Microsoft is stepping up to the plate with their recent Hotmail overhaul!
Microsoft's goal (other than to compete with Google's Gmail) is to make it easier and cleaner to access your mail.
The "New Hotmail has a new "Sweep" feature that allows you to easily clean out junk mail or put mail from a particular sender into a folder. It takes only two clicks, one on an email and another on the "Sweep" button. This can make your Inbox much more manageable.
Also included is a new business-grade SPAM FILTER (SmartScreen), the same spam filter used by several government institutions.
In the New Hotmail you can now arrange email by conversation, and it has integrated Hulu, Social Networking, Flickr.
One of the coolest new features: You can now send to 200 files at 50MB each, a total of 10GB of attachments AT A TIME. Attachments are automatically sent via SkyDrive, a free storage service by Microsoft. This is seamless and integrated and the recipient has the option to view a slideshow OR download all files immediately as a zipped file.
Any Office documents that are sent as attachments are immediately shared with the recipient and can be edited via Office Web Apps, RIGHT IN THE INBOX.
And for you Mac users: this doesn't only work on Windows PCs, it will work on your Mac too!
These features will be completely rolled out soon, so head over to hotmail.com and sign up for a new account to check 'em out!
It's nice to see Microsoft back in the innovation department…
Clicker.tv
TV 2.0?
Many people are tossing in the towel and canceling their cable TV service, now that a wide array of content is available online.
Hulu, Netflix, and all the broadcast networks offer streaming video, but few of their interfaces are designed to be used on a TV.
Enter Clicker.tv.
Clicker.tv is a website that indexes 650,000 TV episodes from various content providers, and is presented in a clean and easy to navigate interface and can be controlled by keyboard, mouse, or by remote control when connected to your TV.
You can easily search by keywords or tags, and a list of trending videos is also displayed to show what's popular RIGHT NOW.
With an interface that easily tops standard cable box or TiVo interfaces, Clicker.tv is on the right track. But, in my testing I found that the ease of use and clean UI are rendered pointless when you click to play a video; you are then taken to the publisher's website and lose the remote control and interface that makes Clicker.tv so cool.
Hopefully they are working on a way to integrate the content to make it a seamless experience. Certainly a service that I will be keeping an eye on.
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