Here’s Bloomba, the Google of e-mail!

E-mail users spend a significant amount of their time on so-called ‘overhead tasks,’ according to a report from San Francisco-based Ferris Research, which specializes in messaging and collaborative technologies.

The report found that e-mail users typically spend at least an hour and sometimes two hours per week on overhead tasks, including waiting for e-mail to download, searching through folders to find messages, printing out e-mail, etc. Of all the overhead tasks cited in the report, searching through e-mail was determined to have the most impact on a user's time per week.

Software developer Stata Labs Inc. has come up with a solution to minimize the overhead tasks with its search - based email program - Bloomba, popularly called the Google of email. Following the success of the first version of Bloomba, it will be soon launching the second version of Bloomba, which is positioned against MS Outlook, remarked Co-Founder & CTO of Stata Labs, Raymie Stata in an interaction with Nisha Kurian of CyberMedia News.





Do you believe that Bloomba will pose a strong challenge to Outlook?



We are highly optimistic that Bloomba will be a strong challenge to Outlook. When we had launched Bloomba last year in the month of February, we had difficulty in convincing the Outlook users to try Bloomba. But we were surprised they tried it out and asked for added features like the calendar, which we have integrated in the second version. When the first version of Bloomba was shipped in the month of November, we had 100,000 downloads, of which half of them had initially used Microsoft products.






What is unique about Bloomba?



The version two of Bloomba comes with features such as the calendar functionality, an improved contacts tool for organizing address book information and an innovative feature called the Related Info that uses machine learning techniques to anticipate customer needs and present information related to Bloomba searches, such as relevant contacts and upcoming meetings.



The Bloomba calendar comes with multiple features such as the calendar search, which allows customers to use keyword searches to find important appointment and contact information, as well as the related emails and attachments. Calendar week picker gives a view of weekly meetings, whereas calendar peek gives the monthly calendar view.


Additionally, Bloomba 2.0 will offer synch-to-Palm functionality, which will synchronize email, calendar and contact information to hand-held devices based on the Palm operating system.





What are your expectations?



We have targeted Bloomba at the heavy email users. We hope to capture 11 percent of Outlook users, which constitutes about 28 million people. Plus we believe that 20 million of Netscape and other email program users will shift to Bloomba.






What are your plans for India?



Since Bloomba has been developed here in India (by Chennai-based Integrated SoftTech Solutions Pvt Ltd, (iSoft) with Stat Labs co-founder and chairman Ray Stata as its Board Director), we have some plans for India too. Currently we have staff strength of 16 people, which we plan to double by this fiscal. Besides iSoft will be investing $one million to expand the team and product enhancement to service Stata Labs and its customers.



We are also looking for worldwide launch of Bloomba and are currently exploring strategies as to how to market it, either through direct marketing or through value added resellers.

CyberMedia News