Zoho Mail: Now With Offline and Mobile Support

It’s tough being a competitor to Gmail. Google has been the first major company to offer virtually unlimited storage for e-mails, and the simplicity of the service, solid spam filtering and good integration with other Google services has made Gmail a favorite for many.

Zoho Mail has been in private beta stage so far and thus it is definitely not as widespread as Gmail, but it has always been a worthy competitor. It’s a slick, feature-rich client that tries to marry Gmail’s simplicity with the overall look and feel of a full featured desktop email client, such as Outlook. Today, they’ve reached an important milestone - Zoho Mail is coming out of private beta, and it has some new features to show off.

First,through Google Gears, Zoho Mail now supports offline mode. To access, it, you must have Google Gears installed in either IE or Firefox, and click on the “Setup Offline” link on the top. Zoho Mail will recognize your connection status and switch between online and offline mode seamlessly. It may not be a killer feature, but it’s useful, and the fact that Gmail has been dabbling with it for quite a while but the official offline mode is still not out there is in Zoho’s favor.

Another important feature is mobile support - oops, did I say mobile? I meant iPhone, since Zoho Mail currently only works with Apple’s phone, and support for other devices is “in the works.” Just login to zoho.com from your iPhone and you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail right there.

These two features, along with some others, for example support for Gmail-style labels as well as Outlook-style folders, and integrated chat, make Zoho Mail an interesting competitor in the Web mail field and a great addition to the already very solid Zoho Office suite.

Courtesy: Mashable

Zoho Mail Gets Offline Support via Google Gears - Ahead of Gmail

Innovative Web Office startup Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again, announcing offline support for the newly public Zoho Mail tonight. Ironically Zoho is using Google Gears to enable offline functionality in Zoho Mail - see the video below by the Google Developer team. Zoho also beat Google to offline support in online word processing, again using Gears, by launching that functionality in November 2007. Google followed up with offline support for Google Docs at the end of March 2008.

We wrote in July about speculation that Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Didn't happen.

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes. The video is also available on Google Code blog.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Publish Sweet Looking Blogs OnSugar (Video)

OnSugar is a new blogging platform with a twist. The service has added several functions usually found on other social networking sites so that it feels like a blend of WordPress mixed with Twitter. For example, on the homepage you can view the public timeline which updates with posts from all blogs or just those you follow. You can also follow bloggers and their blogs and send them private messages (just like Direct Messages).

One of the most useful features is the drop down menu that allows you to jump from one of your blogs to another. The other menu item (see right image) displays all of the tasks that you can perform on the blog you’re currently visiting. For example, you can create a new post, edit drafts, change themes, widgets or pages. You can also change your site settings or invite other bloggers to guest blog on your site.

Speaking of themes, you can use existing themes or copy them and change them to make them your own. You can also create your own original theme from scratch if you want.

The Start Following link appears on all blogs and acts like the subscribe to RSS feed option that we see on all blogs these days.

When you create a new post you’re presented with a great deal of choices, which is another thing that makes this blogging platform different than most standard platforms. You can create many different types of blog posts. Besides the standard text post, you can also create polls, question and answer type quizzes, quotes, links and more. As for media, you can upload audio and video files or embed them.

The home page has a cool filtering system that lets you display whatever you want to see. For example, you can choose to see all new posts from all blogs or just the sites you subscribe to.
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You can select what kind of posts to view too, such as only posts with audio, video, polls, quizzes, links, etc. It’s a unique way to let users manage and control their blogs and those that they follow.
The service might appeal more to women because of its initial look and feel, but there seems to be a significant amount of men on the service already. The platform is different so we’ll have to see what shakes out when more traditional bloggers give it a try. Is it a good idea to mashup social media services with the blogging platform model? I think it is. WordPress and Blogger have made strides (ever so slowly) to give their users more social media tools and functions. Time will tell how much farther they will go to make their blogging platform more social.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Zoho Mail: Now With Offline and Mobile Support

It’s tough being a competitor to Gmail. Google has been the first major company to offer virtually unlimited storage for e-mails, and the simplicity of the service, solid spam filtering and good integration with other Google services has made Gmail a favorite for many.

Zoho Mail has been in private beta stage so far and thus it is definitely not as widespread as Gmail, but it has always been a worthy competitor. It’s a slick, feature-rich client that tries to marry Gmail’s simplicity with the overall look and feel of a full featured desktop email client, such as Outlook. Today, they’ve reached an important milestone - Zoho Mail is coming out of private beta, and it has some new features to show off.

First,through Google Gears, Zoho Mail now supports offline mode. To access, it, you must have Google Gears installed in either IE or Firefox, and click on the “Setup Offline” link on the top. Zoho Mail will recognize your connection status and switch between online and offline mode seamlessly. It may not be a killer feature, but it’s useful, and the fact that Gmail has been dabbling with it for quite a while but the official offline mode is still not out there is in Zoho’s favor.

Another important feature is mobile support - oops, did I say mobile? I meant iPhone, since Zoho Mail currently only works with Apple’s phone, and support for other devices is “in the works.” Just login to zoho.com from your iPhone and you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail right there.

These two features, along with some others, for example support for Gmail-style labels as well as Outlook-style folders, and integrated chat, make Zoho Mail an interesting competitor in the Web mail field and a great addition to the already very solid Zoho Office suite.

Courtesy: Mashable

Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Beta

Back in April, Yahoo acquired IndexTools, a provider of analytics software based in Hungary. Today, that service has re-emerged as Yahoo Web Analytics, and is being offered as a limited beta to customers of Yahoo Small Business – the company’s suite of tools for helping small businesses market and sell products online. Additionally, the tool will also be made available to select Yahoo advertisers.

As you might expect, Yahoo Web Analytics includes integration with other Yahoo products. For example, you can analyze the effectiveness of Yahoo search marketing campaigns and track how well individual products within your e-commerce shop are trending. The product will naturally be compared to Google Analytics, the free offering from Google that has similar integration with AdWords.

While it may be late to the party, Yahoo Web Analytics is apparently a big upgrade for Yahoo Small Business customers. Mashable contributor Sean Aune is a user of the service, and sent along the following screenshot as an example of what the service’s rather archaic reporting looks like today:

If nothing else, if you look at the screenshot below of the new service, it would seem that Yahoo Web Analytics has just received a long overdue upgrade:

Yahoo plans to roll out the service gradually to its Small Business Customers through the end of the year and expand the offering to other users in 2009.

Courtesy: Mashable

Make VoIP Phone Calls Over Email with Momail and Jajah

JAJAH, a VoIP service provider that manages connections for social network users and mobile and non-mobile phones, has teamed up today with Momail, a free mobile mail operator, allowing users to make VoIP phone calls by simply sending an email.

All it takes for Momail users to implement this new option is to register with JAJAH under Momail’s “On Demand” feature page, located within a user’s member page. Once complete, you simply send an email to JAJAH with a phone number you intend to call. JAJAH will subsequently initiate a call to your handset, followed by a call to the intended party.

Momail alone is an interesting invention. Along with popular third-party webmail recognition and push mail for phones - which support the technology - Momail claims to compress data received by users by up to 99 percent its original size. For those operating on metered data plans or simply for phones that cannot consume large file sizes (or whose owners simply don’t have to patience for such transfers), this is handy indeed. Now with JAJAH’s VoIP feature on board, Momail is able to provide extra power with little or no extra investment on the user side.

Note:Momail is still in beta in some countries, including the United States. You’ll have to request a password in order to gain entry.

Courtesy: Mashable

Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously.

Microsoft has announced that the latest version of Windows, due in the next couple of years, will be called - drumroll please - Windows 7. It’s about time Microsoft adopted a naming system that might actually make some sense to users, but I can’t wait for hordes of customers to start asking if they somehow missed Windows 1 through 6.

Windows has had one of the most ridiculous naming schemes in the history of software. First there were logical (but ugly) version numbers, like the once commonplace “Windows 3.1″. Then with the release of the overhauled Windows 95 the company adopted a naming system based on the year of release, which it continued until Windows 98.

Windows Me (perhaps the worst operating system I’ve ever used), sacrificed the scheme for a chance to be clever (it stood for “me” and the millennium at the same time!) Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it’s catchy, and we have no idea what it means. Fine.

Finally we had Windows Vista, which seemed to stick with the naming convention of “something that sounds sort of cool but didn’t really mean anything”. It had been more than five years since the release of XP, so there was little chance of confusion.

Microsoft is now in a hurry to push out its next operating system after the generally dismal response to Vista. And so we’ve come to Windows 7, which is apparently tied to the build numbers and not the actual releases. The new naming scheme lends itself well to faster, more incremental releases similar to what we’ve seen from Apple (about once every 18 months), but it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be more bland.

You can read more at the company’s blog post here.

Courtesy: TechCrunch