Gmail

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2 spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases. Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits. Please don’t make me pay for more storage.

Source: TechCrunch

Continuing its quest to bridge the world’s of broadcast television and the Web, Syndicaster is adding several online distribution options for local TV stations, including the ability to publish video clips to YouTube, AOL (via Brightcove), Yahoo and other sites. Syndicaster is an online editing and video-clip management service that allows TV stations to any broadcast news clip and repurpose it for the Web by publishing it to their own Websites or through its sister service ClipSyndicate (both Syndicaster and ClipSyndicate are divisions of Critical Media).

Now Syndicaster is adding one-click distribution options to the major video sites so that local TV affiliates or station groups can post their videos to AOL Money & Finance or their YouTube channel, and manage it all from one place. One feature that TV customers will appreciate is the ability to set embargo windows for each service, allowing a TV station to publish hot news immediately to its own site, then 24 or 36 hours later to video partner sites where it makes the most money, and then maybe finally to YouTube.

Syndicaster has also recently added an on-location feature which allows TV reporters and crews to upload clips directly from wherever they are capturing the footage, and making that footage available as Web video clips even if it never gets airtime. Affiliated stations can also go to Syndicaster to find footage and use it either on the Web or on-air, depending on their arrangements with each other. When that airplane crashed in Buffalo, NY recently, a local station put all of its footage on Syndicaster, and other affiliated stations around the country used it to grab video footage for their own on-air reports.

Syndicaster charges a flat subscription fee of about $850 a month per TV station or news organization. With 60 paying customers, that comes to about $50,000 a month a few months after launch, with a lot of runway for growth. Syndicaster is exploring ways to bring its online editing and video distribution platform to consumers, but so far it is stumped in that area. CEO Sean Morgan admits:

Look, I don’t know how to make money on the consumer. I’d like to make money on this. We are getting great traction from broadcasters. Bringing it to newspapers is obviously the next path forward.

In May, the company plans to expand its reach to newspaper sites with Syndicaster for Newspapers. As news organizations of all stripes make video a bigger component of their online offerings, Syndicaster is hoping to become the industry standard for ingesting, editing, and distributing these videos. Maybe the A.P. should look into it.

Source: TechCrunch – by Erick Schonfeld

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc’s AOL will launch a personal finance site on Tuesday, adding to a roster of new properties that do not bear its name.

The new site, called WalletPop.com, is a spin-off of AOL’s Money & Finance channel and will focus on consumer and personal finance. AOL Money & Finance will continue to business and investing news and tools.

The launch of another site not bearing the AOL brand is part of a plan to create new online businesses courting younger audiences unfamiliar with a company whose heyday ended with the popularity of high speed Internet access.

TMZ.com, a celebrity entertainment site created by AOL and a unit of Warner Bros, added 35 percent more users in May, now attracting about 9.2 million visitors monthly, according to comScore. Asylum, which the company said is now the top men’s site, attracted 2.7 million unique visitors in May.

Walletpop offers “a comprehensive, accessible, and interactive web site focused exclusively on the money matters of real people, such as debt management, finding the best deals, saving, retirement, insurance, real estate, banking, taxes and more,” Marty Moe, Senior Vice President, AOL Money & Finance said in a statement.

Walletpop’s launch follows on the heels of the July launch of BigDownload.com, a site targeting PC gamers.

Yahoo!