Erictric

Genius: ‘MapEnvelop’ Leaves No Questions As To Where Your Mail Came From

Ever get a letter in the mail and asked yourself, “where the $#&% did this come from?!” A Turkish designer has seemingly come up with a clever solution, and it’s aptly called the MapEnvelop. Using Google Maps imagery, the inner walls of the envelope is blanketed by a map to indicate where on a map a sender’s address is.

True it is that most folks wouldn’t care to know where on a map a sender’s address is — but it’s clever nonetheless.

Two more shots after the article break. More »

What’s Next With Gmail in 2010?

It’s almost certain that many of us are not sad to see 2009 go. It was an interesting year, certainly, but one filled with economic turmoil, social unrest, and no camera-equipped iPod Touch!

A recent post on the Gmail Blog had me thinking. “What’s next?” I asked. Perhaps we may see a new user interface. Perhaps even more features from the Gmail labs. It’s certainly fun to speculate upon. Of course, if any of you know me well — there was no clear response.

As someone who speaks to many people on a daily basis, I find more and more individuals are making the move to Google’s mail services. It’s reliable, easy, and intuitive. And while I haven’t got a clear answer as to what to expect in 2010 – I’m sure that Google will continue to wow its users, and harvest many more from other providers.

So what we want to know is: what do YOU think will happen next with Gmail? Will it grow legs and conquer the Earth? What do you hope to see? Let us know in the comments below.

Get It There Sooner! Tomorrow Is Free Shipping Day!

If you’re waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the perfect deal and you’re shopping online — listen up. Over seven-hundred retailers are bracing for Thursday, December 17th, 2009. Nope — it’s not Cyber Monday or Black Friday (we said Thursday!), it’s free shipping day! For those of you who don’t know what free shipping is, get out — now. Seriously — follow this link.

Popular brands participating in Free Shipping Day include TomTom, RitzCamera, Wirefly, and many others.

According to the Free Shipping Day website, “The Free Shipping Day promotions for participating merchants will be revealed on Thursday, December 17 at 12:00AM EST. Some merchants may have minimum order restrictions. More than half will have free shipping on all orders.”

Though hundreds of retailers and other outlets are already participating, the list continues to grow — so you may want to keep checking back for those free shipping deals!

We’re here for ya.

[ via Mashable ]

Google Launches Free Holiday Postcard Service

Google must think that we’ve all been really nice this year. Thus far Google has provided free in-flight Wi-Fi on all Virgin America flights, and free Wi-Fi in 54 airports nationwide for the holidays. Now, Google has introduced a free holiday postcard service. You see, Google thinks it’s way too much work to “go to a store, aimlessly wander through the aisles, choose a card, wait in line to pay for it, go to the post office, pick up some stamps, etc.,” just to send a real cardboard postcard via snail-mail. More »

Google to Keep Google Voice Mail Messages Off Search Results

After this morning buzz about searchable Google Voice mail messages, Google has decided to tweak the service to keep these messages from being picked up by search engines. This doesn’t mean you are not going to be able to post your voicemails in your personal blogs or websites anymore. It’s just an extra measure to protect people’s privacy.

This is what a Google Spokesperson said:

“We can certainly understand people would want to make their voice mails public on their own sites, but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website. We made a change to prevent these voice mails from being crawled so their content will not be indexed.”

[ PCWorld ]

Another BlackBerry Outage Reported

Here we go again. I’ve been having terrible trouble this evening with my BlackBerry sending/receiving messages.  Turns out that I’m not the only one. Apparently a sporadic outage is occurring at the moment and it has many BlackBerry users email-less.

More information on this as we get it.

Update: This doesn’t appear to be affecting all BlackBerry email users, as far as we know.

Update II: As far as things go on my end, they appear to be all clear.

Push Gmail For iPhone Arrives in Peace

So here it is: Push Gmail access for the iPhone. Not even the ‘push’ feature on the iPhone does it, but it is now possible thanks to Microsoft. Yes, I said it — Microsoft.

Essentially, Apple didn’t make any changes here (they’d probably want you to buy an OS upgrade), but Google has come up with a work around using Microsoft Exchange.

To finally get your Gmail pushed to your iPhone, you need to first set up a Microsoft Exchange account on your iPhone. Of course, you will need to populate that with your Gmail username/password and a few other bits of information (see the link at the bottom of this post).

Surely, this will be of use to iPhone and Gmail users everywhere. For more information on the setup process, click here.

[ TechCrunch ]

New Gmail Feature: Auto-Unsubscribe From Mailing Lists

In effort to help users control the flow of, well, annoying mail to their inboxes (particularly mailing list messages), Gmail now attempts to unsubscribe you from said mailing lists on your behalf.

The features kicks in when you attempt to “Report Spam” on a certain message. Users will get a pop-up (see photo) which will allow them to automatically unsubscribe to annoying messages (no offense, Sears). More »