Well I will focus only on the two Indian players who are pushing their email solutions via a marketing blitz on TV they are Rediffmail and zapakmail.
Rediffmail is an offering by a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq called rediff.com.
They have many offerings like personal blogs,auction site,shopping etc etc but their focus has been on creating an Indian portal and their main offering has been their email service. I have been a user of their email service for four years now and even though I have moved onto gmail now for my emailing needs I still do maintain my Rediffmail account.
They have recently been carrying ads to promote their new rediffmail interface which says it is fast and they providing unlimited storage space.
well the new interface is a standard three pane interface
their javascript engine is ok i guess they have picked up scripts for their ajax interface engine from sites like this and I think rest of the thing is written in house or just the notices from the code taken away from the code snippet.
but their search sucks big time it is painfully slow
Well next one for review is zapakmail
This is also a standard three pane but frankly looks like a rip off from the new aol mail interface but under the hood this is a programmers delight with goodies like dojo ,trimpath going into the making of this ajax interface engine and also they use google analytics to track their user behavior but the thing that i found irritating was that once you login for the first time you are taken to a plain old web 1.0 interface for the email system and then you are given an option to move to the new power mail beta zapakmail ( I mean WTF is the point of having a app in a web 2.0 era which is brand new with two interfaces traditional web and ajax based one )
This offering is by zapak who also have a casual gaming portal called zapak.com and am sure have many more offerings up their sleeves they have ads which are served by themselves so it looks like zapak is going after the lucrative advertising pie in the Indian market and looks like rediff is also doing that coz the ads are served from rediff servers itself
Well rediffmail is trying to pull users because it is lightning fast and unlimited storage
and zapakmail is trying to pull users because it is simple and fast and unlimited
What can I say with the entry of now even aol in the Indian market i think the above two vendors are fighting a losing battle as the users who are currently using their services will move to better services being offered by others if they cant improve their offerings to meet the expectations of the users who will outgrow them at a faster pace then the service providers will be able to innovate.
Till this Indian players grow up and offer more innovative offerings to pull users to their service the TV channels will enjoy the money they are getting from both the vendors trying to showcase their offerings to seduce the Indian web user.
