Tag: microsoft

Mobile app startup, Accompli, purchased by Microsoft

| December 8, 2014

This deal could make it easier for people to manage their email using their smartphones and tablets.

Microsoft has now announced that it is purchasing Accompli, which is an email management mobile app, in a deal that has now been reported to be worth over $200 million.

The deal could potentially give Microsoft a boost in making email easier to manage over mobile devices.

This will give Microsoft the chance to make it easier for users to manage their email over smartphones and tablets that are based on Android or iOS. According to the vice president of Microsoft, Rajesh Jha, when discussing this mobile app in a blog post, “In a world where more than half of email messages are first read on a mobile device, it’s essential to give people fantastic email experiences wherever they go.”

The company feels that this mobile app provides an innovative way to interact with what is in an inbox.

Mobile app starup is purchasedJha also added that “The Accompli team is passionate about this quest. Their app provides innovative ways to focus on what’s important in your inbox, to schedule meetings, and work with attachments and files.” Within the blog and at the time of the writing of this review, there was no official announcement with regards to the price of the purchase, but a number of reports were made by the media to suggest the aforementioned approximate total.

Javier Solerto of Accompli explained in his own blog that the mobile application is going to become a component of the overall strategy that Microsoft is putting into place in order to reinvent the way that people view productivity in an era of mobile devices.

Solerto went on to say that their company began only a year and a half ago and their team moved forward to create a product that would help to make email better when used through a mobile app. He added that the journey of that team has now taken a leap forward by joining a much larger organization in a way that will allow the talent, tech, and market reach to “take the vision of Acompli to hundreds of millions of mobile users across the world.”

Augmented reality used by Microsoft to recreate out of home ads

| November 20, 2014

The AR technology is converting bus shelters into an exciting mobile gaming experience.

Microsoft has been making a number of large and important moves into mobile technology and now it has combined the experience with video games by bringing augmented reality into out of home advertising locations such as bus shelters.

The company has outfitted three bush shelters with AR experiences to promote its Sunset Overdrive video game.

The bus stops are located in London, England; San Francisco, U.S.A.; and Melbourne, Australia. These shelters have each been outfitted with special augmented reality technology that brings the viewer right into the digital environment of the video game. From a distance, these ads look as though they are traditional digital screens. However, when viewed more closely, the AR technology makes it appear as though the figures that are moving around are actually going to leap right out of the screen.

These augmented reality ads are supported by the Empowering Media agency, and Clear Channel Outdoor.

Augmented Reality - Bus ShelterThe displays were created by Grand Visual, which is a company that creates digital out of home advertising experiences. This is not the first time that the company has worked with augmented reality and has incorporated it into its advertising. It is a company that was behind a number of high profile outdoor advertising experiences using AR, motion graphics, and color recognition, such as those from Pepsi, Heineken, and Tropicana.

The Xbox One video game being marketed through this effort, Sunset Overdrive, was created by Insomniac Games and is meant to be the first installment of a franchise of shooting games that will place the player in a fast action situation in which they will battle mutant attackers. This innovative form of advertising makes it clear that Microsoft is serious about its efforts to stand out within a video gaming marketplace that is considered to be quite heavily saturated.

While it is likely that this augmented reality advertising technique will draw lots of attention for the video game, this campaign is truly interesting for the impact that it is likely to have in upcoming outdoor ad display trends.