Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While Google added the option to send money through Gmail yesterday, the search giant clearly wasn’t finished with announcements. It has also debuted new “quick action” buttons in Gmail that you can use to RSVP to events, see flight info, and more — all without leaving the inbox.

Quick actions will appear next to certain kinds of messages in your inbox, and you don’t even have to open the email to provide a response. If someone sends you a calendar invite, a button will show up on top of the email line that lets you RSVP or decline the invitation. Another example: You can rate a restaurant you went to last night straight from an email notice sent to you.

One of the most exciting potential quick actions is checking into a flight from the inbox. Google hasn’t committed to check-ins exactly, but it says that you’ll be able to see flight info more easily in Gmail, including whether your flight is on time and when your connection is. (See an example of flight info and a potential check-in below.)

These quick actions will roll out over the next few weeks to all Gmail users. Developers that are interested in adding Gmail quick action functionality can check out the Gmail developers website dedicated to schemas.

Image via Google

As if today’s other announcements weren’t enough, Google is also bringing Google Wallet support to Gmail, making it incredibly easy to send friends and family payments by just sending an email.

“Google Wallet is now integrated with Gmail, so you can quickly and securely send money to friends and family directly within Gmail — even if they don’t have a Gmail address,” Google writes in a blog post today. “It’s free to send money if your bank account is linked to Google Wallet or using your Google Wallet balance, and low fees apply to send money using your linked credit or debit card.”

To send money using Gmail, you will be able to just hover over the attachment paperclip in the compose view and then click the “$” icon to add money to your email.

The new feature will compete directly with other online payment solutions like PayPal and Dwolla. It will be rolled out to all Gmail users in the U.S. over the age of 18 “over the coming months.”

Check out the video below for more.

Woman with money via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has modified its cloud storage allocation for regular users of its services so they now share 15GB of free storage across Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos.

“With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where,” Clay Bavor, the product management director for Google Apps, wrote in a blog post. “For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.”

Google’s goal with the reallocation seems to be to simplify the purchase of cloud storage and make it more clear how much free storage you have. So if you were planning to buy more space for Gmail or more space for your Drive account, you’ll do that all in one place. Google will also update its Google Drive storage page to help people better understand how their storage is allocated.

On top of making unified storage available to consumers that use Gmail, Drive, and Google+, unified storage will come to Google Apps users as well. Google Apps users will end up with 30GB of unified storage that’s shared between Drive and Gmail.

The changes to Google’s cloud storage will roll out to all users “over the next couple of weeks.”

Photo via Google

Source: John Koetsier

The actual, real, live fire pole.

Like a full regulation fire pole that people can actually use to drop down a floor. Or an officially certified slide to get down to the lobby after a long day. Perhaps a cushioned and enclosed chill room.

Or even, believe it or not, a cattle walkway.

On a recent trip through Ontario, I toured Google’s first office in Canada — and talked to the engineer who leads Google Canada, a former startup guy in Silicon Valley and native Canuck, Steve Woods. If you use mobile Gmail, a Chromebook, Google Maps, Google Calendar, or Google Fiber, there’s a good chance you’ve touched something built at Google’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario.

And if you ever get the opportunity, those offices are definitely something to touch as well.

“Startups are great, because you start from scratch,” Woods says. “Startups are awful, because you start from scratch. At Google, you can literally launch a project that affects a billion people.”

That’s one reason he decided to accept Google’s offer to leave the Valley, return home, and “figure out what we should do in Canada and do it.”

In 2008, when Google opened the office, Waterloo and London were the company’s two centers of mobile excellence — likely due to Waterloo’s proximity to then-leading smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry. So Waterloo and London pioneered the mobile version of virtually every service Google offers: Maps, Gmail, Calendar, mobile search, and more. Waterloo, which now boasts about 200 engineers, also hosts the team that built Google Fiber’s user interface and critical software for the Chrome Pixel, Google’s answer to Apple’s retina display, with full touch integration.

The office is located in a formerly industrial building that once housed a tannery, believe it or not (hence the cattle walkway). Google shares it with a number of accelerators, startups, and coworking spaces that together make up Communitech, a startup mecca with strong connections to Waterloo University, angel investors, and venture capitalists.

Source: John Koetsier

The Googlers who work here. After a year, their drawing gets colored in.

Woods, whose recruiting strategy is to get ex-patriate Canadians to move back as well as to draw new talent from the nearby Waterloo University, says that it’s an attractive place for Googlers for a variety of reasons — not just the fire pole or massage room.

“There’s fewer bosses here, or at least they can’t find you,” he jokes. “At least a third of the people here have moved back from California.”

Source: John Koetsier

The actual cattle walkway

Woods says that Google’s most internally unpopular and controversial product ever was built in Waterloo as well: Conversion Optimizer. That’s a piece of software for advertising buyers that Google calls the “just trust us and push the button button,” which essentially hands your advertising campaign over to Google to optimize for the cheapest and most effective ads.

“It was extremely unpopular in Google,” Woods told me. “People were wondering: How much money will we lose? They were worried that advertisers would optimize their ad spend early in the month, hit their caps, and stop buying.”

Google’s known for taking risks, however, and the company ultimately decided to go ahead despite the chance it might actually lose money. Now, the product is one of Google’s most popular for advertisers, and it manages “many, many billions of dollars.”

“It took a Nobel prize-winning economist to prove that was untrue,” Woods said. “It’s great for Google, great for advertisers, and great for surfers.”

And another product Waterloo build that Woods is particularly proud of is what he calls “the largest project Google has ever done.”

It’s the first mobile search transcoder, which was an infrastructure that rendered web pages on Google’s own internal servers, decided which bits were most important for mobile phone web users, and sent only those bits. It sounds like something for the presmartphone days of historical antiquity, but not so.

“It’s still a very fast-growing project,” Woods told me. “The volume is staggering … billions of pages per day in countries in the third world, and even in the U.S., it’s still growing.”

So … why in Waterloo, Ontario?

Source: John Koetsier

Communitech, the community in the building that includes Google.

“Something interesting is happening here,” Woods says. “The university produces an amazing kind of talent … and people that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well.”

Worldwide, he says, Waterloo has been one of Google’ top three or four recruiting centers for some years now. And, he adds, not everyone who wants to work for Google wants to live in California.

“This area has a very high proportion of startups to population,” he adds. “Google loves startups, and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Oh, and the slide?

The office has a plastic red slide down from the second-floor Google reception area to the first-floor entrance. It has a prominent sign, “For Googlers Only,” which a PR rep told me was placed there because Ontario’s provincial slide inspector (yes, they have one, apparently) raised some concerns about safety.

I was bad, however, as I frequently am, and went down the slide anyways. The PR rep forgave me, as you can see in the video below:

Image credits: John Koetsier

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s decision to get rid of Hotmail and replace it with Outlook.com appears to have paid off. With all Hotmail users now migrated to Outlook.com, Microsoft says it now has more than 400 million active accounts on the well-designed email service.

Outlook.com launched to positive reviews back in July 2012. A few months ago, Outlook.com exited preview with 60 million registered users. But the brunt of the work wasn’t done at that point because it still needed to move its many Hotmail users over to Outlook.com.

Microsoft said it migrated 150 petabytes of email in six weeks. The company writes in a blog post:

When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts. However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes–equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data–and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day. With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about 6 weeks. We’ve spent the last few weeks ensuring that everything was completed in line with our high quality expectations.

On the mobile front, things appear to be looking up for the email service. Microsoft said Outlook.com now has 125 million users that access it regularly on mobile devices.

One thing I find funny about this announcement is that Microsoft previously would not share its internal number of active Hotmail accounts. When I wrote about how Gmail had become the largest email service in the world with 425 million accounts back in June 2012, Microsoft refused to say how many active Hotmail accounts there were. Instead, it referred me to third-party numbers from comScore. (As did Yahoo.)

But now that Microsoft has internal metrics it likes and a service that works (and looks) better than Hotmail, it’s clearly time to boast.

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).

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google updated Gmail for iOS today with one simple update that might just have won me over.

Now, you can move between messages without returning to your inbox simply by swiping left or right. It’s the sort of innovation that is incredibly obvious — in 20/20 hindsight — but just as incredibly useful and time-saving when you simply want a quick overview of what’s going on in your inbox.

After a half-year hiatus, Google has now updated Gmail twice in fairly short order. It completely revamped the app in December and used its widely-praised layout and style for the company’s mobile web email design.

The other update? An Apple iOS mail-like ability to select multiple messages in the inbox and apply actions like delete, archive, move, or mark as unread — another time-saving and efficiency-increasing change.

It’s tremendously un-geeky of me, I know, but I’ve never been able to really get into Gmail online. Increasingly, however, I’ve been using Google’s iOS Gmail app.

Given that Google now has five of the six most popular apps on any platform in North America, I’m guessing I’m not alone.

Image credit: Google

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I’m not sure this is what they meant when they said design is now mobile first. Google has taken the widely loved new look in its iPhone and iPad app straight to the web — the mobile web, that is.

The new look is clean and simple, and much more usable — in my humble opinion — than Gmail’s web app for mail.

But this isn’t just my opinion of it:

“[It's] much more usable now,” engineering student Filipe Werneck said. “And I must say that the redesign of the web app is very welcome and brings color consistency between desktop and mobile.”

But you can’t please everyone, apparently.

Windows Phone is not included in the release, probably because the Windows Phone browser is based on the Trident rendering engine, and just about everyone else (Android, iOS, Opera) is on or moving toward the Webkit rendering engine. But it means that Windows Phone users are forced to use WAP to access Gmail in a browser on their devices — a very 1997 experience.

Other complaints include that Microsoft Exchange support was dropped (old news), and yet another responder to Google’s announcement post said, “Yeah, but the Contacts page still looks like it was developed by Fred Flintstone.”

Visit gmail.com in a mobile browser on your iPhone, Android smartphone, BlackBerry, or even a Kindle to check it out.

photo credit: opacity via photopin cc

I’m no expert, but Microsoft’s anti-Google “Scroogled” ads might be some of one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Not only does the campaign reek of the most feeble kind of desperation, but there’s some evidence to suggest that it’s even backfired on Microsoft.

Now parts of “Scroogled” are on their way out, according to Microsoft online services director Stefan Weitz, who told KQED that his company is winding down the print and TV arms of the campaign.

Weitz said that Microsoft started “Scroogled” with a poll from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, which found that there were a lot of people who had no idea that Google scans their emails to serve them ads.

While attack ads are never all that enjoyable, “Scroogled” is particularly bad because it somehow made me want to use services like Bing and Outlook less. Using fear-mongering and somewhat misleading claims just doesn’t work on those who can see through them — hence the backlash.

But the biggest problem with “Scroogled” is that it doesn’t say anything about Microsoft’s own products. If you want people to pay attention, tell them what your product does well, not what your competitor’s product does poorly. It’s hard to do something like “Scoogled” and look like the good guy — even if your claims are perfectly accurate.

In case you were fortunate enough to have missed the TV spots, take a deep breath, maybe a shot of whiskey or two, and watch the video below. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft really wants its Outlook.com email app to pick up new users. Its solution? Attack the hell out of Google’s incredibly popular Gmail service.

In November, Microsoft tried to go after Google’s credibility by claiming that Google Shopping results were all advertisements rather than fair comparisons of products around the web. Now it appears Microsoft is going after an even meatier target than Google Shopping by attacking Gmail.

The new Scroogled.com site from Microsoft makes the case that Gmail snoops on all of your emails to serve you better ads.

“Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads,” the site claims. “And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy.”

Some of what Microsoft is saying is true. Google does scan email keywords so it can contextually serve you advertising. However, it is clearly lying when it says there is no way opt out. As Marketing Land points out, you can not have Google reading your emails by using the basic HTML version of Gmail, using a third-party email client, or paying $50 a year for Google Apps and opting out that way.

Google has previously addressed privacy issues by saying that it walks a careful line between protecting users and serving ads.

“There is what I call the creepy line,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in 2010 at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

And even as Google has addressed these issues, Gmail’s many users haven’t felt the need to leave. Google claims to have more than 425 million active monthly users on Gmail.

As an alternative, Microsoft is pushing its Outlook.com service, which is debuted in mid-2012 as a replacement to Hotmail. The site’s ad copy reads:

Outlook.com prioritizes your privacy. You won’t see ads based on keywords from your personal email. Your email is nobody else’s business. But Google makes it their business. Even if you’re not a Gmail user, Google still goes through your personal email sent to Gmail and uses the content to sell ads.

Our own testing of Outlook.com showed that it is a smart, modern service, but is harping about Gmail’s privacy enough to get people to switch?

Screenshot via Scroogled.com

Google is giving its Gmail users a late Christmas present.

The company announced today that Gmail users in the U.S. and Canada will continue to be able to make free domestic phone calls through next year.  Google will also continue to offer international calls at “insanely low rates,” the company said.

Introduced in 2010, Gmail’s phone call functionality seemed a bit incongruous at first, but it’s quickly become one of the service’s best, most indispensable features. While Google initially announced that the free phone calls would only be offered for a single year, the company has extended the program at the end of every year since the program’s introduction.

Google’s angle here is clear: By offering Gmail users low-cost phone calls, Google can keep people away from rival services like Skype (and maybe glean a bunch of user information in the process). With that in mind, it’s strange that Google hasn’t announced that it will indefinitely offer the service. But, then again, maybe it likes the yearly fanfare that greets news of the program’s extension.

Google has updated its field trial of new search features with further Gmail integration: Those who’ve signed up for the experimental features can now search for their online purchases (along with tracking packages), reservations, and events right from within the standard Google search.

Google first announced the search field trial in August, when it debuted basic Gmail integration for email, Google Drive documents, and flights. If you’re interested in testing out the new features, you can sign up for the trial here.

“To build the search engine I dream of, we need to make it truly universal,” Google’s search engine chief Amit Singhal told us back in August, “so you can do things that are not possible today.”

Now, instead of sifting through their Gmail messages, trial users can search for “my reservations” or “my purchases” to find relevant information.

While the more pronounced Gmail integration will certainly rile privacy advocates, it’s clear that Google eventually wants to make its search engine about more than just what’s on the web. With Google Now on Android devices, Google is bringing similar integration to its mobile devices — Google Now learns your habits to warn you about potential traffic delays, and it automatically tracks packages for you.

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

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yesterday was a rough day for Google. While it was bad enough that server issues took down Gmail, many users also reported major instability with Google’s Chrome browser. And we now know why.

“From our investigation, it appears the crashes were due to bugs in both the sync client and server,” Google said in a statement.

It’s vague, I agree, but fortunately Google software engineer Tim Steele had some more insight.

“It’s due to a backend service that sync servers depend on becoming overwhelmed, and sync servers responding to that by telling all clients to throttle all data types,” Steele wrote on the Chromium developer forum.

Sync is the service that allows users to copy their bookmarks, extensions, and even browsing history from one version of Chrome to another. It’s a major convenience to those who use the browser on multiple computers, but  it’s clearly not without its share of crippling bugs.

While crashes happen all the time, this one was clearly a bit different: It was a server error that crashed software on users’ computers. It’s a brave new world, this cloud computing thing. And it’s kind of scary.

But it’s not exactly the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing happen. In August, Wired writer Mat Honan relayed the harrowing tale of how hackers infiltrated –  among other services — his iCloud account, which allowed them to wipe the data off both his personal computer and iPhone.

If you want to talk about some of the downsides to the cloud, it doesn’t get much more down than this. While having ubiquitous access to all of our data is changing the way we use our computers, it’s also exposing us to a variety of new hazards, few of which we have any ability to fix directly.

Via Wired.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has confirmed what many of its users have already been painfully aware of: Gmail is down.

“We are currently experiencing an issue with some Google services. For everyone who is affected, we apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

While the service seems to have been restored to at least some users, Google’s App Status dashboard says the company is still investigating the reports.

Gmail service disruptions aren’t at all unprecedented, but what’s notable in this case is that some users have reported instability with Google’s Chrome browser as well. As some have speculated, it’s possible that Gmail’s issues have caused problems for users whose Chrome browsers sync with their Google accounts.

If this is true, it exposes a major flaw in how the Google browser hooks into Google’s servers. While this is conjecture at present, the post-mortem for today’s outage should be particularly interesting.

Photo: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Google has graduated three time-saving experimental Gmail features, kicking them out of the protected confines of Labs and into your inbox.

“Quote selected text,” “default reply all,” and “send and archive” are now official Gmail features. All three options are intended to shed precious seconds from the often redundant process of composing and sending email.

Gmail users can make the send and archive button a default feature to combine two steps, sending and archiving, into one. Also now available as a default option is reply all. Once enabled, you’ll automatically reply to all parties on a thread when hitting the reply button.

Quote selected text also graduated today. The feature is easy to use — just copy-paste text and hit reply — but a little tricky to explain. Here’s how the gmail team describes the option: “Quote selected text’s graduation means that when you highlight text from an email you want to include in your reply, and then click reply, the compose template will be just what you selected.”

Visit the settings section of your Gmail account to turn on reply all as your default or to select to show the send and archive button. Previously, all three features were available through Gmail Labs, the email program’s test tube for half-baked ideas.

Typing image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s app store appears to be having some technical challenges today. Perhaps it’s the massive influx of people downloading Google’s new Gmail app.

I haven’t been able to update apps all day, and apparently, I’m not alone. Others can’t download apps either:

iTunes and App Store down for many, can't get or update apps dld.bz/bSvap #iPhone

—
John Morgan (@IPhonesAppMgr) November 30, 2012

Is @AppStore down?? Can’t download apps, “app no longer available” #frustrated #apple

—
 Rafael C. (@Rafo1580) December 04, 2012

It’s possible that the new Gmail app has something to do with the issue, as it seems to be particularly challenging to download and/or update. Devindra Hardawar, our national editor, was able to download the Gmail app, but only after deleting the existing app and re-installing. Others have been entirely out of luck:

Whoa. The new Gmail app for iOS bringing down the app store ?

—
Amit Bhor (@daamitt) December 04, 2012

When I tried to download the Gmail app for an earlier story, the app store app on my phone could not find it, although it was most certainly visible on the web. Now I can see it but cannot download it — as you can see in the title graphic for this post.

I’ve contacted Apple and asked for an explanation or statement, and will update this post if I hear anything.

The service is certainly not down for all — our own Tom Cheredar was also able to access the app store and download apps. If you can’t, there is only one option, however unpalatable as it is for us impatient denizens of the digital world … being patient:

Looks like the App Store is getting hammered; if you get a message about the new Gmail app not being available, try again later.

—
Lifehacker (@lifehacker) December 04, 2012

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Six months ago, Google says, it started working on a new Gmail app for iPhone and iPad. That’s a long time, but Gmail fans who can’t part with their gorgeous Apple hardware will probably think it’s worth the wait.

The new app has multiple-account support — essential for those of us with secret identities — an infinite scrolling inbox, and predictive response to searches. It may be overkill, but Google has built the ability to add up to five separate accounts on your iPhone. It also has a nice new very Google+ user interface and some time-saving shortcuts such as the ability to instantly RSVP to Google Calendar invites.

That Google+ feeling isn’t an accident — Google has built in the ability to comment on Google+ posts directly from your email.

The update is for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch and requires at least iOS 5. It is optimized for the iPhone 5′s longer screen and is available in 43 languages, including Tagalog and Lingala, which Google tells me is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Google says the app is available immediately, and it is visible online, but I was not able to find it in the Apple app store app, suggesting that perhaps not all of Apple’s iTunes servers have been updated with the new version yet.

Google’s new Gmail for iPhone:

Image credits: Google

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If there is any word that sums up Google’s software development nowadays, it’s integration.

Google is linking up Gmail and Google Drive in major way today by allowing users to send attachments as large as 10GB. As Google product manager Phil Sharp points out, that’s 400 times larger than what users can send as traditional attachments. (Gmail currently maxes out at 25MB.)

Size increases are only half the story, however, because sending an attachment via Google Drive means all users have access to the same version of the file. It’s a pretty convenient addition that should funnel a lot more users into using Drive (which a lot of Gmail users probably have no idea exists).

Should services like Dropbox be concerned? Sort of. As the move shows, Google’s core strength is in its ability to connect and integrate its various services — even the unpopular ones – into one cohesive product. This gives Drive a clear edge over competing standalone cloud services, so expect Google to leverage it as much as possible.

Google says it plans to roll out the update over the next few days. One caveat, however, is that the new features are inexplicably compatible only with Gmail’s new compose functionality. So keep that in mind.

Composing a new email is as commonplace as toasting a bagel. Well, not if Google has anything say about it. Today, the company unveiled a funky twist to the age-old process of writing and responding to email.

In a preview release of Gmail announced Tuesday, the big red “compose” button now directs you to a window pop-up that takes over the entire Gmail experience.

The message pop-up acts like a bigger chat window and allows a person to refer to other emails, search, and see incoming email messages all without ever needing to close the draft.

Why the radical change? Product manager Phil Sharp breaks down the problem:

How many times have you been writing an email and had to reference something in another message? Saving a draft, opening the old email, and then reopening your draft wastes valuable minutes.

And you know what? He’s right. When composing email messages, I find myself needing to stop, save, and search for email addresses, older message threads, and so forth. It is a pain. Is this funky and fresh new compose window the answer? I don’t know. I’m of the ilk that finds Google chat windows rather annoying, so treating messages like chats seems odd to me.

The new compose experience also comes with additional features such as inline image insert, profile pictures of contacts in autocomplete, and the ability to drag and drop contacts between to:, cc:, and bcc: fields.

Sharp said the company is releasing a preview of the new features today. The funktified compose option will arrive for all Gmail users in a few months.

Photo credit: zilverbat./Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SwiftKey is one of many alternative keyboards available to Android phone and tablet users — and today it’s adding one of the features of its biggest competitors, Swype.

SwiftKey’s claim to fame has always been its ability to render intelligible language out of the mishmash of nonsense that your clumsy fingers make as you stab at the onscreen keyboard. With a linguistic analysis engine that draws upon textual data from across the Internet, as well as your own linguistic quirks as expressed in your Gmail, SMS, and social media updates, it’s surprisingly effective, having saved billions of keystrokes. (The company says the current total is 130 billion keystrokes saved. Probably about one billion of those are my own: I’m a terrible touchscreen typist.)

But you still have to lift your fingers from the screen, rather than just sliding them around from letter to letter, as you do with the also-popular app Swype (now owned by Nuance, a company that makes speech-recognition software). That wastes precious milliseconds!

With today’s update, SwiftKey Flow, you can use Swype-like gestures, dragging your finger from letter to letter without ever lifting it from the screen, and SwiftKey will do its textual analysis magic and come up with the correct word, even before you’ve finished swiping. Err, “flowing.”

SwiftKey, formerly known as TouchType Ltd., says its app is the top-selling for-pay Android app, with 15 million downloads of its $4 app. It’s available in 44 languages. The company, founded in 2008, is based in London and currently employs 70 people. It raised a $2.4 million Series A round in December, 2011.

SwiftKey Flow will be available for public beta testing in a few weeks, and you can sign up to test it on the company’s website.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AOL, not exactly known for its cutting-edge innovation, might have its smartest product in ages with Alto — a new email client that promises to clean up your Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and AOL inboxes and generally make your email life easier to manage.

While AOL nicely revamped its own email service in July, the company doesn’t expect users that it lost to Gmail and other services to come back. The email redesign was mostly to keep its 24 million monthly users from fleeing elsewhere. So the best thing AOL can do now is encourage people back into the AOL fold by offering something they can’t get from Google or Yahoo — an interface that helps make email more manageable.

“We have an opportunity to innovate email,” David Temkin, SVP of mail and mobile for AOL, told me as he walked me through Alto. “We assume you have an email address and you don’t want to change it. … This makes your email about things you need to deal with.”

Now available in beta on an invite-only basis, the Alto HTML5 web application provides a clean interface for reading through your email box and making better sense of all the junk you have in there. As you can see in the top photo, your emails sit on the left and “stacks” of objects or emails sit on the right. Clustering some of your email types together can make it much easier to address important emails.

The Alto HTML5 web app works for desktop browsers and iPad’s Safari browser, and it can support five email accounts. AOL also plans to develop a native app for Alto for the iPhone and other smartphones.

Here are some of Alto’s key features:

• All-in-one – Alto makes it possible to check your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and iCloud email all in the same web-based email client.

• Stacks – On the right side of the email box, you can see “stacks,” which are like dynamic folders. You can sort certain kinds of emails or files attached to your emails into those stacks.

• Skip inbox — You can have certain email types and senders skip your inbox and go straight into a specific stack.

• Photos and Attachments — Two of the most handy stacks are photos and attachments. Over the years, you’ve no doubt been sent plenty of photos and files. When you go into the photos or attachments stacks, you can see them all laid out in an easy-to-digest manner. (This is somewhat similar to what Yahoo has done with photos.)

• People — The People tab in Alto shows your contacts, which are made up of anyone you’ve sent an email. You can also add your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter people as well, which pulls in info like title, work experience, recent status updates, and more. As you click on a contact in Alto, you can also see messages, photos, and attachments between you and that person.

• Search — The search tab in the top right corner provides results quickly and contextually. Results are categorized by matching emails, contacts, photos, and attachments.

• Snooze – One feature I particularly like in Alto is a “snooze button” for emails. Let’s say you see an important email in your inbox and you need to respond but can’t just this second. You can hit the snooze button and have the email come back to the top of your box in 30 minutes, an hour, or longer.

The biggest feature that’s missing in Alto? Threaded messages. As an avid Gmail and Google Apps user, I thrive on long threads of correspondence. While Alto’s “stacks” paradigm makes organizing email handy, I still want features that I’m used to. Temkin said threaded messaging will be added later.

One other thing that’s a tad annoying — Alto does not work with Microsoft’s fresh revamp of Hotmail, now called Outlook.com. Alto only works with IMAP services, and Outlook does not support that protocol. If Microsoft adds IMAP to Outlook.com, Temkin said, AOL will to add it to Alto.

AOL will roll out Alto without monetization. Temkin said the company will explore the best way to make money from Alto. Two ways he suggested Alto could make money are by placing offers in a stack you already designate for offers or by giving you the chance to add a branded stack with deals from major brands.

For availability, Alto will be invite-only at first. AOL plans to move the product out of invite-only mode in early 2013.

Check out more photos of Alto’s service in the gallery below.

Searching Gmail sucks, and we all know it. Google knows it too, which is why the company released an “expanded” search feature today that not only helps you find emails within Gmail but also pulls relevant results into Google searches.

“When you’re looking for something, you should be able to find what you need quickly and easily without needing to think about where it might be, whether it’s in your email or out on the public web,” Google software engineer Bran Moolenaar said in a blog post.

The company originally released a field trial of a new search bar in Gmail this past August. It allows users to see relevant emails right in the search bar as they type in keywords. The new feature gives you relevant emails, but also Google calendar events, as well as Google Drive files.

If you want to be a part of the field test, go here.

If you are out on the public web and are logged into your Gmail account, you’ll be able to see Gmail data there too. Any emails, documents, or calendar events related to your Google search will show up in a box to the side of your search results.

Let’s just hope no weird emails show up when a friend is watching you search for “babies eating lemons.”

Binoculars image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Since its public launch in 2007, Google’s Gmail has continued to rapidly add features that make our email lives easier. Now you can add another feature that list: the ability to search inside attachments that have been sent to you.

Gmail is one of the top three email services on the planet, and it claims to have more than 425 million monthly active users, while comScore pegs it at 289 million users. Its chief competition is Microsoft’s Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) and Yahoo Mail, both of which also continue to improve greatly over time.

To search attachments such as .doc, .pdf, and .ppt in your Gmail, add the prefix “has:attachment” before your search query. You can also limit your search to a certain file type by adding “has:attachment filename:extension” (“has:attachment filename:pdf” for example) to your string.

Google Operating System, which first noticed the feature addition, notes that some older attachments may not necessarily be indexed yet.

Photo credit: Google

Amazon no longer allows you to change account information over the phone, after Wired reporter Mat Honan shared his story of how weak security in Apple and Amazon led to a major hack on his digital life this week.

Wired discovered this after trying to recreate Honan’s hack.

Honan’s Amazon, Twitter, Gmail, and iCloud accounts were broken into over the weekend by a hacker who goes by the name of “Phobia.” It all started when Phobia was able to trick Amazon customer service into believing that he was Honan. The company has since seemingly told its customer service department that information can no longer be added to accounts over the phone.

Amazon allows you to add a credit card number or a new email address to an account if you are able to supply the account holder’s name, a billing address, and an email address on file. These three pieces of information are easily accessible, including the billing address, which Phobia discovered through a “Who Is” look-up of one of Honan’s websites.

Phobia was able to add a credit card to the account, which he then used as a piece of identification when he called Amazon back, pretending to have lost access to Honan’s account. After gaining access to the account, Phobia used information from Amazon to get into his iCloud account, wipe his devices, delete his Gmail account, and hijack his and Gizmodo’s Twitter accounts.

The power of linking your accounts.

via Wired; Photo credit: Mat Honan via photo pin

Simple file sharing service Ge.tt is coming to Gmail and Microsoft’s recently-launched Outlook with a pair of extensions for Google’s Chrome browser.

The big pull with Ge.tt is that it works in real time: Once a user selects a file to transfer, the file is uploaded in the background, allowing for instant sharing. While Ge.tt works without them, the extensions take simplicity to the next level by working within the email services.

The strategy behind the move is simple: Ge.tt wants more people to use the service, and there are few better ways to do that than by going after Gmail users. (This, as Get.tt co-founder and CEO Tobias Baunbæk notes in a statement, has been the idea behind the service all along.)

Ge.tt also offers paid options for storage demands higher than 2GB, a strategy that’s worked well for rivals like Dropbox. According to the Ge.tt homepage, the service’s 802,105 users have shared nearly 7.5 million files so far.

Founded in 2010, the Copenhagen, Denmark-based startup raised $435,000 from London’s Atomico Capital last November. 

Photo: Shutterstock/bloomua

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looks like those free lunches are already starting to pay off. Yahoo has moved its popular email service forward with the addition of a calendar tab and made it possible to reply to calendar invites inside mail, the company announced today in a blog post.

Under new CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo hopes to shake off the dust it has accumulated over the years, and it very well could take on a product-focused direction with bigger and better applications. Since email is one of Yahoo’s most popular products, it makes sense that Yahoo wants to make it work better. The company needs to keep people from fleeing to rival services like Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s new Outlook.com service.

Funny enough, the new integration of Calendar and Mail actually one-ups Google because you can access the Calendar without opening a new tab like you have to in Gmail. Yahoo Senior Product Manager Ashish Parnami, writes:

Currently, users access the Calendar by clicking on the Calendar link under the “Applications” section in the left panel. The Calendar would then open in a new browser window/tab. To simplify the process (who wants more tabs open on their browser!?), we’re now making Calendar a permanent tab within Yahoo! Mail. So, as soon as you login to your Yahoo! Mail account, you will see a ‘Calendar’ tab right next to the ‘Contacts’ tab. This tab will remain there even as you navigate around to other tabs within Yahoo! Mail.

Not only is Calendar now accessible without opening a new tab, but users can search for events inside the “Calendar” tab. Additionally, when you receive a calendar invite from someone, you can respond with “Attending/Not Attending/Maybe,” add comments, or add it directly to your Calendar.

It’s a relatively small step, but it’s still a good sign for the company that’s been beaten down so much. We can’t wait to see what else Mayer does in the next year.

Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted, “Someone has apparently slipped an innovation drug into Microsoft’s water supply recently. This is getting interesting.”

I agree. This is definitely one of the more innovative products from Microsoft. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s easy to use.

The last fundamental innovation in email was in 2004 when Gmail launched. I’ve been a Gmail user ever since.

But despite huge increases in the volume of email we deal with in the last eight years, little has been done to improve the core experience. Yes, Google launched Priority Inbox. It’s supposed to help you figure out the important mail; for me, it’s been largely useless. Scanning through my inbox, very little of what Google has marked important really is.

Google’s other major moves with Gmail have largely been about trying to exploit its huge number of mail users into whatever lame social product Google is trying to bootstrap. (Remember Buzz?)

But better email tools could improve productivity for everyone. In the current version of Outlook mail, there isn’t enough innovation to get me to switch. But the existence of a new and credible player who wants to win may drive much-needed innovation in email. Here are some core things that would get me to switch by delivering value, not by tricking people like Facebook tried to do:

Automatic classification

Outlook’s “Quick views” feature offers a quick view of how that could happen: automatic classification of mail. The system automatically scans email for certain attributes that people look for. Oh, hey, this email looks like a shipping confirmation. And this one has a photo. And these have attachments.

That’s pretty rudimentary. But imagine that your email tool could do this:

• Separate receipts from marketing emails. I have eight years’ worth of emails from Amazon, Buy.com, Groupon, etc. Sometimes I want to look up what I purchased, or I need warranty service. Finding those receipts can be a challenge.
• Pluck out bills. Emails from American Express could be scanned for payment due date, and the date could automatically be added to my Google Calendar.
• Keep my travel top of mind. Itineraries, hotel confirmations, and rental car reservations that are upcoming would be available in a dashboard view.
• Identify emails with expiring content. Nordstrom’s anniversary sale ends August 5th. This could be put into a Quick view that becomes more prominent when the date approaches and drops out when the sale ends. Expired emails would also be downweighted in search results.

Some of the above can be done with search. For example, I can search “Buy.com receipt”. But look what happens when I do that:

I get a bunch of unrelated junk. What you can’t see is that the list isn’t complete. I’ve purchased much more from Buy.com. In order to get all of my Buy.com receipts, I have to search for “buy.com thanks for your order”.

Another way to tackle the problem is filters. I have set up numerous filters that file things like receipts, daily deal emails and the like. (You can see some of my filters in the screenshot above.) But that’s a real pain to set up and only geeks will do it.

There are vertical players that are focused on solving pieces of the problem. TripIt and Kayak will parse travel-related emails. I forward my confirmation emails to TripIt, it picks out the relevant details and creates a more consistent itinerary. It can even generate a feed of events that I plug into Google Calendar. That’s a really roundabout way of doing things. OneReceipt and Slice do this for shopping emails.

But the separate apps have little traction. It should be built into the email platform. And once it’s in a large scale system like Gmail or Outlook, emailers will have an incentive to markup the information they send to make it even more actionable.

Google has built a very lucrative business on organizing the world’s information. It should do a much better job of organizing my information.

Secure email

It’s somewhat mind boggling that this far into email adoption, unsecure email is standard operating practice. Yes, there have been some improvements. Gmail uses SSL for your mailbox. That wasn’t always the case.

But if you actually send something, that email is sent unencrypted to the recipient.

Securing email has had three historical challenges: it needs to be easy for the user, it needs to be universal, and it needs to have a business model.

Early experiments like PGP, which put a lot of work on both the sender and recipient, have failed in the consumer market. But for person-to-person messaging, we’re down to a small handful of providers that matter. (Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.) Among them, they should be able to solve this problem, at least for email sent among their networks.

Secure email is also something that would help with financial transactions and could potentially cut the flood of bills that are sent via paper mail. That the post office is running ads touting that paper mail is more secure than email is ridiculous. Not because they’re wrong, but because it’s true.

Even among my more tech savvy friends, many receive paper bills because the process of getting their bill or statement from each credit card company is difficult. If you have multiple accounts, it’s even more complicated because each financial institution has its own system. There is no interface as consistent as ripping open an envelope. They also have different rules about how long they keep old statements online. All of this stuff should show up in my email box as effortlessly and more securely than it does in my regular mailbox.

Because email recipients are concentrated on a few networks, it would be possible to have direct secure transmission of these statements and account notices. Doing that would also reduce the scourge of phishing, because the mail provider could authenticate that an email came from American Express or Bank of America.

This is a service that banks should be willing to pay for, both because it reduces their operational costs (mailing and printing statements) and because it reduces fraud liabilities (phishing.) Even at 5 cents per secure communication, it’d be a bargain.

Not only does this increase productivity, it’s better for the environment. The people who lose out are postal workers, especially the guy who’s job it is to convince banks that they should use paper statements instead of email. (I’m not making that up. Talk about a Sisyphean task.)

Will any of this happen? A guy can hope. And there’s nothing like real competition to help drive it.

If someone is willing to add these features, I will jump ship from Gmail. I would even go back to my Yahoo mail account.

In its latest move, the company is adding  Google+ Hangouts to Gmail, continuing its efforts to bring the services closer together. Hangouts allows up to 10 people to video chat together, collaborate on documents, share their screens, and broadcast their conversations to the Internet.

With the new feature, Gmail users will be able to video chat with not only other Gmail users, but friends on Google + and the Google+ iOS and Android apps as well.

Google says the functionality also will make for more reliable connections, as the new system is built on Google’s network and not peer-to-peer technology like the old video chat. Rollout for the new functionality begins today and will continue over the coming weeks.

Google has been intent on extending its Google+ features to as many other services as it can. In June, it introduced YouTube parties, a feature that allows Google+ users to watch YouTube videos together online. We found the idea to be, well, silly, and it’s fair to assume that Google’s latest move will get a similarly icy reception.

Photo: 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.