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Slovenia-based Zemanta has announced a variety of important product updates today. Zemanta provides a set of content tools which help bloggers "enhance" their posts. They have updated their widget to offer support for video, audio and Web apps including Google Maps. Zemanta has also created "content verticals" in categories including: music, tech, health and travel. The idea of the verticals is to have a set of content sources on hand for each content category.

The other update is a major update for Zemanta. The widget they offer to bloggers will now be available to Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail users. The widget is installed as a toolbar for Firefox. Once the toolbar is activated, Zemanta users can enhance their emails by adding images and links, similar to the blogging product. The company also notes that you can create "postcards" which can be personalized and sent via your email provider. It’s a very interesting extension to writing emails although I wonder how often a person will want to enhance their emails.

One interesting thing I’ve noted with Zemanta is just how many juicy SEO links they push out to sites like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. When a person picks an image for a company, Zemanta drops the image into the post, links to Crunchbase below the image and links the image (with a follow tag) to the page that the image references. In fact, I’ve wondered if Crunchbase would rank so high for company searches if it wasn’t for Zemanta.

Maybe there’s a business model in the links. For example, Crunchbase could pay Zemanta a fee each time their links are displayed on a user’s post. Maybe the user who initiated the link gets a cut of the fee. Of course that would just mean that Crunchbase (and the others) are paying for in-text linking which could easily be gamed and is against Google’s TOS, but perhaps it’s an idea that could spark other revenue ideas for the company.

Perhaps the better idea is to allow the content sources to bid on placement in the widget for each keyword. The more you bid, the higher you are listed on the source list.

Day #3 in the Holiday Gifts Giveaway goes to the Peek email device. Here’s an overview provided by the company along with their offer to the CN readers.

Peek is one of the hottest new products of 2008. It is a super simple and stylish mobile email and texting device that makes it easy to stay connected with your family and friends on-the-go. No contracts. 1 minute to set-up. Very affordable – Peek retails for $99.95 (+$19.95 per month for unlimited email and texting).

The company is offering 15% off the device when you purchase it via getpeek.com. Enter code FVDVMAUJCX during checkout.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our Holiday Gifts series. The company listed didn’t pay CN for the listing. The content above was provided by the company.

Yahoo’s Zimbra email product offering has announced this morning that their Collaboration Suite is now available to educational institutions using the Zimbra Hosted platform. Basically the Zimbra Hosted platform puts the Collaboration Suite into the cloud and removes the need for local server hosting.

Zimbra Hosted utilizes Yahoo!’s worldwide infrastructure and provides customers with 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime, 24/7 support and built-in disaster recovery service level agreements (SLA). Pricing is still based on number of mailboxes and selected features. The company says they offer discounts for educational institutions.

Zimbra already has 400+ educational institutions using their Collaboration Suite locally. You can check out the full feature list here. A big difference from the crappy web-only email client we used when I completed my MBA in 2005.

One of the companies I met this past week was OtherInbox. OtherInbox is a mail management tool whereby it allows you to give out anything@domain.com and it automatically routes it to a newly-created mailbox. This allows you to give out macys@ for Macy’s, contest1@ for a contest and so on. It is one of the most useful tools I’ve seen in recent months. Check out reviews on CNET, Download Squad, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.

Here’s my interview with Josh Baer, OtherInbox founder. If you’d like an invite, go to: http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/centernetworks

Yakov is reporting that Digital Sky Technologies has obtained an additional 15% stake in Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management for $180-200 million. This moves Digital Sky Technologies’ into the majority stakeholder position with 50.6%. Yakov also notes, "It’s also reported that DST could be selling a controlling stake in itself to Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and owner of Kommersant publishing house. Kommersant recently merged its online newspaper Gazeta.ru into LiveJournal’s owner SUP."

Mail.ru has 6.2 million daily visitors and 14.7 million monthly visitors and one of the stakeholders reported income of $56 million for year 2007. DST’s assets range somewhere between $1.1 billion and $3 billion.

Mail.ru was voted one of the top Web sites in Russia earlier this year.

Today at MIX08, AOL previewed the latest version of AOL Mail which is enhanced with Silverlight technology. The preview also showed the usage of a "skin" on the AOL Mail client — check it out below. The company claims that this new version will offer a rich web experience in a desktop portable client.

Will this new AOL Mail version replace the mail inside of the full AOL client software? I sure hope so as the Web version seems sleeker and easier to use than the desktop client version.

Zimbra is probably one of the few companies that are creating innovation and are cranking out a great product but aren’t heard from often. Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo last September for $350 million.

Yesterday I spoke with marketing VP John Robb about their progress and to discuss their latest product: Zimbra Desktop. When I used the word transparent in the title of this column, it’s because no matter what device (computer, mobile, desktop, Web) you use Zimbra with, the experience is as close to identical as possible.

Robb says that Zimbra has 20,000 enterprise customers and over 11 million network mailboxes not including Comcast.

We mainly spoke about the new desktop client which is built on top of Mozilla’s Prism service. I’ve been playing with it yesterday and today and it’s very slick. Frankly, it puts traditional desktop email clients to shame. There are some ties back to Yahoo for search and Robb says this is one of their monetization strategies. The majority of their revenue comes from the enterprise customers. I’ve posted a screenshot of the desktop client below which shows how it has a similar feel to Outlook and is more Webified by using Yahoo services where possible.

The Zimbra Desktop works with pop/imap/etc so you can use it with your ISP email. And making it even stronger, you can download add-ons called "Zimlets". Robb notes that the Zimbra Desktop is a competitor to Thunderbird, Entourage, Outlook and Eudora.

If the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, could Zimbra become the new Outlook Express inside Windows?