I’m no expert, but Microsoft’s anti-Google “Scroogled” ads might be some of one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Not only does the campaign reek of the most feeble kind of desperation, but there’s some evidence to suggest that it’s even backfired on Microsoft.

Now parts of “Scroogled” are on their way out, according to Microsoft online services director Stefan Weitz, who told KQED that his company is winding down the print and TV arms of the campaign.

Weitz said that Microsoft started “Scroogled” with a poll from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, which found that there were a lot of people who had no idea that Google scans their emails to serve them ads.

While attack ads are never all that enjoyable, “Scroogled” is particularly bad because it somehow made me want to use services like Bing and Outlook less. Using fear-mongering and somewhat misleading claims just doesn’t work on those who can see through them — hence the backlash.

But the biggest problem with “Scroogled” is that it doesn’t say anything about Microsoft’s own products. If you want people to pay attention, tell them what your product does well, not what your competitor’s product does poorly. It’s hard to do something like “Scoogled” and look like the good guy — even if your claims are perfectly accurate.

In case you were fortunate enough to have missed the TV spots, take a deep breath, maybe a shot of whiskey or two, and watch the video below. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft really wants its Outlook.com email app to pick up new users. Its solution? Attack the hell out of Google’s incredibly popular Gmail service.

In November, Microsoft tried to go after Google’s credibility by claiming that Google Shopping results were all advertisements rather than fair comparisons of products around the web. Now it appears Microsoft is going after an even meatier target than Google Shopping by attacking Gmail.

The new Scroogled.com site from Microsoft makes the case that Gmail snoops on all of your emails to serve you better ads.

“Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads,” the site claims. “And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy.”

Some of what Microsoft is saying is true. Google does scan email keywords so it can contextually serve you advertising. However, it is clearly lying when it says there is no way opt out. As Marketing Land points out, you can not have Google reading your emails by using the basic HTML version of Gmail, using a third-party email client, or paying $50 a year for Google Apps and opting out that way.

Google has previously addressed privacy issues by saying that it walks a careful line between protecting users and serving ads.

“There is what I call the creepy line,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in 2010 at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

And even as Google has addressed these issues, Gmail’s many users haven’t felt the need to leave. Google claims to have more than 425 million active monthly users on Gmail.

As an alternative, Microsoft is pushing its Outlook.com service, which is debuted in mid-2012 as a replacement to Hotmail. The site’s ad copy reads:

Outlook.com prioritizes your privacy. You won’t see ads based on keywords from your personal email. Your email is nobody else’s business. But Google makes it their business. Even if you’re not a Gmail user, Google still goes through your personal email sent to Gmail and uses the content to sell ads.

Our own testing of Outlook.com showed that it is a smart, modern service, but is harping about Gmail’s privacy enough to get people to switch?

Screenshot via Scroogled.com

Simple file sharing service Ge.tt is coming to Gmail and Microsoft’s recently-launched Outlook with a pair of extensions for Google’s Chrome browser.

The big pull with Ge.tt is that it works in real time: Once a user selects a file to transfer, the file is uploaded in the background, allowing for instant sharing. While Ge.tt works without them, the extensions take simplicity to the next level by working within the email services.

The strategy behind the move is simple: Ge.tt wants more people to use the service, and there are few better ways to do that than by going after Gmail users. (This, as Get.tt co-founder and CEO Tobias Baunbæk notes in a statement, has been the idea behind the service all along.)

Ge.tt also offers paid options for storage demands higher than 2GB, a strategy that’s worked well for rivals like Dropbox. According to the Ge.tt homepage, the service’s 802,105 users have shared nearly 7.5 million files so far.

Founded in 2010, the Copenhagen, Denmark-based startup raised $435,000 from London’s Atomico Capital last November. 

Photo: Shutterstock/bloomua

Microsoft has opened its new Office Store, an app marketplace aimed at adding new capabilities to Office and Office 365 apps, the company announced today.

We suspected the Office Store was on its way due to a July blog post about implementing a new “cloud app model” for Office. Microsoft will incorporate the Office Store into the next versions of Office and SharePoint, but like the Windows 8 App Store, it is now in preview mode so companies and developers can get their apps ready for the full launch of Office 2013.

The idea of the Office Store is to add new functionality to Office apps like Word and Outlook. Product manager Vivek Narasimhan writes:

We know our users spend an incredible amount of time using the Microsoft Office suite – think of how much time you spend reading through email, writing reports, analysing data, preparing sales figures or sharing proposals with your team. We also know that many critical tools and many critical information sources live on the web or in applications outside of Office. We’ve built the store so you could integrate the very best of the web with the powerful features of Office and SharePoint.

A great example of this is Outlook 2013 (or outlook web access) connected to Exchange. If you are sent a part number or an address via email, you shouldn’t have to open another application to get more details. If you are sent an email from a contact, you should be able to see their LinkedIn details or their sales history right as you read the email. Even better, you should be able to interact with and take action on these other applications right from within the Office clients.

Microsoft thinks this is a big opportunity for developers because of the huge number of Office users around the world. Narasimhan writes:

With over a billion people using Microsoft Office the developer opportunity is huge. Whether the app is focused on content management, data visualization, financial management, project management, sales & marketing, HR, education, travel, social … (The list really does go on and on!) there are an incredible number of individuals or teams who are looking for solutions to meet those needs. If you take SharePoint as an example, we’ve made it real easy for users to search for and find apps that will make their sites work for them. This is an opportunity to reach out with tailored solutions for specific verticals from Manufacturing to Legal, or with enhanced tools from scheduling to collaboration, or with those apps that everyone wants from maps to weather.

Companies including LinkedIn, Twitter, and LegalZoom have already added apps to the store. We expect many more enterprise-minded developers to add apps in the next several months.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looks like those free lunches are already starting to pay off. Yahoo has moved its popular email service forward with the addition of a calendar tab and made it possible to reply to calendar invites inside mail, the company announced today in a blog post.

Under new CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo hopes to shake off the dust it has accumulated over the years, and it very well could take on a product-focused direction with bigger and better applications. Since email is one of Yahoo’s most popular products, it makes sense that Yahoo wants to make it work better. The company needs to keep people from fleeing to rival services like Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s new Outlook.com service.

Funny enough, the new integration of Calendar and Mail actually one-ups Google because you can access the Calendar without opening a new tab like you have to in Gmail. Yahoo Senior Product Manager Ashish Parnami, writes:

Currently, users access the Calendar by clicking on the Calendar link under the “Applications” section in the left panel. The Calendar would then open in a new browser window/tab. To simplify the process (who wants more tabs open on their browser!?), we’re now making Calendar a permanent tab within Yahoo! Mail. So, as soon as you login to your Yahoo! Mail account, you will see a ‘Calendar’ tab right next to the ‘Contacts’ tab. This tab will remain there even as you navigate around to other tabs within Yahoo! Mail.

Not only is Calendar now accessible without opening a new tab, but users can search for events inside the “Calendar” tab. Additionally, when you receive a calendar invite from someone, you can respond with “Attending/Not Attending/Maybe,” add comments, or add it directly to your Calendar.

It’s a relatively small step, but it’s still a good sign for the company that’s been beaten down so much. We can’t wait to see what else Mayer does in the next year.

Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted, “Someone has apparently slipped an innovation drug into Microsoft’s water supply recently. This is getting interesting.”

I agree. This is definitely one of the more innovative products from Microsoft. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s easy to use.

The last fundamental innovation in email was in 2004 when Gmail launched. I’ve been a Gmail user ever since.

But despite huge increases in the volume of email we deal with in the last eight years, little has been done to improve the core experience. Yes, Google launched Priority Inbox. It’s supposed to help you figure out the important mail; for me, it’s been largely useless. Scanning through my inbox, very little of what Google has marked important really is.

Google’s other major moves with Gmail have largely been about trying to exploit its huge number of mail users into whatever lame social product Google is trying to bootstrap. (Remember Buzz?)

But better email tools could improve productivity for everyone. In the current version of Outlook mail, there isn’t enough innovation to get me to switch. But the existence of a new and credible player who wants to win may drive much-needed innovation in email. Here are some core things that would get me to switch by delivering value, not by tricking people like Facebook tried to do:

Automatic classification

Outlook’s “Quick views” feature offers a quick view of how that could happen: automatic classification of mail. The system automatically scans email for certain attributes that people look for. Oh, hey, this email looks like a shipping confirmation. And this one has a photo. And these have attachments.

That’s pretty rudimentary. But imagine that your email tool could do this:

• Separate receipts from marketing emails. I have eight years’ worth of emails from Amazon, Buy.com, Groupon, etc. Sometimes I want to look up what I purchased, or I need warranty service. Finding those receipts can be a challenge.
• Pluck out bills. Emails from American Express could be scanned for payment due date, and the date could automatically be added to my Google Calendar.
• Keep my travel top of mind. Itineraries, hotel confirmations, and rental car reservations that are upcoming would be available in a dashboard view.
• Identify emails with expiring content. Nordstrom’s anniversary sale ends August 5th. This could be put into a Quick view that becomes more prominent when the date approaches and drops out when the sale ends. Expired emails would also be downweighted in search results.

Some of the above can be done with search. For example, I can search “Buy.com receipt”. But look what happens when I do that:

I get a bunch of unrelated junk. What you can’t see is that the list isn’t complete. I’ve purchased much more from Buy.com. In order to get all of my Buy.com receipts, I have to search for “buy.com thanks for your order”.

Another way to tackle the problem is filters. I have set up numerous filters that file things like receipts, daily deal emails and the like. (You can see some of my filters in the screenshot above.) But that’s a real pain to set up and only geeks will do it.

There are vertical players that are focused on solving pieces of the problem. TripIt and Kayak will parse travel-related emails. I forward my confirmation emails to TripIt, it picks out the relevant details and creates a more consistent itinerary. It can even generate a feed of events that I plug into Google Calendar. That’s a really roundabout way of doing things. OneReceipt and Slice do this for shopping emails.

But the separate apps have little traction. It should be built into the email platform. And once it’s in a large scale system like Gmail or Outlook, emailers will have an incentive to markup the information they send to make it even more actionable.

Google has built a very lucrative business on organizing the world’s information. It should do a much better job of organizing my information.

Secure email

It’s somewhat mind boggling that this far into email adoption, unsecure email is standard operating practice. Yes, there have been some improvements. Gmail uses SSL for your mailbox. That wasn’t always the case.

But if you actually send something, that email is sent unencrypted to the recipient.

Securing email has had three historical challenges: it needs to be easy for the user, it needs to be universal, and it needs to have a business model.

Early experiments like PGP, which put a lot of work on both the sender and recipient, have failed in the consumer market. But for person-to-person messaging, we’re down to a small handful of providers that matter. (Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.) Among them, they should be able to solve this problem, at least for email sent among their networks.

Secure email is also something that would help with financial transactions and could potentially cut the flood of bills that are sent via paper mail. That the post office is running ads touting that paper mail is more secure than email is ridiculous. Not because they’re wrong, but because it’s true.

Even among my more tech savvy friends, many receive paper bills because the process of getting their bill or statement from each credit card company is difficult. If you have multiple accounts, it’s even more complicated because each financial institution has its own system. There is no interface as consistent as ripping open an envelope. They also have different rules about how long they keep old statements online. All of this stuff should show up in my email box as effortlessly and more securely than it does in my regular mailbox.

Because email recipients are concentrated on a few networks, it would be possible to have direct secure transmission of these statements and account notices. Doing that would also reduce the scourge of phishing, because the mail provider could authenticate that an email came from American Express or Bank of America.

This is a service that banks should be willing to pay for, both because it reduces their operational costs (mailing and printing statements) and because it reduces fraud liabilities (phishing.) Even at 5 cents per secure communication, it’d be a bargain.

Not only does this increase productivity, it’s better for the environment. The people who lose out are postal workers, especially the guy who’s job it is to convince banks that they should use paper statements instead of email. (I’m not making that up. Talk about a Sisyphean task.)

Will any of this happen? A guy can hope. And there’s nothing like real competition to help drive it.

If someone is willing to add these features, I will jump ship from Gmail. I would even go back to my Yahoo mail account.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s just-announced Outlook email service, which replaces Hotmail today, has already attracted 1 million signups, according to a tweet from Microsoft.

As I wrote earlier today, Hotmail had a serious branding problem, especially with the tech community. So Microsoft has ditched it and implemented a much cleaner design based on “Metro” principles. It integrates Skype and Office, and it’s quite functional and attractive. So attractive that it’s already pulled more than a million folks into the fold.

Many of the signups might just be the land grab for great email addresses (I snatched one up myself!), but these are still great numbers. Microsoft badly needed to jump-start Hotmail to get people to consider it seriously again. It very well may have succeeded.

Have you grabbed an Outlook.com account?

Check out a video outlining the service below:

And here’s a slideshow with more looks at Outlook:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Hotmail service is still popular with more than 325 million monthly active users, but the company has decided the Hotmail brand must die in favor of something without as many negative connotations. Here comes Outlook.

First up, you’re probably wondering, “Outlook, like the e-mail client I’ve used at the office for the past 10 years?” Yes, that’s the name, but now there will be the Office version of Outlook and the free, consumer-focused version of Outlook. From here on out, when I say Outlook, assume I’m talking about the new consumer version.

“There was a perception gap with Hotmail from tech enthusiasts and youth,” Windows Live general manager Brian Hall told me. “Many of them wouldn’t take a second look at Hotmail and they would say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable having this next to my name.’ … People understand Outlook is mail from Microsoft, so we thought this branding made sense.”

A revamped consumer email product is one of many product changes in Microsoft’s lineup this year, as it introduces the Windows 8 OS to the world. It is also working to release Office 2013, Windows Phone 8 for smartphones, improved SkyDrive cloud storage, updated Xbox 360 software, Windows Azure with newly added IaaS support, and more. Through strong planning, the company has made it so that many of these products interact with each other. They also share a common look with Metro design principles, with Outlook as a primary example.

As we’d seen in leaked screenshots, the design of Outlook is clean and minimalist, with a white background and a small header at the top. Hall said that the emphasis here was designing for usability and getting rid of clutter.

“We kept many features people liked from Hotmail, but added a clean, fresh, modern design,” Hall said. “This is by far the cleanest email service today.”

Hotmail users will have the option to either keep their “@hotmail.com” addresses or switch over to an “@outlook.com” address, but everyone will get the new design.

If you want to make the switch right away (and claim your ever-so-trendy @outlook.com address), log in to Hotmail and click on the “Options” menu in the upper right, then select the “Upgrade to Outlook.com” option, as shown to the right. Once you’ve switched, go into mail settings and select “Create a Outlook alias” (sic) to select an address @outlook.com.

Another huge feature of Outlook is Skype calling (see the top photo). Since Microsoft purchased Skype for an astronomical $8.5 billion, the company hasn’t done much to integrate Skype into its products besides putzing around with Windows Phone and Lync. But now Microsoft will take serious advantage of Skype for the first time in Outlook. If you click on the video chat button with your email contacts, you can start a Skype call even if you don’t have Skype installed on your computer.

In the top left corner of Outlook, you’ll be able to access messaging, settings, and edit your profile. In Messaging, you can chat with people who also use Outlook and, more importantly, your Facebook friends once you link your account to Facebook. In the settings tab, you can change the color of the top bar, turn on a reading pane, or dig into more advanced settings.

Outlook incorporates Microsoft’s Office Web Apps for viewing and editing documents. There’s also integration with the SkyDrive cloud storage product, so users will able to save and view files from Outlook in their SkyDrive accounts.

Of course, the product isn’t completely free, as it includes advertising. On the far left side of the screen, you’ll see small advertising blocks in simple text form. Only if you hover your mouse over the ad will a photo pop up. Ideally this makes it so the ads aren’t distracting to core email experience.

AOL, with its considerably smaller tiny user base of 24 million, also recently redesigned its email with a clean look. That said, I think most people would much rather have an “@outlook.com” address rather than an “@aol.com” address. Maybe AOL should give its users the chance to switch to another domain as well.

Ultimately, the introduction of Outlook is a smart move by Microsoft. It offers a viable alternative to the tech-savvy crowd that doesn’t want to be associated with Hotmail, and it integrates well with other Microsoft services, creating convenience similar to what Google offers with Gmail, Docs, Drive, Play, Reader, and others. It also creates a new opportunity for people who want dibs on a good email address.

Check out the slideshow below for more looks at Outlook:

WatchDox helps companies share highly sensitive data across across several devices and collaborate on documents in a secured environment. The service is like a more secure version of DropBox for businesses and government agencies.

Before a file is even shared, WatchDox also provides layers of security to documents to restrict how they can be viewed and shared. With a Microsoft Office plug-in, document owners can control whether or not a shared file can be printed, copied, or emailed. You can even set limits on how long someone else can access the document and track geographically where the document has been downloaded or viewed. And if someone downloads a file secured by WatchDox and then looses the device, the file can be remotely destroyed.

Similarly to Google Docs, WatchDox’s Workspace lets you create documents that can be worked on by a team of people in a protected environment. You can control who can access a specific data room, where sensitive documents can be upload and worked on by a group of people.

WatchDox’s service is available as a plug-in for Microsoft Office and Outlook, two native applications called WatchDox Uploader and Sync, and with iOS and Blackberry apps. The company is developing an Android app.

WatchDox faces competition from Accellion, which also offers secure file sharing and document collaboration for businesses across multiple devices and YouSendit, a secure file sharing service.

This latest round of funding for WatchDox was led by investment firm Blackstone, which announced it will begin using WatchDox’s services.

WatchDox has previously raised $14.4 million from Shasta Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, and Shlomo Kramer. The company is based in Mountain View, California and was founded in 2007.

Lock on screen image via Shutterstock

San Francisco-based Xobni was among the earliest and best-known of a number of startups bringing social data into email. (One of those startups, Gist, was recently acquired by BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion.) In Xobni’s case, it allowed users to see their contacts’ Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter information directly in Outlook, giving them social context when writing emails. Now the company will allow other services to integrate with the email workflow by offering a gadget in Xobni.

The store is launching with nearly 20 services, which include document sharing, lead-tracking, issue reporting, and more. Companies can make the apps available for free or for a $9.99 per month subscription. And they’re all built around the OpenSocial format.

So why should developers go through this new gadget store? After all, they could already bring their apps into Outlook by building plug-ins — that’s what Xobni did itself. But company spokesperson Terra Carmichael said the process of developing an Outlook plug-in can be difficult:

On the other hand, it’s incredibly easy to create Xobni Gadgets that live in Outlook. You don’t have to learn Outlook programming to create a gadget. Ours are based on open standards and web standards… so we make it very simple for developers to seamlessly integrate web-based services into Outlook – and use the same code to deploy in Gmail or Google Apps. Lastly, enterprises can build private gadgets based on their existing internal services to help employees be more productive (like an expense tracking gadget, etc.)

Xobni has raised more than $31 million in funding from backers including Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Cisco Systems, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments, and BlackBerry Partners Fund.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) announced this morning that it has acquired Tungle.me, a calendar scheduling application, for an undisclosed sum of money.

Tungle.me, which launched at DEMO in 2007, offers a service to synchronize and schedule meetings across various calendaring applications — including Microsoft’s Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Additionally, it helps prevent timezone and double-booking conflicts, and integrates with devices such as Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s own BlackBerry.

The service has managed to build a fair amount of traction since launching, currently put into use by 40 percent of Fortune 1000 companies and over 800 universities around the world.

While RIM has yet to mention what it plans to do with the service, the company is most likely going to keep it running in its current form, going by its similar past acquisitions of Gist, an e-mail contact manager, and DataViz, a document platform for Outllook.

The Montreal, Canada-based startup was founded by Marc Gingras. It raised $6.36 million over two funding rounds, with investors that included Desjardins Venture Capital, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and JLA Ventures.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Now that Xobni is integrating with Huddle, a social collaboration tool for enterprise users, it has turned itself into a collaboration tool. Xobni users can access “workflows” — similar to a Twitter stream or news feed for businesses — from Huddle and save contact data automatically, all within their Outlook email. Xobni also released its development application programming interface (API) to the public today, so now businesses can create and distribute custom Outlook plug-ins.

There are already a number of collaboration tools like Yammer and the native Huddle app outside of Xobni’s Outlook add-on, but the goal for Xobni is to trim off seconds and minutes here and there for Outlook users in order to increase productivity through its integration with Huddle and other future enterprise gadgets, said Josh Jacobson, senior director of product management at Xobni.

“We’re seeing users who literally will spend 8 hours or more using Outlook,” he said. “Even if it’s a minor change to something they do 100 times a day, that ends up saving tons of time.”

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company was founded in 2006 and has since raised $30 million in three rounds of funding. Its investors include RRE Ventures Fund, First Round Capital and the BlackBerry Partners Fund. Xobni launched its service publicly in May 2008.

Microsoft’s Outlook has dominated the desktop email software market to date, but as the product ages, a few independent contenders are on their way up. One of them is Czech Republic-based eM Client, which is launching a new version of the product today at DEMO.

Like Outlook, eM Client looks to be a Grand Central for communication, letting users manage emails, calendars, contacts, and tasks through a Windows desktop client.

Its 2.7 release features Sync2eM, which allowes users to synchronize contacts and calendars from eM Client to mobile devices like the iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Android, over the air.

Aimed at both regular and business users, the product launched in January 2010 and has gained more than 70,000 installations in six months — an impressive milestone, considering the dominance of Outlook and the trendiness of Web-based email.

Although it seeks mostly to be a worthy Outlook alternative, the product goes beyond Microsoft’s by offering full integration of  instant-messaging clients like Skype, Google Talk, and AIM within its sidebar, and better synchronization with email providers like Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. The 2.7 release adds support for Facebook messaging.

Founded in 2007, eM Client has been under development for three years and left beta testing in January. The 10-employee startup is based in Czech Republic, but recently opened an office in Silicon Valley.

Xobni, a software plug-in that helps users see social connections in their email, is raising $16.2 million in new funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company confirmed the news and said that Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures led the round.

Xobni makes email more useful with fast search; showing your contacts’ Facebook, LinkedIn, and Hoover’s profiles; revealing past attachments from a contact; and more. Its main product is a plug-in for Microsoft’s popular email program Outlook, but it also recently launched integration with the native email application on BlackBerry smartphones.

The company previously raised more than $15 million in funding, including a $1 million addition late last year to its second round. Past investors include incubator Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Cisco Systems, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments, and BlackBerry Partners Fund.

The filing listed Will Porteous of RRE Ventures as a new director. It also says Xobni has raised $11.3 million in this round so far.