Apple invited the press to their “Come see our latest creation” event in San Francisco on January 27th. And the computer and e-book industry starts trembling with fear: Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are getting really nervous, because Apple may conquer the emerging market of Active Content.

Apple did not announce that the company will be engaged in the e-book or tablet-market – but the rumors about an “iSlate” or “iPad” are quite persistent. Therefore Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer tried to steal Apple the show at his keynote at the CES in Las Vegas: He just renamed the tablet-PCs on stage as “slate-PCs” … but it’s not about a name.

Now Amazon announced, that the company will open up their e-book platform for third party developers: Within some month, they’ll release a Kindle Development Kit (KDK) and will also provide the sales channel for the active content created with that software development kit (SDK).
The revenue sharing model looks quite familiar to iPhone developers: 70% to the developer and content provider, 30% for Amazon. But Amazon charges an additional $0.15 per MB for content delivery … as the Kindle is not sold with a mobile phone contract. Amazon has to pay the distribution costs to the mobile network operators if the content is delivered via the mobile data channel.

Amazon is probably in a better starting position in the battle for market shares in the emerging market of Active Content: They have a lot of experience with content distribution with the Kindle and they are in direct contact with the publishers … but Apple has the ability to rouse the e-book-market from slumber by innovation. They may transfer the pathetic e-books into a new and emerging market: Active Content.

There are a lot of advantages for Apple to tip the scales:

• big and growing iPhone SDK developer community … Amazon has to build up a comparable dev community around the KDK
• well-engineered and sophisticated iPhone SDK … with a full bandwidth of network-, graphic-, data- and sensor-support
• color instead of grayscale screens and computing and graphic power
• touchscreen with gestures
• amazing design
• … and there are probably some innovations we don’t expect

Amazon’s move to open up the Kindle to 3rd party developers and create a platform for Active Content is absolutely right … but can it compete with Apples offering? On January 27th 2010 we’ll know much, much more.

Microsoft’s Windows Life Hotmail service wasn’t fun on the iPhone (and on other mobile devices), until now: You had to check the emails via the hotmail website. This was possible with modern smartphone browsers – but it was a usability nightmare.
Now, it looks like Microsoft had to give in the pressure of their customers and add POP3 service to access emails from Hotmail. It’s an old hat for all the other free-mail-providers – but an “innovation” for M$. Now even M$ customers can access their Hotmail-emails via a standard email-client.
This way, it’s even possible to use the native mail app on the iPhone to receive and edit and send mails via a Hotmail account. Also other smartphones like the T-Mobile Google G1 or the Blackberry can now access Hotmail. On the Mac and the PC mail clients work, too – like Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or M$ Entourage on the Mac.

The following account settings are needed:

• POP-Server: pop3.live.com (port 995)
• SMTP-Server: smtp.live.com (port 25)
• SSL-Encryption for POP and SMTP connections must be turned on.
• SMTP password authentication must be turned on, too.

New email-accounts can be set up on the iPhone via “Settings” > “Mail, contacts, calender”. Maybe this makes Hotmail a little bit more attractive …

Source: news.softpedia.com

Good news from the iPhone Software Roadmap event in Cupertino: All business users who use (or want to use) the iPhone in an enterprise environment can be delighted: Apple licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft an will offer a direct connection between the iPhone Mail, Calender and Contact applications to a Microsoft Exchange server.
This strikes a blow against Apples competitor RIM with their Blackberry-solution: Within a Blackberry solution all messages are redirected through a server owend and managed by RIM itself – a real nightmare for everyone responsible for data security and protection within a company. Apple offers a direct connection between the iPhone and the Exchange server of the business customer himself with their new iPhone-solution.

That’s a big one: It really looks like Steve Ballmer want’s to get into the search engine and online advertisement market. Today, Microsoft announced, that the company proposes the acquisition of Yahoo! at a premium of 63% to the current trading price.
It’s a teamup for competing Google – but we’ll have to see whether this transaction will be allowed by the anti-trust authorities and whether joining the forces of Microsoft and Yahoo! development teams will lead to innovation as they want it to be.
How should we call that company in the future? Microhoo!?

P.S. I hope they’ll now hire Ms. Dewey for the future Microhoo! search engine

[Update] You can vote for your favorite name of Microhoo at engadget