Market View: October

This article continues our market view series, where we look into the macro and micro-environments, the politics, economics, trends, and technological advances that create the opportunities and challenges that we need to navigate in our market.

The TL;DR:

Privacy continues to be a major driving force in the market – from both general and industry-specific perspectives. Privacy-focused features like “private relay” are already starting to feel less “new and innovative”, and more “standard”. Synergistically, the focus on proper email authentication and verification through the momentum of DMARC-as-a-Service companies and the increasing market support behind BIMI are also notable.

Atmail’s roadmap is entirely focused on ensuring our service has desirable end-user privacy features, while also offering multiple, elegant ways for our ISP customers to generate revenue from the service. Additionally, our webmail interface has been externally audited and has earned a “green” statement of conformance – fully meeting WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA guidelines.

General Interest Tech News

• Switzerland moves ahead with an underground autonomous cargo delivery, with the project positioned to commence from August 1st. (Read more)
• Australian brain-computer interface startup, Synchron, has implanted its first device into a US patient. (Read more)
• Quantum computing is a decade away. Will telcos be ready? (Read more)
• Amazon is buying healthcare provider One Medical (and a LOT of sensitive personal data) for US$3.9B. (Read more)
• Apple’s ultra-wideband (UWB) U1 chips are coming – which will enable “new hands-free user experiences … like activating a light bulk when just walking by it”. (Read more)
• A former Twitter employee has been found guilty of providing private and personal information of Twitter users to Saudi Arabia. (Read more)
• Chinese gaming company NetDragon Websoft has appointed an artificial intelligence-supported virtual human, Tang Yu, as General Manager. (Read more)
• The FTC released advance notice of proposed rule making to limit Big Tech’s ability to gather user data. (Read more)
• The US implement new regulations that prevent China’s access to advanced chips. (Read more)

Industry News

• Google implement “known senders” filters for Calendar to mitigate spam invites. When enabled, invites must come from contacts, people previously interacted with, or within the same company/organisation. (Read more)
• London’s heatwave results in cooling issues and service disruptions in Google and Oracle’s data centres. (Read more)
• Telia’s CEO comments on the challenges operating in the current macro-economic environment. (Read more)
• Telcos continue their push for Big Tech to pay for the bandwidth they consume. (Read more)
• The Dutch Personal Data Authority have declared that a school’s use of Google’s email and other cloud services is “not lawful” due to privacy concerns. Namely, that educational institutions do not know how and where the personal data of students are stored and processed. (Read more)
• Microsoft prevent users of privacy-focused Tutanota email addresses from signing up for Teams accounts. (Read more)
• UniTel notify their customers that they plan to shut down their email service.  (Read more)
• DuckDuckGo open a privacy-focused email service to the public. Features include private relay and blocking tracking technologies. (Read more)
• DMARC as a Service, EasyDMARC, raises US$2.3M in its seed round. (Read more)
• Alinto acquires Swiss company, Mailcleaner. (Read more)
• Optus suffers a mass data breach affecting millions of current and former customers. The federal government state that Optus is not cooperating with their efforts to protect impacted users. (Read more)
• Microsoft intend to launch Azure Operator Distributed Services (AODS) to provide a carrier-grade cloud platform in a push to capture 60% of the overall telecom market for public cloud services. (Read more)

Synacor Zimbra

• Following on from repeat security incidents, Zimbra have focused all marketing efforts during this reporting period on promoting security – from running webinars to publishing blog posts and white-papers on security best-practices and how to harden a Zimbra installation. 
• No other notable updates this reporting period. 

Synchronoss

• Italian operator Fastweb extend their Synchronoss Email Suite licence for three years. (Read more)
• Synchronoss will power two new personal cloud solutions in Indonesia. University students will receive a free personal cloud account and Telkomsel mobile customers will have access to subscribe to a premium personal cloud service. (Read more) 
• The Synchronoss personal cloud will also be offered at a discount rate via Street Cred Capital for any financed purchase through its mobile sales channel ecosystem. (Read more)
• Synchronoss report their second quarter financial results. While Synchronoss report an all-time high gross margin of 65.8% and an 11.8% increase in revenue attributed to Personal Cloud, revenue attributed to Messaging has decreased by 44.8% in comparison to the prior year period. Total revenue is down 9%. (Read more)

Open-Xchange

• OX partner with Zepto Consulting to launch Mail Connect – a fully featured email and productivity suite, with advanced email security, specifically for business users. (Read more)
• Formerly responsible for driving growth in EMEA for Tucows, OX appoint Thorsten Einig to the role of VP Hosting Sales to lead growth within the hosting sector. (Read more)
• OX launched the first release of PowerDNS Cloud Control in 2021 – a “lab ready” cloud-native DNS solution. OX now announce their intent to launch a production-ready version soon. (Read more)

Atmail

• Last year we engaged the team at Intopia to audit our webmail interface for accessibility – both against the WCAG 2.1 guideline and also from a usability perspective. A number of issues were discovered and we’ve continued to work with the team at Intopia through the year to test and re-test our remediations, to re-audit the final build for regressions, and to audit our upcoming app-specific password feature. I am very pleased to announce that as of October, our webmail interface has earned a “green” statement of conformance – fully meeting the WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA guideline. We expect to ship the updated interface as a rolling release across our regions through December and we will make our statement of conformance generally available on atmail.com
• Atmail is now listed on the BIMI Support by Mailbox Provider at bimigroup.org – stay tuned for updates.
• Our Ideas portal is now ready for customer access! If you would like to join our Ideas portal to log feature requests, vote for (or comment on) existing ideas, and track the development of each idea in real-time, or if you have any other queries, then please contact me.