Fuser in the News

BOULDER – A new downtown Boulder company has a solution to your e-mail overload problem.

No, Fuser won't read it for you, but it will do the next-best thing. It will "fuse" all those e-mail accounts – work, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. – onto one Web page so you can read and respond to them from any Web-enabled computer in the world.

The startup is funded and chaired by Jared Polis, the Boulder-based deep-pocketed serial entrepreneur who made his millions launching and selling bluemountainarts.com and ProFlowers.com, all before the age of 30. Polis also is a Democratic candidate for Colorado's second Congressional District.

Polis launched the company as Confluence Commons in April 2006, but according to Jeff Herman, chief operating officer and chief technology officer, the preferred name today is Fuser. The company will likely keep the name Confluence Commons and do business as Fuser, he said.

Herman is no stranger to Web-based startups. Polis wooed him away from his position as vice president of operations at network security software provider Webroot, and prior to that he was with digital content provider NetLibrary, both are Boulder-based companies.

Fuser is in "closed beta" – more or less invitation only – while it gathers user feedback, and it plans a public beta in August or September. "We are slowly pulling the covers back," Herman said. "We want to make sure it's compelling once it gets out."

Herman wouldn't say how much Polis has invested in the company. He would only divulge that it was enough to employ 19 people and lease about 8,000 square feet of office space in downtown Boulder. The company plans to grow to about 25 by the end of the year.

No other investors are being considered or deemed necessary. "We have no plans to need dollars outside of Jared," he said.

Once the full-featured product launches – Herman would not say when – revenue will be based on advertising. It will be free to users.

"If there's anything people do online regularly is check their personal communications," Herman said. "We have a high page-view application, so contextual based ads are a good way of monetizing it."

And it will "fuse" more than e-mail.

The next versions of Fuser – new releases occur about every two and a half months – will gather social networking and instant message communications as well.

Fuser features are based largely on what users want, and the company is doing a lot of usability testing. It's broken down users into three basic "personas" – "Ryan," "James" and "Michelle."

"Michelle is the busy working mom," explained Betsy Chase, Fuser's director of user acquisition. "E-mail is her primary toolset, and she needs a tool that lets her get in and out fast."

Ryan is a "20-something hipster cool guy" who's in tune with social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, Herman said. "E-mail for that generation is for bosses or parents." James falls in between. He's a young professional who uses e-mail for work but has discovered social networking for dating.

Most testers, who Fuser pays a nominal fee for an hour of tinkering around with the product, fall into one of those categories. They give feedback on font size, button placement, speed of the application and other product elements, Chase said.

These testers, along with beta users, are also the key providers of ideas for new features. Some potential features suggested include the ability to collect voice mail and a mobile product for smart phones.

Herman would not say when Fuser would achieve profitability, but said the business plan assumed "reasonable growth curves."

Growth assumptions are based on the 270 million to 300 million users of e-mail in North America, about 90 million of whom have multiple e-mail accounts.

"We have the potential to reach 90 million, the addressable marketplace of e-mail only," Herman said. "That doesn't include social networking or instant messaging."

While there are other players in the as-yet-unnamed industry of online communications gathering, Herman believes Fuser is very different from what he sees as its closest rivals – Netvibes and Pageflakes. Those sites serve up personalized pages of weather, news, stocks and other information along with e-mail. They call themselves "aggregators."

The company doesn't like to call itself an aggregator for that reason.

"We really focus on the vertical of personal communications. The idea is first thing in the morning you could take look at a command center and get a sense of what's going on with your communications," Herman said.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at 303-440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.

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