In that short time, the venue has hosted 50 events, from a three-hour iPhone photography class that was followed by a round of beers, to ordinary yoga.

The experiment has represented a massive investment.

The historic building was meticulously remodeled to blend old exposed brick walls and antique chandeliers with modern accents like bamboo floors and large flat-screen TVs. (See the accompanying slideshow for a better look.)

While it’s too early to call the clubhouse a success, there are some signs that the concept is starting to pay off.

And if LivingSocial can replicate the venue across other cities, it could be able to distance itself not only from the stigma of the daily deals business, but also from Groupon, which despite being the category leader, has struggled as a public company.

In a presentation to the media earlier this month, LivingSocial’s co-founder and CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said he wants LivingSocial to be to local commerce what Amazon is to online retailing and what Google is to search.

“In a three- to five-year timeframe, I want LivingSocial to be a tab that you keep open in your browser all day long,” O’Shaughnessy said. “We think that there has to be that integrated commerce platform for local commerce, and we really hope it’s LivingSocial.”

Productions

It’s still early days for 918 F Street, but LivingSocial has produced dozens of events there, and thousands of events elsewhere.

Packages have included zip-lining, wine tasting, beer festivals and small concert series. LivingSocial even once organized a summer camp for adults. Inside of 918 F Street, there’s a test kitchen for three dozen students, an art studio for painting classes and various empty rooms that can be set up for different events. A commercial kitchen allows chefs to host pop-up restaurants at the venue to try out new dishes or concepts — LivingSocial is there to fill the seats.

Sometimes the concepts are juvenile, perhaps, but when you mix in alcohol, as they usually do, it’s hard not to compare the place to a virtual Club Med, or a YMCA on steroids.

One benefit to producing its own events is that LivingSocial can solve one of the biggest problems in the daily deals space: Unique inventory. Too many providers are all selling the same stuff. By default, the F Street deals are all exclusives.

For example, a recent event called “Sumo, Sake and Sushi” sold out in 40 minutes.

Not only was it popular for consumers, but for merchants, too. The event was being used to help promote a new restaurant in town.

“When you own the experience, you can produce something great for your membership, and then you have the opportunity to bring in sponsors,” said Doug Miller, who is in charge of new business initiatives at LivingSocial.

So far, the approach is working.

The company says that 25,000 people from the D.C. area have already attended events in the four months the building has been open, and that 83 percent of the merchants had never worked with the company before — including using daily deals.

More validation

In research shared with AllThingsD, Yipit reports that the venue has generated roughly $1 million in gross billings since opening, and that the deals sold there were consistently double the gross billings of the average LivingSocial deal.

Furthermore, the researcher found that 918 F Street’s gross billings per deal have grown steadily — from $18,000 in February to more than $22,000 in May — and perhaps most surprisingly, it already accounts for 10 percent of LivingSocial’s D.C. business (even though it hosts fewer than 10 deals per month in the building).

O’Shaughnessy said the company is still fine-tuning the approach, but of the 50 different types of activities hosted at the venue, only two have not been profitable.

Additionally, he noted that people who participated in events at 918 F Street became more valuable customers, because they were more likely to spend with LivingSocial afterward, whether it’s to return for another event or to buy more vouchers.

Expansion plans

The company was reluctant to say if — or when — it would bring the concept to other markets, but maybe it won’t have to.

In May, LivingSocial announced a partnership with AEG, which owns and operates some of the most well-known venues across the U.S. Together, the two companies plan to co-produce events, by packaging regularly occurring events, like concerts or sports, with other activities or transportation.

If LivingSocial decides to go it alone and build replicas of 918 F Street, it will need additional capital.

As the second-largest daily deals provider in the U.S., LivingSocial has raised $600 million, and already has 5,000 employees. The company’s CFO, John Bax, said it does not need to raise more capital today, based on how it is currently configured.

A baby step away from Groupon

By becoming an entertainment and media brand, LivingSocial is distancing itself from the daily deals business, and from Groupon.

This is true for one main reason: Most of the deals that LivingSocial produces and hosts at the venue or elsewhere are not daily deals in the traditional sense of offering half-off the price — that’s because they are full price.

“Already it [full price] is a significant percentage of what we do. It will be a driver for a lot of what we do, but not the primary driver,” O’Shaughnessy said.

But LivingSocial is not just drifting away from Groupon. Groupon is also finding its own way in determining the future of the daily deals business.

While LivingSocial focuses on producing and curating events, Groupon is determined to become a technology company by building software, such as online calendar tools and payment technologies aimed at the local merchant.

LivingSocial says it also has plans to test out at least three concepts in the payments and loyalty space this summer, but it is not as interested in developing any hardware, and does not want to compete directly with payment processors.

With the two different approaches to the market, it’s anyone’s guess what the daily deals market will look like in three to five years.

AllThingsD.com

There’s a better, more personal approach. And Google may have just found it.

First unveiled at the I/O developer conference on Wednesday, the Events feature allows Google+ users to send out customized invitations to their friends both on and off the Google+ platform. It’s helpful in that it’ll auto-update invitees’ Google Calendars if they accept, and acts as a single repository for event photos; essentially, everyone at the event can take photos and automatically send them to the same place.

On its own, it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature that would make one rush out to use Google+. But here’s the thing: If Google can convince even a small number of existing Google+ users to start sending out event invites, the network could wind up getting a whole bunch of new users.

Example: I’m not on Google+, but I receive an invite to a wedding from a friend who is part of the network. If I click through the email to the invitation, I’m greeted with a big, Google-branded prompt to join Google+. So in essence, it acts as a direct mail solicitation service, powered by a group of people who are much more convincing than Google: Your friends and family.

The tough part from there? Convincing everyone to stick around. Sign-ups exploded when Google+ first debuted, but the main takeaway afterward was that the whole platform became a ghost town — plenty of houses, but no one at home.

It’s possible that Google plans to fight attrition with more real-time feature integration. Hangouts — the on-air group video chat service — has been the service’s most compelling draw to date, offering a far better feature set than Facebook’s one-to-one Skype integration. And the “Party mode” part of Events allows everyone in attendance to instantly upload pictures to the same album using the Google+ mobile app, creating a living, real-time photo journal of a specific time and place.

Obviously, there’s no guarantee anyone will use the service, though it’s off to a promising start: More than 1,000 people used Party mode at Google’s official I/O shindig on Wednesday evening, contributing upward of 13,000 photographs over the course of the night.

Now that’s a party. We’ll see who sticks around to clean up after.

Naturally, Windows apologists, sick of being the target of a decade of malware-based ridicule, were quick to jump up and down and scream that the Mac’s newfound market success has made it the next natural target for malware creators.

One thing that has been lacking of yet is a course of action for the 1 percent of Macs in use that have been hit with the malware. Kaspersky Labs, which did a thorough analysis of the malware today launched a Web-based tool to determine if your Mac is among those known to have contracted it.

The tool checks the Mac’s UUID number against a database of machines known to be affected and tells you if you have it, and if you don’t know what a UUID number is, it shows you how to find it.

If your machine turns out to be among the anointed 1 percent who some say are the harbingers of a new apocalyptic phase for Mac security, there is a removal tool.

So now that we’re nearing the end of this kerfuffle, what can we glean from this incident on the state of Mac security? First off, it’s necessary, as always, to include a hedging statement. In the investing world we often hear the phrase “Past performance is not an indication of future results.” It means that unknown, unforseen circumstances can always bring about a substantial variation in a known and established pattern.

On the subject of security the pattern has been this: Occasionally, a vulnerability, sometimes nothing more than a proof of concept, sometimes something a little more threatening, such as this Flashback malware or the MacDefender one that occurred last year, appears and re-opens the discussion. After years of marginal market share, the Mac now represents a juicy new target for malware creators, and Mac users are in for a rude awakening.

Indeed, various pundits have been saying that some onset of significant serious trouble for Mac owners is just over the horizon. This indeed could happen. A new supervirus could emerge tomorrow that causes all kinds of unforseen troubles. But it hasn’t yet.

Windows still remains a target. As recently as 11 months ago, Microsoft’s own data showed that of the 420,000 Windows users who downloaded a then-new malware removal tool, those who had infections averaged 3.5 threats per machine. And of the top 10 threats seen at that time, seven were the result of vulnerabilities in Java, something you should probably consider turning off, whether your computer runs Windows or Mac OS.

As of today, for those 600,000 people whose Macs are infected, they’re averaging only one threat per machine.

One is still too many, especially if it’s a bad one. And clearly Apple can’t act like it’s impervious to security concerns, yet there’s no evidence that it is. Just slow. Some critics have said Apple didn’t respond quickly enough to this latest outbreak, especially in light of the fact that Flashback/Flashfake took advantage of a Java vulnerability that has been known for about a month. Apple clearly could have and should have responded faster.

Apple last year hired David Rice, a former U.S. Navy Information warrior, so it has at the top of its security team a well-respected executive with a history of thought leadership on the subject.

The current state and future of Mac security will be a topic I hope AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg ask Apple CEO Tim Cook about on the stage at D:10 next month. One hopes he’ll give us some visibility into the urgency or lack thereof with which Apple views the evolving threat landscape.

But if this is the worst that the malware creators can dish out, I still like my chances on the Mac. The apocalypse isn’t here yet.

Nordstrom will acquire the company for $180 million in stock. However, the transaction size could jump to as much as $270 million over time if the company meets certain performance goals and vesting requirements for the existing management team.

At that price, the transaction gives a lot of weight to a burgeoning new area of e-commerce, fueled by private/flash sales and other group-buying trends.

Los Angeles-based HauteLook offers discounts of 50 to 75 percent off home, beauty, travel and local services for women, men and kids. In the last two years, HauteLook says it has conducted 2,500 private sales events for 1,000 high-profile brands.

Seattle-based Nordstrom said HauteLook will operate as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary, to be managed by its current leadership. The HauteLook brand and Web site will remain separate from Nordstrom, and there are plenty of incentives to keep the management team in place.

While Nordstrom is primarily a physical department store, it has a fairly sizable online presence and recently has spent time integrating its online and store presence, so customers can see what inventory is online and what’s available in the store.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2011 and is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory and HauteLook shareholder approval.

While the Consumer Electronics Show and other big events feature acres of tiny booths crammed one against another, Mobile World Congress features a different kind of bigness. The show is spread out over eight big buildings in a historic area of town. Every couple of buildings are set several flights of stairs up from the last one, with the final two buildings just a stone’s throw from the grand National Palace.

Connecting the buildings and lining the promenade between them are various smaller trailers and bungalows.

Unlike the cramped booths at CES, the spread-out nature of Mobile World Congress allows even moderate-size companies a good amount of space to show their wares. Even those with bungalows outside a main hall stand a good chance of attracting visitors. Companies that went with that approach included Acer and INQ Mobile, which was touting its new Android phone with quick access to Facebook and Spotify.

That said, some folks’ presence at Mobile World Congress is clearly bigger than others.

One booth that stands out is Google’s first-ever Android booth, tucked in the corner of Hall 8, just inside the entrance.

The two-story pavilion features many of Google’s partners showing Android applications, as well as a place to create one’s own Android mini-me, plus a sushi-bar-style conveyor belt featuring the many phone and tablet designs based on the Google operating system. Among the designs that scrolled by while I was standing there were well-known names such as Samsung and HTC, as well as less-familiar brands such as China’s ZTE and Alcatel, which is new to Android.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of the booth is a slide that allows children of all chronological ages to relive their youth and glide down from the top floor back to the bottom. The most popular thing, though, was a series of collectible pins being passed out throughout Mobile World Congress by various Android partners. They were a hot commodity, and by Tuesday afternoon most booths were completely out of their supply of pins, placing green candy inside the dishes instead.

While impressive, the Android booth was not the largest by any stretch. One of the more massive setups I saw was the Ericsson booth, which occupied nearly all of Hall 6. A small Sony Ericsson booth was open to the public. Behind a security gate, though, was a massive spread for the many partners of both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. It featured two bars and two kiosks serving various tapas.

There were meeting rooms and patio tables for more-casual interactions. On display were all kinds of Ericsson technologies ranging from its core infrastructure gear to all kinds of other products and research projects.

A few caught my eye, including a mobile payment section that featured a “Museum of Money” talking about days gone by when people used paper currency with all its flaws. Under glass were such relics as money, piggy banks and counterfeit-detection pens, while Ericsson showed off its many payment technologies.

In another corner, Ericsson was showing off a vending machine that is paid, not with cash or credit card, but via SMS message. Ericsson has a unit that serves as an intermediary between the vendor and the carrier to manage the transaction.

“2011 looks a lot like 1984,” Motorola says in the ad, which features an image of the Earth surrounded by Apple’s white headphones. “One authority. One design. One way to work. It’s time for more choices.”

The ad then touts some of the Xoom’s features, such as its dual-core chip, HD video playback, front- and rear-facing cameras and its ability to play Flash.

The tablet wars are clearly heating up, with all the players staking out their space. RIM also posted a video on its Web site, touting the business capabilities of its yet-to-be-released PlayBook tablet. The video shows the PlayBook being connected to a BlackBerry and using a Flash-enabled dashboard from SAP’s Business Objects unit. RIM plans to talk more about its developer plans at an event on Thursday in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Google is hosting an event on Wednesday to go deeper into its tablet-oriented Honeycomb version of Android. The Xoom, which debuts next month, is to be the first device running Honeycomb.

Mobilized will be on hand to provide coverage of both the RIM and Google events.

Here is Motorola’s Super Bowl teaser ad:

For those who need a refresher, here was Apple’s Super Bowl spot introducing the Macintosh:

Bragiel bragged that of the six I/O Ventures companies from last year, one has been acquired (Facebook fan page creator Damntheradio by FanBridge), one is in late-stage acquisition talks (online video monetization platform SocialVision), three have raised funding of at least $400,000 from investors such as Max Levchin and Dave McClure, and the last (experience marketplace Skyara) is closing a funding round.

While I/O Ventures will continue to run with a curriculum quite similar to other start-up programs–soliciting young folks who have an idea but not much else, for a few months of intensive mentorship and events, followed by a “Demo Day” for investors–it has a few characteristics that set it apart. Mainly, the program is located in a building owned by its founders in the happening Mission District, home to a newly opened cafe called The Summit, which has become a bustling space for techie meetings and laptop sessions.

Bragiel said he expects to accept five to six companies once more, rather than swelling to a larger class, as Y Combinator has done. The program pays $25,000 and waives rent in exchange for eight percent of a start-up’s common stock. This year’s edition will include more events and more hand-holding around the initial company formation process, Bragiel said.

I/O Ventures continues to be funded by its four founding partners: Bragiel (who recently sold his forum company, Lefora), as well as BitTorrent co-founder Ashwin Navin, HotorNot co-founder Jim Young and Myspace co-founder Aber Whitcomb. It will accept applications through Feb. 15, with the sessions starting March 1.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

It’s skimming the cream off the top.

It will not blanket America with offers, but rather only enter markets where there’s enough luxury experiences and high-end restaurants for its target audience of highly educated, 25-to-40 year-olds (In other words–affluent, wealthy and plain ol’ rich people).

Gilt City is an extension of the New York-based Gilt Groupe, which provides invitation-only access to products and experiences at discounted prices. Gilt City competes more directly with Groupon and LivingSocial by offering discounts to spas, restaurants and cosmetic treatments, like Botox. So far, it’s launched in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.

Gilt Groupe has raised upward of $50 million in venture capital, and will still have to contend with Amazon-based LivingSocial, and Groupon, which aims to raise up to $1 billion after spurning a buyout attempt by Google.

Gilt City’s President Nathan Richardson promises us it still has aggressive goals, but that its plans look different from the others. “We won’t be in a lot of secondary markets, but there’s 40 markets that have the depth we need.”

Meanwhile, Groupon and LivingSocial are in more than 100 markets each today.

“The high-end of the market is enormous,” Richardson says.

Unlike Groupon and LivingSocial, Gilt doesn’t send out a deal every day, but rather offers up to three deals in a weekly email, because “that makes it worthy of reading in your inbox.” In Chicago it’s up to sending two a week, and in Los Angeles and New York, it’s now sending two to three.

In addition to offering discounts on restaurants, spas and beauty, Richardson says Gilt is also selling experiences.

For example, on the Fourth of July in New York, it hosted a party on the retired aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, which was positioned right under the fireworks. ”Not only did the offer sell out, we had three times as many people on wait list,” he says. ”We have the opportunity to extend our curated lifestyle brand to events. People have come to expect us to be consistent. It’s not hit or miss. We want to make sure the email surprises our customers and is always on brand and something we feel proud of.”

To make his point, Richardson often talks about the deal’s “exclusivity,” not how deep the discount is. But why would an exclusive restaurant–which presumably has no trouble selling out–be interested in offering a discount to Gilt’s subscribers?

Richardson says it’s an opportunity for these brands to introduce new opportunities or extend its franchise to a new audience.

For instance, a new restaurant opening in New York’s Flatiron District offered a deal that introduced a new menu to the public. The chef signed the menu and visited the patron’s table for a chat. Another upscale eating establishment used Gilt to promote availability of a private dinning room.

Richardson says that in a survey Gilt conducted, customers said that 80 percent of the time they had the intention of going back to a restaurant, gym or skin-care provider at full price, and in 60 percent of the cases they did go back.

One particular highly accessible kind of flash mob, in which local singing groups perform Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus at shopping malls, has been replicated all over the U.S. and Canada in the last month or so.

Quickly: Flash mobs are traditionally secretly orchestrated performances that play out in public places while bringing a little bit of magic to unsuspecting people in the right place at the right time. If you’ve ever seen those videos of a person breaking into song or dance in a public place, then being joined by hordes of interlopers who somehow know the full routine, you’ve seen a flash mob. (There are also less choreographed variations, like public pillow fights.)

Since flash mobs seem so fun, organic and full of life, they’ve of course been co-opted by marketers who mimic the style right down to camera shots of the surprised and confused onlookers capturing videos of the moment with their own camera phones. But they’ve also recently been adopted by wholesome community groups wanting to spread a little holiday joy. And in many cases, both the performers and the audience know about the event in advance (element of surprise be damned).

One flash mob performance of “Hallelujah” in a Canadian shopping mall, posted on YouTube on Nov. 17, has been seen more than 25 million times. YouTube’s Trends blog recently called it “by far, the most popular video of the season.”

YouTube’s Kevin Allocca also highlighted some 20 other flash mob performances, also of “Hallelujah” and mostly in shopping malls, from Orlando, Cleveland, Chattanooga, Juneau and Winnipeg. Allocca says the meme may actually have been kicked off by the Opera Company of Philadelphia performing “Hallelujah” in a Macy’s as part of the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture. That video was posted Nov. 1 and has more than six million views.

It’s gotten so bad that on Monday night a mall near Sacramento had to be evacuated after crowds overwhelmed it and the fire department feared for its structural integrity. A planned flash mob by the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra and other local congregations had been endorsed by the mall and promoted for weeks, drawing thousands to watch and sing along with their printed-out sheet music.

Would-be flash mobbers broke into impromptu singalongs as they were escorted out of the building and into the parking lot (with their video cameras recording all the while, of course). So apparently spontaneity isn’t dead yet.

We’ll also see what they have to say about the Yahoo search partnership and its efforts to catch up with Google (and trip them up with antitrust headaches).

Liveblog

Okay. I’m onsite and nearly caffeinated. Yes, there are donuts, but Mobilized is going for the savory option.

10:03 am: Still waiting for things to get started here.

10:04 am: Microsoft search engineering head Satya Nadella comes out. “Okay, let’s get this thing underway.”

10:06 am: First up, some momentum stuff. Share is at 11.8 percent per comScore numbers released yesterday, up another 0.2 percent from October. Overall up 48 percent since launch. “We’re very, very happy with that growth.” Now over 90 million users, but the big deal, he says, is more heavy searchers. “We never had the fans of Bing and the heavy users,” Nadella says.

10:08 am: Nadella says Bing is still getting a larger percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds than its share of searchers as a whole.

10:09 am: “These are footholds that we have in the marketplace,” Nadella says.

10:11 am: Continued focus on specialized verticals (like travel, music, health, image search etc). Overall, such searches account for five percent of all queries, but specialized search makes up of 10 percent of Bing’s searches.

10:12 am: Partnerships: Yahoo is obviously the big one, but Nadella shows slide with Facebook, Twitter, Verizon., BlackBerry, Apple, Android, Foursquare and other logos.

There ave been 5.5 million downloads of the iPhone app.

Nadella says the toolbar deals are also important: They just give us a shot at acquiring the users. They have another one coming with Conduit. Also, they are now at least an option on iPhone and Firefox.

10:16 am: Nadella says the engineering team is focused on three areas, beyond the “arms race” of overall search quality–increasing the visual organization, task-centered nature and social elements of search.

“We’re neck and neck in terms of search quality and we are able to maintain it,” Nadella says.

10:18 am: Lots of talk about the ins and outs of search tech. Nadella says Microsoft has moved from a “neural net” approach to “boosted decision trees.” (No idea what that means.)

10:22 am: Effort to make search more social is important, but just beginning. “This is a journey we are at the very beginnings of,” Nadella says, but says social will change search in terms of how results are discovered, formulated and answered.

10:24 am: Nadella is talking about the importance of visual highlighting to call out various results as well as boosting interactivity, such as including forms within results so users can take action.

Still waiting for any new stuff, but we’re told it’s coming.

Nadella says the company has broken down a list of the tasks people are trying to do when they are trying to do more than just navigate to a particular site.

“We have a pretty granular understanding just looking at the query stream of what people are trying to get done.”

Microsoft has broken it down to some 150 categories, but here are some of the top ones: 4.6 percent of searches are music related, 1.8 percent clothing and shoes, 1.6 percent consumer electronics, 1.1 recipes, 1.3 percent home furnishings.

10:29 am: On to some new stuff.

New image search launching today, but first Microsoft is talking about visual search for things like finding movies and giving direct answers for some new types of queries.

10:31 am: Microsoft is talking about any sort of non-search result as “answers.”

In one case, an “answer” for the query “let’s make a deal” would be video episodes of the game show.

But Microsoft says that automatically putting it at the top is not necessarily best. What the company says it should do instead is put it below the first two results, such as the show’s homepage, which get more clicks than the video.

10:35 am: Also when a user searches flights from Denver to Las Vegas in June, Microsoft pre-populates the fields in a flight search with a guess at the dates, in this case the first weekend in June.

10:38 am: New image search represents first major changes in a year. Biggest shift is white space is gone with just a ton of tiles of images, with some categories at the top.

For example, search “Casablanca” and you get an option for the city in Morocco, another for the movie, a third for the style of wedding dress and another for the Casablanca Lily flower.

10:40 am: On to shopping. Quadrupled the number of products in its database.

10:43 am: Bing is adding a new focus on places as “destinations” with all the potential content from booking a flight or hotel to maps and attractions.

Which is nice, because I’m ready to go on a vacation right about now.

They use weather data to show times to go to and times to avoid a particular place.

10:45 am: Microsoft is beefing up event listings with partnership from FanSnap and other partners. You get ticket info, diagram of stadium, etc.

10:50 am: Back to social. Nadella says search can change by using one’s social graph to influence search results.

First example, you will start to see when your Facebook friends “Like” a page that is in search results.

For now, such results will only come up fairly infrequently, but Nadella says it will be a big deal when you do see pages that your friends have liked.

Search allows the data your friends share on Facebook to come to you when you actually want the information.

“In a way you are taking your friends with you,” says Microsoft’s Paul Yiu.

An example is when you are shopping for a product or going to visit a place–that’s a time when you really want to know what your friends think.

(Seems pretty cool, but wondering just how infrequently this will show up.)

10:57 am: Another example Yiu gives is a search one might do at 3 am for what will make your baby stop crying. There are lots of results, but one that your friend likes might be worth trying first.

11:00 am: Bing is also using one’s Facebook social circle to rank results in people search–i.e., if you have a friend in common, it will rank that “John Doe” higher than one you don’t know.

11:01 am: Nadella is back to talk about local and maps and how that integrates with mobile. Behind him Blaise Aguera y Arcas is pulling out several phones to do a demo. (And they look like iPhones.)

11:03 am: Aguera y Arcas takes the stage to show some changes coming to maps, first on the desktop. He notes the recent shift away from putting its most powerful map features on a Silverlight-powered site. Now it is moving that all to an HTML5-based site that needs no plug-ins.

11:07 am: Bing is bringing the “tasks” concept to searches within maps. A search for a restaurant now brings up not just a map, but more info on the eatery and also the ability to make reservations via OpenTable.

11:09 am: Aguera y Arcas switches to the iPhone. Shows how people can add their own panoramas to maps using a cellphone.

11:13 am: iPhone demo over 3G is going really slow. Aguera y Arcas asks how many of the reporters in the room are using 3G.

11:15 am: Although its going painfully slow, looks like Bing app starts to recognize a restaurant search and pops up options like types of cuisine and price. The goal is to save keystrokes.

Other options are things like get a map, make a reservation, menus, etc.

Still R-E-A-L-L-Y S-L-O-W.

“This bandwidth situation is really going to suck for what I have to demo next.”

He switches to a first-person StreetSide view, but all we see are dots.

“This is so sad,” Aguera y Arcas says, lamenting that we aren’t able to see all the cool stuff. There does seem to be some new StreetSide view stuff on the iPhone app that could be neat, assuming it runs faster on the street than inside this demo room.

11:23 am: We’ve reached a new low. “Close your eyes and imagine….” Aguera y Arcas says, and then describes what the app would do if we could see it.

11:23 am: And they have switched to Wi-Fi. “This is so exciting,” Aguera y Arcas says. Now he’s going back to StreetSide. “That’s so much nicer.”

As for directions, Bing now has bus directions with schedule info in addition to driving and walking directions. “It’s about time,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for this one myself.”

Another feature reminds you to do something when you reach a certain place, like call someone or check-in to FourSquare or Facebook.

11:29 am: Aguera says we are in Search 2.0–where you do more than just search and get results.

Image search is an example. Shows the coming ability to search for something by using a camera to start a search. Basically you can shoot a picture of a page and use any of the terms there to start searching (It uses character recognition in the background).

Questions and Answers

11:32 am: How big a deal is Google Instant?

“We are absolutely studying Google Instant,” Nadella says. Says they could match it. It’s a question of whether it makes task completion easier. “Is it a value or a distraction?” Doing studies and so far Microsoft’s research says it is mixed at best.

“It’s not a game changer. It’s a nice feature at best.”

He hedges a bit on whether it is something Microsoft needs to match.

11:39 am: Mobile features were demoed on iPhone. So when will they come to Windows Phone 7 and other platforms?

Nadella says they now have software for most major phone operating systems, including Android.

“The different devices have different schedules,” he says.

11:42 am: And we’re out of here….Thanks for tuning in.

Qualcomm once had high hopes for the service. However, Jacobs acknowledged at a Churchill Club event last week that, outside of certain live events such as sports, it probably makes sense to offer mobile TV via on-demand streaming, rather than as a broadcast.

To be fully eligible for the rebate, customers must have purchased and activated the service, though there is also a form for those who didn’t even make it that far.

Qualcomm doesn’t want your unit back (apparently, it doesn’t want a bunch of FloTVs, either). Instead, the company’s Web site lists some recycling options. Or you could always keep it as a collector’s item–an early adopter badge of glory.

It’s worth noting that your service gets deactivated once the refund is processed, so on the off-chance you are still watching your Flo, you might want to wait until March to send in your form.

On Jan. 20, the White House recently launched its first official iTunes app, which brings key features of WhiteHouse.gov to mobile platforms. The free app allows users to view White House video, photos, blog posts and other news events.

The “Newsroom” tab includes press briefings, transcripts, and Letters from the President. The app also offers live streaming video, such as a Q&A with Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer. If there are no events occurring, that part of the app simply says there are no events streaming at this time, and users have to navigate back to the main menu to access earlier video.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Liveblog

9:13 am PT: Quite a scene here this morning; the queue for media credentials is nearly as long as some of the iPhone 3G launch lines I saw a few years back. Moments ago, an Apple PR rep slipped through the doors of the Yerba Buena Center to ask that the press waiting outside take two big steps back. The last time that happened to me, I was at a Jesus Lizard show.

9:54 am: The doors open and the press enters the event hall. Initially, at least, the scene is pretty crazy. “This is like the subway in New York,” an attendee behind me jokes. More like the subway in Tokyo, I think to myself.

A Bob Dylan soundtrack plays as media and guests file in. It’s momentarily interrupted by a “please take your seats, our event is about to begin” announcement.

10:00 am: Interesting stage set-up today: Instead of an empty stage or a simple table, there are a black leather chair and side-table. Lights are dimming….

And Steve Jobs takes the stage to a standing ovation.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical product, but first a few updates….A few weeks ago we sold our 250 millionth iPod…I didn’t want to let that moment pass without recognizing it.”

10:05 am: Jobs offers a quick overview of Apple’s retail operations and some of the new stores it has opened recently before moving on to the iTunes App Store. “A few weeks ago we announced that three billion applications had been downloaded from the App Store–that’s in 18 months…amazing.”
He notes, as he did in the company’s earnings release the other day, that Apple is now a $50 billion company.

Apple is a mobile devices company, says Jobs, “the largest mobile devices company in the world now. Larger than Sony’s mobile device business, larger than Samsung’s and, astonishingly, Nokia’s as well.”

10:07 am: A quick historical overview now. Jobs touches on the first PowerBook, introduced in 1991. He moves on to the MacBook and then the iPhone.

“All of us use laptops and smartphones, now. And the question has arisen lately: Is there room for a device in the middle?…We’ve pondered this question as well.”

This “middle” device, says Jobs, must be better at doing certain tasks than either the laptop or smartphone. If there’s going to be a third-device category, it must be better at browsing the Web, video, photos, music, etc.

“Some folks say this device is a netbook…. The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

10:10 am: But we have something that is, says Jobs, “and it’s called the iPad.”

Photos of the device appear on the giant screens. Very thin. Very slick. “IPad offers the best Web browsing experience there is–way better than laptops.” There is no camera that I can see. That’s not going to go over well with folks hoping for a device that supports video iChat.

10:13 am: Further details: The “iPad is a dream to type on,” Jobs says, pointing out its life-sized onscreen keyboard. It’s also an awesome way to enjoy media. iTunes, iTunes University and YouTube HD support are built in.

10:14 am: Jobs sits down to demo the device: “Using this thing is remarkable. It’s so much more intimate and capable than the laptop.” He loads Safari and surfs over to the New York Times (NYT). The iPad loads quickly and Jobs is able to easily navigate the page, loading stories and zooming in on articles.

10:15 am: Demonstrating landscape and portrait now. “This device adapts to the way I want to use it.”

Definitely an impressive browsing experience. Fast and elegant.

Now, an overview of Mail. Also elegant. Nice split-screen presentation. Hit compose, and a nice onscreen keyboard pops up. Jobs types out a message to his colleagues at Apple. Seems relatively easy.

10:19 am: Moving on to iPad’s photo capabilities. It supports iPhoto’s Events, Faces and Places features. It also offers built-in slideshows complete with soundtracks and transitions.

Running a slideshow demo, Jobs pauses and looks out at the audience with a Chesire Cat-wide grin. He’s clearly relishing this moment.

10:22 am:: The iTunes experience on iPad is much as you would expect. Similar, if not identical, to what the software currently offers. Calendar and Contacts apps are also nice and, again, similar to what you’d find on a MacBook or iPhone.

10:24 am: Demoing Google Maps now. The iPad supports Google Street View and the implementation is very slick.

10:25 am: Moving on to video. Jobs calls up an HD clip from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube and displays it in both portrait and landscape. That finished, he fires up iTunes and loads “Star Trek” to demo the device’s video features, scrubbing, etc. Then he shows us a clip from Pixar’s “Up.” Tap to go full-screen. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

10:27 am: Watching that is nothing like actually having one in your hands, says Jobs.

• iPad is one-half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and comes with 9.7 inch IPS display–“very high-quality display”
• Full capacitive multitouch
• 16GB-64GB flash storage
• iPad is powered by our Apple’s custom silicon–“We did it inhouse and it just screams,” says Jobs.
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, accelerometer, compass.
• Battery life: 10 hours.

“And in addition to 10 hours of battery life, iPad offers a full month of standby time,” Jobs notes. “It’s also a good environmental citizen,” he adds, noting that it’s a very green device.

10:31 am: Jobs invites Scott Forestall to the stage to talk about apps on the device.

“We built the iPad to run virtually every app in the App Store right out of the box,” Forestall says.

Evidently, a built-in pixel-doubling feature automatically scales iPhone apps to full-screen iPad apps.

10:35 am: Forestall runs an unmodified racing game from the App Store. He first demos it in the screen size of an iPhone. Then, using the pixel-doubling feature, he blows it out to full screen. Very slick.

“So you can buy the iPad, take it home, hook it up and download all your iPhone apps and run them with no problem at all,” he says.

Forestall announces a new iPhone software development kit specifically geared to the iPad. He notes that iPad-specific applications will be featured “front and center” in the App Store.
He then invites Gameloft’s Mark Hickey to the stage to demo some new games the company has developed using the new SDK.

Hickey notes that the iPad’s additional screen space is a boon for developers, particularly those building games. He demos a first-person shooter that showcases this. “We’re now able to interact with the game world in ways that we weren’t able to before.”

10:40 am: Next up, the New York Times. Martin Nisenholtz takes the stage to talk about its iPad effort.

After talking up the Times iPhone app, Nisenholtz segues to the the paper’s new iPad app: “We think we’ve captured the experience and essence of reading the newspaper.”

The app is largely what you’d expect. Tap to resize text, zoom, breaking news updates, video. “This is everything you love about the paper and everything you love about the Web.”

10:44 am: Now, a painting application called Brushes that was famously used to create a New Yorker cover.
The app is impressive enough on iPhone; it’s even more so on the iPad. It supports “playback” of paintings, and as the presenter notes, brings us one step closer to a real virtual painting studio.

10:46 am: EA’s Travis Boatman take’s the stage. The topic of his presentation: Need For Speed.

“Building for the iPad is a little bit like holding a high-def TV screen a few inches from your face,” he says.

The iPad version of Need for Speed boasts a number of touch-activated enhancements: Tap on the car to view its interior, tap on the rear-view mirror to look behind you.

10:52 am: Up next: MLB.com’s Chad Evans. He demos the outfit’s iPad-optimized app, which uses the device’s additional screen space to display video excerpts and MLB TV.

MLB TV can be streamed like and enhanced with onscreen stats and data. “This big display really allows us to create a much more immersive experience,” Evans says.

10:52 am: Forestall returns to the stage to make another brief plug for the SDK before Jobs takes over for him.
“Let me show you another one of our apps that we’re very excited about,” Jobs says. “An e-book reader.”

Behind him a photo of Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle appears. “Amazon did a great job with their reader and we’re standing on their shoulders here….Today we’re announcing the iBooks store,” says Jobs, adding that it will be supported initially by Penguin, Simon & Schuster and a number of other big publishers.

The iBooks Store interface begins with a simple bookshelf view. Tap the screen and it loads a more iTunes-like view. Purchase a book and it’s added to your bookshelf with a slick little animation.

The reading experience seems very appealing. Much more book-like. From where I sit, the pages look like they’re written on paper.

“We use the e-pub format, the most popular open-book format in the world,” says Jobs. “We think iPad is going to be a very popular e-reader not just for bestsellers, but for textbooks as well.”

10:58 am: And here’s another new product announcement: A new version of iWork tweaked for use on the iPad. Jobs invites Phil Schiller on stage to demo it.

“We have a completely new version of Keynote, a completely new version of Pages and a completely new version of Numbers–all optimized for multitouch.

Schiller demos Keynote first. Creating presentations appears intuitive and simple–a slide navigator on the left, tap to load individual slides in the main window, drag to rearrange.

Nice use of multitouch gestures to enhance the app. Pinch to resize photos, tap to insert animations and transitions. These are all fairly advanced techniques and the device seems to handle them well.

11:05 am: Moving on to Pages now. Also impressive, though creating a written document on a tablet device like the iPad seems like it might be a drag. A nice tool for editing, though. Simple controls.

11:07 am: Moving on to Numbers. This application also makes good use of multitouch gestures and boasts a data-entry keyboard along with some 250 built-in functions. The software’s gesture capabilities makes Excel look antediluvian.
Powerful and fast.

So what’s Apple going to charge for iWork? $9.99 each, says Schiller, who notes that all three applications are compatible with their Mac versions.

Jobs returns to the stage, grinning. “Isn’t that great?” he asks for what’s easily the 10th time. iPad, he says, will synch to Mac or PC via USB.

11:14 am: Evidently, there will be two iPad models–one with Wi-Fi-only and one with Wi-Fi and 3G. The 3G device will come with two plans: 250 MB per month for $14.99, unlimited data for $29.99.

And who’s the carrier? AT&T.

A small groan ripples through the audience.

Jobs allows that AT&T is also throwing in free Wi-Fi at its hotspots. He follows that up by noting that there are no contracts for the iPad. You can cancel at anytime.

All iPad 3G models are unlocked and they use new GSM micro SIMS, so chances are they will just work, Jobs says, after noting that Apple hasn’t yet worked out international carrier deals.

11:16 am: Now a quick overview as a wrap-up. Jobs touts the overall tablet experience along with the new iBook app and iBook Store. “This is an amazing product with tremendous breadth. What should we charge for it?…When we set out to develop the iPad we not only had aggressive UI goals, we had aggressive price goals, because we wanted to put this in the hands of as many people as possible….IPad pricing starts not at $999, but $499,” Jobs says to a huge round of applause.

$499 for 16GB base model.
32GB for $599.
64GB for $699.
Adding 3G requires an additional fee.

Apple will ship Wi-Fi models in 60 days and 3G models in 90.

11:20 am: Apple has created new accessories for the iPad: A standard dock and a second dock with a keyboard attached to it. “Keep one of these in your den and you can write the next “War and Peace” on it.” The final accessory, a new case that doubles as a stand.

Running a video now. It features a number of Apple execs enthusiastically talking up the iPad.

11:25 am: Let me circle back here for a moment to pricing. Adding 3G to iPad requires an additional $130. So we’re talking $629 for the 16GB model, $729 for the 32GB and $829 for the 64GB version.

Designer Jon Ives on the iPad: “In many ways iPad defines our vision, our sense of what’s next.”

11:32 am: Jobs returns to the stage and recalls the “middle device” scenario he mentioned earlier today. “Can we create this new category? The bar is set pretty high, but we think we’ve got the goods.”

“This is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” he adds. “The reason the iPad is going to be so great is because Apple has always strived to be at the junction of technology and liberal arts.”

And with that he concludes. Lights go up and Dylan begins playing over the speakers again.

View the slideshow

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple’s Tablet: A $2.8 Billion Business?
• Apple’s Tablet: MacBook Airbus?
• Apple Announces Jan. 27 Special Event: “Come See Our Latest Creation”
• Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Wednesday, Jan. 27
• Apple Pitching Tablet to Publishing Industry; Spring Launch Expected
• Time (Finally) for the Tablet? Apple Developers Supersizing Their Apps for January Event.
• The Apple Tablet Is Delayed? So What?
• $1.9 Billion in Capex? What’s Apple Planning?
• Apple’s Tablet: Read Different?
• Imaginary Demand for Mythical Apple Tablet Exceeds All Estimates
• Apple Tablet Coming to AT&T?
• New From Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster: The Apple iPad
• Rumored Apple Netbook Actually an E-Book?
• iTablet: Apple’s Killer App for Higher Ed
• iFugly

The New York-based service opened its doors last week, but it won’t really kick into gear until Apple (AAPL) signs off on its iPhone app, and that’s taking a bit longer than the company expected. Founder Justin Shaffer still thinks he’ll be up and running on Apple’s platform in a few days, but until then, you can check out this video interview I shot with him yesterday, where you can get a sense of how the app will work.

Or if you’re impatient, here it is in a nutshell: The service is supposed to let users converse in real-time about “events”–whether a football game, business conference or maybe even a really good house party.

You can already do that on Twitter and Facebook, but the pitch is that Hot Potato will help “curate” the chatter, so you will end up talking to both your friends and interesting people you don’t know–and that’s something Twitter and Facebook don’t do well right now.

If it works, there are some obvious advertising/sponsorship opportunities available for the service: The NFL could sponsor chatter about its games, for instance. Or someone who isn’t related to the football league could sponsor chatter about the games–since this is user-generated content in its purest form, Hot Potato isn’t required to get the go-ahead from anyone before it creates a conversational stream.

In any case, Hot Potato now has a pile of money to help it figure this stuff out. Last week, the company closed its first funding round of $1.4 million (I had originally reported that it was raising “about $1 million”), and in addition to VC backers First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, the start-up has an array of high-profile angel investors who have pitched in.

Here’s the roster: Super-angel investor Ron Conway; real-time start-up incubator Betaworks; Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, who runs Thrillist; New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and his brother, Josh Kushner; ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick; Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon; About.com co-founder Scott Kurnit; Facebook executive (and Apple vet) Dave Morin; Boxee’s Zach Klein; angel investor Allen Morgan; and entrepreneurs and investors Scott and Cyan Banister.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091125/hot-potato-is-ready-to-eat-do-twitter-facebook-users-want-another-realtime-chatter-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweak-outlook-email-to-work-for-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweak-outlook-email-to-work-for-you/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:26:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweakoutlook-emailto-work-for-you/ If you have a job, chances are you use Microsoft Outlook.

But are you using it to your best advantage?

Despite the popularity of Microsoft Outlook, several of its functions aren’t noticeable unless you dig around in menus or try out keystroke shortcuts. Many of these tricks can be found by reading a user manual, but users would rather be spending their time in Outlook responding to or writing emails.

In last week’s column I reviewed a program called Postbox, which displays email and its contents in unique ways. In that review I mentioned that Outlook, too, has extra functions, but that these aren’t always as obvious as they should be. Below, I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be some of Outlook’s lesser-known talents. I focused on Outlook 2007, which many people currently use, and I also included a handful of notes about what Outlook 2010—due out late spring or early summer—will include. With any luck, you’ll find a few tips here that make your time in Outlook better spent.

Search Me

Rather than simply entering a word into the Outlook search box, you can help the search engine narrow its results by giving it specific parameters. For example, if I remember that my friend sent an email with “LSU tickets” in the subject line, I can type “subject: LSU” to pull out all emails about the Louisiana university. Or if I want to find all emails from Molly, I can write, “from: Molly.” This works with several other terms including “to,” “sent,” “cc” and “message size.”

Search Folders, shown in the folder list with a magnifying glass icon beside them, offer a way of saving the searches you perform most often. If, for example, you often search for flight confirmation emails, you could make a Search Folder called “Travel” that would contain a constantly updated list of emails containing the names of airlines.

New folders can be set up by right clicking on the Search Folders icon, selecting New Search Folder and following steps to select a type of folder from one of many pre-set types of folders—such as “mail sent directly to me,” “large mail” or “mail flagged for follow up.” Or you can create a custom Search Folder by telling it to search for certain words that appear within specific message fields.

Color Coding

To make certain emails stand out in a large list—like emails from your boss or messages addressed only to you—you can set up a rule that makes the email show up in a specific color. Or you can set certain emails to appear in bold font, or in a specific font type and size. Just think of all the emails from your mom that will never go unnoticed again thanks to red type, 14-point font and underlined text.

Setting up the way emails are displayed can be done by going to the Tools menu, selecting Organize, Using Colors and then choosing specific colors for emails from specific people. More advanced automatic settings for applying font type and size to emails can be added by selecting Automatic Formatting in the top right corner of the Using Colors screen. Click “Add” to create more rules.

Souped-Up Calendar

The Outlook Calendar can be organized to look the way you want it rather than the way it’s set up by default. For example, if you like looking at your day in hourly intervals rather than Outlook’s default 30-minute blocks, you can right click anywhere you see hours shown and select 60 minutes. Other increments are also available, like five, 10 and 15 minutes.

Outlook can also display other time zones right beside your own time zone by right clicking on the listed meeting hours, selecting Change Time Zone and checking the box labeled Show an Additional Time Zone. This is helpful for people who often work with distant colleagues, saving them from making a mistake and not factoring the right time zone for the other person. A Swap Time Zone button here quickly changes from one set zone to another, which could be a boon for people who regularly travel to different places and want their Outlook settings to reflect that they’re working from there.

Like color-coded emails, calendar events can be automatically sorted into pre-set categories like Personal, Travel and Family by setting formatting to look for certain words like Tennis (Personal), United (Travel) and Mom, Dad or Allison (Family). Added events that use these words automatically get labeled with a designated color to give your calendar a visual way of distinguishing different types of activities.

Another useful calendar tip: You can hold Control while selecting certain dates on the small view of the calendar and you’ll see only the schedules for those dates. So if I want to see Sept. 19, 22 and 24, I hold Control while selecting each date to see the three days’ activities displayed in the right viewing panel.

Visual Contacts

All Contacts in Outlook can be labeled with a photo of the person, which you add by double clicking on the small head icon in someone’s contact card and then choosing a photo from your collection. People who work in the same company and use Outlook can add their own photo to their contact and it will show up with their emails.

The top right corner of each contact card shows what a person’s digital business card would look like; this is an image that can be edited and copied using a right click, and then it can be copied and pasted to any email signature.

Looking Ahead

In Outlook 2010, due out next year, Microsoft (MSFT) says it hopes to streamline work in Outlook, creating smarter rules that do more with less manual work.

One example of this approach is that emails in the next version of Outlook will be, by default, sorted into conversations—a little like Gmail’s current system. An Ignore button will move all future emails related to the same conversation into the Deleted Items folder. That will include those with changed subject lines because Microsoft uses a special identifier to know which emails are associated with one another. A Clean Up button moves all redundant replies to the Deleted Items folder, leaving just the most recent message in the conversation.

Another feature is Reply with Meeting, a button in Outlook 2010 that will let users create a meeting out of an email. Selecting Reply with Meeting automatically invites those included in the email to attend a meeting.

The title of the meeting is the same as the subject of the email. If the users are in the same corporate network and they all use Outlook Calendar, this tool also looks for the next available time and date on everyone’s calendar.

Quick Steps, another streamlined feature of Outlook 2010, are one-click shortcuts that simultaneously perform several common actions that people take when handling email. If you select a Quick Step called Reply and Delete, it replies to an email and deletes the original. Users can create their own personalized Quick Steps like one labeled Social that, when selected, marks the email as read, moves it to a special folder and labels it under a certain category.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to
Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweak-outlook-email-to-work-for-you/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090911/are-you-ready-for-some-football-on-your-browser-you-may-have-no-choice/ http://allthingsd.com/20090911/are-you-ready-for-some-football-on-your-browser-you-may-have-no-choice/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:08:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10874 Pumped for some pigskin this Sunday? Me too. But actually watching a game this weekend, or most of the year, may be tricky for a big swath of the NFL’s fans.

That’s because the league’s blackout rule, which shuts off local broadcasts if the home team can’t sell out its stadium, may end up affecting about 20 percent of this fall’s games for fans in up to a dozen cities. No idea why NFL teams thought it was a good idea to raise prices during a recession, but they have. Team Marketing Report says prices jumped four percent, to an average of $75 a head this year, and the consequences have been obvious: Lots of unsold seats.

This week, the NFL announced that fans in blacked-out cities would be able to watch the games online–after midnight on game day after the game ends. So that’s a nonsolution.

My question: How many people who can’t watch their teams on their big-screen TVs will turn to pirate sites, torrents and the likes of Ustream to get their fixes?

All of the above are pretty good options if you have the time and inclination to find something that’s already aired on TV. But you’ve got to be a real devotee to put up with the technical hassle, crummy images, etc., that you get if you’re trying to watch something in real time. Then again, lots of people really, really like football in this country.

The big picture here is that major sports leagues and events are supposed to be the most impervious to the disruptive power of technology like the Web and the DVR. Which is why they command such huge premiums from the TV guys–they’ll pay the NFL alone $11.6 billion between 2008 and 2011.

But what happens when people have absolutely no choice but to use the Internet, no matter how unsatisfying that is? We may find out.

My humble suggestion for Web surfers with gridiron itch to scratch: If you haven’t seen it recently, or at all, go find North Dallas Forty, which remains the best football movie ever made.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090911/are-you-ready-for-some-football-on-your-browser-you-may-have-no-choice/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081205/ces-2009-three-booths-and-a-clapping-toy-monkey/ http://allthingsd.com/20081205/ces-2009-three-booths-and-a-clapping-toy-monkey/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:26:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=9235 If a global manufacturer of computer hardware like Belkin’s not exhibiting at CES, who is? I posed that question jokingly earlier this morning, but turns out there’s a very real and ugly answer to it:

Not Seagate (STX).

Not Logitech (LOGI).

Not Cisco (CSCO).

Not Philips.

Not Yahoo. Obviously.

And not Sanyo, either.

All six companies have abandoned plans to exhibit on the Consumer Electronics Show floor. Like Belkin, they are all opting for the more intimate and inexpensive floorspace of a Vegas hotel room. Said Seagate spokesperson Woody Monroy, “We haven’t pulled out of CES…we’re just taking a different approach.” Cisco offered this statement on the matter:

On our Q1 FY ’09 earnings call on November 5 we announced that we will be reducing expenses for FY09 by over $1B from our annualized expense run rate, given the challenging macroeconomic environment. We are targeting reductions in travel and discretionary-related expenses, including offsite meetings, outside services, equipment, events, trade shows, prototypes, marketing and other activities. Given this focus on reducing costs, we are modifying our participation in the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2009.

We have several speakers presenting in the various CES sessions, and Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers will be delivering a keynote at the conference, as well. We are focusing our CES presence on our direct customers, press and analysts in order to create a more intimate event and reduce expenses. We look forward to an exciting CES 2009 with multiple product announcements that will reinforce Cisco’s consumer strategy. We remain committed to the consumer market, and we believe our cost control focus at this time is appropriate. In support of our CES presence, we will be utilizing Cisco’s world-class Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, such as TelePresence and WebEx, to maintain essential customer and partner communication. Cisco will have compelling demonstration areas and meeting rooms in the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas as we have for the past several years.”

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