Microsoft's phone talk is all business
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Rather than touting fancy new features that compete head-on with the iPhone, the software maker is courting the people who help businesses decide what phones to buy--the IT geeks.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates chats with Berkeley students about everything from open source to malaria to the next Xbox.
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Microsoft Corp.  sees the shift by business organizations to Web-based phone systems running on its software to generate "billions" of dollars in revenue for the company, a top executive said on Tuesday.
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A complex remote-control work around has achieved what every geek wants: running Skype on an iPhone.
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A startup is giving enterprises a way to roll out one phone for use inside and outside the office without a mobile operator's help.
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French telecommunications company AlcatelÂ has signed a deal with MicrosoftÂ to help develop applications that allow users to make phone calls from their computers, it said Thursday.
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Microsoft is releasing a new application for delivering &quot;snippets&quot; of data to Windows Mobile devices, one of several announcements planned for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.Microsoft plans to announce that it will offer software for Windows Mobile users based on MSN Direct, a service it developed to deliver data snippets to watches. The new application displays small bits of information like weather, stocks and news on the home screen of the phone. &quot;This is an innovative take on how to get information in a glanceable way on handsets,&quot; said Brian Arbogast, vice president of mobile services at Microsoft.Windows Mobile users can download the application, which will initially be offered as a beta.Microsoft and its competitors Yahoo and Google are jockeying for lead position in the mobile market. Each is working to draw mobile users to their services in hopes of ultimately establishing a revenue stream from mobile advertising. So far, the market is relatively open.Microsoft also said it is offering a new software development kit that will give developers access to additional Microsoft mobile services protocols. With the new tools, Microsoft&#39;s software vendor partners will be able to build richer clients that access additional Windows Live for mobile capabilities. For example, a developer could make an application that lets a user click to record a voice clip and send it to an MSN Messenger buddy, even if the sender is using a Windows Mobile phone and the recipient has a Nokia S60 phone.&quot;These are rich and fun and engaging features in Messenger that we had on some of our top-end platforms that are now opened up through this protocol,&quot; said Arbogast.Microsoft also introduced a new program, Windows Live @mobile, aimed at making it easier for operators to quickly begin offering Windows Live and MSN mobile services across their device portfolios.While Windows Mobile has been seen primarily as a product for business users, Microsoft is increasingly trying to push it into the consumer market. &quot;This is about us really extending our focus to be, instead of predominantly on the work part of life, to be about delivering phones for your entire life,&quot; said Arbogast.Microsoft also recently hired a new marketing executive tasked with positioning Windows Mobile to appeal more to consumers.Still, Microsoft isn&#39;t shifting away from its business customer focus. It is stepping up its efforts to sell mobile products to small businesses. Through a new partnership, Brightstar and TechData will sell Windows Mobile phones to small and medium businesses in Europe. The companies will offer a portfolio of products and services to customers, including servers, devices, services and support.In the U.S., Microsoft said that Cbeyond, a provider of communications services for small businesses, will offer a new hosted Exchange e-mail service that supports mobile devices for small and medium businesses.
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Skype, GoogleTalk, MSN, and Twitter all in one client Symbian VoIP and messaging client Fring has launched a version for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, connecting them to multiple VoIP and messaging services from a single client for free.â¦
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InfoWorld - Mobile phones play an important role in Microsoft's software-plus-services vision, CEO Steve Ballmer said Tuesday.
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For many of us, the latest mobile telephones on the market are simply cool gadgets for making calls, with a few nifty electronic extras -- MP3, agenda, e-mail, image capture -- tacked on.
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(InfoWorld) - Nearly one year after Skype stole the headlines at the 3GSM World Congress with itsÂ plans to offer a mobile versionÂ of its Internet phone, a couple of nimble startups -- and not the Net telephony pioneer itself -- appear to have found a way to make this type of service work, both technically and commercially. Earlier this week, JajahÂ announced aÂ new mobile VOIPÂ serviceÂ that allows smart-phone users to make low-cost and, in some cases, free international calls. Customers simply enter Jajah's mobile Web portal through their handset's browser, enter their user name and password and then make a either a free or low-cost call. The launch of Jajah Mobile Web comes on the heals of a mobile VOIP (voice over IP) offering by Fring, which, unlike Jajah, requires users to download software and install it in their Internet-enabled handsets. The Fring service gives mobile users access to P-to-P (peer-to-peer) VOIP offerings such as Skype and Google Talk. Microsoft appears to have its finger on the pulse of mobile VOIP, too. Next week in Barcelona, the U.S. software giant will unwrap aÂ new version of its Windows Mobile OSÂ that will supposedly enable carriers and device maker to add VOIP functionality to Windows Mobile devices. All these announcements -- and the many more expected at this year's 3GSM World Congress -- come as Skype, which essentially stunned the mobile phone industry last year with its VOIP plans, acknowledges technical and commercial hurdles. In a recent interview in Finnish newspaper, Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas ZennstrÃ¶m spoke of "technical obstacles" and conceded that efforts to make Skype work had been taking "much longer than expected." At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, Eric Lagier, Skype director of business development for hardware and mobile, called the lack of attractive flat-rate fees for most mobile phone services a key commercial hurdle to mobile VOIP usage. He said the company didn't want to be in a position of claiming that its service is free, but facing users who at the end of the month are docked with a huge broadband usage fee. At last year's 3GSM World Congress, Skype and the Hutchison 3 Group (Hutchison 3G)Â announced a partnershipÂ to provide what they had hoped to become the world's first commercial VOIP service for mobile phones. Hutchison 3G, which operates IP-based mobile broadband networks in several European markets, was one of the first mobile phone operators to embrace VOIP, a technology many in the industry view as a major threat to their cash-cow voice business. But industry experts admit that challenges remain.Â One hurdle in providing quality VOIP serviceÂ over mobile handsets is the uplink, which is currently too slow to support quality voice calls, John Giere, chief marketing officer at Alcatel-Lucent, said in an earlier interview. To increase uplink speeds, operators of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks, which dominate Europe and many parts of Asia and Latin America, will need to upgrade their networks with HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) technology, which will give operators "the bidirectional capability they need to run real VOIP," he said. The high-speed technology is not expected to become commercially available in volume until the latter part of 2007 or early 2008. Operators are presently busy rolling out the downlink counterpart HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access).
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Mobile phones play an important role in Microsoft's software-plus-services vision, CEO Steve Ballmer told the CTIA show in San Francisco today.
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Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled its vision of "unified communications" in the enterprise, with one executive saying that the tools "will transform business communications as fundamentally as e-mail did in the 1990s." But what does unified communications really mean for the enterprise?
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US software giant Microsoft is aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market by rivals like Apple.
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(InfoWorld) - For business users who want Microsoft Office on their cell phones, Windows Mobile 6, the upcoming version of Redmond's mobile operating system to be unveiled next week, will be a must-have upgrade. Mobile 6 comes with mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With the continuing increase in sales of smartphones at the expense of handheld devices, Office makes a lot of sense, especially for synchronizing with desktop files, according to Rob Enderle, principal at the Enderle Group. Carriers and handset manufacturers who believe they can put the limited memory and storage to better use, however, are out of luck. Microsoft Office still comes with Mobile 6. According to John Starkwether, a product manager in the Mobile and Embedded Devices Division at Microsoft, Office is part of the package. Starkwether conjectured that if a vendor really wants to exclude Office from the operating system, an accommodation might be possible. Additional upgrades to the mobile OS include Microsoft's Direct Push Technology with automatic synchronization of Outlook calendars, tasks, and contacts using Exchange Server. For security and management, Mobile 6 will also give mobile network managers the capability of remotely wiping out all data from a device should it be lost or stolen. Other security features include certificate options and storage card encryption. Business users will also be pleased with the inclusion of mobile versions of the .Net Compact Framework and SQL Server in order to access a company's standard line of business applications remotely. The Office applications are the most robust to date for the limited capacities of a cell phone. Spell checking in Word, though, is not included. E-mail viewing will be easier on the eye with formatting, tables, and pictures viewable as originally generated. One-click options for e-mail, such as "reply all", moving a message to a subfolder and "delete" have been added to accommodate the restricted functionality of a small device. Windows Vista users on the desktop will be able to swap music, pictures, movies and Outlook information between the Vista PC and the mobile device. Windows Live will integrate mail, messenger, search, contacts, and spaces. Call history is now placed inside the individual contact card. Enderle said that although there was "a lot of great stuff" in Mobile 6 Microsoft still has to focus on ease of use. "Compared to the Apple iPhone with its simplified interface, Mobile 6 is still complex to use," Enderle said. Devices with Windows Mobile 6 will ship worldwide in the second quarter.
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That rewrite of the old Microsoft Corp. motto might not fit precisely, but the Redmond company yesterday showed its ever-expanding ambitions with new software that connects the desktop computer to the traditional telephone next to it.
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U.S. software giant Microsoft  is aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market by rivals like Apple.