plehti

The deliveries of Wippies HomeBoxes started finally this week. The first customers have already received their Homeboxes. We’ll be able to deliver up to 1500 Homeboxes in two weeks.

Wippies HomeBox and WifiBox are equiped with Saunalahti UMA support. UMA (Unlisenced mobile access) is a 3GPP standardized fixed mobile convergy protocol with what mobile phones can utilize Wifi networks.

Saunalahti’s UMA enabled mobile phones roam automatically to World Wide Wippies Wifi network. The calls between Saunalahti’s UMA phones will be free of charge. Shortly there will be thousands of World Wide Wippies hotspots.

As far as we are aware of Wippies mail is the world largest free email box with 4Gigabytes of storage space. In addition Wippies mail is equiped with plenty of advanced features like:

• IMAP / POP support 
• IMAP Idle push email support
• Spam filter
• Virus scanner
• Possibility to suggest your own domains to be added
• Webmail with witag tagging support
• Possibility to send and receive large emails up to 40 Mbytes

It goes without saying that Wippies mail support also aliases, “holiday answer machine” and possibility to automatically forward received emails to the defined address.

One of the most important drivers for Wippies is centralized storage. With Wippies mail you don’t have to think about if you have enough email space left. Our target is to provide Wippies users plenty of email capacity to store all emails if one wants to do so.

I have been asked by quite a few users: “how can you provide just a large email box for free?” The answer is pretty simple. Due to open source strategy we can produce email boxes with pretty marginal cost nevertheless all the components of the system are secured and backed up. There is absolutely any single-point-of-failures. For Wippies mail is a marketing tool to make Wippies brand more known – we are much happier to give a way services instead of spending alot of money to purchase media space for ads from tv or magazines.

Wippies webmail application will be shortly published under open source license.

Why tagging is becoming important? The answer is simple – search engines or application specific bookmarks doesn’t help too much if you are looking for a specific photo, email, webpage etc. And things get even more painfull if you are using plenty of devices actively.

WiTag combined with centralized storage for emails, photos, music, videos, files etc. is an answer. Witags can be private or public. Private tags can point also to a locally stored files nevertheless in multi-device environment it can be painfull to notice that the file you are just needing is stored on the harddrive of the device you are not carrying right now with you…

Webmail is the first application which have already from the beginning witag support. In couple of weeks we’ll publish witag plugin for IE which enables you to Witag any webpage and what is more not just a webpage but the excact word, phrase or photo on a specified webpage. By default all witaged email messages are marked with private tag. Webpages can be witaged with private or public witag.

Further on the native witag support will be added to Wippies photo and music gallery  applications. And of cource witags can be added, editeted and searched with using witag web application from where ever and whenever.

Witag is offering for software developers a specified api so anyone can add witag support to his own applications. Also the source code for witag plugins well be published under open source lisence.

This is an unofficial Wippies blog. The major idea of this blog is to discuss about Wippies overall. All comments, suggestions and ideas are more than wellcome.

The basic idea of Wippies is to be the world’s first real Web 2.0 service provider. Of course we can raise a question: What is web 2.0 service provider? To me it means:

Web 2.0 Services

• user generated content
• tagging
• long tail
• new pricing

Open source

• Users as an integrated part of service development
• Users as contributors
• Open source applications, hardware development and marketing etc.
• Customer self service

Flat World

• Global value networks
• Compressed supply chains
• Services available 24/7
• International workflow

Mobility

• Broadband
• Always on net
• Convenience
• Imaging and video
• Audio and music

It goes without saying that Wippies is pretty much based on what we have together done in Saunalahti. Most of the Saunalahti’s applications have been based on open source. As well as we have believed for years for a mobility.

Why we didn’t put together Wippies earlier? The reason is simple, Saunalahti didn’t have resources enough to start Wippies. Luckily the situation is now different. As a part of Elisa we have required resources to start and build Wippies.

The services available today are just a beginning of the journey. Thanks to efficiency reached by utilizing open source ideology we can provide Wippies users e.g. the world largest free email box with 4 Gibabytes space for each own email messages. No need to worry about the email box size.

/ Panu.