Martin Tobias recently posted his take on the most recent "Future in Review" (FiRe) conference.  Originally founded by Mark Anderson, FiRe is a PowerPoint-free tech conference striving to provide an accurate view of the tech industry in the next 3-5 years.  This year's edition, held in late May in San Diego, counted with the presence of cognoscenti such as Barry Diller, Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor, Lee Hartwell, and Josh Wolfe, among others.

Martin's insights are, for the most part, bang-on, including his skepticism on WiFi carrier models, which I also happen to share.  But most of us in the blogsphere will be happy with his NEW prediction: blogging software will gain significant market share in the web authoring and content management business.  Tobias also predicts that blogs will move upmarket into the enterprise sector, again, agreeing with what I had presented at VON Canada earlier this year in a panel on blogging.

His article is definitely worthwhile reading... 

As soon as the news of Google's GMail application (still in Beta mode) were proliferated across the cyber space, one suspected that competitors such as Yahoo! and MSN would soon introduce new features to make their offerings more competitive.  Just on the storage limit front, the new GMail product easily eclipsed its peers: 1,000 MB of space versus 6 MB for Yahoo! Mail and only 2MB for Hotmail.  Yahoo was the first one out of the block, boosting the storage space for its free webmail service users to 100 MB.  MSN followed suit by boosting its free storage to 250 MB.  Nothing exciting about these two announcements, particularly considering that storage is getting increasingly cheaper (for instance, Google claims that it can offer 1 GB for under US$2 per user).

But introducing slight changes on the user interface and adding more storage alone will not suffice in the e-mail wars.  Microsoft and Yahoo must also pay close attention to providing their online e-mail applications the necessary support so that the developer community could start writing third party software that can further boost their functionality.  Case in point: GMail already counts with a variety of extra applets, such as PGtGM (Pop Goes the Gmail), a program that sits between the Gmail web server and a user's e-mail client and converts messages from web format into the POP3 format that most e-mail clients (such as Outlook or Lotus Notes) can understand.  Other apps include:

• G-Mailto: enables a mailto:// URL to open up a page with GMail's compose window
• GMail Loader: allows a user to import mail into GMail
• GTray: Windows system tray notifier for new GMail mail.  

These are just a few of the many new third party GMail apps that are being made available, which will definitely help drive end-user adoption.  Eventually, some of their functions could become incorporated in the Google mail application.  We will definitely be hearing new similar developments on the Microsoft and Yahoo side... the e-mail wars are just beginning to warm up!

UPDATE: a friend of mine told me today that an Israeli company (Walla) also offers a 1 GB e-mailbox free of charge: http://www.walla.com