Raging Bull editorial/interview on another player, this one with a real product and clients:
ragingbull.com
Prepare for the impending death of
paper-based business communication. Say
goodbye to the overnight express delivery of
sensitive documents. The inherent efficiencies
of the Web and convenience and speed of
e-mail are poised to eat "snail mail" for lunch.
Just wait and see. When you really slice
Tumbleweed Communications' (TMWD)
business model down to the core, this is what
Tumbleweed CEO and founder Jeff Smith one
day hopes to achieve. In Smith's ideal world,
secure e-mail messaging will soon displace
voice and paper as the preferred method for
businesses to communicate. Smith even
believes that digital postage providers such as
Stamps.com (STMP) and eStamps.com
(ESTM) are only temporary transitional players
in the document delivery game, since physical
postage as we now know it will one day
become largely obsolete. Thus, Smith is keenly
positioning Tumbleweed to become the de
facto platform and infrastructure provider for
this nascent messaging market.
Tumbleweed definitely thinks big. If outsourced
e-mail providers like Mail.com (MAIL) and
Critical Path (CPTH) are poised to evolve into
the digital messengers of the next millennium,
then Tumbleweed intends to become the
virtual provider of digital postal trucks, mailing
envelopes, and postage stamps. The company
would in effect become the underlying central
nervous system of secure messaging. Quite a
lofty goal indeed. However, judging by the
impressive partnerships and customer list the
company has already amassed, Tumbleweed
appears to have a shot at achieving that
Herculean goal. Traditional packaging and
delivery giants Pitney Bowes (PBI) and UPS
(UPS), which is also an investor, both already
utilize Tumbleweed's technology for their own
online services. We recently sat down with
Smith to discuss the future of electronic
messaging, and the race to become the
dominant secure messaging platform of the
future. |
