Company: Kahuna (Hotmail Ajax Beta) Status: in private beta Location: Mountain View, CA Previous Profile: August 16, 2005 Kahuna – Extreme Marketing I am a little bit annoyed right now. Sometimes people get a little too cute. Microsoft’s Kahuna may be falling into that category. I’m pretty excited about Kahuna because I love ajax and this is going to be one cool ajax application. It looks like (and should be) the new version of Hotmail will act very much like a desktop application. I like that. I want to try it out, and blog about it. And although I don’t always get an invitation to participate in a beta, I usually don’t have to waste a lot of time getting to an answer. Kahuna is offering beta invites, but require you to read through team member blogs to find out the answers to questions. If you find the answer, you get another hint. Here’s a recent post by Imran Qureshi, the Kahuna Program Manager: The mail team wants to invite a few more beta testers into the mail beta, but simply adding people is just too easy… so we put together a small treasure hunt: One of our team members made a post about the origin of the product’s code name, locate his space for your next hint. WTF? This is stupid. This is not time well spent. This does nothing to build a brand or make me a loyal user. It suceeds only in pissing me off. I’d much rather use this time either testing Kahuna (and most likely writing amazing things about it), or testing something else (there are lots of other profiles on my to-do list). So, do you guys agree and consider it kind of lame to waste our time like this? Or am I wrong and this treasure hunt is an example of hip, cool, edgey and/or extreme marketing (marketing 2.0)? I am now done with this particular gripe. Kahuna Update Back to Kahuna, Imran has posted additional screen shots and information on the service. He had a previous post where he stated 2 of his top 5 reasons for liking Kahuna. Today he posted reasons 3 and 4 (leaving us in suspense for #5), along with a new screen shot of Kahuna (see to left): 3. Keyboard shortcuts to read mail I’m sure the power users will love this. Use “[“ and “]” to → Read More

Company: Kahuna (Hotmail Ajax Beta) Status: in private beta Location: Mountain View, CA Kahuna (the new hotmail with Ajax) hasn’t launched yet, but the Start.com team (profile) has been working on it seriously since May 2005 and it is now in private beta testing (updated). From posts by the Kahuna team (see below) and various beta testers (and others watching the space), it looks like it as as signifcant an enhancement to Hotmail as Start is to the old MSN portal. It appears that they will be launching the service under the URL mail.start.com. Key features include liberal use of ajax to eliminate screen refreshes, an “outlook�? approach to allow reading of emails without leaving the inbox, and a generally faster and cleaner user interface. Details of the recent history of Kahuna can be found here. From Imran Qureshi, Kahuna team member: Top 5 reasons I love the mail beta… reasons 1 and 2 Mail beta is a brand new web mail experience focused on being faster, simpler and safer than existing web mail services (read more). The team focused on the basics of reading and sending mail. Mail beta is a work-in-progress and a large number of beta users are driving what it becomes (we can barely keep up with all their ideas…) Here’s the first of some of my favorite things about reading mails in mail beta: 1. Fast, faster and faster still Mail beta is significantly faster, I mean by an order of magnitude: a) The UI responds instantly to many actions and quickly to others b) Very few context switches (where the whole page changes and your eyes have to rescan) c) You need fewer clicks to do the everyday tasks d) Cleaner look (including more “white space�?) so your eyes can relax and find stuff faster 2. Read mail without leaving your inbox using the Reading pane The Reading pane allows you to read your mail without leaving your inbox. If you like the reading pane in Outlook now you have it in web mail. Other web mail services forces you to open each message and close it before reading the next message. If you have 10 messages to read, they will require 20 clicks, Kahuna: 10. (How’s that for your carpal tunnel?) Want to see a wide email? Just double click the message and voila! We’re looking forward to testing this out ourselves. → Read More