Small Town, Big Ideas

"My computer died and I lost all of my email!"

I had an appointment with an executive of a fast growing company in Blacksburg yesterday. When I showed up, one of the first things she said was, "my computer died and I lost all of my email!" I could definitely empathize with her as the same thing has happened to me several times over the years. And when it happens, it's not just email. It's email messages, calendar appointments, contacts, tasks, etc. However, its not going to happen to me again because in August, I switched from using Outlook as my email client to using webmail as my email client. As a webmail user, all of my data is stored online and backed up nightly to three data centers managed by Amazon. So even if something happens to one of our servers (servers are just computers and computers do die!) my data is still available.

There are many reasons to move your email to the web. This is just one of them.

PS: the executive at this company is a customer. She just happens to use POP3 to download all of her email from of our servers to her computer.

Email's future points to accessibility, storage

The Blue Ridge Business Journal did great piece on the future of email last week and we were their primary source. They don't put a lot of their information online, but they allowed us to reprint this article on our website. I think they did a great job of capturing my quotes and articulating what I had to say. Hopefully you agree.

Here is the article, if you're interested.

Email Company on the Inc. 500

Return Path, an email performance management firm based in New York, just ranked No. 167 on the 2006 Inc. 500 with three-year sales growth of 667.8%. This is awesome news! While they don't play in our space, it's great to see a company in the "email industry" doing so well. We've worked with Return Path on a small scale, I've met Matt Blumberg a couple of times, and I'm an avid reader of his blog. From everything I know they definitely seem like a great company.

Congratulations to Matt and his team.

NetIdentity Sells to Tucows

Looks like Tucows has made another acquisition in the email hosting space—this time acquiring NetIdentity at what looks to be a 4.5 revenue multiple. Not bad.

NetIdentity was an interesting company, at least from an email hosting perspective, in that they had always outsourced their email hosting to third party providers. This is proof that outsourcing can free up the right resources to create value elsewhere in the company. Hats off to these guys, they seem to have done a great job in creating that value.

Here are the financial details from the press release, if you’re interested:

Consideration for the transaction will be approximately US$18 million payable in cash, promissory notes and the issue of approximately 3,603,000 shares of common stock to the stockholders of NetIdentity.

Is the Competition Running Out of Gas?

Apparently not!!

Admittedly, this is only their “consumer brand.” But it always brings a smile to my face when I see any type of competitor plastering completely irrelevant advertisements on their website—ESPECIALLY on the homepage.

What’s wrong guys? Giving away unlimited storage space for free isn’t profitable?

;-)

Email is Still Good

A gazillion people sent me the link to Isaac Garcia’s follow up post to the ‘The Good In Email (or Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool)’ article he blogged a few weeks ago (both were Slashdotted, so both got quite a bit of visibility). This post, titled ‘The Bad in Email (or Why We Need Collaboration Software)’ has a lot of good information in it, but I’m not sure it’s that relevant. He argues that email isn’t the perfect tool to be used to collaborate and share information with teams and groups. Although many people try to use email for this purpose (and many others), I’m not sure anyone thinks it’s the perfect tool for this purpose—at least in its current state.

I believe that because people spend so much time in their inbox, they try to make it do things it wasn’t meant to do as opposed to using specialized software to accomplish the same goal. Isaac and his team are working on specialized collaboration software services in hopes that people will go outside of their inbox to collaborate with team members and co-workers. There are a ton of companies trying to do similar things and I think many of them are having a tough time. Changing learned and ingrained behavior is a very challenging thing to do and I think that is the reason so many technology startups with great ideas end up failing.

An example of a tough question that many technology startups face is: “at what point do we build something new and better and risk the learning curve and resistance to change that’s involved, versus building something and making it work like a Microsoft product since most of the world knows how to use a Microsoft product?”

It’s a tough question and one that most technology startups have to deal with. I don’t know the right answer but at Webmail, we do a little bit of both. We take risks where we think the potential payoff is big but we leverage the fact that “everyone” knows how to use email (and Microsoft Outlook in particular) as we build new features into our service. And that is something we will continue to do.

Email is Good

Finally, a "Web 2.0" company that admits that email still works!

Isaac Garcia, the founder of Central Desktop, has a good blog post on the "Good in Email" and "Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool".

His article was also Slashdotted.

Issac highlights his thoughts on why email is such a widely adopted tool and why companies in his industry are having such a difficult time with end user adoption of standalone collaboration software and services. I agree with everything he says (including the fact that there is a big market for the companies in that space that get it right).

But although it may be more exciting to be a Web 2.0 "collaboration" company, I feel a lot better about being an old school email company with a little collaboration up our sleeves.

More on this subject later.

The future is hosted, online e-mail

I somehow just discovered ZDNet blogs today. Here is another great one by Dion Hinchcliffe talking about why businesses should outsource their email. My favorite quote is part of the last paragraph:

Organizations spend untold millions managing non-strategic IT assets and it causes them to lose crucial focus from their core missions. It the end, it makes about as much sense as maintaining your own electrical power generation facilities; you can do it, but why would you?

Apparently ZDNet bloggers have been having this conversation over the last couple of weeks. I'm not sure how I missed out.

If you want to subscribe to the ZDNet Bloggers' feed, grab this URL and subscribe today.

What's the true cost of running email in-house?

I, as much as anyone, wish ALL businesses would take that question more seriously.

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet gets it right. Of course, I am a little prejudiced too. ;-)

Anyone got an extra $1,000,000?

If anyone in the email hosting world has an extra million dollars, the domain emailhosting.com is for sale. The owner says he's looking for $1,000,000 and that the price will soon go up.

Any takers? ;-)

PS... if so, feel free to email him. Hopefully he'll give me a finders fee if I uncover any buyers.