

Already 14 years have passed since the Google has been established, and they celebrated it with a cake doodle. Of course it has 14 candles, and after they are blown out the cake gets cut out and the remaining parts create the Google logo from the plate below. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were at Stanford University. It all started on September 4, 1998 when the company was first incorporated as a privately held company, while public the offering happened on August 19, 2004.

Microsoft is working very hard to make a fresh start of things. After announcing that they were doing away with their Zune player and eventually their music service (both of which were arguably better than their Apple counter parts, but Microsoft failed to market them properly) they are now moving in on Hotmail. Today they launched their replacement for the Hotmail service called Outlook.com. This is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to rebrand Hotmail though and might not be the last. Before they tried to change Hotmail into Windows Live mail (which failed) as a way to remove the old outlook express application from Windows and provide it as a service to those that wanted it (in a bundle with a bunch of other Microsoft apps).  Still Hotmail survived and continued to be one of the most popular free webmail services in the market.

It looks like there is a new exploit out for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (all versions) which affects people running everything from XP to Windows 7. The security issue was not patched with the last round of Microsoft patches (called Patch Tuesday) so it remains an active and open security hole. According to Microsoft Security Advisory 2719615 there is a flaw in their XML Core services that can allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code at the same level of permission as the logged in user.

In other “hacking news” two days ago Google announced that it would begin spreading FUD…. I mean warning users about the possibility that their computer systems and Gmail accounts could be under attack by “State-Sponsored” individuals. The new came after recent discoveries that Stuxnet was a US sponsored attack and the widely held belief that Flame is also a state-sponsored bit of malware.

Earlier today we talked about how AMD’s Rory Read is looking to cloud based services to help overcome the lack of processing power available to AMD’s APUs (and other CPUs moving forward) in that article we talked (very briefly) about some of the concerns that are keeping people out of cloud based services. Although one that is commonly talked about is privacy the other (and perhaps even more important) is security.