Looking for an alternative to Gmail? You have a new option now, straight from the people who brought you Tetris.
Mail.Ru just launched My.com, which includes email, chat, games and photo editing services aimed at the U.S. market. Here’s what Mail.Ru CEO Dmitry Grishin said in an interview with VentureBeat.
“Globally there are not too many countries where local players are winning the market, but in Russia we are more popular than Facebook or Google. Mail.Ru showed people that Russia has huge potential as an interesting market. We thought a lot about our next move, and realized to be successful globally, you need to compete with the best players, and the U.S. market is the most competitive.”
The official My.com blog offered these words in its introductory post today:
“Being the geeks that we are, we set out to develop really useful apps that will be powerful enough for a power user and at the same time, not too complicated for his grandma. In other words, we wanted our apps to look sleek and be easy to use, while offering a host of features for those looking for them.”
Here’s one particularly interesting factoid about My.com that could make the ears of those who have privacy concerns perk up pronto. Despite the fact that My.com is based in Mountain View, Calif., (yes, that’s Google territory) My.com’s servers are located in the Netherlands, not here in the U.S. This could allay people’s fears after it was revealed that the NSA monitors communications here in the states.
Whether My.com can compete with the likes of Google, Yahoo and others remains to be seen. Though Mail.Ru is incredibly popular overseas, that popularity won’t necessarily translate to high immediate adoptions numbers here in the U.S.. Stay tuned.
