Critical Path, Inc., a leading provider of
messaging software and services, today announced that
FASTWEB, Italy’s second largest fixed line telecommunications
provider, has launched a new social webmail service, powered by
Critical Path’s suite of Memova
solutions. FASTWEB’s residential customers now enjoy enhanced
Web 2.0 Calendar, Address Book, Mail, Fax, voice messages, and a
“Do Not Disturb” service – all integrated with the social networks
they use today.
Research conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Critical Path
identified that 90% of Italian consumers want a simpler, more automated
experience for updating and sharing their contact information and
status. FASTWEB, a provider of Internet, voice, TV and mobile
services to residential customers, is launching an enhanced and
redesigned portal to address this need.
FASTWEB
subscribers can now integrate their social networks, exchange
large multi-media files via email, organize their lives through public
and personal calendars, access maps, enable notifications and RSS
feeds, and import and manage contact lists from social communities
simply and easily. Once logged in, people are presented with a
widget based dashboard that summarizes the status of the inbox,
received faxes, voice messages and contacts. There are also
widgets for sending multimedia attachments, calendar, personalized
RSS feeds and Life Stream, powered by Critical Path’s Social
Address Book solution, a service that provides updates
from subscribers’ favourite Social Networks, such as Facebook.
"Email
continues to play a central role in communications, particularly
as social networking gains momentum in Italy. We wanted to offer our
residential customers an easy-to-use service to simplify their online
experience to help them communicate, inform, share and organize
their lives all from one place. In addition, it is important to
also offer those services that are unique to a Telco, such as
providing advanced services integrated with our network, like Do
Not Disturb, which enables customers inside the social portal to
create rules to stop calls from a single number, a class of
numbers or telemarketers,” said Fabrizio Costantini, Marketing
Manager, FASTWEB.
Soon, FASTWEB, together with Critical Path, will
launch new mobile services that will extend this experience from
the web to the mobile.
"We are delighted to have participated with
FASTWEB in bringing this new integrated suite of communication
services to their customers", says Renato Miletti, Vice President,
Critical Path. "Consumers are placing increased value on staying
connected online and on their mobile. Our Memova solutions, such
as Social Address Book, play a key role in delivering this
to the new FASTWEB portal. We look forward to continuing to work
with FASTWEB in the future to deliver value to them and their
customers".
