Emergic CleanMail

We have added some new features to Emergic CleanMail, our anti-spam and anti-virus protection:

Quarantine Access - Companies can review quarantined messages and retrieve improperly blocked messages through the "DASHBOARD", web-based tool.

Personal Spam Manager - A radical new technology that enlists users to delete or release their own spam messages, held in quarantine. Increase detection accuracy, eliminates false positives and removes the management burden from IT staff.

Improved Graphical Reports - Statistics showing email volumes and patterns by day week, month and top users receving spams & viruses.

We are also looking for partners globally who are keen on reselling Emergic CleanMail.

Emergic | PermaLink | Comments (1)

Congratulations on the new release. CleanMail looks good.

It is sometimes shocking to see that several Indian ISPs still do not (by default at least) offer spam solutions to personal and corporate customers!

~sumedh

Posted by Sumedh Mungee

Handsets in US, Japan and Korea

PocketPCTools.com - points to an MSNBC article which explains why the US lags behind Japanese and S. Korean handsets:

1. While the Japanese and South Koreans have aggressively cleared real estate on the wireless spectrum specifically for lightning-fast, third- generation systems (3G), our FCC has taken a more laissez-faire approach toward the big carriers' use of bandwidth. The result is an electromagnetic soup where our existing second-generation (2G) networks jockey for position with UHF channels, digital TV broadcasts, emergency/medical networks and even garage door openers. The FCC recently announced that it won't auction space for true 3G networks until the middle of 2006. Meanwhile, DoCoMo is already mapping out a staggeringly fast 4G network that will allow users to download data at speeds of 100 megabytes to 1 gigabyte per second.

2. The second reason is simply that American consumers may not covet or need cutting-edge phones as much as their Asian counterparts do. A large proportion of the Japanese population experienced the Internet for the first time when DoCoMo launched its i-mode service in 1999, and handsets remain their most popular portal to cyberspace. In this country we tend to do our surfing on "big screens," which gives us less incentive to exploit our phones' Internet features. As of Q3 2004, wireless data services -- text messaging, Internet surfing, etc. -- accounted for 8 percent of Sprint PCS's average revenue per user; the American industry average is even lower. DoCoMo's, on the other hand, make up almost 25 percent of average revenue per user.

3. Asian consumers tend to place a higher value on phones as high-tech fashion accessories, jumping to purchase the latest products with the most unique, experimental functions. Americans, meanwhile, tend to opt for value and reliability.

Accessing and Managing Information

Andy Beal describes his tools of the trade:

Toolbar - Google; because I like the "blog this button" for blogger. No other reason, hence gets about half of my searches
Homepage - My Yahoo; great for keeping track of stocks, news, weather etc. I now probably do half my searching with Yahoo because of My Yahoo.
RSS (desktop) - Newsgator; I like reading feeds from Outlook
RSS (laptop) - Bloglines; just seems easier when on the road (I may switch desktop to Bloglines soon).
Instant Messenger - Trillian; no ads and I can IM both AOL and MSN accounts
Map Search - was MapQuest, now switched to Google Maps
Image search - Ask Jeeves; they just seem to have a fresher index
Blog search - Feedster; results seem accurate and updated often
Blog backlinks - Technorati; again seems to be most accurate
Desktop Search - Google for quick searches in email; Copernic for deeper searches
News Search - both Google and Yahoo.
Local Search - Yahoo; just because
Shopping - Pricegrabber; I always seem to find best prices and good selection of vendors.
Webmail - Yahoo for personal; GMail for the blog

Andy's comment: "You'd think that one provider would be able to accomodate all of my needs, but I find that no one company has gotten everything right. It goes to show how tough it's going to be for these companies to dominate in more than one space."

Yahoo Tech Buzz Game

Check it out!

Hacking Google Maps

For those in the US - Engadget shows how.

Structured Blogging

StructuredBlogging.org has been launched by PuSub: "Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that - formatting blog entries around their content...On another level, it’s a bit more complicated - what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers - other programs, sites, and aggregators - better understand the content."

TECH TALK: The Future of Search: Subscriptions

Subscriptions define our interests. We need to make a conscious decision to subscribe to something – be it a newspaper or magazine, or an emailing list, or even a social group (in the physical world). When we add a “buddy” into our IM list, we are “subscribing” to chat with each other. Because we need to be pro-active about “subscribing” to something, there is an inherent decision that we are making about our likes.

Subscriptions by themselves are not new. Email newsletters and newsgroups have existed since the early days of the Internet. Push, as pioneered by Pointcast, was once seen as a major breakthrough technology. After many false starts, the world of subscriptions is now coming into its own. Among the enabling factors have been the acceptance of RSS as a format for syndication (and subscription), the emergence of user-generated content via blogs which has a narrow field of interest, and the growth of RSS aggregators for viewing these niche content sources.

Kevin Laws wrote about RSS:

Unlike the original push towards push technology, the open RSS standard is already widely adopted. As with the web, this may allow a variety of interesting capabilities which extend RSS capabilities in different directions.

One direction relates to automating tasks for you. This is basically the return of agent technology. Now that a wider variety of web sites are available in machine readable format, it should be possible to tell your computer things like "tell me when an article about gnosticism appears". While this is similar to the stored searches on Google, the fact that RSS aggregators are closer to real-time makes this more valuable. The best analogy is "Tivo for the Web" - specify web sites to definitely "record" and the agent can also record a selection of potentially interesting web posts.

Another direction is enterprise use for RSS. Imagine replacing Microsoft Exchange with an interlocking array of RSS feeds. Each user with Outlook receives their shared calendar, contacts, and other information from subscriptions to RSS feeds. Or they become contributors, sharing one of their calendars with others. I'm sure reading that sentence inspires a host of potential objections for why RSS can not do that. Yet.

Steve Gillmor wrote about how RSS and attention coalesce together:

What if…[we] shift to another architecture–say one that supports lightweight routing of XML fragments around the network in a highly accelerated virtualized kind of digital dial tone infrastructure? Let’s call it RSS, flowing through an attention-based inforouter.

In this alternate universe, user interfaces would be plastic in nature, morphing as data types trigger template switching that routes packets of information through transformation engines based on metadata-driven signals. Charting services are overlaid with ticker text treatments, then piped to handheld devices as a stream, and cached on terminal screens to be called up on demand. Color-coded expert opinions are syndicated to executive information feeds to provide real-time "gut decisions" from consultants and rating data from affinity groups.

…on Planet RSS, the data is transformed through a pipeline of services for delivery to the endpoint renderer. Attention-based preemptive caching reduces latency in bandwidth-constrained or offline scenarios. It’s the virtual rich client, the Really Smart Server.

RSS is the HTML of tomorrow, and Subscriptions will be the Search of tomorrow. RSS is reaching a tipping point – and making its way beyond the early adopters. The potential of RSS goes way beyond just reading blogs – it is a fundamentally different way to consume information. For example, I have subscriptions to over 200 RSS feeds now. When I came across a new source of information that I like, I simply add it to my Aggregator. When that source is updated, my Aggregator notifies me – much like an email folder announces new mail. The challenge now becomes that even tracking 200 feeds is becoming difficult – and so the interface needs to change. Even as Search is the window to the Reference Web, the Aggregator is becoming the window to the Incremental Web.

Tomorrow: Tags

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TECH TALK: The Future of Search: MyToday [April 5, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Future of Search: RSS to OPML [April 4, 2005]