In follow-up to our quarterly BluMail Advisory Board meeting held in June, following is a summary of we've been and where we are headed in 2009.
WEBSITE UPDATE
Learning Center -- All content is finished and fully edited.
Email System -- Our email account registration system is fully operational with a simple, and quick email account registration process. BluMail email accounts offer great email functionality including instant chat, video conferencing, and generous storage.
World’s Best Websites – This is one of the most popular sections of the websites, currently at about 100 of the world’s most popular websites. We are thrilled to have reached agreement with World Summit on the Information Society to feature their list of world’s best content websites.
Take Action – Overall, functionalities have been or will be developed in 2009 to allow for:
Get Involved – finished Google AdWords – finished
Read / Share a Story - finished
Search Optimization – finished
Tell 5 friends – finished
Write About Your Life - finished
What Do YOU Think - finished
Be / Find a Mentor
Tribute / Donate
Women Stand With …
Text Messaging Project
Volunteer
Find A Job
Sell Your Product
What Do YOU Think / Proust Questionnaire – This site asks 35 provocative questions intended to allow the respondent to write one-sentence answers, upload a photo of himself or herself, and to communicate with other respondents.
Read / Share A Story -- The intent is to encourage all people of the world to write about a memorable event that will be featured at Read / Share A Story. The 1-3 page stories are moving, insightful, funny, poignant, triumphant, indignant, nostalgic, and powerful. Anyone who reads a compelling story can connect with the person who has written a memoir that has inspired the reader.
Write Your Life Story at The Remembering Site -- This is a project that a group of us started in 2002 to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to write, share, archive and publish one’s life memories and memoir. The site has been redesigned to be similar in design the BluWorld website.
EVENT AT THE UNITED NATIONS
BluMail Event at the United Nations -- On June 17 from 3:30 – 5:30 pm, an awareness-raising event was held at the United Nations to inform UN agencies, missions and Ambassadorial staff to the UN, and New York-based organizations about BluMail.
The intent of these awareness-raising seminars is to provide an overview of BluMail, invite new alliance members, and receive in-country contacts, ideas, comments and recommendations to build awareness for BluMail with, again, the focus on reaching our goal of 2.5 million active email account registrations.
Sponsorship of the event was by the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations.
Remarks were made by BluMail Alliance Member and Supporting Organizations and H.E. Mr. Peter Maurer, Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the United Nations and Chairman of the Working Group on Informatics; Sarah McCue, PhD, Founder, BluMail; Angel Aloma, Executive Director of Food for the Poor and BluMail alliance member; and Claudia Maffettone, Youth Alliance Coordinator, BluMail
ALLIANCE
We are in the process of building an alliance of 100 non-profit organizations, technology firms, and foundations from developed and developing countries to grow BluMail into an email and content portal similar to Yahoo, Hotmail and other commercial email and content portals.
IN CONCLUSION
We had a soft launch of the beta version of BluMail in September 2008 and we look forward to many more public launches to celebrate the launch and growth of something new ... and something Blu!
All the best and regards,
Sarah McCue, PhD
Board Chair, BluWorld / BluMail