Thinkervine

About six months ago, I have written this post to talk to you about Otherinbox for Gmail. Now, I have been using this service for nearly one year and I would like to give a feedback on my usage over these last twelve months.

For a starter, let me refresh for new comers and those who don’t know OIB what this is. Otherinbox, is fresh start-up, based in Austin (TX) that provides a service to automatically organize your inbox. No need to create filters and rules to keep a decent inbox and avoid a 6 months backlog, Otherinbox filters your e-mail on the basis of the receiving e-mail address. It lets you create a custom domain (<username>.otherinbox.com or your own domain name if you have one) to which you associate your e-mail accounts. This empowers you with the ability to use create on-the-fly addresses when registering to a new service, removing you the strain of creating the addresses before.  This service also comes as a great way to identify who’s spamming you,  hence you don’t need to use that old “no-spam” address we all used to have.

So over the year, Otherinbox has improved on several levels. First thing, as any brand new product, there were few bugs, but where Otherinbox deserves an A+ grade is their dedication and quick response to the users requests, fixing the issues in order to avoid harm and inconvenience to the users.

On the other side, they have been working hard in order to bring several new features:

? Spam filters. Now your e-mails are all scanned and spams are automatically discarded.

? Otherinbox for Gmail: If you’re willing to keep your Gmail account and still use it as a primary account for your contacts, no worries. Otherinbox has come with O4G. This service will scan your new e-mails and it will automatically archive them in your OIB account following built-in rules for recognition and grouping. Nothing is deleted on the Google Mail servers, e-mails are just endorsed with the label “Otherinbox”. Few months laters, the integration with Yahoo! Mail has been provided as well.

Following the same philosophy of autopilot e-mail, they have provided automatic filters to organize mailing lists subscriptions (Google groups, Yahoo groups, Craiglist…).

You e-mails are accessible through a regular ajaxed web interface but you can also have them delivered through RSS on your favorite aggregator.

If you’re willing to use Otherinbox from a fat client or from your mobile, you will have to sign up for a Premium account (20$/year) which will provide you access all your e-mail using IMAP, the Premium version will also allow you to see messages that have been on your inbox for more than 30 days.

Last and not least, Otherinbox technology is now compatible with most browsers on the market including IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

But Otherinbox is not stopping there. They are working hard on bringing new features and improving the experience. The roadmap includes enhanced mobile versions (you may check the iPhone version), coupons and full list of your receipts.

Otherinbox has really helped throughout the year with this powerful on-the-fly email. Either when subscribing to a service, when networking with people, or just when I had to enroll for specific registrations (hotels, premium memberships, clubs, coupons). I didn’t need to think about being spammed anymore or that I would have to manage any unwanted e-mail. The only thing that I was thinking about was being creative when providing the new e-mail address.

Oh and by the way, this is just my personal feedbacks and I am, in no way, affiliated to Otherinbox, but you have any specific questions, you may ask them on Twitter.

Cette étude, incluant un SWOT analysis, reprend les dangers potentiels que peut encourir Google aujourd’hui. En partant d’un historique et des faits actuels, l’étude retrace les différents événements qui peuvent avoir un impact majeur sur l’activité de la firme de Mountain View, qui comme nous le savons connaît un recul important dû à la crise.

Rappelons que Google s’est séparé de 10,000 contractants, a mis en place un plan de licenciement, et a connu différents problèmes majeurs (erreur de provisionning pour le moteur de recherche, downtimes importants de GMail, Google Apps).

L’un des facteurs déterminants est la stratégie d’acquisition de Google et la mise en valeur des services issus du 20% time. Hors aujourd’hui, l’histoire a prouvé qu’une majorité des rachats de Google se sont soldés par des fermetures de services le plus souvent (Jaiku, Notepad, Orkut, Dodgeball).

A côté de cela, la monétisation de Youtube, malgré le succès de la plateforme reste très mitigée. Le CA pour 2008 était aux environs de 90M$ uniquement, bien loin des prévisions originelles.

Aujourd’hui, plutôt que d’investir dans de nouveaux services, Google devrait revoir son portefeuille de services et d’en consolider l’utilisation, afin de permettre de délivrer plus de valeur ajoutée aux utilisateurs, ce qui permettrait potentiellement d’augmenter les revenus publicitaires générés par la plateforme.

Au delà de cela, l’un des reproches que l’on puisse faire à Google est leur manque de réactivité et d’information (ex downtime de Gmail). Les équipes ont mis plusieurs heures avant de communiquer des informations aux utilisateurs.

Les études démontrent de manière claire que l’un des facteurs clés d’acquisition d’utilisateurs et d’adoption par ces derniers d’un service est d’abord le facteur de confiance, ceci est particulièrement vrai pour le E-Commerce (en B2C) et les services critiques pour l’utilisateur.

Cependant, suite à cela, Google a créé un compte twitter permettant de relayer l’information, de même un service status a été mis en place afin de donner l’état des services Google. Gageons que ces actions permettront de pallier à ce manque de transparence.

Google est certes un géant de l’Internet à position dominante, tout comme l’étaient Microsoft ou IBM il y’a quelques décennies. Cependant, tout comme ces acteurs, démarre pour eux une période de récession due à des erreurs de stratégie et un manque d’anticipation qui mettent à mal leurs prévisions.

Leur attitude et leurs décisions durant les prochains mois seront particulièrement déterminantes dans la confirmation de leur position de leader ou dans le déclin du mammouth blessé.

“Dear Santa, I’d love to get my e-mails back. Could you please bring Gmail back up ?!”

That’s what millions of people have been secretly thinking this morning when they discovered with horror that gmail was not available.

It was matter of minutes before hundreds of messages were posted on Twitter with hashtags #gmail and #gfail. If your tried to open your emails, you should have encountered an error 502, although it still seems to work via IMAP and POP.

Google has just posted a status on their support page saying they are aware of the problem and they’re working on fixing it:

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30AM Pacific Time. We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.”

But for few hours, noone managed to post any information to the users. There was no blog entry to give an update on the issue, not even through their Twitter account. Another disturbing fact is that when trying to reach the service, you just get an Error 502 page saying : Server Error. You guys couldn’t manage to have a hold-on page saying : « Google Mail is temporarily unavailable, we apologize for any inconvenience. We will keep you updated. »

Now, that’s the second major issue Google is facing in less than a month after years and years of unfailing services. Is this a lead to their diving in the abyss ? Is this related to the termination of their contracts with third parties who were in charge of managing many of these services ?

As long as this would only affect you for your personal use, you could still handle it, but what about all the professional users of Google services, including Google Apps. How do they manage this kind of prolonged outage. It would be rather interesting to rate the business dependance to gmail services.

Many web marketing agencies and most websites make use of AdSense, some of them are living from it. Google is also the most used search engine, so most SEO strategies will focus on how good you are ranked in Google. Now what if Google failed to bring the appropriate service. What’s your plan B ?

Update: Gmail is back at 2:25 PM CET.
Update 2: Acacio Cruz, from Google, has posted a blog entry on the outage.

Souvent, vous vous retrouvez dans une situation où vous ne savez quel film choisir pour l’occasion. Soirée DVD en amoureux ? Ennui ? Soirée entre amis ou en famille ? Quel film satisfera les goûts de tout le monde ? Une question existentielle qui ne trouve souvent pas de réponse.

1000 suggestions, quelques moues et un léger consensus plus tard, on finit par trouver le film qui plaira à tout le monde.

Jinni est un nouveau service qui vous évitera ces tourments. Il vous permet de sélectionner les films que vous souhaitez regarder à travers différents critères: thèmes, humeur, genre, acteurs/réalisateurs.

Par ailleurs, Jinni puise sa force de différentiation dans son moteur de recherche et de suggestion sémantique qui vous permettra d’effectuer des recherches telles que vous les demanderiez dans un vidéo club, par exemple: love movie involving dance.

Ces choix peuvent être renforcés par un profil que vous aurez pré-établi. A travers des questionnaires, on tentera d’établir vos goûts afin de vous proposer les films qui vous plairont (moteur de suggestions).

Une fois votre choix effectué, vous pourrez alors choisir de visualiser le film en le louant, l’achetant ou en le regardant gratuitement en fonction de l’offre. Vous retrouverez également toutes les infos sur le film (résumé, casting, revues de presse et utilisateurs). Vous aurez vous-même la possibilité de noter le film et de rajouter une revue afin de guider les choix des autres membres de la communauté.

Jinni est pour le moment en mode bêta, accessible uniquement sur invitation. Si vous souhaitez le tester, laissez un commentaire avec votre adresse, je vous enverrai une invitation.

Oh! Et joyeuse Saint Valentin à tout le monde!

You might have heard of Otherinbox. It ain’t just another webmail service, it is the ultimate service to manage your subscriptions.

More and more, you need to get subscriptions on several websites and services. For each you need to provide an e-mail address and you’re soon flooded with bunch of spam and advertizing!

Otherinbox allows you to provide on the fly a targetted e-mail address without prior creation of the account. Let’s take an example. You’re willing to subscribe to Facebook (and god knows how many e-mails notifications you will get from the service). So instead of just creating a specific e-mail address, you will be able to register using a facebook@<your-oib-account>.otherinbox.com.

All e-mails coming to this email address are automatically organized.

A couple of days ago, OIB went one step further. It is testing a new service called Otherinbox for Gmail. With this service, you can still provide your gmail account. OIB will act as an IMAP client and will retrieve all recognized services and merchants emails and organize them in your Otherinbox account.On Gmail level, nothing is deleted, the recognized emails are labeled “Otherinbox” and archived. Nothing’s lost and it is completely reversible.

I would like to congratulate all the OIB team, all the developers and especially Aaron Scruggs, plus Hoon Park for this great work and the great effort put into this service that works like a charm.

Interested in trying the service, try it out here: http://budurl.com/ObamaOIB

You might also follow Otherinbox on Twitter.

Keep it up guys!

Un peu plus tôt ce matin, en naviguant sur Facebook, je me suis rendu compte qu’il y avait une nouvelle bannière qui faisait son apparition (probablement dûe au fait que je sois au Maroc en ce moment): une bannière Meditel ventant les mérites de sa clé 3G+.

Le ciblage publicitaire du couple Microsoft/Facebook (le premier gérant les campagnes publicitaires du second) a l’air de faire son petit bonhomme de chemin. Je me demande dans quelle mesure, il s’appuie sur les informations publiques du profil, et dans quelle mesure il s’appuie uniquement sur mon adresse IP.

La contre-partie, est que cette bannière à l’air de s’inscruster. Elle constitue désormais 70% de l’affichage publicitaire que j’observe à travers les pages, sans parler de son “apparition spontannée” entre deux pages, ce qui laisse présager un ciblage très axé sur la provenance géographique et un peu moins sur le contenu que présente mon profil (contrairement aux campagnes que j’observe depuis Paris).

Reste à voir combien de personnes vont effectivement souscrire un abonnement via Internet en général et via Facebook en particulier.

People tend to think that social networks actually expose you to the world.

It might appear that through your shares, you expose personal and professionnal informations, allowing people to have an insight on your deep self, but this only partly true.

This is what I would call a public profile selective exposition . These platforms act as a PR agent for each of us. I will explain myself.

When publishing new pictures, for example, you will carefully choose those who are in your best advantage in order to reflect a controlled image of yourself. You will even untag yourself from those of your friends that will shed a dark light on your profile. The same goes for  published articles, short messages and interests.

The publisher will leverage every possible information that will provide the targeted image of himself depending on his audience, on the other side, he will bury any pain point. Digging the matter deeper, we will notice that depending on the platforms and their context, this image might change over the pages, and the interests that were to be highlighted on facebook will be different from those listed on LinkedIn or Plaxo.

This schizophrenia is not a new born that has appeared with social platforms. It has made a long way since usenet, forums and IRC networks, only in a better controlled environment.

The informations provided through social platforms, including blogs, are filtered and distilled. This is even more true for people making money through these platforms such as company founders or professional bloggers.

The idea behind is to attract a population of readers and increase the traffic on the profile/page for one part but also to provide a synthetic overview of the person for diverse goals (professional and acquaintance network expansion, opportunities, desperate quest for the sister soul), the spirit of sharing tend to come as a secondary matter,  this is ultimately emphasized with Digg-like networks.

The exposition on the web is real for some matters. Identities are carried over the sites and it is possible to trace someone’s activities on the web thanks to Google’s smart indexation. I have known recruiters and partners typing people’s name on Google to know who they were. But anyone who has been on the place for some time will know how to control the output of the search and let only selective information pass through as a result of the search.

So far the idea about being more exposed than before is not so relevant that people will have to worry about their boss knowing what they’ve been doing over the week-end.

Google ? General Electric ? Gazprom ? Microsoft ? Ever wondered which of these was the most powerful company ? Which of these was ranked #1 in the charts.

Of course Forbes would give you its hearsay, based on its criterias, most of which are financially based. But come to talk about dominance on a market, some companies have their own distinctions.

Restricting to the world wide web, Google has un undisputable place as it is the starting place to the Internet for most people.

Now It would be interesting to see something based on people’s opinion, say like the grammy’s or oscars, where you have a community of people voting for which is the most powerful company. Furtherly add a pinch of Christies auctions. The companies would have to buy an entry ticket, bidding themselves into the game.

Have the auctions run 50 days and win a one-year title re-challenged year after year. Get into the competition, keep the track and run for the gold.

This is the idea behind The World’s Most Powerful Company. Created by three students from a reputed business school, the company aims to provide an alternative way to elect the most powerful company in the world, through auctions and polls.

The most important idea here is that the results are not financially driven but are rather the employees, customers and external observers’  view of the entreprise, their personal notes and ratings.

The winning company gets an interesting counterpart:

- One year free ad on the website

- The site’s design could be adapted to the winning company’s needs

- A guaranteed matching of the words “Most powerful company” to the company on most popular search engines

Although enterprises could raise their bid to increase their popularity, the polls mirror the real public opinion on the company, which represents a pretty good KPI of customer relationship.

The idea behind this concept is innovative. Coupling principles of collaboration with most prized web strategy and marketing actions as a reward, the idea should represent a real benefit to the winning company when exploited to its full extent, and ROI should be fast.

But most importantly, when you look deeper into this, it is not really the money generated through the ads that is the most important.The challenge is to be entitled as “the most powerful company”. The challenge is the capacity to keep the title over the years as it is put back into the arena year after year.

The running companies will be able to promote their image to a large user base through an unprecedented experience. Large campaigns could then be organized around this yearly summer event and have people vote for them.

These guys are on the starting blocks but are running on the fast lane. It would be interesting to get some more companies involved and see the results of this, have yours involved and see how popular it is. Visit The World’s most powerful company and support them!

Geekement correct a web cast TV show will be shot in public tomorrow at the O’Sullivan by the Mill (Place de Clichy, Paris).

For their final episode (season 2008), the whole team is glad to invite and interact with their public, in a cheering mood.

The event is sponsored by several actors such as Microsoft, VMWare and Jiwa. More information on their RSVP page.

Event info :

Paris blogue-t-il ?

The 13th edition of Paris Blogue-t-il is coming to the 14th Arrondissement of Paris this wednesday.

Blogs presentation, live music and a whole lot of bloggers sharing this unique experience will be at the heart of this event.

To RSVP visit their Hive O’Clock page.

Event info:

Hope to see you there

Depuis quelque temps, Microsoft met en test son nouveau webmail, qui fait partie de sa série de services Windows Live. Le principe ? Recréer tout votre bureau sur Internet.