One of the highlights at the Web 2.0 Summit last week was the presentation given by Mary Meeker, uber-analyst at Morgan Stanley.

You can check out her video presentation at TechCrunch (see link below), but let me give you a very high level summary of her ’state of the Internet’ address:

E-commerce sales growth is flattening out, while general retail sales growth has declined sharply;

Growth in all forms of advertising - including online advertising – has dropped; and

Online ad inventory is growing… while CPM rates (cost per thousand impressions) are declining (a classic case of prices going down due to supply outweighing demand).

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Mary Meeker’s View Of The World In 50 Slides”, TechCrunch, November 6, 2008

GoldMail has built a platform that allows you to send media-rich messages.

Basically, you can use GoldMail’s client to create a Flash slideshow that can include images, Powerpoint slides, and text, all accompanied by your voiceover. The slideshow is uploaded to, and hosted on, GoldMail’s servers. Then an email is sent containing a text introduction and a link to the full multimedia presentation.

Hmmm… sounds a bit like sending an email with a link to a video.

Then again the service may make it easier for you to create and send multimedia presentations if you can’t whip up a video or slide show yourself in 10-15 minutes (the average time it takes to create a GoldMail presentation and email).

And the cost? Until recently it was a hefty $5,000 for an initial license and $500 per user. Recently GoldMail dropped the price to around $100 per user, per year, with no initial license fee.

Source: Jason Kincaid, “GoldMail Brings Media-Rich Presentations To Email”, TechCrunch, October 4, 2008