The mailboxes will have a one-gigabyte capacity. Revenue will come from advertising banners, according to key words in the text.
A week after launching a one-gigabyte e-mail service in Israel, Internet portal Walla! has announced the extension of the service to the US. Walla! also plans to expand the activity to countries in Europe and other places worldwide. The new service supports all languages. Walla! has founded a joint venture with Cydoor Technologies, which specializes in online advertising for the world’s leading sites, to market the service in the US. Cydoor will allocate media space on sites with large advertising exposure, such as Kazaa, to market Walla!’s new service.
Walla! decided to inaugurate its one-gigabyte e-mail service using a unique development, which significantly compresses information, enabling a large volume of information to be kept in a smaller storage space.
Walla!’s business model is based on automatic scanning of mail reaching surfers by an advanced system, which will recognize key words in the text. Banners appearing on the pages will be attached to the textual content. The key words in the text will be highlighted, and become links. Clicking on the links will connect the surfer with the advertiser linked to the word. Google has also announced that it will use a similar model for its service.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on July 7, 2004