On Message with Ben Gross

Over the weekend, Google improved Gmail integration with Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Users can now open Microsoft Word attachments directly into Docs & Spreadsheets where they can be saved, shared or edited further. Gmail gained integrated handling of Excel spreadsheets late last year. Google often pushes new features gradually across all accounts so this feature [...]

Spam is now officially entrenched in mainstream American culture. ” You can listen to Penn (of Penn and Teller) Jillette’s January 23rd, 2007 Penn Radio show “Solving The SPAM Problem” online or download a MP3.

The O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference will be held from February 27 until March 1, 2007 in Burlingame, CA.
Conference topics include:

Open Source Software and Hardware / Open Telephony
Wireless Mobility and Mobile Telephony
WiFi Telephony, the Telephone Network as a Platform
Intersection of VoIP telephony and Web Services Infrastructure
Voice as Data
Ethnography, Culture, and People
Usability and Experience
Business Models
Early Warning Signals

The [...]

The latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview. Pew reports are especially interesting as they are nationally representative and follow a consistent methodology and their data is well respected. Pew also makes some of their datasets and questionnaires available for further research.

A social networking [...]

RSA Conference 2007 will be held from February 5th through 9th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.
The conference will include 19 tracks with more than 220 sessions along with more than 300 companies exhibiting at conference expo. Featured keynote speakers include Colin Powell, Tom Kelley General Manager IDEO, and Ray Kurzweil.
The conference [...]

The 9th General Meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) will be held in San Francisco, California from January 29 through January 31, 2007. January 29th sessions are reserved for MAAWG members. Meeting registration will close on January 25, 2007 at 5PM PST.
Sessions and panels include:

Keynote by Howard A. Schmidt
Increases in Spam: What’s Really [...]

Along with each new year comes a new crop of predictions and summaries. Here are some selections from around the web relevant to readers of Messaging News.

Akonix Delivers Predictions for Corporate Instant Messaging in 2007
Collaboration Loop: Looking Back…Looking Forward
Converge Digest: Ten Predictions about the Cell Phone Industry in 2007
Digital Identity World: Identity predictions for 2007
eWEEK: [...]

Scott Rosenberg’s new book, Dreaming in Code, will arrive in bookstores in a little over a week. The subtitle of the book is Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software.
The book chronicles the early history of the Open Source Applications Foundation’s (OSAF) email and PIM project called Chandler. [...]

Yesterday, Cisco Systems agreed to acquire IronPort Systems for approximately $830 million in cash and stock. IronPort specializes in appliances for email security, filtering and anti-spam. IronPort had itself acquired email encryption vendor PostX last November.
Cisco also provides a public annual summary of acquisitions.

Preliminary call for papers for the Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2007)
The conference will be held Thursday August 2nd and Friday August 3rd, 2007 in Mountain View, California.

“The Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) invites the submission of papers for its fourth meeting. Papers are invited on all aspects of electronic communication including [...]