Back in November 2006, I published the Top 10 Greatest Internet Digital Media M&A Deals of All Time. It included eBay’s $1.5 billion acquisition of PayPal, Yahoo’s $1.6 billion acquisition of Overture, and Microsoft’s $400 million purchase of Hotmail back in 1998. It also included News Corp’s $580 million acquisition of MySpace. Don’t laugh. The list was published a month after the big $900 million deal with Google, which I thought Google had drastically overpaid for at the time. Of course, times they change, as does the list, so I decided to update the list – and yes, I went through all 255 pages on the Acquisitions section of CrunchBase.
Below is my updated list of the Top 10 Greatest Digital Media M&A Deals, in reverse order. Give me your top ten in comments. → Read More
Microsoft’s newly announced Hotmail for Android application is available now in the Android Market. The app, which aims to serve the world’s largest webmail platform, offers a handful of standard features including push email, synced calendar and contacts, support for multiple accounts and more.
More interesting, perhaps, is the related news that Hotmail will finally become available as a selectable account option in the “Mail” settings area on iOS 5 (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) → Read More
Microsoft Hotmail doesn’t get much love in Silicon Valley these days, but the service has been steadily making improvements to the product, particularly over the last 18 months or so. And today it’s giving a boost to its ‘Active Views’ product — which sets out to make email quicker and more interactive than the sort we’re used to — by adding new partners including Posterous, and LivingSocial.
Hotmail’s first iteration of Active Views involves linked content — Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live, says that 90% of email contains a link to an external service like YouTube, Flickr, or LinkedIn. So when Hotmail sees that there’s a link to a YouTube video, it will automatically embed the video so that you don’t have to actually follow the link (Hotmail isn’t the only service to do this). Mehta says that this has been very effective — while only 10% of users click on a normal link to a video, 25% will click on an embedded version. → Read More
Ever wished you could have multiple email addresses that all routed to the same inbox, without having to set up a bunch of different accounts and forwarding options? Hotmail — yes, the email service you probably haven’t looked at in years — has just added a very handy new alias feature that lets you do just this. In other words, I can now setup a Hotmail inbox that lets me seamlessly handle correspondence to both jasonkincaid@hotmail.com and JediMasterJ@hotmail.com from the same inbox — woohoo!*
Aliases aren’t anything new for webmail services. Hardcore Gmail users are probably familiar with the old ‘+’ trick: if your email is jason@gmail.com, you can use a + symbol to create a variety of aliases that all go to the same place. For example, you might create jason+receipts@gmail.com, jason+deals@gmail.com, and so on — each with a different filter to route the emails to different labels (or deletes them immediately). It’s not perfect, but it works decently well. → Read More
These days, most emails you get from major services like LinkedIn or Orbitz are full of rich graphics and other elements that make the message feel more like a webpage than the basic text emails from days of yore. But there’s been a key thing missing: these emails are all static, so their content goes stale. Depending on how often you check your inbox, that hot deal from Orbitz may be long gone by the time you see it, or the movie recommendations from Netflix may already be out of stock.
Today, Hotmail is launching a new feature as part of its Active View platform that looks to fix this. The email provider has teamed with a handful of select parters to provide rich, dynamic emails that will update when you open them, and allow you to interact with services directly from your inbox. In other words, they’re making email a lot more like real websites. → Read More
Dear Microsoft,
Remember me? I’m that guy at TechCrunch who actually defends you and your products, when appropriate, and whenever people start talking that crazy talk about you.
I would like to genuinely thank you for your part in making Web-based email popular with Hotmail – now called Windows Live Hotmail I see – and all. My wife still proudly hands out her @hotmail.com address whenever someone asks her how she can be reached, even though she is known to occasionally use Facebook and Skype. And yes, I still think she rocks. → Read More
Back in the days before Gmail, webmail on the Internet was really, really bad. Inboxes were limited to 10 or 20 megabytes, interfaces were slow and ugly, and the experience simply didn’t come close to matching what most desktop clients offered. This is how I remember Hotmail. I hated it. In fact, since signing up for Gmail in 2004, the only times I’ve checked out Microsoft’s webmail client were immediately after big launches, at which point I would reactivate my account, give it a quick run through, and promptly decide that it still wasn’t very good. So when I say that the new version of Hotmail that’s launching this summer has me excited, that’s saying something.
This morning, Microsoft showcased this new version of Hotmail to a room full of press at its offices in San Francisco. It’s fast, slick, and comes with a set of new features for managing large amounts of email that make it a much better rival to Gmail. Does it look like a revolution? Not really. But it does incorporate some very nice features — things that seem quite obvious once you seem them in action, but aren’t already available elsewhere. And more importantly, they’re features that regular people will actually use. → Read More
With Bing stealing the online spotlight at Microsoft recently, Windows Live has been collecting dust in a corner. But Microsoft is preparing to update the core services that make up Windows Live over the next few months, and is refocusing what used to be a hodgepodge of different online services into three main products: Hotmail, Messenger, and Windows Essentials (which includes photo-organizing and movie-making apps). Microsoft’s VP of Windows Live Chris Jones explains: “Anything about information discovery, retrieval, and the public web is Bing. Anything about personal information is Windows Live.”
The focus will not be to recreate people’s social networks or where they share photos, videos, or status updates, but rather simply to connect Windows IM and email products to the rest of the social Web. Although Hotmail boasts 350 million active users worldwide and Messenger has 320 million, both products are a bit long in the tooth. → Read More
“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.” – Microsoft statement on Google Buzz.
When one of the big guys launches a new product, competitors generally just sit it out and let the press do its thing. But Microsoft made a point of reaching out today with the quote above, criticizing Google Buzz as “another social network” and noting that Hotmail has aggregated Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and other services since 2008.
Of course Microsoft also owns a chunk of, and has a search deal with, Facebook. So they’re being threatened on a number of fronts. Still, just the fact that Microsoft is speaking on the record about Buzz shows that the guys in Redmond are a little worried. And they are not the only ones. → Read More
The following is an excerpt from Adam L. Penenberg’s new book, Viral Loop: From Facebook To Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves.
Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build an insanely fast-growing business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will flock to throw money at you.
Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, Flickr and rising stars like Twitter are prime examples of a “viral loop”—to use it, you have to spread it. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.
In Viral Loop, Penenberg tells the fascinating story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses—some worth billions of dollars—that we have all grown to rely on. The trick is that they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them.
One such business was Hotmail. After their 20th venture capitalist meeting, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, former hardware engineers at Apple who first came up with the idea for webmail, finally raised seed money from famed VC firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. → Read More
Come on, people. You’re probably aware of the big Hotmail scandal going on right now, what with some 30,000 account names and passwords having been leaked over the past few days. And now Gmail and Yahoo! e-mail accounts appear to have been compromised. The thing is, these leaks aren’t the result of a software glitch or anything, but the result of successful phishing attacks. I have one question: what the heck is wrong with you people? → Read More
Microsoft has upgraded its Quick Add feature in Hotmail, first announced earlier this year, with a number of features from their new Bing search engine.
We’re not talking about a small number of users who will be affected. Hotmail is still by far the largest web mail provider on the Internet, with 343 million monthly users according to Comscore. Second and third are Yahoo (285 million) and Gmail (146 million). A year ago Hotmail had just 273 million users, so it is still growing rapidly.
The new features let users search for and insert maps, movie listings and times, in addition to the restaurants, videos, images and business listings that were there before. And all of these have been upgraded with Bing functionality via the API.
Some of these quick adds are quite useful, particularly the maps and movie listings. For the masses that use Hotmail, it’s also a great way to introduce them to Bing.
Screen shots below: → Read More
We’ll say it right off the bat: what the hell took Microsoft so long? Years after Yahoo and Google integrated web IM features into their free webmail services (Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail and Gtalk in Gmail, respectively), Redmond is finally enabling users to log into their Hotmail accounts and converse with their contacts over instant messaging directly without the need to log on to Windows Live Messenger separately, or to even have the program installed altogether.
The new feature will be gradually rolled out, starting from today enabling subsets of users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA to send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages. The feature earlier rolled out to some users users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. → Read More
Google launched Gmail only four years ago, and it is now the fourth most popular e-mail service on the Web after Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Windows Live Hotmail. In 2008, it saw some serious growth in the U.S. Google doesn’t break out the number of Gmail users, but comScore estimates unique monthly visitors. According to the latest stats, the number of people visiting Gmail grew 43 percent last year to 29.6 million. In contrast, the much more massive Yahoo Mail grew 11 percent to 91.9 million uniques. AOL Mail finished in second place for the year with 46.6 million uniques (plus another 7.2 million visitors to AIM Mail), while Hotmail actually declined 5 percent to 43.5 million.
How can Gmail keep growing at such a fast rate, when the other email services seem to be stagnating? Maybe it’s because Gmail is evolving at a faster rate. → Read More
It’s 2009. Storage is so cheap that Email providers like Yahoo are literally giving you as much space as you want. Yet we still have to deal with archaic policies that allow these Email providers to delete everything in our inboxes if, for whatever reason, we forget to login for a few months.
The time limits vary: Yahoo cuts you off at 4 months, Windows Live Hotmail at 60 days, and Gmail after a more lenient 9 months of inactivity (you can see a more comprehensive listing here). Most of them have some kind of grace period where your account enters a deactivated ‘hibernation’ state, but still retains its data. Some of them have these policies in print but rarely actually delete your account. But for others, once you cross the threshold, every Email message, photo, and file attachment is gone for good. → Read More
I’m not sure how many BlackBerry users also use Hotmail, but the three or four of them will be happy to know that BlackBerry devices will soon support push Hotmail. Oh, and Windows Live Messenger, too. → Read More
Microsoft’s new ajax Hotmail client, called Kahuna, is massively expanding its beta group today, to approximatley 200,000 users. Until today the beta was extremely difficult to get into, frustrating some hotmail users. We’ve been beta testing Kahuna for a few weeks. It is a big improvement on the old Hotmail interface, using ajax to provide a much more Outlook-like email experience. Features include a three-pane view and drag and drop functionality to folders, etc. We previously wrote about Kahuna on August 16, 2005 and August 24, 2005. → Read More
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
