lipitor rhabdomyolisis…

Logging into the site is slow, and the site automatically nullifies your password after about 3 months – you find out about this nice feature the hard way. While security is a plus, so is consistency and perhaps WARNING users ahead of time, like right from the start???

After my experience with them, I am less than satisfied. Don’t expect to have any email forwarding AT ALL with a FREE account, and buyer beware that support for 20 emails at jane@yourcompany.com does not mean FREE (cost of domain and cost of lost productivity in communications by losing any pre-setup forwarding mechanisms)!

They are underhanded in this regard, and I don’t care to have the word bluetie.com attached to my corporation’s emails if I’m to use a free service.

They are an annoyance, and mislead startup businesses.

- Joe Eckstein
CEO Empowerus Tools Corporation

If you only enter ‘johndoe’ it won’t accept it because there could be a johndoe in multiple enterprises.

Try the format ‘username.enterprise’ along with your password and you should be fine.

Polished?

-We have had revenue growth for each of the last three years. We expect this to accelerate based on current numbers.

-We have never had a substantial decline in our user base (greater than a thousand users).

-In addition to our direct sales (under the BlueTie brand) we also private-label our solution to several dozen ISP’s. They all pay us per mailbox, per month.

-We also still have a paid version of our product, and we still have more than a dozen direct salespeople that sell that product. That division has also grown in revenue year over year.

-To say that the entire paid model is “selling flowers” is inaccurate. There are more than 20 revenue generating opportunities, and we have announced three already which are all noted, large small business advertisers. We can actually generate more revenue on a free user than a paid user over time.

-We don’t publish exact user counts, but our stated number to the press (in the releases, and in the presentation we shared with them was hundreds of thousands of customers. We were never more specific with anyone, and don’t intend to until we are at “millions of customers,” at which point we will update everyone.

-Up until this year we have never published user numbers at all. Any numbers the media generates were based on their own estimates, or on our projections (which is where I take complete responsibility as they were admittedly overly aggressive in 1999-2001).

-With regard to patents, we have many issued dating back to 2000, in addition to new ones pending. The patents are on a range of things from a method of secure email, to a method of utilizing a temporary time zone for scheduling meetings. We are not patenting the CPA model

Hopefully this clarifies everything. We will be adding more content to our website in the next few weeks to detail our technology, our architecture, our business model, our partners, and our user growth.

We really appreciate all the feedback, criticism, and comments. We have already made several enhancements to the sign-up process based on it.

David Koretz
President & CEO
BlueTie, Inc.

They claim “several patents pending” on their new revenue model. Boy, that always sets off alarm bells in my head. It just so happens that I too have several patents pending. They’re on my time transmogrifier. I’m sure I’m going to get approved any day now. “Patent pending” in the Web 2.0 world is code for “we’re desperately trying to convince an outdated and overburdened intellectual property system that there really is something new under the sun.”

And unless I’ve missed something, here’s what they’ve achieved: Hold on. Wait for it. Here it comes… They’ve integrated one or two 3rd party services into their solution. Gasp! There’s a real software revolution! Oh, wait, they’ve also adopted a pay-per-action revenue model. Yup, Google has only indexed 33,600 prior references to that. I’m sure they’ll have good luck patenting their implementation of it.

I also noticed some — shall we say — confusion regarding their user counts. Here they are back in 2001, citing 250,000 users and expecting 1 million users by the end of that year.
http://www.priv...ZZVKTWTUMC.html

Here they are in 2006, five years later, citing “more than 100,000 mailboxes.” That’s a LOT less than the quarter million users they claimed in 2001. Ouch. That’s a lot of lost customers.
http://www.inte.../news/193401267

But wait, here they are just two days later, this time with “several hundred thousand users.” I’m not a mathematician, but that sounds to me like their userbase went from more than 100K to more than 200K in just two days, after losing customers over the last five years. Huh.
http://www.demo.../610250334/1001

And finally, here they are the same day, forecasting more than one million users by the end of the year. So let’s see… eight years to get the first coupla hundred thousand users, and 2 months to get 800,000 more. Sure, seems reasonable.
http://www.pcwo...SS/article.html

Face it. They’re an eight year old software company that has never made significant inroads in their industry. They’ve got a good product but suffer from reliability issues (judging by the comments here). They’ve got an indeterminate number of users, but it’s certainly far, far fewer than companies who’ve been in the space much less time (Zimbra comes to mind). They’re desperate to stop burning up VC capital and finally turn a profit. They apparently couldn’t sell their service during the past eight years, so now they’re going to try giving it away. So they cooked up some PR with some highly suspect statements and numbers in it, and TechCrunch picked it up and gave it legs.

Welcome to Journalism 2.0, where the motto is “If they say it’s cool, it must be cool.”

Sofa king, wee todd ed..

How? All I see is a sign-up link, no description.

I apologize if you have had issues in the past. We had some issues as we grew quickly, but have made multi-million dollar improvements to our architecture. We now post our hardware architecture publicly, but here is the summary:

-We use redundant Cisco routing, PIX firewalls, and switching
-We now have multiple datacenters (350 miles apart)
-We use F5 load balancing for N+N reliability on all servers
-We implemented a new email architecture this year
-We have implemented a new backup and disaster recovery solution.

As a result of this, we have had greater than 99.9% reliability in 2006.

We are also working on publishing a quarterly external security and reliability audit from a third party. This will give everyone complete visibility into our architecture.

Victor Pinenkov
VP of Engineering
BlueTie, Inc.

You can see our UK website at http://www.bluetiebiz.co.uk, and I would personally welcome a call from any UK companies interested in looking at BlueTie on 0800 177 7047.

We also expect to be announcing details of Service Provider customers providing BlueTie-based e-mail in the UK soon.

Best regards

Ian Hendry
BlueTie UK

Looks promising and the free storage is a bonus.

I agree with other posters. The best end-result will be a product where one can search on Tags (Labels) etc and find e-mails easily. For now I’ll stick to G-Mail. It ain’t pretty. But it works flawlessly.

So it makes me wonder, Michael: Are you here to be a journalist or just to cultivate hype? I think it’s great that you’re getting involved with these companies, but please realize the cost is your own credibility.

The future of web apps is light apps and simple ways to bring data together – not monolithic goliaths like this dung heap.

peace out.