
The gremlins seem to be playing havoc with our plans to report from the Symbian Smartphone Show today. The first post from the show which went up just after lunchtime, seems to have disappeared, so here it is again, hopefully not looking too different to the original…
First, to the Emoze stand, where we find the company in bullish mood, with a raft of new announcements. First is the upgrading of its free software that provides secure push email to mobile phones all over the world, to support Google Apps, the packaged collection of Google applications including e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and web authoring applications. Google Apps enables consumers and businesses to use their own custom domain names with several Google products, including Gmail. Families, business and educational institutions can create their own domain name for emails with professional addresses like johnsmith@mycompany. Emoze already supports push emails from the Gmail domain. Now, with the updated emoze version, emails can be pushed to the consumers mobile device even from private domains on the Google server.
Second, Emoze Marketing Director Caron Tal tells us, the Enterprise edition of Emoze will launch globally next week. This, as regular readers will recall, is Emozes corporate email solution that will be sold in batches of 50 licences at a cost of 500 (250) for each 50 users per year, a price that significantly undercuts the cost to a corporation of running a fleet of Blackberrys, which Emoze says is around 30 – 50 per month for each device. With such dramatic savings to be had, we suggested, some may find the figures hard to believe. But Tal insists:
We have no problems in selling it. Once people see its better and costs less they are very happy to try it out. Its secure, and theres no need to worry about data storage. We have a couple of companies trying it in Israel, and they are over the moon.
Finally, says Tal, Emoze will launch a Java-based email solution before the end of the year. The current Emoze solution runs off the native client of each handset. Tal insists that email attachments on a mobile look much better when seen via the handsets native client, but says:
There is a huge mass market out there who will only download a Java application because its so simple; one click and its all configured for you. We said to ourselves that we were limiting ourselves to a couple of million users when we could probably have a billion. Thats why were doing it.