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Another Boulder Company Acquired – Tucows buys NetIdentity
Last Thursday, Tucows announced that it was buying Boulder’s NetIdentity. At a deal value of over $20m, it’s healthy for a company with only 10 employees, although my understanding is that NetIdentity was very profitable. Four other Boulder software companies have been bought in the past few months – @Last (Google), Vexcel (Microsoft), Wall Street on Demand (Goldman Sachs), and Micro Analysis & Design (Alion). I sense opportunities for luxury goods retailers in the Boulder County area.
The Tucows CEO explains the deal via podcast at http://resellers.tucows.com/about/investor/ni/tucowsnetidentity.mp3. He basically says they’re acquiring them for the portfolio of domain names.
I’ve been using NetIdentity’s services since it was MailBank.
Back then, $9.95 for a memorable email address was pretty nice. I just renewed (again) with NetIdentity a couple months ago at $24.95 for the same service.
I don’t know if the profitability is so much in the domain names as it is the fact that it’s hard to switch from such a custom address, especially when you know that everyone has it in their address books.
This purchase has been the worst thing that could happen to Netidentity. They have migrated the e-mail to other servers. The service was down for about 2 weeks. It is now going on the 4th month.
E-mail’s are not delivered. Some are bounced while others disappear into cyber space.
The corporate blog is full of details of this fiasco.
info.netidentity.com
The Better Business report shows Netidentity has an unsatisfactory rating.
http://www.bbbmwo.ca/commonreport.html?bid=1045601&language=1
Tucows has all but destroyed what was once a great service.