Yahoo Mail lets you IM, but still closed — waiting for Orgoo
Yahoo Mail upcoming redesign is offering text messaging from within email to external mobile phones.
It is introducing shortcuts, underlining addresses, places, dates, contact information and other data with blue dotted lines. Click on these link you’ll be taken to maps for the addresses, calendar for dates, and so on — with more to come. Most notable, however, is its text messaging (SMS) service: You can now send them a text message from your email, in addition to instant messaging that is already available. Responses also come into your mailbox. Techcrunch has a review here, noting that Yahoo’s main weakness continues to be the lack of free POP access. We use Google’s Gmail to import messages to Outlook for example, using POP, for free.
In fact, we’ve been following a young Los Angeles California company, Orgoo, which is still testing its product privately, and lets you communicate in an even more comprehensive and open way than Yahoo or other mail services. It is due to launch this fall.
It supports all IM and major email clients (not just Yahoo), and so lets you IM people directly from your Orgoo’s messaging dashboard, regardless of what IM service they use. It includes texting, as well as video chat and video email. It also allows you to POP other email clients into Orgoo, and its testing version lets you POP Orgoo into Outlook. However, it’s unclear what Orgoo’s exact plans are, and what services it will make free versus paid. We’d encourage to offer it all for free, because that would make us switch over, and probably millions of other people too. But then there’s the inconvenient question of how they’d make money. Orgoo is also offering IMAP, so that you can sync any device. Ah, there’s a way to make money: Offer it to corporate clients, along with support, and they’d snap it up in a heartbeat. It works seamlessly with Outlook, and young, top-performing employees crave its integrative features, companies will want to try it out. To do that, though, the bootstrapped Orgoo would have to raise a hefty venture round first.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
