Emergintex

Update: Multiple delete was added today to Live Mail. You can select multiple mails by holding on to control button and clicking on the messages. Once done selecting, you can right click and select Delete. Cool !

I did a hurried post about Windows Live Mail here, a day ago. I used the new UI today extensively and found the following issues:

1. There is no way to select multiple emails to delete them. The old UI had checkboxes to select multiple emails and do a action on it. Here I had to select them by holding the SHIFT key down and selecting the mails in question. It was a hard user experience from where it came from.
2. Windows Mail Live Beta is not yet implemented fully for FireFox. My Home PCs have FireFox usage more than IE7

Outside these, there was this interesting piece of information flashing at me:

Since the system already found that the sender is a known sender (because it is in my allowed senders list), why does it need to show me “Why?” and “Report and Delete” links now. If this is only for Beta to explain the feature, then its ok. Else it is a issue.

More later !

Technorati Tags: Windows Live

Got the invite tonite for Windows Live Mail Beta. It looks slick as most MS products. Nice usage of Ajax, brings nice refreshing experience to read your Hotmail.
First impressions after the initial wow ! Too much clutter going on. Not sure if this is just my idea, or someone else also reports the same clutter. I dont know why it is there, but things would be good if there was some room for the eye to settle at.

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I blogged about Google Video coming up with a pay service a couple of days ago, which was then later on confirmed by thores of sites inclusing CNN.

It went live today and Om has a brief post about it going live.

Technorati tags: Google Video

Google Pack was launched today, at CES. At the moment it is an installer for various Google Goodies, and some non Google stuff too.

It promises to be an updater too, so you wont have to worry about updating to newer versions of Google Goodies when they are out. It is clean and to the point. Like that.

Is it just a small ’side-app’ by Google, or is it a step towards installation management market? It could well evolve, and given Google’s reputation, could well become a publisher for software updates. Searchable, Sortable Software delivery and updates.

Though the rationale given behind the birth of Google Pack was rejected by some bloggers (which I agree to), but I see a lot of potential behind this service if Google decides to venture into Software Management landscape.

Technorati tag: google pack.

Update: Om just pointed out what I missed. The new Google Video service brings along with it, a new DRM system to protect the paid for videos. As one of the comments said, this is not progress. Its giving us skews of DRM solutions which are not compatible with each other. We need **one** centralized system/format which would let me play my videos on different platforms. Not sure how this new DRM would be implemented as, this service is just a online service and no hardware is involved.

Update: The news is obviously out in the ethernet. CNN confirmed the news citing un-named Wall Street Journal sources, that Google will offer paid video content in partnership with CBS, NBA and others.

Google is getting ready to uncover some of the speculated services during the upcoming CES. There have been some interesting speculations about these upcoming services, like this and this post here by Garett Rogers. He gives a nice detailed step by step description of how he discovered and speculates about one of the new upcoming services, Google Video (enhanced and probably supporting pay-per-view). It seems that Google might be getting ready to come into pay-per-video market also, using enhanced Google Video service as a vehicle.

Also if you point your browser here, you are asked to login into your Google account and then redirected to your Accounts Summary page. Looking at the initial URL (http://purchases.google.com) it seems everything is ready behind the scenes and awaiting for the keynote by Larry Page.

There were rumors that Google might launch Google PC too on this occasion, which would be a low cost PC available at Wal-mart and likes, but that was officially denied by Google in recent past.

Google is really spreading along all the possible dimensions, which might give the company a nice hold on the market.

Technorati tags: CES,Google Video

37Signals announced in late December about an upcoming offering in their existing suite of fine products.

I am sure the product would follow the neat UI guidelines 37Signals have been following on their existing products. For small business’ I completely agree here that most of the CRM solutions for them are too enterprise’ish, and hence are an overkill for them to deploy these solutions.

As a step towards bringing applications and solutions to web, this would help start with small business’ where the solution can be utilized with minimal footprint and less overheads of infrastructure and deployment. This would be different from ASP model in the past as this would be a complete web app, instead of individual customer facing and support facing applications.

What I would like to see in the application for these business’ is a neat way to migrate their existing data into Sunrise. The historical data is valuable in CRM domain, and if once that is in Sunrise, there is no stopping.

The application code named Sunrise would be launched at Getting Real Workshop, to be held on 27th January 2006 in Chicago. At the moment the workshop seems to be sold out and I guess I am not gonna be there. Unless I get lucky.

Cant wait to review Sunrise.