If you spend time in virtually any financial or business centre in the world, you will see people picking up their email, usually on a BlackBerry or similar smartphone mobile device. When the BlackBerry was first introduced to the UK, people didn’t want it, companies wouldn’t pay for it and BlackBerry couldn’t sell it.   

The early adopters were the road warriors who had a real need for email anywhere and on the go.    Overtime, UK businesses adopted and accepted enterprise mobile email because of its convenience and productivity boost, making it a ubiquitous solution. There has not, until now with Momail’s new service, been a mobile email solution that offers the same ubiquitous potential for the even larger consumer market.

Mobile email is actually not a terribly new concept. Ericsson, Nokia and others have had email clients pre-installed on their phones for many years already. What has hampered the adoption of mobile email outside of the office was the perceived complexity to set up and maintain it, the cost of data and the inability to manage the download and use of attachments and large files. Enterprise mobile email was so successful because the majority of businesses used enterprise email solutions, be that Microsoft’s Outlook, IBM’s Lotus or another enterprise solution to which the mobile email could be “strapped” on. The cost per seat in the enterprise model was justifiable through scale. 

Outside of the office, people had to buy an expensive phone and pay a premium to the operators to have emails delivered to that email-enabled smartphone/BlackBerry. The fact that there are a growing number of people who have elected to pay the premium shows how much consumers really do want and are ready to receive their emails - wherever they are - anytime - as long as the costs are predictable and the experience is right. Having understood this market need, Momail has developed a new ubiquitous consumer solution that is simple, cheaper and smarter which works on normal consumer handsets.

Email is as much a data management tool as a communication tool today. Webmail has enabled people to store their documents, files and photos in ‘the cloud’, making them accessible at any internet-enabled computer to edit, resend or review. Mobile email is an extension of this data management capability. In 2005, the second and third most popular WAP destination sites in the US were Yahoo Mail and MSN mail respectively. Only accessing the weather was deemed more important than getting your email live through your mobile phone.   

Just as email was the original killer application for the web, mobile email becomes the mobile web killer app when it is available on any phone, free of subscription fees, cheap to access without tariffs or while roaming, fast to download and operator independent. That is, when it’s easy, then it becomes ubiquitous.

Most consumer solutions to date have required a mobile application download, are data heavy and a decent technical savviness is needed to install and use. Momail’s tagline: “Free mobile mail for everyone” captures its power and is a reality. You can have a technology phobia and still use Momail.   

What was the game change? Momail makes use of the existing email client available on most mobile phones. This means that users do not need to download and install an application to their phone. One just registers by providing one's country, mobile number, model of phone and operator via Momail’s web or WAP site. Then, Momail does the rest. One SMS confirms handset ownership, while a second  automatically configures the data, email and access settings. At that point, the user can add their favourite email accounts (Yahoo, .mac, Gmail, Hotmail or ISP/Pop3) which Momail can pick-up and deliver to their phone. Momail really comes into its own at this point since there are some key features that make it stand out including:

Dynamic sending – If one has multiple email accounts delivered to Momail as ‘portfolio executives’ may easily have, when replying, Momail automatically uses the correct sender email address.

• Reduced Data – The Momail service minimises the data required to receive emails by up to 99 per cent, thus making it faster and cheaper to use Momail email than any other solution.
• Optimised Attachments – Momail adapts and optimises all email specifically for the make and model of handset including attachments. It is capable of converting MSWord and PDF to text which can be read directly on the phone and can optimise 40 different graphic file types. Users can therefore customise how attachments are handled on their device, for example photo attachments are optimally adapted for best fit to the specific phone and then automatically restored to original quality when forwarded on or viewed on a PC.
• True Momail – makes sending email as easy as sending an ordinary SMS using regular mobile numbers rather than an email addresses
• Spam Filtering – Momail’s server side processing performs spam filtering to ensure you only receive the emails you want.
• Push Capable – Momail system provides push technology in networks [who allow it] and to capable devices so that emails can be received automatically to the phone without the need for send and receive.

The target market for consumer mobile email is potentially enormous. Think of the teacher on a school trip who wants to keep in touch with their personal email while away or the university student with a night job who wants cheap email on the go to handle their schedule, projects and social life. Momail finally brings these possibilities to the users simply, cheaply and smartly.

Please do let us know if you have tested the service and what you think, and tell a friend.

If you would like to sign up to be an Ariadne Beta Tester, please email betatesters@ariadnecapital.com

By Julie Meyer and David Scholtz, Ariadne Capital

One of the interesting aspects of working at Ariadne is getting to see a staggeringly wide variety of ideas and innovation. But just occasionally something comes along that makes you stop and think about some of the very bedrock technology innovation.  This happened earlier in the week when a piece hit the news wires about the Japanese government initiating a project to replace the internet with a  new technology by 2020 (some of the headlines during the week put it more sensationally “Japanese government plans to scrap internet”).

Wow, replace the internet, that sounds an ambitious project. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, there are things wrong with the internet as it is: lack of effective quality-of-service, security bolted on at various layers, power consumption of the billions of components, to name a few.  But ripping it up and starting again as the headlines imply is not the  way to go about it. Having two separate parallel networks? No thanks. Having an alternative network architecture driven out of a single government’s initiative to get an edge economically? This is counter to the whole meaning of the internet.

The internet has survived and thrived today because its underlying TCP/IP architecture has be able to embrace change. One part can be replaced or added  without effecting everything else.  At the bottom of the internet stack, faster physical transports have been developed and deployed without affecting the overall network - your dial-up modem has been no doubt now replaced by ASDL broadband and will, in future, be replaced by another faster technology such as VSDL, but it is still the same universal internet you are connected to.

At the higher levels of the stack innovation has flourished at a staggering rate. Simple application protocols such as Gopher and Veronica of the early 1990s have been superseded by http, enabling the web as we now know it. The universal addressing and transport of the internet has built entire industries, and continues to spawn more new and previously uncontemplated businesses.

This is the wonderful thing about the internet: as a universal platform it has fostered unprecedented innovation. The pace of change is set to continue with the initiatives around the semantic web and new technologies allowing for the distribution of computing around the network and hence blurring the boundary between computer and network.

The future of the internet, the platform that has been the powerhouse behind growth and innovation for the last 25 years, depends on evolving it and reinventing from within to remain the single open, universal network, not on ripping it up and starting again or building a second network.

By Fraser Harding, Ariadne's CTO in residence

Is today’s computing paradigm, which has evolved over decades from the single central processing unit to networked or virtualised processing units, on which ‘applications’ are loaded and interact with ‘files’, but otherwise remained basically the same, adequate for tomorrow’s computing requirements?

Visions of ubiquitous computing and ambient computers have been with us for quite a while, mostly created by companies who would like to sell us the wall that turns into a large display, the coffee table that becomes an interaction device, the clock that announces important news, the mobile device with access to a slew of functions. 

Imagine, however, your grandmother trying to install that coffee table: “Please select the SSID for your network”, “Please assign a unique name to this table”, “Please select your server from the list of available servers”, “Please select your proxy settings”, “Select the applications that will run on this device” ... 

Clearly today’s network architecture is not ideal for handling all the devices around us that will be always ‘on’ and will interact with us and with other devices.  What is needed is an environment where there are no more servers and clients, no more applications that start and stop, no more files or documents that are saved, but rather a continuum where objects just exist and interact and are modified according to the environment, where data is not ‘saved’ but rather ‘exists.’ Each device is part of a whole doing things according to its own capabilities.  A ‘matrix’, if you will, just like in the film, where a world just exists and evolves.

For this to happen, several conditions need to be met:

- Data has to exist on the network, and not on one particular device or cluster. Google’s implementations have been impressive in this area.  Once, a whole Google data centre burnt down and users didn’t even noticed.

- Devices of all sorts (from the powerful laptop to the mobile phone to the clock on the wall) have to identify themselves to the network, communicate their inherent capabilities, and run the same functions at different levels according to what they are able to do.

- ‘Applications’, just like data, have to exist on the network and not ‘run’ on a specific processor. They have to split themselves between the powerful servers on the network and the user devices according to device capabilities and availability.  An ‘application’ has to be available from any device and has to be able to switch from one to another without any problems.

Now your grandmother can start writing you a letter on her desktop computer, and then move to the lounge where she can visualise and slightly modify the same letter on the display of the coffee table, without worrying about where she ‘saved’ the letter and without telling the coffee table how to connect to the rest of the network.

Science fiction?  Not really. A very exciting start-up (and Ariadne Capital’s newest portfolio company) by the name of GravityZoo has designed the architecture that will make this new paradigm a reality on the internet. With GravityZoo it is possible have an application ‘exist’ on a huge cluster of computers, and it is possible to access it from a PC at one moment, another PC in the next moment, and a mobile phone in the next.  Imagine, as a realistic scenario, that OpenOffice is “GravityZooed;” it becomes a suite of applications that are always available, with various levels of functionality depending on the capability of the access device.

Isn’t this just a web operating system?  Not really.  We are not talking about a complex application running at a data centre and a browser accessing it.  If everything was possible with a browser, surely Google Earth, Skype or Second Life would not force you to download complex applications in order to use their services.  This is technology that makes individual devices and servers irrelevant.  This links the whole network together into a ‘Matrix’.

By Julie Meyer and Jem Eskenazi, Ariadne Capital