With more than 10 years of experience, Outblaze was one of the first companies to offer a fully hosted multilingual e-mail service and now supports over 40 million users. Outblaze’s proven online Web-based messaging service offers unique capabilities for branding and administration. Today, Outblaze operates one of the largest online service platforms for the provision of private-label email, collaboration and social media services for other service providers, telecommunications operators, corporations, academia, media and publishing companies.

The Outblaze messaging service will be part of IBM Lotus’ Project “Bluehouse.” “Bluehouse” is IBM’s online social networking and collaboration service designed for business and currently in open beta (http://bluehouse.lotus.com). “Bluehouse” helps people work together more quickly and easily beyond the boundaries of their organizations. Within the service people can share files, chat, participate in online meetings and network over the Web.

“The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus’ commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement,” said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal. "People are more connected, but getting the right information and expertise, particularly outside of your own organization, can pose quite a challenge. IBM will help companies overcome the barriers of time, distance and affiliation to easily work together and deliver better business outcomes,” added Picciano.

The combination of the Outblaze assets and “Bluehouse” will provide customers with more choices in messaging solutions. Enterprise clients will be able to use IBM as a single provider for all their messaging needs, whether on-premise or online, serving a range of user needs from occasional to full-time. Small business customers will get an simple to acquire, integrated set of collaboration services that allow them to easily work with their network of customers and partners. Partners such as telecommunications operators and Internet service providers will be able to package and sell collaborative services to their clients under their own brands.

Further detail on how these new assets will become part of the IBM online portfolio will be divulged at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando next week.

The full post is here and reposted down here.

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Also, if you look at JamJam, that’s a seriously cute looking cuddly outfit, very fitting for HKO!

What was interesting in this event was how new players suddenly got great offers for their gear, and many were saying how this was "much harder", I thought this was really interesting that buying equipment from new players was considered tougher by some than actually questing for some difficult items which can take many hours to complete.

For those who know the game, watch the details in the chat text, 1000 dollars for T-shirts, trading level 9 wands for level 1 wands etc., it’s great to be a newbie in HKO right now, click the image to see it expand (to see the full sized screen if you want!)

The below is the redemption line, it was the end of the line, the entire line I could not capture from my position as they were redeeming their items for quest fulfillment, it was pretty funny and interesting.

Some players referred to it as the reason they liked HKO, the little things like this which are so different from other mmo’s in the social aspect of gameplay. What I found interesting is the time (and length) everyone was prepared to invest in a fun group activity that simply had no benefit to gaining levels, money, status or otherwise. It was just for fun and that’s what Hello Kitty Online is about now isn’t it?

This is a phone camera shot of the Autobild 1 Event in Geneva.

Very cute video blog introducing Hello Kitty Online from a user experience point of view and introducing the game element, well made entry.

Here is a screenshot of a bunch of people building a house together in a social setting in Hello Kitty Online, in this case the house is almost finished but it takes many hours to finish it as a group, and days if you do it solo! Here 5 of us are constructing the house together, after having gathered the necessary resources, people would work together to collect materials and then put them to good use in constructing the house, which can then be decorated inside.