Google Apps Paid Version Coming Soon

Today, Google Announces the paid version of their Google Apps . The Premier Edition for businesses will be offered for $50 / user account / year. The Standard Edition will remain free, and a separate Education Edition is also available for schools. The Premier Edition will have 10 GB email storage compared to the free Standard Edition 2GB email storage.

The Premier Edition includes:

• Additional email storage -- 10 GB accessible from your computer or mobile device
• Telephone support alongside email support,
• 99.9% uptime guarantee for Gmail
• Extensibility APIs to integration with your business’s current infrastructure, including user directory synchronization, single sign-on for users, and use of an email gateway
• Additional partner integraions

Currently, we can't purchase this Premier Edition, however we can sign up for free until April 30th, 2007. But the bad thing that I dislike is providing my credit card information while signing up for evaluation. Yes! users need to provide their credit card details even to evaluate this Premier Edition.

The very good thing about this premium edition is that the users will have the option to enable or disable the relevant text-based ads alongside email. But I am not certain how comfortable the enterprises will be to send/receive mails through Gmail even after Google's justification:

Google scans the text of Gmail messages in order to filter spam and detect viruses, just as all major webmail services do. Google also uses this scanning technology to deliver targeted text ads and other related information. This is completely automated and involves no humans.

What do you think about it? Pour your comments...

WikiCamp event

Wikicamp a one day event aimed at harnessing the power of Wikis is to be held this 25th Feb. Many best minds from the world of Web 2.0 are gathering in this event to talk about various issues and evolution of Wikis.

Another highlight of this event is the presence of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and President of Wikimedia Foundation. He will be sharing his vision for Wikipedia and his experience. I am very much excited to attend this event, since the event's venue is in my home town, Chennai.

I will post more about this event after attending it.