An article on Zaplet in the San Jose Mercury News says: “Zaplet was supposed to be the new, new thing. Instead, the company’s plan to sell its software for collaborative e-mail to individuals and businesses has flopped….Zaplet is now throwing its resources into winning government contracts, hoping to tap into the $38 billion soon to be spent by the government on homeland security.”
Zaplet was a cool company when it started…it had a way to do “magic” via emails — opinion polls, live updates, collaborative apps, and much more. I even remember us trying to “reverse-engineer” what Zaplet was doing — we are after all in the messaging business. It was after all, a Vinod Khosla (Kleiner-funded) company.
The problem was that even though the demos could be neat and cool, the real applicability was still not clear. I still think email applications have a part to play in the future, though I’m (still) not too sure how they’d work and what they’d do. The combination of Email-IM-SMS may provide an answer.
