July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There’s no more waiting for the hot iOS e-mail app Mailbox.

Mailbox issued version 1.2 of its app today, which dumps its controversial reservation system while also adding some nifty new features.  Notably, it’s Mailbox’s first major update since it was acquired by Dropbox.

“After 10 weeks of around-the-clock hard work, our engineering team has scaled the Mailbox service to deliver over 100 million messages per day (and growing),” the company wrote on its blog today. “We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system.”

Mailbox’s app offers an elegant interface for managing your Gmail account, but what makes it truly interesting is its capability to help you manage mail by quickly swiping or deleting messages as well as delaying messages. The update also brings faster swiping performance, some interface enhancements, and time-sensitive snooze messages.

Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood told us the company implemented the reservation system to avoid having a complete meltdown on launch day:

We’ve designed the system to be as redundant and fault-tolerant as possible and have done as much load testing ahead of time as we could conceive of doing without real users. The reason we didn’t just ‘switch it on,’ though, is because we don’t know what we don’t know. Even the most advanced services run into problems when they initially scale, and we wanted to maximize the chance that we could keep our service up.

While the wait list made sense at an infrastructure level, Mailbox was also criticized for creating a false sense of scarcity to hype up its app. Also, those lucky enough to snag their reservation just wouldn’t shut up about it. Now that it’s open to everyone, look out for early adopters jumping ship.

After waiting several weeks for my Mailbox app, I ended up giving up on it within 10 minutes. I appreciated the design and interface tweaks, but I’ve become a bit too reliant on Gmail’s Priority Inbox, which Mailbox surprisingly doesn’t support. At this point, Gmail’s iPhone app is still the best e-mail experience on Apple’s platform (though it could use the offline capabilities of its Android sibling).

While most tools of the digital communication age continue to evolve, for some reason email has been curiously (and tragically) stuck in the past. Online email clients have replaced clunky desktop software, and spam filters have vastly improved, but at its core, email today functions much like it did in the ’90s.

MxHero, a New York City-based startup (and recent graduate from Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator), hopes to save us from the archaic limitations of email with a universal platform that can work across any email provider.

Today the company is launching a Google Chrome extension that will give any Gmail user a taste of its platform, including the ability to send a self-destructing email, notifications of when recipients access attachments, and the ability to send batch personalized emails. The latter feature is particularly intriguing, because it solves the ugly blind carbon copy hack for sending batch messages without sharing all of the recipients (i.e., putting your recipients in the “BCC” field and your own address in the “To” field.)

While the extension is MxHero’s first direct-to-consumer offering, the company’s technology has already been implemented by the likes of Zimbra, Box, and VMWare. MxHero’s technology can be implemented as both a cloud service and an on-site service (which should make stodgy IT departments happy). It also works across any email platform.

MxHero’s full suite of plugins includes the ability to control the delivery times of certain types of email (for example, all of your newsletters can land after the work day ends), a simple method for sending large attachments (despite your email provider’s limitations), and the ability to be notified if a recipient doesn’t respond to your email in time. These are seemingly simple additions, but they’ve been difficult to implement so far in decades-old email standards.

Alex Panagides, MxHero’s founder and chief executive, tried to push forward the potential of web apps with his previous firm, Inova. He’s also committed to maintaining the open nature of email standards — MxHero’s technology is open source, and it has made an API available for developers (though it’s not fully documented yet).

I’ve been testing out the Chrome extension for the past week, and I can confirm that all of the plugins work as advertised. After a short setup period (which simply involves granting the MxHero extension access to your Gmail account), you’ll see two new buttons when you’re composing a Gmail message. To use one of the extension’s features, simply choose it from the “Apps” button and then click the MxHero “Send” button (not the standard Gmail send button).

To add new features to email, the company takes some creative routes. For example, the self-destructing email feature turns your message into an image, which is what the recipient actually sees. Once the image has been viewed once, it is removed from MxHero’s server. A shady recipient can still take a screenshot of the message, but the feature still adds a helpful layer of security.

MxHero is about halfway through raising a $900,000 seed round, Panagides tells me.

Photo via Shutterstock

Google has just acquired Sparrow, a company that has gained notoriety for its innovative iOS and Mac e-mail clients.

“We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience,” Sparrow CEO Dom Leca wrote on the company’s blog this morning. “Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.”

Sparrow’s apps have gained a devoted and vocal fan base, thanks to their clean design and elegant functionality. The apps integrate particularly well with Gmail, so it’s not too surprising that Google was interested in snapping up Sparrow. On iOS, Sparrow filled the gap for a truly powerful Gmail client (Google released its own Gmail iOS client in November, but it had a very rough start).

When it comes to Sparrow’s existing apps, we’re hearing that Google will support them with critical updates, but don’t expect any new features.

Sparrow is based in Paris and has received seed funding from Kima Ventures. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Update: Sources tell the Verge that Sparrow was acquired for under $25 million.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With a keen eye for technology that could benefit users in emerging countries, Google today launched Gmail SMS, a service that will let you send and receive messages from your Gmail account via text messaging.

The service, which will initially be available in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, lets users tap into the much more ubiquitous (and reliable) voice cellular networks, instead of relying on Internet connectivity. It’ll open up Gmail to people who only have feature phones with basic voice and texting capabilities, and for others it’ll be a useful fail-safe for dealing with shoddy network infrastructure.

The service shows that there’s still plenty of life in SMS in emerging markets, even as consumers move to data-based messaging tools like iMessage and Facebook Messenger in more developed countries. There’s little overhead with SMS, since it’s a core part of most cellular networks, and it remains essential in countries that don’t have significant mobile web coverage.

After signing up for Gmail SMS, your e-mail messages will show up as text messages automatically. You can reply to e-mails directly through texts, and you can also use commands like “MORE,” “PAUSE,” and “RESUME” to control the flow of messages.

Google is offering Gmail SMS for free, though of course you’ll have to watch out for standard texting fees.

Google has added customizable backgrounds to Gmail, so you can finally set whatever picture you want as the background, the company announced today in a blog post.

Gmail has offered a small set of colorful backgrounds since the addition of themes in 2008. (I’ve been partial to the “Planets” and “Ninja” backgrounds myself.) But now Gmail users will be able to add whatever photos they want for the background of their e-mail accounts, creating a much more personal experience.

Google software engineer Greg Bullock writes on the Official Gmail Blog:

When we unveiled Gmail’s new look back in November, we introduced a number of new, beautiful HD themes. We also heard that many of you wanted to bring an even more personal touch by setting your own background. So over the next couple of days we are rolling out a new Custom themes section with two options, Light and Dark where you can do just that.

You can upload your own images directly, select from your Google+ photos or simply paste any image URL. Or, if you don’t have a particular image in mind, you can browse our searchable Featured Photos section to find one that speaks to you. With so many great options, it may be hard to choose, so to get a sense of the images available, try searching for ‘hdr scenery’ or ‘bokeh wallpaper’ in the Featured tab.

No word on whether or not Google Apps users will also get personal backgrounds, but we’ve contacted Google to find out.

Check out the personal backgrounds in action in the video below:

Yahoo Mail is officially DMARC compliant today, meaning your inbox is now part of a revolution in armoring email against phishing attacks and spam that spoof unsuspecting users into giving up personal and financial information.

In January, Yahoo joined the DMARC consortium, a group of Silicon Valley big wigs dedicated to using DMARC, or Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. These companies include Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and PayPal who all pledged to use different tools to identify and authenticate an email’s sender, and report any issues.

The way DMARC works is an email host, such as Yahoo Mail, will refuse to deliver any messages to an inbox that is not able to prove its identity using DMARC. DMARC looks at two forms of authentication: SPF (Sender Policy Framework), as well as DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail). SPF works by having a company to pick which employees are allowed to send emails on the company’s behalf. The DMARC system on Yahoo’s side looks to see if the IP addresses of any incoming emails from that company match the approved list.

DKIM works by allowing a company to set various parameters around the email. For instance, the company can say, “E-mails from us will only come from the domain randomcompany.com. If it comes from any other domain, such as information.randomcompany.com, it isn’t from us.” When an e-mail comes into Yahoo’s systems, Yahoo will check for these set parameters and deliver the e-mail if all of them are met.

Having major email providers require DMARC authentication will force companies to use SPF and DKIM as a way to identify themselves, or be lost in email purgatory. Yahoo says companies will be able to choose how they would like an unauthorized email to be handled as well. For instance, if an email from PayPal fails the DMARC test, PayPal can request that email be delivered to spam.

One big issue DMARC is attempting to tackle is email spoofing, or an email that looks like it’s being sent from a legitimate source, such as Apple, but is actually spam. A huge number of fake emails requesting account or financial information plague inboxes everywhere and dupe those who haven’t had experience with spotting spam.

Yahoo says it will be “working with ISPs, email senders, and other email providers to encourage the creation and deployment of DMARC policies,” in the coming months.

Image via Yodel Anecdotal/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Brand-new e-mail backup service DropMyEmail.com has signed up more than 520,000 users only 50 days since its public launch, a feat that makes it one of the fastest growing startups by users ever.

DropMyEmail.com attracted attention at DEMO Asia when it launched on March 1 due to the simple, easy-to-convey nature of the service. The company, which operates on a freemium model, switches your emails from one email account to another and backs up your e-mails in the process. Basically, it creates a new level of freedom so you don’t have to be tied to a single e-mail provider, a function that is attractive to consumers and businesses alike.

“People are using e-mail across the web and mobile more than ever,” CEO and founder John Fearon told VentureBeat. “It only takes two clicks to back up your e-mail, and people are responding to how simple it is.”

Based on current growth, Fearon believes the company is on track to hit one million users in three months. That would mean it would achieve growth faster than Twitter, Dropbox, and almost any startup you can think of that let anyone sign up from day one.

The service is available worldwide, so distribution of users is scattered globally. The largest base of users is in India, where 20 percent of users reside. No other single country has as huge a number, and the U.S. only has 2 to 3 percent of its users.

DropMyEmail.com works with most e-mail providers, including Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. Users get 500MB of storage space for free, but if they need more, than they pay for it. Users can then purchase up to 10GB of extra storage space per year. If you need 5GB of space, that’ll run you $0.99 per month or $ 9.99 per year. If you need 10GB of storage for your precious e-mails, that’ll run you $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. Those who refer friends to the service get an additional 2GB of space for free, an aspect that is likely helping fuel growth.

“Most of our users are free so far, but about 10 percent are reaching their limit.” Fearon said.

Singapore-based DropMyEmail.com has received seed funding of around $290,000 from Crystal Horse Investments, Stanley Street Labs, and individual investors. It will soon open an office in San Francisco and pursue another round of funding, something that will likely come easy if its growth continues as is.

E-mail photo: nokhoog_buchachon/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has decided to disable the push functionality for all MobileMe and iCloud email accounts connected on any iOS device within the borders of Germany, the company confirmed today.

The reason for the move comes after a German court ruling in early February that determined Apple’s e-mail syncing services violated a Motorola patent. While Apple is appealing the decision, for the time being the push functionally has been disabled for anyone in the country. The patent violation won’t affect syncing for calendar and contacts for German iOS users. The violation also won’t affect push functionality for other e-mail clients like Gmail and Hotmail.

It’s worth noting that iCloud e-mail users will automatically have the push functionality turned off when they enter the country, while MobileMe e-mail accounts will permanently have push cut off until Apple gets this situation straightened out.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, considering Google’s rhetoric about not using Motorola Mobility’s patents to hinder other companies. Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola has been approved by the U.S. and E.U., but the deal has not closed just yet.

Via The Verge

Think you’re an email ninja? Check yourself before you wreck your (online) self with Tout’s special year-end product, Year in Review, built to help show email users their habits and trends in 2011.

After allowing Tout access to your email, it scans your account (for up to 72 hours, depending on traffic at the time) and subsequently sends a private report to you, complete with charts and infographics. The report features useful statistics like the number of emails you “dealt” with over the past year, the percentage of emails sent as compared to received, and the response rate (both from you to your emails received and from your friends to the emails you sent them).

Why scan your emails? Knowing how often or not people respond to your messages may help improve your efficiency, professionally or personally. Knowing who is spamming you too often may strain a friendship, or help enable improved communication. The list goes on, but using Tout’s Year in Review almost seems like getting a physical for your online communication habits–maybe a bit annoying or overwhelming, but extremely helpful.

The report dives deep into your mail, telling you your busiest email month (mine was December), your busiest day, your busiest hour, your top 10 contacts (this was fun), popular words in your subject lines, emails by day, week, and of course, the highest numbers of emails sent by specific senders (of course, mostly newsletters). Needless to say, the whole experience was fairly terrifying, but kind of addicting at the same time.

Seeing that I had dealt with over 15,000 emails in 2011 really sparked some personal questions regarding time management (let alone quality of life).

The Tout App service launched a few months ago. The app is meant to be an extension to your email and your customer relationship management (CRM) systems (i.e. Salesforce, Highrise) which helps to “coordinate and streamline your emails through templates, tracking, and scheduling.”

By using it, you can better measure analytics on who views and clicks your emails, send out more group emails at a speedier pace, share email templates with your team, and schedule your emails in advance. On top of this, you can connect it to your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to improve the way you interact with your connections and followers. San Francisco-based Tout refers to their product as EMM (E-mail management) software.

Tout is a free plugin with a freemium model (for teams and high volume users), and they also have an iPhone app available for 99 cents.

Try the Year in Review product to get a better sense of just how productive (or unproductive) you are with your emails (and to see who is bothering you most), and then run screaming to sign up for the beta of unroll.me, which after connecting to your email, helps you unsubscribe from your email newsletters, all at once!

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Finally, iPhone users could soon get access to the rich Gmail experience that Android users have had since the beginning.

Google is close to launching a native Gmail app for the iPhone, MG Siegler reports. The app may already have been submitted to Apple for approval, and if so we could see it very soon.

This is big news for several reasons: Up until now, iPhone users who rely on Gmail have had a subpar mail experience on the device. You can set up Gmail as an Exchange server (this is my preferred method), which gives you access to Google Calendar on the iPhone as well, but you don’t get access to useful Gmail features like Priority Inbox. Google also updated its mobile web version of Gmail in 2009, which has been steadily upgraded but still lacks the speed and features of a native app.

A full-fledged Gmail iPhone app won’t be able to take the place of the iPhone’s built-in mail application (thanks a lot, Apple), but it could still offer a lot of useful features for Gmail addicts like myself. As Siegler points out, the app will likely offer push notifications, which can alert you whenever you get a new email. But for me, the real killer feature would be Priority Inbox support, as well as the ability to easily flag and access my email labels.

The app could also get some Google+ integration, since Google is now trying to push its new social network into all of its services. Siegler also notes that, while Google hasn’t had the best track record with its iPhone apps (though I still give the company credit for supporting other platforms, unlike Apple), this one is shaping up to be killer.

And when the native Gmail app is released, Android users will have one less feature they can lord over iPhone owners (strangely, Gmail is still separate from the native mail app on Android). Together with Apple’s recent acquisition of C3 Technologies – which will allow the company to overhaul its mobile maps apps to feature cool 3D buildings like the Google Maps app on Android — it seems like Apple is making some big strides towards filling in the few gaps where it lags behind Google.

Photo-sharing apps are flourishing in the age of the 5+ megapixel smartphone camera. To stand out, though, an app needs a unique angle. PhotoRocket‘s appeal is what its designers call “radical simplicity.” Last week, PhotoRocket strenghtned its hand by adding a feature that allows consecutive photo shooting unfettered by the calls to edit or share that are common in popular rivals like Instagram.

The app, which launched at the DEMO conference in Spring 2011, is not alone in this development. Apps like Hipstagram also allow uninterrupted photo taking. But PhotoRocket’s edge is to let users share bulk photos to a number of outlets (Facebook, Flickr, email, etc.) at once.

In practice, PhotoRocket’s camera function is mind numbingly easy. After you finish taking pictures in a camera roll, just click done. You can also switch the iPhone camera to its outward or inward facing positions, turn flash on and off and view a film strip of previously taken photos. The only drawback is the roughly 2-3 second wait time between photos.

PhotoRocket is particularly convenient for the average event-goer. Take yesterday’s gay pride parades. Most shutterbugs don’t want to do deep editing on the spot, a feature not available on PhotoRocket, but the app saves them the task of arduously locating and individually uploading photos via, say, the Facebook app and then repeating the process for e-mail. PhotoRocket allows you to shoot all of your pictures in-app and consolidate them onto a roll to be shared. If you’re like me, that means 200 photos uploaded to your social community and sent to your chosen contacts all at once. (You still have to be careful about sharing shots so colorful they violate terms of service.)

When asked about competitors, Anna Collins, a Microsoft veteran who recently joined PhotoRocket as president, gave an interesting answer. “When it comes to sharing photos, six to seven out of ten times, consumers use e-mail. We consider ourselves a competitor with e-mail.”

That’s one tough competitor. Because in essence, PhotoRocket is competing with habit. People are used to receiving attachments. PhotoRocket, however, gives you the ability to send hundreds of photos to an e-mail address sans attachments and sans login. One of its main value adds, Collins says, is the focus on user and receiver experience. The app has what Collins calls the, “Grandma factor.” Easy for you to share, easy for Grandma to open.

PhotoRocket plans to release an Android app, but has no update on timing.

Got six minutes to launch your game changer? We’re finding top shelf thinkers from around the world ready to showcase their products at DEMO Fall, on the same stage where companies like Netscape, TiVo, E-Trade, and Java got their start. After you sweat out your six minutes of fame, head off the the DEMO pavilion to chat with potential investors, partners and show off the goods.  Apply for your spot here. Demo Fall 2011 is located at the Hyatt Regency in Silicon Valley, September 12-14.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Digital content-delivery startup YouSendIt announced this morning that its acquiring two startups: Attassa, which makes add-ons for Microsoft Outlook, and Zosh, which has an app to let you to sign documents from an iPhone.

Attassa, founded in 2007, provides add-ons for Microsoft’s Outlook email software, such as file-sharing and backup as well as an improved display of conversations and extended contact information. Its application for the iPhone, All My Mail, lets you browse and manage multiple email accounts.

Zosh launched at DEMO Spring last March, winning the DEMOgod award in the Mobile category at the conference. Its presentation featured CEO Joshua Kerr destroying a fax machine on stage with a baseball bat, to prove the point that the application, which lets you sign documents on your iPhone by emailing them to an address, obviated the need for faxes.

YouSendIt plans to integrate the acquisitions to extend its own product offerings and has decided to shut down both individual offerings in the interim. Back in September, the startup raised $15 million in its fourth round of funding. No terms of the acquisition were disclosed.

ExactTarget offers marketing and market research tools that use text messaging, voice messaging, social networks and websites to reach potential customers. Expedia.com, Fairfax Digital and Best Buy are among its clients.

All former mPath employees have accepted positions in ExactTarget Australia, according to a company release. ExactTarget will capture more than 150 former mPath clients in Asia Pacific through the deal, including Fairfax Digital, Lend Lease and Tennis Australia.

ExactTarget and mPath have done business since 2005, when mPath became the exclusive distributor for ExactTarget’s technology in Asia Pacific. mPath founder and CEO Chris Gartlan will captain ExactTarget Australia.

This is the third acquisition for ExactTarget in the past 12 months. Earlier acquisitions include San Francisco-based Twitter platform CoTweet in March and U.K.-based KeyMail Marketing in September.

ExactTarget has raised $155 million in venture capital funding from investors including Technology Crossover Ventures, Battery Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, Ontagu Newhall and Scale Venture Partners, according to peHUB.

[photo: travellingtamas]