Freemail launch marred by glitches
Summary Description Technology failed the latest Australian freemail service at its launch in Sydney last week.
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Roullas Top10 Simon Vandore

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Editorial InformationArticle Location
Article Topic Internet
Story Order 6
Story Group 980426
Post Date 20/04/98 07:39 AM Status Posted Entered by Angus Kidman on 20/04/1998 07:39 AM


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Introduction
Technology failed the latest Australian freemail service at its launch in Sydney last week. The hype was faultless, but nothing else went according to plan.

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An hourglass and a blank screen was all that appeared when Senator Richard Alston clicked the remote mouse button to launch InfoBank Online, which offers a free online personal organiser system including a diary with automated reminder messages, a contacts database, online clipboard and bookmarks, a search engine and 2M of hard disk space.
Alston and the new company's directors spent the next 20 minutes standing in semi-darkness answering media questions -- nobody wanted to step back into the incredibly harsh spotlight trained on the speaker's podium. When the site demonstration eventually came online, most guests departed for their next appointments.
Earlier, the Senator jokingly expressed concern about InfoBank's "soft porn channel" after business development manager Cinnamon Pollard pointed out that 70% of the service's initial users were young, single males. She said they could use the service to access erotic information without their employers finding out.
The service is also controversial for its use of the domain 'InfoBank.au.com' instead of the standard 'InfoBank.com.au'. The au.com domain is actually a US-registered name space owned by Sydney-based NetRegistry, a company set up by a European partnership. Domain names within au.com are cheaper than the standard Australian Internet 'com.au' format (administered by Melbourne IT) and NetRegistry predicts it will have the second-largest name space in Australia by the end of the year. Questions about the potentially confusing domain name were deflected with the statement, "com.au is a brand, au.com is a brand".
InfoBank claims it has taken the freemail concept to the next level by integrating personal organisation tools for the first time in the world, though these are not yet capable of including converted information from more traditional databases. It is presenting its service as a "bank" for storing information in the same way as a financial institution stores money.
InfoBank intends to make its money from advertising and sponsorship, though it guarantees absolute privacy for its users and does not intend to sell user information to advertisers. InfoBank's information architect Rob Manson said the company hopes to be making $10,000 to $20,000 a month from advertising in the near future and expects to have 100,000 users within 12 months.
It also intends to avoid exploitation by spammers by only allowing email to be sent via the Web interface, with a maximum of around 30 recipients per message. Stored information will be backed up and Infobank's hardware provides a level of redundancy, but the start-up company is not able to offer compensation for data that goes missing.


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