Saving time and money on email

We use email for everything from notifying a co-worker in the next cube that we're ready for lunch to storing important documents for later use. Despite all the collaboration software out there, email is still the workhorse of the office and often the home.

So now comes Google with the idea to create something like a spam folder but for the really good stuff. InformationWeek reports:

Priority Inbox relies on a filtering system to sort significant messages from less significant ones. It differs from Gmail's existing user-configurable, keyword-based filters in that it filters automatically, can be corrected when it fails, and tries to learn on its own.

Google suggests that Priority Inbox is like the Gmail spam folder, except for the good stuff. Training is simple: A "+" icon puts e-mail into the Priority Inbox; a "-" icon takes e-mail out. The system also considers frequently e-mailed people to be important.

Here are some numbers from Google.

• The average information worker receives 150 messages per day.
• Testers spent 6% less time managing e-mail using Priority Inbox.
• With the estimate that information workers spend 13 hours per week on e-mail, that works out to about 46 minutes saved per week.

For employers, InformationWeek says, that could translate into a productivity savings of over 40 hours per year. In monetary terms, that would be worth over $1,100 annually per Gmail user for private sector companies and almost $1,600 annually per Gmail user for government agencies,

Talking to you on gmail

If you are a Gmail user in the U.S., you can now make free Web-based phone calls to any phone in the U.S. and Canada right from the Gmail interface. You can also make International calls for fees starting at $0.02 per minute.

ReadWriteWeb has the details:

To use this new feature, you will have to install the Google Talk plugin, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Google plans to roll this functionality out over the next few days, so it might be a bit before you see it in your Gmail account. In addition, Google Apps accounts won't have access to this feature yet.

If you are a Google voice user, your Google Voice number will appear as the outbound called ID number on calls made from Gmail. You can also opt to receive inbound Google Voice calls from inside the GMail interface.

Gmail users were already able to initiative VoIP and video calls with other Gmail users, but the added telephony feature and integration with Google Voice makes this feature far more useful. You can now, for example, simply initiate a call by simply clicking on a phone number in an email signature.

So I'm paying land line and cell phone bills ... why?