An announcement coming at CTIA in San Francisco this week will unveil plans to offer the ability to sign up for a Windows Live ID from your phone, simply and securely. Why is this important? This from Phil Holden from Windows Mobile:
We think this is an important step in delivering a great end-to-end solution in the 'mobile first' scenario where we know many customers in countries like China, India, Brazil that their primary computing device is the mobile phone. We already have services like Hotmail broadly available in most countries around the world already so this enables folks to sign-up directly for a new Live ID and get access to email for the first time.
The service is going live as we speak, it can be accessed via your mobile phone from
Anyway, we think its a nice clean experience that is appropriate for a mobile device. In the past its been way too hard to try and create a Live ID on a phone and in fact was really limited to a couple of operators/countries. Now we have a sign-up experience that is available to a much broader list of potential customers and so much easier - yeah!
(...)The service has been designed to work with the built in mobile browser that comes with your phone and all folks need is a data plan to get started. Its going to be available in 33 languages and about 70 different countries
Accessing Windows Live (and other) services in many parts of the world comes either from a mobile phone or not at all. Om Malik wrote recently about the importance of Symbian (read: Nokia) around the world, with a graph of phone usage around the world:
..so this new service, in conjunction with Windows Live for Nokia and Windows Live for Mobile, continues efforts to broaden Windows Live presence around the world, on a variety of devices, something we will be following closely in the coming months.