nonsmokingarea.com

back from London and the first thing I notice is Techmeme overly cluttered with news about Google, which finally did what so many have expected and demanded in the past: launched feb 21st, Google Apps Premier is a subscription-based, corporate version of the application package launched in late summer 2006, including the already well-known Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets. for 50 USD per year & user, Google offers 10gbyte mail-storage, 24/7 phone support and a guaranteed uptime of 99.99% for email-services . it doesn’t take a major in business administration to realize that these numbers undercut offerings of Microsoft and others by _far_.

moreover, the comparison chart of Google Apps Standard and Premier edition unveils that the paid service lets users opt-out of contextualized advertising in email and includes an additional application for resource-management, which could be an indication on where Google Apps Premier might be heading in the near future. TechCrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick hits the nail with his headline: “It’s G-Day“, extensive coverage all around the web can be found at Techmeme.

after a short but very much-required hiatus for myself, it’s time to pick up this blog with various bits of news I stumbled upon during the last days…kind-of emulating Marc Canter’s primary posting-style…

while most users are still waiting for their Gmail-accounts to fetch external POP-mail, Google Operating System has got some screenshots & descriptions. Gmail supports up to 5 POP-accounts (only for retrieval, outgoing-mail is still processed by Gmail and therefor includes Gmail-headers). all mail is syndicated into one inbox.

Multiverse is an upcoming (2007) 3D-framework & client/server-infrastructure, allowing 3rd-party content-publishers to create & host their very own virtual worlds at minimal cost. think of Multiverse as various branded, independent Second Life-grids (according to rumours, a scenario Linden Labs itself is actually thinking of in the near future). while the idea seems to advance on Second Life’s concept, it’s still not “open” in the way of fully exposing protocols/interfaces - which would bascially allow anyone to build their own (opensource-)clients & servers.

according to TechCrunch, Hey!Watch is the next big thing in online-video conversion (compare ZamZar or Media Convert). Hey!Watch removes much friction by offering various ways of importing video-data: besides the usual upload-form, Hey!Watch provides a bookmarklet to import any (f.e. YouTube-)video, a Firefox-plugin and even automatic import of RSS-enclosures. video-files are processed to fit on your iPod, PSP or mobile phones, users may subscribe to their converted files via RSS. sounds very good, indeed.

ok, that wasn’t as telegraphic as I supposed it would be, anyway

apparently Google is about to add a widely claimed feature to their successful Gmail-service: Mail Fetcher will allow users to fetch mail from any existing POP3-mailbox. while it’s currently possible to setup ‘foreign’ mail-accounts to forward mail to Gmail as well as setting alternative from-addresses, this new feature will make it very easy to use Gmail for aggregating several mail accounts (personal, business etc.). Mail Fetcher will be gradually rolled out to all Gmail-users. (via TechCrunch)

Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogscoped reports the recent integration of Google Spreadsheets into Gmail. when receiving xls-attachments, Gmail users are now given a direct link to open such files in Google Spreadsheets. a similar feature for Word-documents / Google Docs (ex Writely) is still missing but almost certain to follow soon.

with todays release of a java-based client for Gmail, Google gives recognition to the uprising market of web-access via mobile- or smartphone. and while the stripped down html-version of Gmail (http://m.gmail.com) has been doing quite a good job for some time, this dedicated app will surely make mobile email more efficient. from the press-release:

• Up to five times faster access and use, thanks to automatic pre-fetching of messages
• Drastically reduced clicks and scrolling to access email
• Fewer keystrokes for reading, composing, or searching mail
• Attachments, including files and photos, viewable and automatically resized to fit the user’s phone

the java-client, which should work on most modern phones, can be downloaded by visiting gmail.com/app (unfortunately, the actual download of the package currently doesn’t work for my Nokia 6630 :().

update: the download finally worked today! Gmail has a very low footprint (the jar-package is only 112 kbytes), therefor loading quickly into memory. messages are opened with almost no delay, thanks to smart pre-fetching. another highlight are the keyboard-shortcuts for searching (’1′) and composing (’2′) new mails - simple, but a real timesafer. on the downside, the java-client currently doesn’t allow logins with accounts from Google Apps for Domains (Google’s product allowing Gmail to be used as mail-service for your personal internet domain), at least it didn’t work with mine. still, the mobile client is highly recommended and might even be a reason to switch from your current email-solution to Gmail.

this is probably not news, but I just recognized that Gmail/Calendar seems to handle event-invitations via email (like typically sent by Microsoft Outlook/Exchange-users) quite well. not only does Gmail offer to create an event-entry in Google Calendar (I was aware of that), but it also allows to give direct response (”Are you coming? Yes/NoMaybe…”) to the sender. the same seems to work with outgoing email (”Add event info”). seems like the last missing peaces of the “how-to create an outlook-killer”-puzzle are getting in place!