Comcast Taps Zimbra, Plaxo For SmartZone

By WebProNews Staff - Mon, 05/07/2007 - 13:18

Comcast.net's online communications center called SmartZone will have applications provided by a number of companies for email, voicemail, and instant messaging. Several firms are part of today's announcement aimed at Comcast's customers. The SmartZone service will be rolled out later in 2007. Zimbra and Plaxo will provide messaging and address book services, respectively.

Users of SmartZone will be able to manage email and voicemail messages, IM with others (including video), and track contacts with a smart address book. A Comcast spokesperson said people will be able to customize their SmartZone portals with news, weather, and video clips.

GigaOM's Om Malik likened the SmartZone announcement to an attempt to boost Comcast's page views and opportunities to display richly-profitable advertising to its subscribers:

The sizzling broadband subscriber growth hasn’t really translated into huge page view growth for Comcast. According to BusinessWeek, over the past 12 months, its traffic actually went down 5 percent. It needed to do something to reverse the trend, and email is a good place to start. While many consumers choose to ignore the Comcast.net portal, the take-up rate for Comcast email is fairly high. By offering an enhanced email experience, Comcast is betting that it can attract these same consumers to Comcast.net website and keep the page views growing.

Comcast and Yahoo recently announced a multi-year deal that places Yahoo's ads on Comcast's Internet properties. It could prove a dramatic boost for video advertising delivered by Yahoo due to Comcast's ability to deliver those ads as very clear ones to viewers.

News Tags: Yahoo, Zimbra, Comcast, plaxo

5 Comments

By jay keck (WPN reader) - Mon, 02/02/2009 - 23:11

comcast smartzone, they should have tested it first

i was switched over to smartzone this weekend and since then email has been a hit or miss(90% miss) affair. keeps telling the server is slow and tells me to cancel my request. No doubt comcast will pro-rate my bill this month for all of my downtime.
Their QA/apps team should be real proud of themselves, or, are WE the QA team???

By Guest (WPN reader) - Tue, 01/27/2009 - 13:33

smartzone

I agree with all of you. I deleted my whole address book by accicent, now I can't get it back. Says I can by changing my date back to before "smartzone" by using "Plaxo" but I can't get into plaxo. So now what do i do

By Guest (WPN reader) - Fri, 01/23/2009 - 20:09

I just got swithed to the

I just got swithed to the "smart zone".
What a real pain in the back side.
The ability to access secondary email accounts via a single login is the worst.
I have three accounts, and have to log off one, then log onto the next.
When I read an e-mail, then delete it, my old system would automaticly open the next e-mail. The new system won't do that.
What a drag.
I'm not a real techie. I want simple.

By Guest (WPN reader) - Sun, 10/12/2008 - 16:52

DumbZone

SmartZone user experience, Oct 2008:

After over a year of beta testing, Comcast is rolling out SmartZone to existing customers. If my experience is typical (and the Comcast forums on the subject suggest I am definitely not alone), SmartZone should be called DumbZone. Skip all the marketing hype. This software is designed to add all sorts of bells and whistles to "improve" the user email experience. Bull puckey. Basic functionality has been lost, notably the ability to access secondary email accounts via a single login to a primary account. Oh, they say they are "working on it" but there is no estimated time this previous capability will be available. As if this weren't enough, the DumbZone servers are different ones than the ones used for the previous webmail. And the new servers are available and working only about half the time.

Comcast should be ashamed, embarrassed, mortified for putting this piece of over-rated junk into use, without testing it with everyday users instead of techies, who apparently were demanding all the bells and whistles. It is absolutely awful.

By Dissatisfied Comcaster (WPN reader) - Thu, 10/23/2008 - 02:58