Creative Idea Powerhouse

Accoding to a report recently by Spamhaus, the global top 10 Email Spaming countries are as below:

1. USA
2. China
3. Russia
4. UK
5. South Africa
6. Germany
7. Brazil
8. Japan
9. France
10. India

Out of all the emails sending day by day, there are more than 95% of the emails are spams, and these are causing the corporate world the losses of $308billion a year. This amount is more than enough to save the bad situation of the top 3 car makers from financial bailout, restore back the entire financial crisis and global economic recession worries, or even to throw in a daily meal for all African poor kids from suffering of hunger.

Enough for email as new social environment. Inbox 2.0 should not focus on getting more stuffs into your inbox, but rather to focus how to make you do less in your email and start to get productivity up. Last month, GigaOm posted an article about Email as the new social environment, which OM talks that Yahoo and Google finally realize that their biggest assets, 260million email users from Yahoo! and 100million from Gmail, can be converted into social environment. Yeah I agreed from business standpoint there is huge amount of benefits and profit dollars in making email as a social platform for you to get your friend’s RSS update, twitter message, facebook updates, which make your email client become more sticky to you. By then, not only ads, spam are all squezing into your inbox, your facebook feeds, RSS, social sites updates all are going to bomboarding your inbox too. Currently average users get around 160 emails a day from all your multiple mailboxes. Imagine if your facebook, myspace, flickr, and other many more updates are going to come in to your inbox, what is this going to happen to you in person?
We are currently under email overwork, email overload, email overspam and email overstress stage. Imagine you are half-way rushing your weekly report and inside your mailbox there’s someone just drop in and say hi on your facebook, it pop up small notifier, which lead you to get distract. Go and look back at your facebook once again, I have 400 friends on my list, and if I were to continue getting updates from my social network, what will happen next?
It is time to call for a ‘stop’ and ‘think’ stage before we further innovate the email system already. Yes I agreed young generation wants to stay connected as much as they can, and I like Gabor’s argument on this ‘the fact is that when they go in to corporate world, does the company want their employees to stay connected always?’. Email will not die, and will continue to stay as a form of communication for corporate world in next decades. So how to better help the user to ‘Manage’ their works by helping them to manage their ‘email workload’ will be a big interest for corporate market in next few years to come. After all, $300billion losses per year on email overmanage is a big figure for corporate world according to research from Radicati.
While waiting for some cutting edge tools to better manage your inbox, here is some self-help tips that you can work by yourself before the email flooding your inbox.

I remember I start to pick up interest in email reengineering party last year when I read the post from Techcrunch introducing Xobni . The company picked up a 16 years old products where most of the internet users would have at least one, and some may have more than 10 inboxes (personally I tried to reduce from 12 last year to 5 right now), and try to reengineer it; and thats the reason Xobni is the ‘Reengineering’ of Inbox when you read backwards.

Since then, the industry start to refocus back on email again, and many starts to look back on how to enhance, connect, multiplex, increase efficiency of human interacting with email, and out of sudden, there are more than 10 already known startups that doing the emails development now. Ex VP of Engineering for Xobni had also leave the company and start his own new email company too (You can check out his blog at here)

In my list, there are currently so many new faces in email startup:
1. Xobni.com
2. WrapMail
3. unison.com
4. Zenbe.com
5. Inbox 2
6. Zimbra.com (acquired by Yahoo)
7. Xoopit

Lately, even Yahoo has unofficially announced that they are launching Inbox 2.0 but I’m not sure if it is same as Inbox2.com. You can check out the full post from GigaOM here.

In term of business model, Zimbra used subscription base, which pretty close to Gmail Pro version, while many others embebed the advertising engine (same old way as Hotmail started back in 90s, can’t we have some new business model for email please?!?!). Bottom line, I think email has reached a pretty simple milestone as Gabor has mentioned long ago, to improve users’ efficiency to handle ‘Urgent’ and ‘Important’ email, less attention to less important email rather than continue to ‘PUMP’ ads, information to users which at the end of the day, who border to read the ads in an email? Moreover, we all hate spam, same as we hate ads. Time to change, I love Inbox ZERO idea presented previously in Google Tech Talk, do less email, have more fun, life is simple. Don’t complicate users inbox with more ‘storage’ for email, instead, leave inbox to Zero email everyday as a best practices for all email users as the Mantra for email business that any new startups want to jump in. I will talk more on Inbox Zero practice later.

Below is the Elevator picth would like to share with you from Inbox 2.0.

I’ve been working on an email project since 2 years ago, and keep a close eye on Xobni for a while. Recently I found a post from Gabor, the ex-Xobni exec talks about the future of email in Australia 2 weeks ago, and would like to share with you guys Enjoy the slide and welcome to the future of email revolution.