E-mail to exceed 60 billion a day

The International Data Corporation (IDC) says e-mail volumes will continue to grow rapidly in the coming years, particularly as genuine person-to-person e-mail is joined by mushrooming volumes of spam, e-mail alerts and notifications.

The company predicts that by 2006, as many as 60 billion e-mails will be sent daily around the globe. It expects about 31 billion a day this year and predicts that little more than half of these will be person-to-person e-mail. The rest will be auto-generated messages or, predominantly, spam.

With this figure in mind, the IDC is predicting that demand for mail filtering systems is going to boom. "To ensure that e-mail continues to be a valuable business and personal communications tool, suppliers and customers will need to find new ways to provide near-real-time access through desktop, mobile and wireless devices to important and time-sensitive e-mail content and alerts for more effective collaboration."

Next week Sony will launch a range of PalmOS 5.0-based Cli'e handhelds. The range, which TheRegister describes as "deeply cool-looking", is expected to include everything from wireless card slots to Sony`s memory stick, as well as MP3 players and cameras on some of the models. The top of the range is the NX70V which runs a 200MHz ARM chip that powers a 320x480 TFT screen, MP3 player and 310K pixel camera that records video clips as well.

As far as connectivity goes, the new range appears to support almost all common connection methods and most will come equipped with a USB cradle, infrared and the wireless card slot. Running on PalmOS 5.0, Sony could do the Palm platform a world of good if it manages to make a success out of this lot.

PalmOS, once the darling of the handheld world, has suffered at the hands of Microsoft`s PocketPC operating system which now all but dominates the market. Perhaps Sony`s move will re-inject some life into the quickly disappearing Palm OS platform. [More at TheRegister]

InterSystems yesterday launched the latest version of its database, Cach'e 5. The new version "raises the database bar", the company says, because it is a post-relational database.

For those not in the know, a post-relational database is one that treats records as objects rather than the traditional flat structure arrays. Cach'e 5 features support for .Net as well as Java Enterprise Edition. Built-in Web services support also makes it possible to expose any Cach'e stored method as a Web service.

InterSystems South Africa country manager Henry Adams says one of the features that make Cach'e 5 so powerful is its ability to manage data sets across distributed locations using InterSystems` Enterprise Cach'e Protocol.

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