What happens when your browser-based eService shuts down or goes bankrupt. Read this article in Forbes by John C. Dvorak.

While on an extended vacation, I found a new browser-based email service that is better than the ones I mentioned earlier here: mail2web.com

Brightmail offers to pre-read your POP3 mailbox and strip out messages from known spammers, leaving only the good email for you to read. The suspected Spam is kept on the Brightmail servers in case you want to review it someday.

I registered for the service, but my first attempt failed because I told them I was using Eudora Pro when I was actually using Eudora Light -- the setup instructions are wrong. (Hint: you need your POP3 login to end up as user%mail.xxx.com@mail.brightmail.com, where mail.xxx.com is your existing POP server). After I straightended that out, setup was easy. I will let you know if the filtering actually works.

One more thing, Brightmail does not work if your mail server is being a firewall.

The Kingdom of Tonga is installing a high-speed wireless network to provide voice, internet and video. The contractor, www.dandin.com, is from Silicon Valley. Link from Tomalak's Realm.

Article about an interesting venture capital business model: create funds in small college towns that are nice places to life. One of the startups they funded was Employease, browser-based personnel services.

SecondSaver provides an open-source calendar/schedular system as a free eService. Found via webapps.

Omniupdate allows you to update a web page from any browser. Great for when you spot a typo while showing your web page to someone at their office! Of course, you must put a link to their editor service at the bottom of each page, but for a small fee you can make it very small and discrete.

One of the major promises of eServices is custom-manufactured products, connecting the customer directly to the manufacturing process. Jakok Nielsen has a good article about designing good usability for product configurators. Configurators show up when ordering computers and other products. Beware of pull-down option menus.

Recently I designed a business card on-line at Staples and found the user interface excellent. Interestingly, the Staples stationary-design service is actually an eService of another company, Easiest.com.

Will business resist ASPs because the performance will never be as good as PC-based software?

Message boards or discussion forums are a good feature for any web site that has a devoted following. Accessboards provides free message boards. So does Bravenet, which is good about letting you customize the layout of the web pages to your site design. Some features that would be nice to control abusive postings, but which you probably won't find in either of these free services: confirmation of register user email by requiring a reply, moderation (approval) of new postings. Free services usually display banner ads. For more message boards, visit TheFreeSite.

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