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Originally published on 05/30/2002
I spent an hour last week in the Mill Valley office of Chris and Alex Bohn, two brothers who make SidePipe, Internet software that makes it easy to collect and distribute links to share with other people. If it were 1999, this company would be rolling in venture funding, as were many collaboration and co-browsing companies back then. But it's 2002, and Chris and Alex both worked though the Internet bubble. Surely, one would think, they've learned from it.
Fast Facts:
SidePipe
www.sidepipe.com |
| CEO |
Chris Bohn. Last job: Director of software development, Mindscape.
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| HQ |
Mill Valley, CA
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| Employees |
5
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| Market |
Collaboration software
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| Funding |
$600,000 angel funding; no VC
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| Profitable? |
Projected within one year of commencing commercial sales.
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They claim they have. First of all, their company is run on a shoestring, out of the basement of Chris' house. Second, the failures of collaboration companies, like Third Voice, were educational. That product ran afoul of publishers, and required a large critical mass of users to make the system feel like more than an empty stadium; SidePipe is useful even in one-on-one communication.
SidePipe allows users to set up annotated collections of Web addresses that other users can tour through and leave comments about. While there is a free consumer product, the Bohn brothers see business in selling the tool to companies that are in the business of providing customized value-add to existing information. Real estate and travel agents are good examples. SidePipe has strong technology that can capture a "deep link" of a Web page, even when saving the URL won't work (a problem with some online catalogs).
The SidePipe features are good, and may work well as a complement to message boards, collaboration systems, and blogs, but I'm not at all convinced we need a new, link-centric communication paradigm now. More importantly, I don't see how this product becomes a revenue-generating company. These tools belong in a fuller CRM or collaboration suite. The problem is, right now, few software companies are buying outside technology.
DEMO: Click here to see a SidePipe of the Related Companies for this column.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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