Gmail News & Articles

Using the Cloud is getting cheaper all the time. And it should get cheaper with the announcement by Softlayer (news, site), a provider of on-demand virtual data center services, as it starts to deploy Isilon’s (news, site) scale-out NAS to power its cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft  (news, site) and Yahoo! (news, site) have been given the final approval by the EU to go ahead with a partnership that was agreed to last July. That partnership will see Yahoo’s search results being powered by Microsoft Bing for a cut of the ad revenues.

The deal has also been agreed to by US regulators without any conditions seeing the two take control of 30% of the search market -- the other 70% of which is controlled by Google.

A joint statement by the companies said: "While Microsoft will provide the underlying platform, both companies will continue to create different, compelling and evolving experiences, competing for audience, engagement and clicks."

By combining the two, Yahoo! will take over the search advertising work of Microsoft saving them the cost of running huge spidering centers, while Bing will provide all the links for every Yahoo search.

Like all such deals at the moment, the original agreement announced last summer is designed to cut costs for both companies and increase revenue share, which should see some improvement as the combined networks should be considerably more attractive to advertisers than they would be operating on their own.

Microsoft and Yahoo will begin the transition of algorithmic search and have set a goal of completing that effort in at least the United States by the end of 2010.

The companies also said they hope to make significant progress transitioning U.S. advertisers and publishers prior to the 2010 holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season.

All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.
 

Demanding modern consumers want not only rich, engaging online experiences, but, according to Forrester's research, they also expect these experiences to extend transparently across multiple channels -- from the web to call centers, to direct mail, mobile, social networks and in-store displays. In fact, recent research says that more than 70% of U.S. consumers use the Web plus another channel when making purchase decisions.

We've said it before, 2010 is shaping up to be a year where experience management needs drive the Web CMS sector in new, and in our opinion, interesting directions.

On Thursday February 25 at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern and 4pm GMT CoreMedia and Forrester are holding a webinar entitled The Role of Web CMS in Cross-Channel Customer Relations.

The live event will be presented by Forrester's Tim Walters and aims to:

• Review the emerging trends in cross-channel communications and experience management
• Explore how Web Content Management solutions can a play key role in driving customer responsiveness
• Demonstrate that synchronizing, updating and optimizing your digital content for a wide variety of consumer end points can quickly increase your customer engagement

If you're tasked with optimizing your customer communication and interaction channels, then this event might be just what you need. Inquiring minds can register here.
 

The recent release of Optical Image Technology’s (OIT) upgraded DocFinity adds electronic Forms to the document management software that it launched in March 2009 after a ground upwards rebuild.

So, Google just grew a new leg called Buzz. We caught wind of the addition yesterday, but what we thought was going to be a simple status update option has turned out to be what can only be described as Facebook for Gmail.

Yesterday we reported that Facebook was taking a tiny slice of Google’s pie by adding a webmail feature. Today, it looks like Big G is taking that slice back by adding status updates to Gmail.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

So, Gmail labs is pretty cool, right? Engineers throw an experiment at us and we get to play until we're either bored with it or wonder where it's been all our lives. The whole concept has been a pretty sweet deal since Google initially released it in June of 2008.

But Google giveth, and taketh away. We saw some particularly gruesome casualties earlier this year when Jaiku, Google Video and Google Notebook were kicked to the curb. Now Labs has started their own downsizing, beginning by sending right-side labels to the chopping block. Understandably, loads of you are still mourning the loss. Our advice? Prepare for even more heartache; word on G-Lab Street is another round of slashing is about to take place.

Most of were beginning to believe that Google applications were to be tagged as "beta" forever. Today, Google (news, site) has surprised us by taking the Beta tag off of Google Apps, because they say it reached their "high bar for taking products out of beta". Not quite sure what that high bar is, but there are probably a few enterprises out there glad to see the beta tag gone.

Google Apps has worn the beta tag for the two years it has been in existence, Gmail for five years. But, as Google says, what they consider a beta application doesn't really fit the traditional idea that most of us understand a beta application to be.

To most, beta means it's not ready for production level consumption. This has not been the case for Google Apps. That has been proven with the ever increasing number of enterprises who have adopted either Gmail or Google Apps, or both, as their productivity tools of choice. And from the beginning Google has also provided 24/7 support and offered service level agreements for Google Apps.

What's in a name. A Google Beta by any other name, will work the same. So says Google. The beta tag may be gone from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk -- enterprise and consumer -- but that's not going to stop Google from enhancing and improving these tools.

They just seem to have made a few nervous enterprises happier. After all, it must be kind of scary to convince management to invest in a production level solution that has "Beta" in its name. 

It is increasingly common to see updates on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter come from people using their mobile devices. Vufone is a new service from NewACT that makes accessing and managing messages, photos and video across a range of social sites a one-stop task.

Chances are you are one of the 100 million users of Gmail. Chances are you store stuff on there because you can get to it no matter what machine you are accessing the web with. Novel chapters, presentation notes, report data, etc.

But you’re on a plane, or in a car, or doing the great search for the American Dream via Greyhound and you don’t have web access. Or the bandwidth you can access is unreliable. Spotty. Intermittent. Oh the humanity!

In these days nearly every tech company is seeking the holy grail of new services, software, SaaS options or enterprise 2.0 solutions. The organizations want to get that edge they may need to hold their ground.

However, it seems a little odd that anyone would think that another webmail client is really what we need. MySpace seems to think this is the case, and has a stealth webmail client in the works as their newest 1-2 punch.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Embedded GMail Video is Deeper than you Think
• Reference Extract: Google, Except by Smart People
• Apple Building a Search Engine?
• Twingr— Make Your Own Twitter
• 30 Different Uses for RSS
  
  

Embedded GMail Video is Deeper than you Think

You may or may not have noticed a new feature in your GMail account: embedded video chat. It launched a couple of days ago to high acclaim. (Mashable came up with the best summation, calling it the “anti-Skype”).

It’s primarily noteworthy because there’s hardly any reason to leave GMail anymore for your communication needs. IM, email, and now video/audio can now all be accessed from the GMail interface. Which is quite remarkable, when you think that all this is being done from the browser. Imagine if we’d frozen Scoble a couple of years ago and thawed him out this week to see this— he’d fall over backwards. (Which would give us a good opportunity to throw him back into the deep-freeze for another decade or three.)

iGoogle just recently got even cooler by putting its new canvas view into effect for U.S. users.

With new features and details like the tab display as a left-hand column rather than a menu up top, and each gadget having its own individual page for expanded viewing, iGoogle aims to make it possible for users to get all of their ritualistic Web practices taken care of without leaving the comfort of their own homepage.

Zoho, a Web-hosted Microsoft Office and Google competitor, has announced offline support for their Zoho Mail product. Zoho Mail joins Zoho Writer — the company’s word processing product — in using (ironically enough) Google Gears for offline support and access.

By comparison, Google has yet to implement any type of offline access to their Web-hosted email product, Gmail. Zoho, in choosing to utilize Google’s own offline-enabling engine, beat the search giant to the punch in an effort to remain competitive in the space.