ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Corporate Vice President of Windows Phone Marketing, Thom Gruhler.
THOM
GRUHLER
: Hi, Laura. How are you?
How are you doing everybody? I’m Thom Gruhler the new head of marketing for Windows Phone and I’m really excited to be here. This is also my first WPC, and after being with the company for just 90 days I can tell you as a career marketer there’s no more exciting place in the world to be than right here at Microsoft.
We have an unbelievable amount of momentum, when you consider what we’ve announced this week, over the past several months, and what’s coming, very exciting. But, I’m especially excited to share with you some of what’s coming in the launch of Windows Phone 8, which we announced earlier this summer.
Windows Phone 8 will be truly the most modern smartphone platform available anywhere. One of the most exciting features is that Windows Phone 8 will be on the shared core with Windows 8, which gives us an unprecedented level of code-sharing between our two products and literally allows us to bring many of the robust features that you’ve enjoyed with Windows right into the Windows Phone platform.
But, of course, Windows 7 already brings together so much of Microsoft, from Bing to Office, to Skype, and great integration with SharePoint and Exchange, making Windows Phone the most integrated mobile platform for the Microsoft family of products. In fact, many of our IT partners and professionals around the world have already begun adopting Windows Phone for their enterprise solutions. And just recently, 81 percent of CIOs ranked Windows Phone as great for business. And Windows Phone also continues to delight our end users.
Our end users rave about our people-friendly features, our beautiful user interface, and our buttery smooth performance. In fact, this taken just yesterday from Amazon shows that seven out of ten of the highest consumer-rated devices on Amazon are Windows Phone. (Applause.) I don’t need to tell you this, but that is certainly exciting and important to us in a world where consumer choice is driving devices in the business world today.
We are also pleased to announce that we have surpassed 100,000 apps in our Marketplace. (Cheers and applause.) And that’s including many of the thousands of apps that you in the room have made possible. And for that we say, thank you. (Applause.) But, it’s not enough to have a great product that people love. Smartphone users today don’t know about Windows Phone and that’s a problem we’re going to fix. With Windows Phone 8 we are truly committed to building consumer demand and are very excited about the momentum we already have with our consumers, our OEM partners and mobile operators around the world. And we’re off to a great start with the tremendous response we’ve received to our gorgeous new Start screen, which we announced in June, and has been the subject of quite a lot of buzz. And you’re about to see why. Windows Phone 8 offers users truly the most personal smartphone experience available anywhere.
It starts with a tile, a tile that’s special, that’s alive. Live Tiles are the heart and soul of a Windows Phone. It’s a simple, elegant thing, but so powerful, and no other phone has them. When someone puts their stuff into one of our phones it officially becomes their phone from the inside out, in a much more profound and powerful way than any other smartphone. It literally gets powered by their passions and interests, their likes and loves, and the things and people they care about most. We know that our users really fall in love with their phones, and the biggest reason is that Live Tiles makes the technology disappear, turning their phone into a unique fingerprint, and precisely reflects each and every one of them.
Live Tiles are also the face of Windows Phone. And now that very pretty face is about to become drop dead gorgeous and a lot more personal. Introducing the new Windows Phone Start screen. We’re putting people in total control of their Live Tiles. Now not only can they pin the stuff they want, whether it’s a person or an app, right on their Start screen, they can also set the size of any of their tiles. If someone is really into text, they can make the messaging tile full size so they can see the text without opening the app. And if someone is not a heavy email user, they can make that tile small and put it a little out of the way. And for all of you power users who use tons of apps every day, you can make all those tiles small and reduce the amount of scrolling on your screen.
No other phone can do anything like this. And the result is that Windows Phone is even more personal than ever before. So, now people won’t just be buying a phone, it will be Thom the music lover getting a Thom the music lover phone, and Laura the social butterfly getting a social butterfly phone, and it will be Anna the bookworm getting a bookworm phone. And Dave the sports nut getting a configured-for-sports-nut phone, and Robin the news junkie getting her news junkie phone, and Mike Jones the accountant by day gamer by night getting a precisely Mike Jones phone. It’s the best of what Windows Phone already is made even better. (Cheers and applause.)
But, we are not stopping there. With Windows Phone 8 we are continuing to push to make Windows Phone the world’s best enterprise-class mobile platform, with new features and functionality that return us to our heritage as an early enterprise leader in the mobile space. We literally heard you and we put features that make Windows Phone 8 great for you, our partners, and great for our customers. And I’m pleased to announce to you today that Windows Phone 8 is business ready.
We are going to keep building on our integration with Exchange, SharePoint and Lync to provide great business productivity experiences right out of the box. And with Windows Phone 8 we will provide business customers with a complete security platform, starting with secure boot all the way to full, always-on data encryption using Microsoft’s enterprise-grade BitLocker technology. (Applause.)
This means you can now expand to sell mobile solutions to verticals like financial sector, government, healthcare and many more. We are also changing our app distribution and we’re enabling a new model for enterprise app distribution, which no longer requires your customers to publish their apps through the Microsoft App Marketplace. (Cheers and applause.) With Windows Phone 8 enterprise organizations can take complete control over their LOB apps, gives you the opportunity to sell those solutions to customers who don’t want their apps published broadly.
Enterprise device management, Windows Phone 8 has a built-in device management solution for large enterprise, offering a simple user interface and integration with existing software management solutions they’re using today. And, of course, our shared core with Windows 8 will accelerate our innovation. It gives tremendous benefit to our end users, it gives tremendous benefit to our hardware partners, and of course it gives tremendous benefit to you our partners, including the robust tools and support in Visual Studio, which make it faster and easier to develop for our Windows Phone platform.
In fact, many of you have told us it’s 30 percent easier than Android to build and maintain solutions on the Windows/Windows Phone platform. And of course, the 1.3 billion users today give a combined scale across Windows and Windows Phone 8 to make our platform the best platform for your business solutions.
Now, enough from me; help me welcome my colleague Augusto Valdez to give you a sneak peek at the Windows Phone 8 product.
Augusto. (Applause.)
AUGUSTO
VALDEZ: I’m very glad to be here today, this morning, to show you a sneak peek of what Windows Phone 8 is going to bring up into market. We’ve done a lot of improvements and one of the key things we have done is to have a common shared code in-between Windows Phone and Windows. And that is going to enable us to do many, many new things on the phone that hopefully I’m going to be able to show you today.
So, as Thom said in the video earlier today, it all starts with our Live Tiles, and our Start screen. So, for that, let me just unlock my phone here. So, before getting to the Start screen, of course, I have to get my PIN code here. So, this is a secure connection, and everybody knows my password.
And now as I’m here on my Start screen, and as you see me here, it’s a very different one from all the ones that Thom showed before because this is mine. It’s really, really mine, and it has people that I spend most of the time with on the top of my screen here. I have multiple Live Tiles here with information about my work time, my email. I’m an email person, so I have multiple email accounts in here. I can also see my more personal side with my games, and also something you will notice is that I also have a couple of tiles here from applications, like Weather Channel and USA Today, that are actually applications on Marketplace today. So, this means that all the applications, the more than 100,000 applications that Thom just talked about a few minutes ago, are going to work without change in Windows Phone 8. So, we’re carrying compatibility of existing applications into the Marketplace for Windows Phone 8. So, that’s I think very great news for all your applications that are already published. Great. (Applause.)
So, some of the other things that you can do with the Live Tiles now is that as you can see we have multiple different sizes. We have a small one, medium one, we have even large ones. And if you want to focus specifically on certain things, like for example I’m a very email person, so I can grab my Live Tile for email here, and then just click and hold, and what it allows me to do is to basically customize and change the size of it. So, I can make it big, and when I make it big, it actually gives me more information about it. It gives me what is the latest email that I received, not just the counter, but also the email itself, which is really easy for me to see one dozen emails coming into my phone. I can make it a medium-sized Live Tile, or I can make it back into a small-sized Live Tile. It’s really customized.
And this extensibility for the Live Tile sizes goes beyond just our native applications like email to, for example, third-party apps. I have here Nokia Drive, which is a Nokia application, that I can just click and hold, and as you can see it has the Live Tile here, but if I make it big it changes to show me, for example, my route, so I can see right on the Live Tile what’s going on there. And if I change it again to a medium one, it still shows me information in a medium size, but easy for me to see what’s going on. And I can always go back and make it small again.
So, that’s just a little bit of a small preview of what our Start screen can do, and somehow people are going to be able to customize this to make it really theirs.
Now, some other things that we have been able to do with Windows Phone is to grab capabilities that we have on the platform that are being deployed in Windows 8 as well, and make those things work in Windows Phone based on the shared code that we have here.
So, last night when I went out for dinner, Thom and I were spending time preparing for the session, and we’ve been spending a lot of time together, so I wanted to add his information to actually have it into my phone. Something that we have been able to enable in the phone with Windows Phone 8 is support for NFC, for near field communications, which allows me to communicate and pass information in-between devices, or even business cards like this with an NFC chip, in a very simple way.
So, see this is a business card here, it’s a regular business card with an NFC chip on it. The only thing that I need to do is just put into the back of my phone, and it automatically recognizes information on the card. I accept that, and boom there I have all contact information from Thom ready to be entered into my phone super quickly. (Applause.) It’s going to be really handy for me to have Thom’s information here now that review time is coming. So, I wanted to have that in here.
So, I can save that in it. And, you know what, now I also have here Thom’s slate with Windows 8 here on my desk here. And since I have now Thom’s information on my phone, what I would like to do is, I would like to actually pass Thom my own information across so he has my contact card information in his. So, I can just open up my own contact card, and I can say that I want to share this contact card. I can accept this as the information that I want to share, and now I receive multiple different options of ways to share this information with Thom. I can send him an email as we were able to do before, but now I have the option to “tap and send.” So, I just click on tap and send, and it’s giving me instructions on how can I do to share this information with Thom.
So, now let’s move into the slate, this is Thom’s slate. Very cute here. I’ll just point it up there, and just unlock it. And as you can see here, it is displayed with this information, and the only thing that I need to do is just to grab the phone, and then touch the slate right here, and you see that it’s asking me if I want to receive that content, and it will pass my contact information right into Thom’s. So, it’s super easy for me to move information from Windows Phone 8 with Windows 8 slate. So, that’s a really cool way to share information there as well. (Applause.)
Great. I have his info, he has mine. So, we’re all set for review time. Next, what I would like to do is now that I’m in Thom’s slate, I can look around here, and I see that he has this browser session here that is called click me for 1 million. Have you received some of these emails sometimes where they are saying if you go to this website, you’re going to win a million dollars? If I go there, there you go, as you can imagine, this is scam site. It’s a place and site that is actually trying to get my information. And something that we have done in Windows 8 is that they’re building up in IE 10 an anti-phishing technology to protect people from scams. This is a great technology that I tend to be emphasizing a lot for Windows 8. As I said before, we share code, so we share the code. IE 10 is something also that we are including in Windows Phone 8, and you’ll see that we have some of those capabilities embedded in there. So, let’s see that for this particular time I also want to share now this website that I have on my Windows 8 slate back into my phone.
So, very similarly, and this is the great thing about having a common share, is that I can just go here to devices, and then say that I want to tap and send this website into my phone. So, now that it’s ready to tap and send, the only thing I need to do is go back into my phone, let’s unlock it again, and then just put my phone back into the slate. And you’ll see that now the phone is going say if I want to receive content. If I say accept, and I’m hitting the same website, but in the phone we get exactly the same method that you would get in Windows 8 because we’re taking the same anti-phishing technology that we have in Windows 8 and in Windows Phone 8, so it’s the same experience for users at any time.
Now something that we have been able to do as well as having Internet Explorer 10 embedded into the phone is, if I go to websites you’ll see how we have been able to improve the HTML5-rendering capabilities that we have on the phone, and see for example these examples of applications just flowing up. This is a pure HTML5 that we’re seeing from the Web, and see how perfectly it performs, it looks great in there. And it doesn’t stop there. Now we are adding also touch controls in the HTML5 cameras that we have in here, so if I actually touch the screen here, I’m able to control the screen, and then leave it, and then keep controlling it. It’s actually great this way because we are going to be able to develop applications that are very, very rich in the browser itself using HTML5. So, that’s just a little bit of what we have been able to do in Internet Explorer 10.
Now the other interesting thing that we have been able to do a little bit taking advantage of the NFC technology is to create a replacement for the wallet. So, we have a wallet technology here that basically replaces the wallet, the physical wallet that I have in my pocket. And the idea of having a wallet here is to be able to replace the wallet having all the information that I typically have in my wallet right here on the application.
So, a couple of things that are important for me to have are, for example, my membership card; like, for example, this one for American Airlines. Then I can have multiple credit cards, right, the ones that I have in here, or bank accounts. I have others like Delta Sky Miles. I have my Regal Crown Club, a movie theater membership card here as well. So, all these things are in here. The other typical things that you also store in a wallet, or some of us, are coupons. So, I can also store here in my wallet deals that I want to be using later for going to specific places, and getting specific discounts, or something like that.
Now, the interesting thing for you in a business scenario of the wallet is that the wallet is very extensible. So, the way that you get information into the wallet could be in different ways. The first one is actually by deploying an application on the phone itself. So, here for example I have this credit card from Chase Premier Plus. So, if I open it up, this particular wallet entry was not entered by me manually. It was actually installed automatically when I deployed the Chase application into my phone, and it actually creates an entry on my wallet if I want to do that, and this is a concept application that we’re working, of course, with Chase that is dependent on Windows 8 for the future.
Now, the cool thing about my wallet entry now here is that I can see all my wallet information. I can see my balance. I can see which numbers I need to call if I have trouble. If I swipe to the side, I can even see a summary of my transactions. So, don’t pay attention too much to it. And then I go back into my about screen again. But the interesting thing about the wallet as I said is that it’s always connected back into the application. So, in this particular case, as you see here, I have a notification that says quick pay request from Kim at Abercrombie. So, Kim is asking me to actually make a transfer to her, and I cannot do the transfer on the wallet itself, but if I actually tap on that notification it automatically takes me to the Chase application, and I don’t need to actually be navigating to go there, so there are connections that you can actually move into one place and the other.
Now I’m in the Chase app, and from here I can click on that. I can basically see what the request is about, I can make the transfer using the Chase application and when I’m done I just click back here and then I’m back into my wallet. So, there is a great integration point there in-between the wallet and applications that you might be creating for your customers that they want to actually deliver services to their customers, as well. Isn’t that cool? (Applause.)
Another scenario that we have been able to build into the wallet, as well, as I said before, is that coupon, or that deal management, or managing your deals. In this particular case next week when I go back home I want to take my kids out and spend some time with them. I’ve been on the road for the last three or four weeks. So, I want to take them into the movie theater and actually it’s one of my son’s birthdays. So, to do that I just open up my Regal membership card here. I can even have the barcode so when I go to the movie theater I can just get the barcode scanned so I can get my membership points. So, everything is out here in the wallet. And then I can see, for example, the address of this place. And as I said before, I want to go to the movie and then I want to take them for dinner.
So, I’ll just click on the map, or on the address, and it’s going to go get me directly to the maps and it’s going to show me, of course, here that movie theater is located. Then I can use the good old Local Scout capability that we have in Windows Phone 7. But, what we have done in Windows Phone 8 is that now you see it’s showing me all the different places that I have for eat and drink around the movie theater area, but instead of sorting it by distance what I want to do is I want to filter these places by the places that are offering deals. I’m a little bit cheap in this particular case. I want to make sure that I’m going to a place where I can get a discount. And there you go.
The Wanta Thai Cuisine, which my kids are going to love, have actually a discount here. And it’s actually “get a free birthday meal,” pretty convenient, right? So, if I open that up you’ll see that I have here the deals in my phone, so I can have access to that restaurant information. I can see, for example, here the deal that I have. I can open up the deal itself and it’s going to take me to the deals and this is a new card that we have in Windows Phone 8 for deals specifically. It tells me what the deal is about. It tells me the link for where I can get more details on the deal. But, the most important thing is that it also connects back into the wallet.
So, since this is going to happen a week from now I can add this into my wallet for looking at later. So, I just add it. It’s in my wallet now. And if I click, if I want to view it on my wallet, I go back in there and I can see the deal right there. And even I can do things like, for example, pinning it to my Start screen. So, from now on I have the deal right there and I don’t even need to go to the wallet. But, the interesting thing on the wallet itself is that if I go back in it you’ll see that I have here the cards that I had before, and then now I have a couple of deals that are already expired, that are the ones that are grayed out, and then I have this new one that I just added today that is going to expire on December 31, 2012. So, I have access to it really quickly at any time. I think with this we are giving users the opportunity to actually manage their lives and their transactions in a way better way.
Something that I have not shown, of course, in the wallet, but it’s something that you can intuitively think that we’re going to be enabling as well, is payment. So, you can use credit cards that I have in the wallet to do payments. You can use credit cards and you have a secure element based on the SIM card that you have on the phone, you can actually touch and pay in retail locations that will support payment, as well. So, we’re all supporting the wallet and we’re very excited about that.
Now, the last thing that I would like to show you that is related to the enterprise deployment that we were talking about, or that Thom was talking about earlier before, is an enterprise application that we call, and a new core capability on Windows Phone 8, that we call the Company Hub. Company Hub is a concept that we have that is basically an app that you can deploy using the management services that we were talking about before, and when you enroll into the management server, then this update is automatically pushed down into your phone and you can use that as your company repository for other applications, or other services that you want to offer to your employees.
This concept of a Company Hub is going to be shipped as a template with Windows Phone 8. So, you are going to be able to customize Company Hub for your own customers. You can create those for them and then have those Company Hubs being deployed using the management server in each one of your customers at any time.
Now, what I want to show you is one example of a concept that Microsoft IT is working for our own usage at Microsoft. So, again, this is a Company Hub that we have created for ourselves. It’s not the one that we’re going to be shipping. We’re going to be shipping templates so you can create your own Company Hub for yourself.
So, the way that this works is that I just open up this application that is called the Microsoft IT Company Hub, and this is just an example. Once we have pushed this application down into the phone now I’m able to see all the applications that are company applications on this first area that I have in here. That if I try to decide I can have here all the company applications that are available for me to install on my phone at any particular time.
These are not applications that are public in the Marketplace. These are applications that are living on our company servers, so they don’t need to be public out there and I can actually install those applications if I have the right certificate on my phone, and only if I have the right certificate on my phone, so I can have access to them at any time. Then I can see a new headline here, so it’s easy for me to see, for example, RSS feeds coming from our internal servers, alert server, which IT application wouldn’t be good without having an IT alert, or stuff like that. I can see my ticket status, and it says my software is going to expire in the next couple of days. Then of course, I have to remember myself. So, I have my profile area here, where I can change my own photo. I can see that I’m busy doing a presentation. I can see what my team members are and things like that.
Just to give you an example of how the deployment application works is, if I go back into the app for me, and say that for example I want to install this MS Time Off application, because I’m going to be taking some days off after the event, I can just tap on it. It’s going to allow me to actually connect now, not to marketplace, but to the Microsoft share where we have the private source for deployment.
What we have done is we have created a very similar interface like the one that we have in Marketplace. So, it’s very familiar for users, how to install the applications. So, I just click install and now this application is being installed on my app section. So, I can have access to that. I can just tap on it, and then from now on I can actually just enter my time off, my vacation days, expense reports, or things like that.
So, that’s just a little bit of a brief glimpse. Hopefully you guys are so excited, as we are. And hopefully you have a great next fiscal year. (Cheers and applause.)
THOM
GRUHLER
: So, I guess you’re telling me there’s no million dollars?
AUGUSTO
VALDEZ: There’s no million dollars.
THOM
GRUHLER
: Please give a great welcome, or thank you to Augusto, Peru’s greatest demoer. (Applause.)
Thanks. It’s really great for us to see Windows Phone 8 in action. It’s really great stuff. And what’s even greater is that Windows Phone will be a truly global and deeply local platform. We will be in over 50 languages. That is 25 more than Apple announced in June. (Applause.) And we will be deploying apps through our Marketplace available in over 180 countries, dramatically expanding your addressable market for apps.
And with the launch of Windows Phone 8 you will see some of the most exciting hardware ever for Windows Phones, from our four fantastic OEM partners; Nokia, HTC, Samsung and Huawei. As you can see, we have taken the time to make Windows Phone a central part of the Microsoft Live story for you our partners. And we are hopeful that we can continue to work with you to make it part of your story. We thank you for everything that you’ve done and we look forward to working with you in the year ahead to make it a great one.
Thank you very much.
END
