Archive for March, 2010

Where is India’s CAN-SPAM act? An unsolicited mail for musli power on the way

Monday, March 29th, 2010

India is now #2 in generating spam and accounts for 10% of global SPAM. What is not clear from the report is the target of the spam — it only identifies that the source of the spam was from Indian IP addresses.

This is tell-tale and beckons the growing usage of internet in the urban areas of the country. With an impending boom in e-commerce — the day is not far when there will be online shops peddling ‘Musli power’ (the Indian equivalent of Viagra) through spam messages.

India has an umbrella law called the IT Act which governs data privacy, cyber-terrorism, cyber-security and the likes. However, there are a lot of open areas related to personal privacy, sharing of data, personally identifiable information, sharing with consent, etc. The current law talks about penalties related to hardware damages, “insertion” of virus, peddling of porn, etc. But, nothing around annoying marketing messages.

What we need is an Indian version of CAN-SPAM Act which precisely talks about (a) Content compliance (b) Unsubscribe compliance (c) Penalties for sending unsolicited spam (d) Local abuse.net (e) Civil & Criminal enforcement.

A well crafted anti-spam law/act:

  • Allows legitimate businesses to send legitimate messages
  • Prevents harassment of businesses from customers, ISPs, law enforcement
  • Allows businesses to do generate leads and control electronic communications with their customers
  • Creates a compliance guide for businesses for connecting with their customers through e-mail & SMS

Can you solve some email problems for the world?

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Email is overloaded. Too many emails, too little time. We still consume email as if it is 1995! I am personally averaging two apologies per week to people whom I have failed to respond in time. email_overload_alerts

Gmail has solved spam issues to a large extent for it’s users, other email providers are still struggling with spam.

More than spam, it’s missing of legit emails which is bothersome.

We at Morpheus have some ideas and are looking for a few smart techies to solve a few problems around reducing the email overload.

Do you think you can solve a few? Then apply to The Morpheus program. You must be a guru in all of the following POP, IMAP, Hypertable/BigTable, Javascript, Java, PHP, and you walk on HTTP, web security standards, Firefox/Chrome Plugins, REST-ful APIs in your dream. Send some cool code of problems you have solved in the past and your vision around solving some of the issues related to user experience, information overload, organization, closing the loop, etc. and we may work with you in the next 4 months (and also put some money) to bring the product to life for the global technology market.

Are you game? Come discuss with us.

Update: It is the company we help you build. You are the founder/CEO whatever.  Thought we should clarify that we are not looking for someone to just “code”.