Man bites dog: Microsoft Outlook.com embraces Gmail users
Well, embrace is too strong a word, but Microsoft says it’s making it easier for colleagues and friends with different mail accounts to chit chat. Read more »
Google keeps fighting for the heart of the iPhone with new Gmail update
Even as Apple has decoupled its iPhone partnership with Google for everything except search, the web company has still found a way to reach its users who have iPhones and iPads. Read more »
Barnes & Noble integrating Google Play into Nook HD and Nook HD+ tablets
Barnes & Noble is integrating many Google services — including Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps and the Chrome browser — into its Nook HD and Nook HD+ tablets. Read more »
Why are bad email habits so hard to break?
photo: Thinkstock
When it comes to mobile mail, today is one of the best times in recent memory to find a better solution. But changing email habits, even when they’re bad, turned out to be tougher than I expected. Read more »
How free online storage got to be so ubiquitous [infographic]
Remember when your email was capped at 2 MB? It wasn’t that long ago. Read more »
Good news Gmail users: Google extends Sync support through July
When Google announced it was dropping Sync support last month, it left Gmail users on Windows Phone reeling. An extension give Microsoft time to address the situation. Read more »
Microsoft Hotmail and Outlook.com problems persist
Microsoft said it’s working on an issue that’s affected some Hotmail and Outlook.com mail users. Users reported issues with those services starting Monday that spilled over into Tuesday. Read more »
The 2013 task management tools market
The task-management market is growing, in part because users need to coordinate with teams via mobile. In this case, heavier-weight solutions like Yammer, IBM Connections, and Podio don’t always suffice. But the demand for digital to-do lists that can be shared across project teams is increasing. Read more »
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL: grading their iOS apps for 2012
Google is excelling on Apple’s own platform with popular iOS apps, but it’s not alone among its fellow consumer internet companies. Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo also had some success on their rival’s platform in 2012. Here’s a look at who did better. Read more »
Google’s big push to make better iOS apps than Apple
By creating a bevy of new iOS apps, what Google has been up to is becoming more obvious. It’s made it its mission to not just compete with Apple with the Android platform and Nexus mobile devices, but battle Apple on its own platform. Read more »
Gmail’s outage disrupting Chrome for some too
Google’s Gmail service is down and up and down again, but why does that mean Chrome is getting crashy as well? Google, we really, really want to know! Read more »
Gmail app for iPhone, iPad gets multiple accounts, infinite scrolling + more
Other improvements to the app include sending and receiving attachments within the app, the ability to archive, label, star, delete and report spam, read email as threaded conversations, see profile pictures in those conversations, and respond to Google Calendar invites and Google+ posts. Read more »
Gmail improves for recent Android devices; old versions need not apply
Gmail for Android gains some great enhancements that everyone will likely want, but only devices running Android 4.0 or better can get right now. Pinch to zoom in email, swipe to archive and fit to screen are some of the more impressive features. Read more »
Are we ready to archive our online lives? Archify hopes so
Archify isn’t the first service to promise a personal search engine but, with smart touches such as Gmail integration and the recording of social streams, it has a decent chance of being the one that succeeds. Read more »
How to set up multiple Google calendars on Windows Phone 8
Getting multiple Gmail calendars on a new Windows Phone 8 isn’t difficult, but the process is slightly different from older Windows Phone versions. Follow these simple steps and in under five minutes you’ll have up to 25 shared Gmail calendars on your Microsoft-powered phone. Read more »
Quick tip: Setting up Google mail on iOS and OS X
No, you are not crazy, and your Google contacts are not somehow missing in iOS. It just that there is more than one way to set up your Google Mail service on your iOS and OS X devices. Here’s a quick explanation how. Read more »
Gmail finally beats Hotmail, according to third-party data [chart]
Gmail has been claiming the top spot for worldwide email providers since this summer. New outside data finally shows it’s true. Read more »
Don’t call it an incubator: 3 startups to watch from Founders Den
Ten startups that won the exclusive honor of hacking in the Founders Den space in San Francisco pitched to investors and the media Tuesday night in San Francisco. Here were three of the ten companies that caught my eye based on their pitches Tuesday evening. Read more »
Who needs data? Google launches Gmail SMS in Africa
Text messaging. It’s one of the few functions of a feature phone that graduated to today’s smartphones and continues to be used heavily by people all around the world. Now, in three African countries, it can even be used for Gmail at no extra charge. Read more »
Gmail for iOS gains Notification Center and more
Gmail users on iOS have an early gift prior to this week’s Google developer event: The Gmail on iOS app was updated on Monday with Notification Center support and more, suggesting that Google wants users to access its services everywhere on all sorts of mobile devices. Read more »
Yahoo email users spend more on energy than Gmail users
Here’s a weird bit of energy data courtesy of energy software startup Opower: people that use Yahoo email spend $110 more a year on electricity — or 11 percent more — than Gmail users. Why? Read more »
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Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
The adoption of tablets, social media and new interfaces and the changing nature of the TV itself mean the digital living room will continue on its path of rapid change, thanks to new ways of creating, viewing, bundling, distributing and selling content. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Gmail’s new translation service
photo: Shutterstock / Roman Sigaev
Reading an email from your developer in Japan, or your prospective business partner in Argentina? Forget copy and pasting into Google Translate to decode the message. Google now offers automatic translation for incoming emails. There are options to turn off translation or automatically translate all messages […] Read more »
Hey, new-and-improved Google, please fix your apps
Google under CEO Larry Page will focus on easy, intuitive user experience, according to VP Marissa Mayer. Taking her at her word, could the company please, please get to work on its productivity applications and really fix Google Docs and Gmail? Read more »
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Web startups: How to guard against security breaches
Growth phases at Web startups are invariably accompanied by attacks, as we’ve seen with sites like Facebook, Twitter and many other web-based companies. Here we look at which are the most brutal attacks and how companies and developers can guard against them in the future. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Report: Google gets Drive cloud storage ready to roll
Google is close to announcing its own long-rumored cloud storage service for consumers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The new Google Drive — which would offer some storage free — would compete head on with existing services like Dropbox. Read more »
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12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Web giants take on phishing in quest to make the Internet better
Companies such as Google, PayPal, Facebook and Microsoft have teamed up to create a standard to help boost email security. They are part of a working group to create the DMARC standard, which will help cut down on the number of phishing attacks. Read more »
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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Updated: Two ways to use a smartphone to log in to Google on a PC
After my Gmail account was hijacked last year, I looked into Google’s two-step verification process. It relies on your having your smartphone with you, even when logging in on a PC. Here are two ways to use your smartphone to better protect your Google account access. Read more »
New Year’s resolution checklist: Daily backups
A new year is a perfect time to talk about ways to protect your data. You should be backing up and you know it, and if you are already backing up, it’s time to test your strategy and include things you may be forgetting. Read more »
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Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Smartphones help us to understand the cloud
A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s official: The LAPD ain’t going to Google
After a long-running controversy, the Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that’s final.
The City Council voted to kill the proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD although the city’s other 17,000 employees are still aboard. Read more »
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Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
How Spanning built a backup based on clouds
Spanning is a backup service for Google Apps that’s completely hosted and run from Amazon’s web services. The idea of backing up one cloud service via another was intriguing enough that I asked Mike Pav, the VP of engineering at Spanning, how he does it. Read more »
Gmail returns to the App Store, now with fewer bugs
Google has re-introduced its native iOS Gmail app to the App Store, with a new version number and instructions to delete the old version if you managed to grab it before it was pulled prior to installing this one. Besides bug fixes, little has changed. Read more »
Google kills Gmail app for BlackBerry
BlackBerry may not be a top priority for Google or one of the other major software vendors, but to kill off a decent app that many of us BlackBerry owners used is just wrong. Effective Nov. 22, Google is ending support for BlackBerry’s native Gmail app. Read more »
Return to sender: Google pulls new iOS Gmail app
Google released a native Gmail client for iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices, but quickly pulled the software from the iTunes App Store due to some app errors. As a long-time Android user, I like what I see in the client, but it needs work. Read more »
How cloud-based Gmail is energy efficient
Cloud-based Gmail is a more energy efficient option compared to companies’ locally-hosted email solutions, according to Google. That’s largely due to the inherent efficiencies of the cloud, and also Google’s own brand of energy efficient servers and data centers. Read more »
