Walla Communications (TASE: WALA), Israel’s leading Internet portal, announced the official launch of its free-to-all web-based 1 gigabyte mailbox today. Walla! thus becomes the first company in the world to launch an e-mailbox of this capacity commercially. Other companies, among them international search engine Google, are still operating this kind of service on a trial basis. "Globes" reported in April that Walla! was about to offer the service.
From today, Walla! will upgrade the estimated 1 million existing e-mail boxes of its subscribers to the new boxes. The company estimates that the upgrading process will take a few days. Walla! will also offer the huge e-mailbox free to new subscribers. In addition to the mailbox, Walla! provides free anti-spam and anti-virus services. Walla! CEO Ilan Israely says Walla! was able to decide on raising the capacity of its e-mailboxes thanks to a unique development by the company that makes it possible to compress the information substantially so that even a very large quantity of data will not take up too much storage.
The new e-mailbox will enable subscribers to receive individual messages of up to 10 megabytes, or 30 megabytes for paying subscribers.
At the same time, Walla!'s business model is somewhat problematic as far as privacy in concerned. Messages reaching surfers will automatically be scanned by an advanced system that will spot keywords in the text. Banners will be attached to the messages on the basis of these keywords,. In the text itself, the keywords will be highlighted, and will become hyperlinks to relevant advertisers. So for example if someone writes about his or her latest trip overseas, the recipient will see banners offering travel bargains, and a click on the word "flight" will lead to, say, Arkia's website. Google has also announced that it will use a similar business model for its service, and Israely adds that the method involves no legal problem of invasion of privacy.
Israely estimates that, at first, surfers will use much less storage capacity than 1 gigabyte, but he expects the volume to rise in time.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on June 29, 2004