Cnet
Microsoft is rebranding its Bing apps and bringing them under the MSN brands. The new MSN apps will have a bar of shortcuts at the top of the app that allows users to quickly login to their Outlook.com email accounts, as well as social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and soon Skype. The "Me Stripe" shortcut bar will sit above a feed of news which includes both original stories and aggregated content.
The Chicago Tribune
Bruce Levenson, the owner of the Atlanta Hawks, is selling the team and it all stems from an email that he sent back in August 2012. In the email, Levenson made racist remarks about the fans which caused an uproar in the basketball community. Levenson has now come out and apologized for his behavior and put the team on sale. Hawks CEO Steve Koonin is running the team and will oversee the sale, until a new owner buys the team.
Computing.com
Seventy-nine percent of business email users cannot detect phishing scams, which could put their company's digital at risk, according to McAfee. The company has issued a new report called McAfee Labs Threats Report: August 2014, which warns that the majority of employees who took the McAfee Phishing Quiz failed to identify emails with malicious links. According to the report, employees in the finance and HR departments are the most likely to mis a phishing scam when it lands in their inbox.
eSchoolNews
Next year, schools will no longer be eligible for eRate support, a discount program that gives schools a discount on email, voice mail, website hosting and Internet connectivity. The program makes these tech services available to schools and libraries at a 20 percent to 90 percent discount. Instead, the FCC is recommending that schools take advantage of free and low-cost programs offered through the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Gov. Sean Parnell has mistakenly sent a fundraising email for his re-election to an unknown number of state employees. In response, Alaska's Department of Administration has reminded all 18,000 state employees that using state resources for to campaign is illegal. However, Parnell did not break the law, as he did not send the message from a state email address and it included the required paid-for-by message on it. The email was sent by the vendor AirNet, who failed to remove government employee addresses from the list, despite being instructed to do so by the client.
The Telegraph
Hewlett-Packard has revealed an internal email sent by Mike Lynch, the former chief financial officer of Autonomy, in which he warned that dropping revenues had been covered up. HP is using the email in a fraud case against Lynch, who it has accused of lying about the performance of the company, which HP acquired.
NPR
Pinterest sent out an email this week intended to go out to future brides with the subject line "Here Comes the Bride" with ideas on how to help them plan for their special occasion. However the recipients that got the emails were not necessarily getting married. The users had just showed interest in wedding-related content. One recipient tweeted about the email that she must have gone too far pinning wedding related items.
TechCrunch
Tocomail, a mobile app designed to allow kids to use email, has introduced a new app called Tocomail for Gmail. The new tool is designed for teenagers and allows users to send and receive email messages, share photos and attachments and even chat. The tool, which works as a Gmail client, allows the user to have a Gmail account with parental controls on top. Parents can control their child's contact list by categorizing senders under tabs such as "Safe," "General" and "Blocked."
Metro.co.uk
The London School of Economics has apologized after sending out an email to new students referring to the recipients as Kung-Fu Pandas, leaving some recipients offended. The university sent an email to all of the students who had been accepted in its undergraduate program with the subject line: "Dear Kung-Fu, Panda," and a message that read, "This is to certify that Aa-Kung Fu, Panda Tiger Test Test has firmly accepted an unconditional offer of admission to the London School of Economics and Political Science for the full-time, three-year programme of undergraduate study."
Direct Marketing News
Email volume increased 9 percent from 2013 to 2014, according to a new report from Yesmail Interactive. The "Email Marketing Compass," report analyzed email metrics from 25 billion emails sent between Q2 2013 and Q2 2014. According to the report, unique clicks have decreased by 14 percent, and overall email open rates were down 3 percent.