The Battle Over College E-Mail by Magdalena Rosova

College students have a new topic to be picky about. E-mail inboxes. Students complained that their school e-mail accounts are too small for their mails and big photo attachments. Who will offer students e-mail account for free? Google and Microsoft. Campuses became battlegrounds for the tech titans. Students complain that when they receive hundreds of e-mails a week to their tiny school inbox, they miss the important class messages. Therefore many students redirected their messages to Gmail accounts. Google now manages e-mail for more than two thousands colleges and universities. Google also offers students possibility to transform their school accounts into ordinary Google account which allows about 70 times space. Microsoft provides free e-mail accounts for thousands of schools in more than 80 countries. Senior director for Microsoft's Live@Edu program, Kirk Gregersen, said that schools which had allowed Microsoft to manage their e-mail systems were very satisfied a! nd could enjoy the comfortable advantages of the quality service. Northwestern was one of the first school which adopted Google. Later Cornell, Georgetown and Temple joined as well. Google saves schools money as they do not need to pay for costly server upgrades and students are satisfied as well. According to American college-focused market research firm the average college student has two or three personal e-mail addresses and Gmail is the most popular one. Gmail's popularity among students doubled over the past two years. Over 50 percent of the schools switched to outsourced student e-mail service or they are about to do so. In addition, new college students like to use the Web-based e-mail they had in high school and do not want to use another one. Both Microsoft and Google do not charge schools as they charge companies and they also promise to not impose ads. Companies hope to gain the students' confidence and that they will use the service in future as well. !

by Magdalena Rosova for SigEx Ventures (http://sigexventures.com)

SigEx Ventures's matrix of properties are quickly becoming leaders in digital telebroadcasting, free content delivery allowing people to easily talk, view, upload and share through free online TV broadcasting, free unlimited global calls, video blogs and SMS. SigEx Ventures invests in projects deploying "free" to add-on royalty revenue models