Microsoft To Overhaul Hotmail

Microsoft will debut next month a major overhaul of its Hotmail webmail service, with upgrades across the board, including in areas like spam, security and performance.

“We listened. We learned. We reinvented Hotmail from the ground up,” reads an invitation sent on Friday to journalists for press events to be held on Oct. 3 simultaneously in New York and San Francisco.

“Forget everything you thought you knew about Hotmail. Just don’t forget this date,” reads the invitation.

Hotmail’s primary competitors are Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail. The last time the consumer webmail market got a product jolt was in 2004, when Google surprised the world with Gmail and its then-unprecedented amount of email storage.

At that point, innovation in webmail services had stagnated for years but Gmail shook Microsoft, Yahoo and other webmail providers like AOL out of their comfort zone, as they quickly responded by increasing the size of their email inboxes.

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IMs To Overtake Emails In Workplace

Many CIOs predict that real-time communication technologies, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, Chatter and Yammer will outpace traditional email in the workplace in the next five years.

That’s the conclusion of a Robert Half Technology survey of more than 1,400 CIOs at U.S. companies with more than 100 employees. The survey was published last month.

More than half (54%) of the CIOs polled said real-time workplace communication tools will surpass traditional email in popularity within five years. The prediction was a bit lukewarm, however: 13% of the respondents said real-time messages will be “much more popular” than email, while 41% said they’ll be “somewhat more popular.”

Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm, said a transition to real-time tools could yield workplace benefits, potentially making it easier to work as a team, solve problems, share ideas and manage documents.

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Google Acquires Zagat

Google has purchased the prestigious restaurant ratings publisher, Zagat to boost its online maps and local business listings with trustworthy reviews and recommendations, which Web surfers increasingly seek and value.

“Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering — delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world,” wrote Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of local, maps and location services, in a blog post.

Google acquired Zagat, which was founded in 1979, because of its brand, reputation and quality of its surveys and reviews, which it publishes in print guides and online. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Best known for its restaurant ratings, Zagat also surveys consumers about the quality of hotels, nightclubs and other leisure-themed businesses.

Sprint Sues To Stop AT&T-T-Mobile merger

Sprint on Tuesday announced it has initiated a lawsuit against AT&T and Deutsche Telekom to block the two companies from merging “as a violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.” Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act bars any person from acquiring “the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital” that would “substantially … lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.” In its suit, Sprint argues that the proposed merger would violate this act because it would lead to AT&T and Verizon’s controlling 75% of the wireless market while taking in 90% of the profits.

Sprint’s antitrust suit comes less than a week after the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against the merger with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In its suit, the DOJ similarly argued that the proposed merger would significantly damage competition in the wireless industry, especially since T-Mobile has historically offered low-cost wireless voice and data services for customers. The DOJ also contended that any efficiencies gained by combining AT&T and T-Mobile spectrum would not be enough to offset the damage done to U.S. consumers by further consolidation of the wireless industry.

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HTC Is On A Buying Spree

Taiwanese handset maker HTC has been on a shopping spree to reshape its business, though it remains to be seen if the strategy will help it gain ground on rivals such as Apple, Samsung and Research In Motion.

HTC has bought or invested in at least six companies this year, many of which provide technologies to improve how users consume and share content on its devices. It’s a big change for the Taiwanese manufacturer, which focused for much of its existence on hardware, leaving software and content to its partners.

Times have changed, however, with rivals like Apple and Nokia building whole ecosystems around their products, including app stores and content delivery systems. HTC has shifted its focus before, moving from contract manufacturer for Microsoft’s smartphones to selling its own HTC-branded devices. It must now evolve once more.

“It is no longer enough to focus only on hardware innovations,” said Ryan Lee, an analyst with Taipei-based Topology Research Institute. HTC’s acquisitions, which include both technology and patents, “pave the way for HTC’s greater competitiveness,” he said.

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Apple Blasted For Not Blocking Stolen Certificates

A security researcher blasted Apple for what he called “foot dragging” over the DigiNotar certificate fiasco, and urged the company to act fast to update Mac OS X to protect users.

“We’re looking at some very serious issues [about trust on the Web] and it doesn’t help matters when Apple is dragging its feet,” said Paul Henry, a security and forensics analyst with Arizona-based Lumension.

Unlike Microsoft, which updated Windows Tuesday to block all SSL (secure socket layer) certificates issued by DigiNotar, Apple has not updated Mac OS X to do the same.

DigiNotar, one of hundreds of firms authorized to issue digital certificates that authenticate a website’s identity, admitted on Aug. 30 that its servers were compromised weeks earlier. A report made public Monday said that hackers had acquired 531 certificates, including many used by the Dutch government, and that DigiNotar was unaware of the intrusion for weeks.

Because almost all the people who were routed to a site secured with one of the stolen certificates were from Iran, many experts suspect that the DigiNotar hack was sponsored or encouraged by the Iranian government, which could use them to spy on its citizens.

Microsoft isn’t the only software maker to block all DigiNotar certificates: Google, Mozilla and Opera have also issued new versions of their browsers — Chrome, Firefox and Opera — to completely, or in Opera’s case, partially prevent users from reaching websites secured with a DigiNotar certificate.

Users of Safari on Mac OS X, however, remain at risk to possible “man-in-the-middle” attacks based on the fraudulently obtained certificates.

Because Safari relies on the underlying operating system to tell it which certificates have been revoked or banned entirely, Apple must update Mac OS X. The Windows edition of Safari, which has a negligible share of the browser market, taps Windows’ certificate list: That version is safe to use once Microsoft’s Tuesday patch is applied.

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Microsoft: Stolen SSL Certs No Good

Microsoft has officially stated that a digital certificate stolen from a Dutch company could not be used to force-feed customers malware through its Windows Update service.

The company’s assertion came after a massive theft of more than 500 SSL (secure socket layer) certificates, including several that could be used to impersonate Microsoft’s update services, was revealed by Dutch authorities and several other affected developers.

“Attackers are not able to leverage a fraudulent Windows Update certificate to install malware via the Windows Update servers,” said Jonathan Ness, an engineer with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in a Sunday blog post. “The Windows Update client will only install binary payloads signed by the actual Microsoft root certificate, which is issued
and secured by Microsoft.”

Seven of the 531 certificates now known to have been fraudulently obtained by hackers in July were for the domains update.microsoft.com and windowsupdate.com, while another six were for *.microsoft.com.

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Dell & Baidu To Create Mobile Devices

Dell Inc and China’s top search engine Baidu Inc plan to join forces and develop tablet computers and mobile phones, targeting the Chinese market dominated by Apple Inc and Lenovo.

China is one of the fastest growing markets for tablets and is home to more than 900 million cell phone subscribers, but analysts were skeptical that the partnership would knock Apple from its dominant perch in the market.

“I suspect this is just Dell, who has a lot of problems on the mobile and tablet front, grasping at straws to get any kind of publicity that it can to make its product more attractive,” said Michael Clendenin, managing director of technology consultancy RedTech Advisors.

“Ultimately in China, I still think it is Apple’s game, still for the iPad and iPhone.”

Dell declined to give a timeline for the launch of the devices, but local media reported on Tuesday, quoting sources, that it may be as early as November.

Baidu launched a new mobile application platform last week and offered a glimpse of its upcoming mobile operating system, which it hopes will serve a growing number of users accessing the Internet from smartphones and tablet computers.

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2TB USB Thumb Drive On The Horizon?

According to a video posting on YouTube of memory card maker Transcend and Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have joined forces to produce a USB 3.0 flash drive with up to 2TB of capacity.

The drive, described as measuring as long as a human thumb and slightly thicker than a penny, was video taped at the Display Taiwan 2011 technology show. The model on display had only 16GB, but the display states that it’s capable of scaling to 2TB.

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Lofty Wishes: AT&T To Offer $700 HTC 4G Tablet

AT&T on Wednesday announced the new HTC Jetstream, its first LTE-ready tablet, will become available on Sept. 4 for $700 and a two-year contract.

Jetstream’s price may be too steep for many customers, even with a fast LTE plus HSPA+ connection, given expected lower prices for tablets on the horizon. Amazon is expected to unveil a 9-in. tablet soon priced at $299, while Hewlett-Packard has begun a $99 fire sale for its soon-to-be-defunct TouchPad.

The 10.1-in. Jetstream runs Android 3.1 with an expandable storage capacity of 32 GB, but at nearly $700, it would be $100 more than the 32 GB Apple iPad 2 with its 9.7-in. screen.

That premium price for the Jetstream seems to based principally on its fast LTE (Long-Term Evolution) connection and a digital pen input capability that allows for drawings and signatures on the touchscreen.

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