1st in Europe – Kwaga BirdsEye gets Gmail OAuth support

[France] Kwaga, which offers a semantic email organiser, has announced that users of its Kwaga Birdseye product can log in without handing over their Gmail password. That’s because the service now supports Google’s newly rolled out implementation of the OAuth standard, a first for a European company, says Kwaga.

The Paris-based startup was a third-party developer tester and worked with Google’s Eric Sachs and team to fine tune the implementation of the protocol for both Gmail and Google apps accounts within Kwaga. The result is that subscribers to the service just need to type in their Gmail address, including Enterprise accounts (Google Apps for Your Domain) where they’ll be redirected to the Gmail dashboard and asked to grant access without ever revealing their password.

We’ve covered Kwaga before, as recently as last week when the company released its new BirdsEye desktop widget. The Windows/Mac OS/Linux app keeps an eye on your in-box and attempts to single out the most important emails or the ones that require more immediate attention and flag these up while you work in other applications. The idea is that it negates the need or temptation to keep checking your email in situations where you’re waiting for a meeting time confirmation or for an answer to a question you’ve asked a colleague. It makes these intelligent guesses using the company’s semantic search technology.

Kwaga BirdsEye is available from the company’s website and also from the Google Apps Marketplace.

Kwaga was founded in 2008 by Philippe Laval (founder and previously head of Sinequa, Enterprise semantic search engine vendor) and a team of software entrepreneur and computational linguistics specialists. The startup has won a number of French innovation awards (Oseo, Scientipole, Paris Innovation, Centre Français de l’innovation, Web 2.0), while both SeedCamp and Kima Ventures have provided seed-funding.