AfterTheDotNet

Gmail for mobile 2.0 – use Gmail offline on your mobile

I’m sure a lot users use Gmail on their mobile like me. Gmail as such is one of the best email solutions one can use for personal mail and with Google for your domain the service is a viable one for small companies as well.

Gmail had an application for the java enabled mobiles but there was a demand for something faster, more robust and easier to use. Two days back the Gmail team released Gmail for mobile version 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. The new application can be downloaded from m.google.com/mail

Read more about Gmail for Mobile 2.0….

Tags: 2.0, email, gmail, mobile

Make others more aware of your social networks using Wisestamp

Wisestamp is a Firefox extension that allows you to add personalized email signatures on any of the webmail services. You can add multiple signatures and can also include your social networks.

The features of the service are

• Personally designed signatures.
• Easy setup and configuration interface.
• Use multiple email signatures (Business and Personal)
• Signature Rich Text editor (WYSIWYG Editor-choose color and font) and allows preview. It also supports special characters.
• Add your logo or image to your signature.
• Automatically insert your signature to your webmail services like Gmail, Google App’s, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL and more…
• Easily Include all your IM (Instant messaging) ID’s + icons.
• Easily link to all of your social services-links & Profiles + icons
• Manually add your signature at mouse cursor location.

Advantages

• Popularize your social profiles.
• Drive traffic to your social networks.
• Improve networking.
• Makes otherwise dull signatures something interesting.

Disadvantages

• Works in only Firefox as it is only a Firefox extension
• Some people are of the opinion that signatures are not that important.

Conclusion

I would recommend everyone who is into social networking sites to try it for sure. It will increase traffic to your social networks for sure. If Wsestamp does not work for you then disable it.

Tags: email, free, html, signature

Sendible – The message sending manager

Sendible allows you to send messages to people by scheduling them in the future. There are multiple options for recipients. You can schedule a message to email addresses, phones via SMS, contacts in Facebook, contacts in MySpace and to your Twitter followers. One of the great features is that Sendible allows you to send international SMS free of charge.

Some of key uses of Sendible are

• Sendible lets you schedule messages to be sent in the future to various platforms like Email, SMS and social networking websites like Facebook or MySpace.
• You can manage all your contacts from one place as Sendible integrates with all major email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail and other major social networking websites.
• Create future reminders for yourself. Now that you can import your Facebook friends birthdays into Sendible calendar it is very easy to set up reminders for them and perhaps also schedule an email to them.
• Keep yourself informed about upcoming events. You can also subscribe to information and choose it to receive it in the medium you are likely to use the most eg. mobile, email or a social networking website.
• You can manage your outbox. You can get a bird’s eye view of what your future messages are and make changes if needed.
• Sendible.com allows you to create ad campaigns and have your ads appear in the messages our users are sending to their friends and customers.
• The latest update (June 30th 2008) allows you to update your Facebook status via Sendible.

Future additions

The following would be added soon

• support for other social networking websites like Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and Xing.
• Ability to update multiple services at one go. Right now one has to update different services one at a time.
• Ability to setup surveys in Sendible and invite people to take the survey from Sendible.
• Ability to set up events in Sendible and send invites from Sendible using different mediums.

AfterThe.Net analysis

Ease of use	Easy
Learning curve	Short
Version	Beta
Design	Average, intuitive and can be improved.
Pros	Very usable, can be used to add value can be used by everyone
Cons	lacks support for new social networks which I’m sure would be added in future
Competitors/Alternatives	Hellotxt Tweetlater Fuser
Recommendation on a scale of 10	5

Tags: email, future, manager, message, reminder, sms

Help set a world record by download Firefox 3!

If you are a Firefox fan here is an opportunity to show your support. What’s more you will be part of the Guinness Book of World Records without doing something wacky like eating glass or swallowing a sword. All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June.

 

To participate in it go to the Firefox Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. Once you pledge an email notification would be sent to you the day Firefox 3 is available to the public so that you can attempt to set the world record.

There are other ways you can assist in the “Download Day” endeavor.

• get the word out so that more people can sign up

• Host a party to download Firefox - you will provide the people and Mozilla would provide the favors. There are already 171 parties to be hosted.

• Display the Download Day badge on your website or blog.

So what are you waiting for? To pledge now click on the image below.

Technorati Tags: Firefox 3,download,record

Tags: blog, email, IM, image, Internet, style, web

Asia DNR (or DNS) spam

I just received this email about a domain name that my company owns as I’m to the domain contact.

“ Dear CEO,  

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong, and in charge of the registeration in Asia,We have something important need to confirm with your company.
On the May21,2008, we received an application formally. One company named “Hkadtod Holdings Limited ” applied for the internet trademark:
” bayinfocomm”

    Domain names:
    MyDomain.cn
    MyDomain.com.cn  
    MyDomain.net.cn  
    MyDomain.org.cn  
    MyDomain.tw  
    MyDomain.com.tw  
    MyDomain.hk  
    MyDomain.com.hk  
    MyDomain.asia

    Internet brand keyword:
        MyDomain
    through our body.

    After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of  Luyun AP Company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit for dissent application is 10 workdays. If your company files no dissent within the time limit,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by “Hkadtod Holdings Limited”.
Best Regards,
brent.lee
——————————————————————————————————————————————–
-Brent| Asia  DNR Auditing Officer |King Regards-
ASIA DNR  (HONGKONG)
Tel: +852-3075 9838
Fax:+852-3177 1520 | +852-3177 1510
Email: brent.lee@asiaip.org | brent.lee@dnrinasia.com
Website:  Http://www.asiadnr.org      www.asiaip.org
Add:  3A, Units 20/F, Far East Consortium Bldg., 121 Des
          Voeux Road, Central, Hong Kong”

I was perplexed and was going to consult the legal department about the same. I was about to forward the email with a covering letter asking for assistance but decided to check the Internet hoping to get a better idea about what was happening as the whole thing seemed fishy.

When I googled “Asia DNR” the results confirmed my doubts that it was spam.

The question that was on my mind was how would the spammer gain? After researching I found that the only way they could gain was that once you respond to their email they would offer to transfer the other domains (which are similar to the name of your company) for a transfer fee of about $300 per domain! Maysoft’s blog at http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.nsf has a pretty good explanation on how the scammers benefit.

The reason why this scam might get some results is that when one receives this kind of an email the first reaction is to act and act fast without thinking much and I’m sure the spammers have managed to get responses from a lot of recipients of these kind of emails. Some of them would have paid for the additional domain names.

The lesson is that whenever you get similar emails search for similar emails on a search engine and that would help you judge whether the mail is spam or not.

Tags: blog, email, engine, Google, IM, Internet, manage, research, search, search engine, style, web

Commenting on blogs for online marketing.

Commenting on popular blog’s posts is increasingly being used as a online marketing tool. If you leave a comment on a popular blog post it would be read by many people and what’s more it will remain there till the blog post is online giving you exposure on a long term basis. Blog readers see comments as a good representation of the commenter or their business.

Doshdosh blog has a post (Rethinking Blog Comments: Much More Than Just A Quick Way to Get Web Traffic) on comments where he advises blog readers to comment on posts on popular blogs to build a network. He also points out that one should not comment for the sake of link building because it might serve a short term benefit of increasing your website’s page rank but in the long term it would not be an advantage.

Comments and links in the comments should be relevant to the content of the post to generate more click throughs. Bloggers and blog readers usually do read comments and if your comments are relevant more readers are likely to follow the links, if there are any, in your comments. All bloggers would tell you that they like comments on their posts as the main purpose of posting on a blog is to generate a discussion amongst it’s readers. What’s more developing a network with people of similar interest will be beneficial in the long run.

Doshdosh mentions in his post how he caught a known Internet marketer leaving same comments on number of blogs and posts! Doshdosh promptly marked his comments as spam. The loss for the marketer was that he lost an opportunity to build a network. This is a great example how commenting for the sake of commenting might not be beneficial or might lead to negative publicity.

Therefore, one should comment on blogs for developing relationships and one’s network and not to reap short term benefits.

Update (June 2, 2008)

Since I posted here I was confused about whether one should insert a link to one’s website or blog in the main comments itself because I had seen some of the commentators doing that. I found the answer at a post on Search Engine Journal blog in the post named SEO & Link Building Via Blog Comments. In this post it is clearly mentioned NOT to add links in the comment body unless required. To quote “But do not place a signature link in the comment body itself except for critical circumstances. Linking to your own site in the comment body is not only spammy in nature, but can also get your name, site, email and IP flagged by ’social’ blog spam software like SpamKarma, and get your comments automatically deleted from dozens of blogs which use the application.” Since the author of the blog is Loren Baker who is the editor of the blog and also an authority in the arena of Search Engine Marketing I believe what he says is correct.

DMiracle has a post which discusses the advantages of branding your blog comments. You can get it here Do You Brand Yourself in Your Blog Comments?

Tags: blog, blogs, commenting, comments, edit, email, engine, IM, Internet, marketing, online, search, search engine, SEO, social, style, web

Download Gmail mails through POP on two machines

I have been using Gmail for some time and love the program. Since my cell phone (W700i - I’m a poor man ) is GPRS enabled I always wanted to have access to my emails when on the move. Since I was sick for about a week the need for accessing emails on my cell phone arose. However, when I tried downloading the emails from the same Gmail account on to my desktop the mails were not downloaded. If an email has been downloaded via POP on to one machine the same mails cannot be downloaded on another machine. 

So I started looking for solutions so that I could download the mails on to my desktop. One solution is to use IMAP but then the size of my inbox is so huge that syncing the inboxes on two machines would take a lot of time and bandwidth.

Another solution I found has been developed by Gmail and I recommend that. All you need to do is that on the second machine while setting up the account, in the user name field where you would use your Gmail address (eg. someone@gmail.com) add ‘recent:’ to the username (eg. recent:someone@gmail.com). Depending on the email client you are using do the following

• In Outlook, on the Advanced tab, check the box next to Leave a copy of messages on the server.
• In Outlook Express, on the Advanced tab, check the box next to Leave a copy of messages on server.
• In Apple Mail, on the Advanced tab, remove the check next to Remove copy from server after retrieving a message.
• In Thunderbird, on the Server Settings tab, check the box next to Leave messages on server.

That’s it! You are done. For detailed explanation please visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47948. This feature also works on custom domains if you are using Google Apps with Gmail.

Small enhancements like these make Gmail an excellent service. Unlike other email service providers the Gmail team takes feedback and adds features which I’m sure will make Gmail the most widely used email service.

Tags: email, Google, IM, message, style

Software as a Service - The fundamentals

Ever since online software like Google Docs and Zoho have been introduced the threat to Microsoft and other developers of office suite software has increased. In fact the IT world has coined an new phrase for the online software which is "Software as a Service". According to Wikipedia "Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it"

SaaS was initially thought of as a low cost alternative for a business to gain access to commercially licensed software. However, that is not the case anymore and this amply clear from the launch and success of Windows live page and Office Live Free Website. Some of the areas where SaaS has been effective is Customer relationship management, Video Conferencing, Human Resources, Accounting and Email. SaaS is different than ASP (Application Service Provider) as in SaaS the focus is on what the customer wants and not what the application developer can deliver.The success of Salesforce.com, which started in 1999, and has 390,000 subscribers has proven that SaaS can be a successful model. In fact nearly all the major IT companies have staked claim to the space as observed by Rick McGee, vice president of SaaS strategy for IBM Global Services.

There are many reasons why SaaS model is a popular one. One of them is the cost and work associated with deploying a SaaS model software. The cost of migration to a new version of a Software is a big cost for corporates and usually results in delay of work. This is not the case in SaaS. In case of SaaS model the burden of software deployment, maintenance, and availability is that of the service provider which makes it easy for the company deploying it.

There is criticism of SaaS model and there are some rightful concerns. The biggest one being data security. A post at Rocket Matter does deal with these questions. In the end you have to careful as to who is offering the service and how secure is your data with them before subscribing to any given software.

Software as a Service model has caught my fancy for sure. It seems SaaS is practical as it has a strong revenue model. In days to come I will be writing more on SaaS. If you have any thoughts please share it with me.

Tags: blog, email, Google, IM, Internet, manage, online, style, video, web