Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

South-by-Southwest (aka SXSW) happens to be where one of the biggest parties happens for the web technology industry.  Each year tens of thousands of people from around the world end up taking over Austin, TX for a few weeks to celebrate music, film, and emerging technology.

Each year they open up the conference to allow attendees to present their own panels or presentations to the masses.  This year Rackspace has submitted 11 potential topics and we need your help to get in.  Right now SXSW has opened up the Panel Picker for 2010 which allows anyone to vote on topics they would like to see presented at the conference.

You can check out the topics that we have submitted and vote on the ones you would like to see presented.  You will need to sign up for an account to vote, but its a painless process.  You can also check out and vote on other Interactive Panels, Music and Film Events.

Please note voting closes on September 4th, 2009.

Web designers in Southwest Virginia are plentiful but dispersed. With so much talent in the area, it’s hard to believe that no forum existed for designers to share ideas and thoughts. So, Jacob Puckett and I, members of the Rackspace design team, partnered with the NewVA Corridor Technology Council (NCTC) and Modea, a local digital design agency to form a group to remedy that.

The group’s mission is to provide support and education for local designers interested in interactive design principles.

Each meeting is participant-driven revolving around a presentation on a specific topic. So far, Jacob Puckett of Rackspace, has presented on paper prototyping.  David Poteet, president of New City Media, enlightened the group on mental models.   The development of Click ‘n Pledge for non-profit web ventures was discussed by Thomas Becher, president of the Roanoke-based public relations and advertising firm, tba.  In the future, the group plans to delve into wireframing and designing for mobile devices. At the end of each meeting, the floor is opened to discuss the presentation and any other new and interesting developments in the world of web design.

If you’re a web designer in Southwest Virginia, you can join the fun too! More participation drives the flow of opinions and experiences making the group even more beneficial to everyone involved. To find out when the next meeting will be held, contact me.

Customer feedback is a huge part of our success here at Mailtrust. It’s how we built one of the fastest growing email hosting businesses in the world with over 900,000 happy users. And, as you can imagine, we want to continue that trend. So, we created a new way to get your ideas on how we can do a better job.
Meet Idea Central. Use Idea Central to vote for different ideas and suggestions from other customers, even some from Mailtrust employees. Or, if you have a great idea on how we can improve the service, submit your ideas. We’ll take all your feedback and use it to help shape the future direction of your inbox.
So, got an idea? Tell us about it. We are listening.

How often do you get a chance to step foot in the 32nd Best Place to Work in the United States? Well, after years of attending local career fairs we figured it was finally time to have one of our very own.
We’ve grown immensely since moving into our new location in the University City Mall in Blacksburg and in doing so, our presence has become a lot stronger in the community. A lot of local “techies” have heard our name and we wanted to give them a chance to see what we’re all about. We’re opening our doors this Wednesday, October 8th from 12:00-7:00pm for students, professionals, and anyone interested in touring our office, speaking with employees, or learning more about Mailtrust.
Employees will be onsite and are excited to be able to share what Mailtrust does, what our culture means to them, and what our future looks like.
Feel free to stop by for a tour or to apply for a job. We’ll provide food to snack on, a ping pong table to play on, a slide show to watch, and Mailtrust give-aways.

Here at Mailtrust, our developers love to innovate and provide customers with new tools that increase their productivity. Sometimes it makes sense for us to develop the solution from scratch ourselves and other times we look to build on top of an existing solution. One of the new features to our Noteworthy product line is Noteworthy Sync. When we decided to begin offering this service to our customers, we had to evaluate the different options available to us to determine which approach was better.
Ultimately we decided to leverage the open-source code of a company that specializes in this kind of synchronization software. Funambol’s data synchronization server offered a flexible way to integrate with our existing systems—the entire project is open source, cross platform, and built on open standards. With Funambol, we are able to work off of their existing code, improving and tweaking features here and there to more tightly integrate with our services, and ultimately we return our changes and bug fixes to them. To date, they have adopted several of our changes into their core code base.
They’ve also adopted our Blackberry-Sync plugin—a plugin that was developed in house—into their core services, and that is something we are very proud of. We’ve been working with Funambol closely for the last several months to improve the plugin and extend its features. In the process, we began coordinating on other projects, and comparing plans and roadmaps. We hope to continue to work with them as time goes on, and we have some exciting projects planned.
At their JavaOne presentation on mobile email in April, Funambol recognized some of our developers as core contributors in their “Hall of Fame.” Just the other day, one of our developers got the opportunity to discuss some recent development experience with Funambol and Noteworthy Sync for BlackBerry devices. You can read all about the experience online at Funambol’s company blog.

We hit an interesting recruiting challenge recently. Our company hires a lot of software developers and we’ve done a decent job tapping into the huge resource across the street – Virginia Tech. We go to all of the VT career fairs and most of the computer science and engineering students have at least heard of Mailtrust.
However, one of our part-timers, who is a CS student at VT, told me a few months ago that although most students have heard of us, they don’t always think of us as an exciting company to work for. “They just don’t know about all the cool things we do here,” he said. To make things more challenging, most students at VT do not plan to stick around Blacksburg, VA after they graduate. Most students have no clue that there are interesting technology companies in this area, and think they’ll have to move to Northern VA, Charlotte, or other big cities in order to find a job where they’ll get paid to do the stuff they love.
From the outside looking in, it is hard to tell that this little ol’ email company in Blacksburg, VA is working with some of the most innovative new technologies on the Internet. So to address this and get more students excited about what we do, we came up with a simple idea… let’s start publicly talking about all of the cool stuff we’re building! And to make it even more interesting and help promote the entire software development community in the region, let’s invite other companies to come and talk about the cool stuff that they are building, too!
So we started hosting a series of Tech Talks that anyone can attend. The first three were a great success and the videos of the talks are now online:
Tech Talk 1: MapReduce vs. MySQL (Video on Y!DN)
Speaker: Stu Hood (software developer @ Mailtrust)
Tech Talk 2: Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB (Video Part 1 and Part 2)
Speaker: Jan Lehnardt (open source developer)
Tech Talk 3: Introduction to the Semantic Web (Video)
Speaker: Manu Sporny (CEO @ Digital Bazaar)
If this sounds interesting to you and you’ll be in the Blacksburg area on Wednesday July 9th, please join at 6pm eastern for Tech Talk 4: Agile Software Development.

I got a good chuckle the other day while reading an article from Dreamhost, a popular web hosting company. The blog post, What Web Hosting is For, is all about email. They make the case that, while their customers buy web hosting, it’s email that their customers use more than anything—and they hate managing email for their customers. To quote them:
“Web Hosting is for email.
Stupid, boring, old, annoying, dumb, repetitive, stupid, boring, old, annoying, dumb, EMAIL.
Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.
I have to give Dreamhost some credit here because they’re saying what many web hosting companies are really thinking. I’ve long said that web hosting companies offer email as a checklist item—something they spend very little time on. And while email hosting drives probably less than 1% of revenue for most of them, it likely drives up to 50% of support. What a bummer!
This is actually why we merged with Rackspace. They view the world differently which happened to be the same as us. They realize that IT hosting is a big part of the future and that IT starts with email. And so they’ve empowered us to maintain our focus on business-class email.
Dreamhost goes on to say that, when looking for a web host, people have:
“. . . been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.
And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email!
They are right here, too. The only argument I’d make is that while there is real web hosting (like what they offer, I’m sure), there is real email hosting as well. Free email doesn’t cut it in the business world. In fact, one of our largest sources of new customer acquisition is from businesses that currently host email with a web hosting company that doesn’t take email seriously. While it’s typically cheap or free, sooner or later they realize they need to work with a company that does this for a living. We currently host more than 800,000 paid email accounts—so we’re obviously not the only ones that think like this. Businesses do too. Besides, why would you want to leave your most important business communication tool up to someone that doesn’t even want to host it for you?

Microsoft continues to embrace the software-as-a-service path and has big hopes for hosted Exchange in the future. According the Radicati Group, Exchange will run about 210 million corporate email accounts in 2008, growing to 319 million mailboxes in 2012—and Microsoft says 50% of them will be hosted. Not bad. It will be interesting to see if such a big company can make this kind of strategic shift—and how much they’ll involve partners along the way.

• Student’s for Free Culture at VT hosted an awesome talk given by Richard Stallman last month, so we hit them up to see how we could bring more interesting speakers to Blacksburg. On Wednesday the 23rd, Mailtrust and Students for Free Culture bring you Nelson Pavlosky to give his popular talk on Free Speech, Free Software and Free Culture.
  When: Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
  Where: Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, room 30
  As usual, Mailtrust will provide pizza.
• Tech Talk 3: Practical Web Semantics
  Join Mailtrust again on Monday April 28th for a presentation by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar covering the Semantic Web.
  When: Monday, April 28, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
  Where: Mailtrust, 775 University City Blvd, Blacksburg VA
  RSVP: techtalk@mailtrust.com (yes, more free pizza!)