Mailtracker For iOS Brings Read Receipt Functionality To Apple’s Default Mail Application

Want to stalk people via email, so you’ll know the moment they read your message? Or maybe you want to know if they gave your message a good look, instead of only a glance? Mailtracker, a newly launched app for iPhone, allows you to do just that, and more.

Email stalking? Oh god, why am I telling you about this one? I’m already imagining the horror of the PR person’s well-timed, follow-up phone call thanks to this technology.

But I have to admit, it’s pretty impressive that you can now easily do this type of email tracking from your iPhone, while still using Apple’s default Mail application.

To be clear, the Mailtracker app itself is not meant to be a mail client that you would use to send and receive emails, but rather a tracking application for monitoring your email analytics. Currently, the service works with emails sent via Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, and Outlook.com/Hotmail accounts, the company says, and it will add support for Microsoft Exchange in the future, given the obvious business implications for its software.

In addition to alerting you when an email has been read, Mailtracker offers other analytics, too, including how many times the email was viewed, how long the email was read for, the recipient’s location information, and their device details. So yes, very stalker-y.

You can also star and mute notifications and quickly take action after an email is read using Mailtracker’s ”Reply” and “Call” features.

The company, Answerbook, is the third startup from co-founders Chris Nguyen and Lee Liu, who previously built and sold an early location-based job finder acquired by onTargetjobs, and later launched TeamSave, a social commerce platform that helped publishers, including eBay, get into the daily deals market.

While there, Nguyen says they began to realize the importance of email messages and what it meant when those emails were open and read. However, it wasn’t until last summer, when he and his wife came across an ad for a San Francisco apartment on Craigslist that sounded a little fishy, that the idea for Mailtracker was born.

Nguyen asked Liu if he could whip up a prototype that would let them extract some basic information about the ad’s poster via email. Using this early version of what later became Mailtracker, they quickly learned that the email sender was actually based in Nigeria and read the email on a Windows PC for 31 seconds. (Yes, the apartment was too good to be true, as it turned out).

Now that prototype has morphed into the consumer-facing product Mailtracker.

Like other mail analytics providers, Mailtracker also uses tracking pixel technology - a small, transparent image that’s downloaded when an email is viewed, allowing the sender to track the image request from their own server. But what makes the app interesting is that it’s introducing this type of tracking on the iPhone.

To do so, Mailtracker requires the installation of a configuration profile on the iPhone to get started, which is what allows the app to insert the pixels before the message is sent from Apple’s Mail client.

The company is now working on a version for Android and desktop users, due out in a few months, as well as a MailTracker API that will help business customers track not just opens, but also email engagement. The API will rate recipients based on their email opens, how long messages are read, and how many times they read the message.

(TechCrunch readers can enter “techcrunchMT” in the sign-up box here to receive early beta access.)

“It’s kind of like an engagement score, or engagement as a service,” explains Nguyen. “We want to be able to be plug-and-play quick, kind of like the Twilio model,” he says of the forthcoming developer option.

For now, the consumer-facing app is free to use with two email accounts, and those who want to add more can pay for the Pro version of the service via in-app purchase (either $4.99/month or $44.99/year).

Mailtracker is a free download here on iTunes.

Welcome to MailTracker from MailTracker app on Vimeo.

View the original article here

SRCH2 Brings Its Fast, Google-Like Search Technology To Android Developers And Consumers

SRCH2, an enterprise software company founded by ex-Googlers and Stanford PhD’s and focused on building faster, more efficient search technology, is expanding its reach to mobile consumers and mobile developers. The company is now launching a new Java SDK for Android app developers, which will allow third parties to integrate the SRCH2 technology into their own applications.

In addition, a consumer-facing mobile app showcasing what SRCH2 technology can do has also gone live in Google Play, offering end users the ability to search and find any contact, message, calendar invite, music, app and more.

To give you an idea of the various use cases for consumers, this search functionality supports searching by things as specific as a song’s artist or a title fragment, or users can look for an address from a calendar invite from a particular time frame, for example.

Founded back in 2008 by ex-Googler Chen Li, also formerly of IBM and HP, SRCH2 has been primarily focused on its in-memory search engine technology for enterprise customers. The technology, a competitor to Lucene and Endeca, is now used by customers like CBS, Huawei, and most recently HTC, which is planning to integrate SRCH2 natively into their new Android smartphones launching in the first half of this year.

In fact, it was HTC’s move to integrate SRCH2 into the kernel that gave the company the idea about making this move to mobile, and the subsequent launch of its SDK.

“When we first did that deal, we started realizing that there’s some opportunities there that maybe we should have thought through a little bit better,” admits SRCH2 CEO Dev Bhatia. “Why is it that a major handset manufacturer wants to run this kind of an enterprise search software inside a handset?,” they asked themselves. “As it turns out, the way it’s built is really efficient, and it’s small enough and thin enough that it can do that high-performance stuff…and still fit on a handset or any device,” Bhatia says.

While the datacenter-focused technology was 40 times faster than competitors, the company claims that on mobile, it’s now 400 times faster. (SRCH2 references a study from a third-party report as the basis for these figures.) Plus, it uses less power, which is also an important factor on mobile.

The SDK is designed to be integrated into mobile applications using 5 lines of code, and once there, it provides the end users of that application with a feature set not previously available via other search utilities.

For example – as you can see when using the new SRCH2 for Mobile consumer app – the app can adapt itself as you use it, learning and returning more relevant results the more you interact with it, while also offering things like instant, typo-tolerant search-as-you-type, index all your phone’s application, log your interactions with them to rank those you use more often higher, and more.

Though clearly, they’re a technology provider, not a design-focused company:

The company envisions the initial customers for this new SDK will be more in the business utility space, and likely on the enterprise mobility side of things. Bhatia details a potential use case, explaining:

“Let’s say the client is a major cloud enabler of sales people, hypothetically. Salesperson #1 in Austin, Texas logs a call and makes a change to his data…that gets propagated to the cloud as is available to salesperson #2 who’s in Brazil interacting with the same global client,” says Bhatia.

“What I’ve just described is federated search for mobile – no one in the world can do that, because we’re the only search engine that can sit on a phone. And the potential for that is massive,” he adds.

In addition, that company’s partners could connect to that search capability via API, which is where the Java SDK comes in.

SRCH2 is backed by funding from Data Collective and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The new SDK is here, and the consumer app is a free download on Google Play.

View the original article here

BlinkMail Brings A Mailbox-Like Email Triage Experience To Mac Users

A new application called BlinkMail, launching into beta today, offers Mac users a different way to manage their email inbox from their desktop. Though competing in the same general space as other OS X mail clients like Sparrow or Airmail, what makes BlinkMail interesting is that its main focus is on email triage. Its user interface is inspired by gesture-based mobile apps like Mailbox, letting you quickly move through your message list by taking decisive actions, like archive, delete, reply or even send to Evernote or Dropbox, for example.

BlinkMail is the latest product from Moscow’s YaM Labs, a SaaS solution provider and maker of tools for more efficient meetings and email add-ons like Powerbot. The 10-person team is headed by Anatoly Gaverdovsky, a Russian entrepreneur and former CEO of VDI (EPAM) and CTO Pavel Yakhitov, previously of Mail.ru. The startup is backed by $2 million in funding from Foresight Ventures and other investors.

Like its earlier tools, BlinkMail’s overall goal is one involving increased efficiency. After installing the email client, you can customize your Mac’s arrow keys as you like, setting one as the delete or archive action, another for replies, one for adding a label, another for sending the message to a cloud storage service, and so on.

BlinkMail today integrates with Dropbox, Evernote, Things, and OmniFocus for saving emails and notes, while also letting users quickly accept or decline event invitations from its main interface.

Its keyboard shortcuts enable users to get through as many as 100 emails in about 200 seconds, the company claims.

BlinkMail is a free download (for Mac OS X 10.9 and above), but a premium version for $19.99 is on the horizon, which will include support for multiple accounts, reminders and the Evernote integration. iPhone and Windows applications are also in the works, the company says.

Personally, I’m unsure that our desktop-based email clients should try to exactly mirror our mobile experiences – after all, the reason why standalone triage apps for smartphones took off is because full email management solutions aren’t really available (yet) for the smaller screen. Better to do lightweight tasks, like email clean-out, for example, and leave the more complicated emails and appointment-setting for when we’re back at our desktops or laptops.

That being said, my perspective on email comes from having spent years in corporate environments using Outlook, and later on moving to cloud-based — and fairly robust — solutions like Gmail and Google Apps. A new generation of users, however, is growing up mobile-first, where tablets like the iPad are their first computers. For these users, desktop apps that more closely resemble their mobile counterparts may be preferred.

At the very least, for either group, BlinkMail could serve as a complementary app to your preferred, default email experience.

The beta version of BlinkMail is available for Mac users here.

View the original article here