Bloomba will be a threat to Outlook

E-mail users spend the bulk of their time reading and writing, besides
spending a significant amount of time on so-called "overhead tasks",
according to a report by San Francisco-based Ferris Research, which specializes
in messaging and collaborative technologies. The report found that e-mail users
typically spend at least an hour and sometimes two hours per week on overhead
tasks, including waiting for e-mail to download, searching through folders to
find messages, printing out e-mails, and so on.

Of all the overhead tasks cited in the report, sifting through e-mail was
determined to have the greatest impact on a user’s time per week. Software
developer Stata Labs has come up with a solution to minimize the overhead tasks
with Bloomba, its search-based email program, also popularly called the Google
of emails. Following the success of the first version of Bloomba, it will be
soon launching the second version of Bloomba, which is positioned against MS
Outlook. Raymie Stata, co-founder & CTO of Stata Labs, in an interview with
CyberMedia News, talks about the road ahead.

l Can Bloomba
pose a strong challenge to Outlook?

We are highly optimistic that Bloomba will be a strong challenge to Outlook.
When we had launched Bloomba last year in February, we had difficulty in
convincing Outlook users to try Bloomba. But we were surprised that they tried
it out and asked for added features like calendar, which we have integrated in
the second version. When the first version was shipped in November, we had
100,000 downloads, half of which had used Microsoft products.

l But what is
unique about Bloomba?

Version two of Bloomba (Bloomba 2.0) comes with features such as the
calendar functionality, an improved contact tool for organizing address book
information.



It also has an innovative feature called Related Info that uses machine-learning
techniques to anticipate customer needs and present information related to
searches, such as relevant contacts and upcoming meetings.

The Bloomba calendar comes with multiple features such as the
calendar search, which allows customers to use keyword searches to find
important appointment and contact information, as well as the related emails and
attachments.

Calendar Week Picker gives a view of weekly meetings, whereas
Calendar Peek gives the monthly calendar view. Additionally, Bloomba 2.0 will
offer Sync-to-Palm functionality, which will synchronize email, calendar and
contact information to hand-held devices based on the Palm operating system.

l On market
expectations:

We have targeted Bloomba at the heavy email user. We hope to capture 11% of
Outlook users, which constitutes about 28 million people. We also believe that
20 million of Netscape and other email program users will shift to Bloomba.

l On the
company’s plans in India:

Since Bloomba has been developed here in India (by Chennai-based iSoft with
Stata Labs) we are bullish about India. Currently, we have a staff strength of
16 in India, which we plan to double it this fiscal. Besides, iSoft will invest
$1 million to expand the team and product enhancement to service Stata Labs and
its customers. We are also looking forward to the global launch of Bloomba and
are currently exploring strategies to market it–either through direct
marketing or through value-added resellers.

NISHA KURIAN in Chennai/
CyberMedia News