Lately, Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) has been pushing its dot-com agenda. For example, the company is putting together a major video portal and even purchased Fandago to help make this happen. It's part of a strategy to become like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) or Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO).Today, Comcast generated some more buzz. That is, the company is developing SmartZone, a web-based system for customers to manage email, voice mail, address books, video clips, instant messages, and so on. It will certainly be a big point of leverage for Comcast's 12 million broadband users and three million digital phone users.
A critical part of the system is Zimbra's platform. "We spent a year working on this deal," said Zimbra's CEO, Satish Dharmaraj, to me in an interview last week.
Zimbra is no ordinary email/messaging provider. Rather, it is a highly versatile Web 2.0 system that allows for drag-and-drop and easy integration with many web services (such as Wikipedia, Salesforce.com and so on).
The Comcast service will be free. It should also be a nice value-add to get new customers -- and retain existing customers. It's also a big validation for the Web 2.0 community.
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.
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