Yahoo removes email cap

Yahoo! is giving users of its web-based email service unlimited storage capacity.

The move celebrates Yahoo Mail's 10th birthday and today's rich media demand.

Beginning in May, Yahoo will stop the one-gigabyte cap for people with free email accounts and the two-gigabyte cap for those who pay for premium accounts.

A Yahoo! spokesman claimed that people are increasingly sending photos and other rich-media formats driving the amount of storage up beyond the levels needed a year ago."

Yahoo!, based in Sunnyvale, California, bought web-based email service Rocketmail with its four megabytes of storage when it was relaunched as Yahoo Mail in 1997.

The demand for memory has grown strongly year-on-year.

Today, four megabytes of memory would not be sufficient to hold a set of pictures taken during the course of a weekend by someone with a typical digital camera.

Last year, Apple introduced an 80-gigabyte iPod capable of storing as much as 100 hours of video.

Yahoo Mail is the most popular web-based email service and has more than 250 million users, according to industry-tracking comScore Media Metrix.

The elimination of the storage cap comes at a time when costs of computer storage are declining and in the face of a relentless trend for people to exchange video, music and other data-laden digital files online.

Yahoo said its "email server farms" around the globe were equipped to handle the storage load and the company will invest in improved capacity where necessary

From: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21461965-5003418,00.html , 28 March 2008

Zoho writer: sharing documents on the web

As Microsoft continues down the route of creating powerful – and memory hungry - licensed software that sits on your home or business PC, there remains a plethora of fully functioning remote-accessible applications free to use on the World Wide Web.

Zoho Writer is a free to use remote word processor, which neatly integrates with your locally stored documents and can be shared over the web.

It allows you access, create, save and send your documents from any PC with an internet connection, meaning memory cards and email are no longer needed, nor is expensive software.

All Zoho Writer’s functions are accessed through your browser window, via a log-in.

It has all the word processing features you need, 95% of the time: tables, full formatting options, lists, image import, tables, alignments and it will even automatically create a table of contents. All this is laid out with buttons and menus, just like any word processor.

Better still, it can flip seamlessly between document editing with WYSIWYG and html, and uses inline cascading style sheets to accurately format your documents. All the commonly used html elements are available with the graphical user interface.

And when your document is finished, you can save remotely or locally to a number of text formats including .pdf and Microsoft Word document format, share via email, publish to your blog and even share online with other Zoho users, making electronic collaboration of information easy.

In addition to the word processor, Zoho has created a whole suite of free online products, accessible remotely over the web, including spreadsheets, databases, presentation suites, planners, live chat and email.

Your community online

Hundreds of web surfers have joined Whereilive since the community website’s launch last week.

The site, www.whereilive.com.au is comprised almost entirely of content created and uploaded by the community.

It allows people to post local news, reviews, pictures and events.

They can form groups with people of similar interests and buy and sell their goods.

The site also gives sporting and community organisations the opportunity to have an easy-access presence online and for businesses to link directly with local customers.

Whereilive.com.au is constructed around postcodes so users will always get the information that is most relevant to them.

Like all ‘community’ based sites operating in the private sector, Whereilive.com.au will make or break on site traffic and the number of people who sign-up, as ultimately its business model will be built on revenues from online advertising.

It is doubtful that it can be sustained purely through banner ads in the medium-term, so it is likely that Whereilive.com.au will eventually move towards the Google-Yahoo model of sponsored ads for business and classified searches and greater prominence given to business listings who pay to advertise with richer media, as opposed to the – albeit free – text listing as supplied. 

So, as an incentive to join up, Whereilive is giving new registered users a chance to win overnight accommodation for two people at the Mecure Hotel on North Quay and two Riverlife Adventure Centre sessions. One randomly selected user each week, until September 10, will win the package.

A version of this article appear in City News, 24 August 2006.