MailVu makes video email easy, business apps on the way

December 7th, 2010

By Allan Maurer

Alan Fitzpatrick

CHARLOTTE, NC – For a time, the video telephone – a staple of science fiction from the pulp magazines of the 1920s to Kubrick’s “2001,” and beyond, were, along with flying cars, one of those sci-fi predictions that just didn’t happen. Now, with smartphones, PCs, and a host of other devices capable of both video and telecom along with the broadband service supporting them, that may be changing.

Alan Fitzpatrick decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge last year to form his start-up MailVu because he saw the much-hyped online and tele-video era actually coming into being as Internet infrastructure caught up with those picture-phone dreams of sci-fi.

A 22-year veteran of the telecom industry, Fitzpatrick notes, “The technology and idea has been around for years, but the infrastructure is available now for anyone to use video anywhere.”

His MailVu service, launched this year, features an easy-to-use interface that lets people record a video message of up to 10 minutes and send to anyone on virtually any device. “It’s the quickest, easiest and fastest way to send private video messages,” he says.

Fitzpatrick, CEO, and his co-founder Addy Kapur, both veterans of ACN, launched MailVu earlier this year, self-funding it. The current consumer-facing free service is partly a way to attract users and provide value, “Then monetize it when you have traction.”

The economics of creating an Internet start-up are so different from the boom years when it took millions to open a company’s doors that many entrepreneurs are following similar models. They launch with an initial product, create a user base and technology then roll out products they sell.

MailVu is no different. Fitzpatrick says it has just started selling business plans, mostly to customers who asked for a version of the company’s technology they could brand or modify for business purposes. “It’s nice when customers come to us,” he says.

MailVu was a demo company at the recent Internet Summit in Raleigh, where he says “We were pleased with the reception we got.”

Next year, Fitzpatrick says, MailVu will seek a $500,000 seed funding. “That should take us to profitability,” he says.

That’s different from the Internet boom years, too. The first Internet firm I worked for, dbusiness.com, spent $17 million in two years and still folded up when the bubble burst.

Fitzpatrick is enthusiastic about the potential for the potential of digital video. “Companies like Skype have really made the market with 500 million users worldwide and 40 percent using video. A Cisco study said online video will increase 34 percent compounded annually through 2014.

“We saw what the market was doing while at ACN and decided, ‘Let’s get into this space ourselves,” Fitzpatrick adds.

The MailVU service does have some unique features, such as the ability to recall a video or have it self-destruct after a certain number of views. “We believe there will be a backlash against the public nature of social networking,” says Fitzpatrick. “People will want privacy.”

While there is lots of talk about a new Internet bubble forming, Fitzpatrick says that may be true on the West Coast, where funding criteria are different. Here on the East Coast and the Southeast in particular, he says, “There is a more conservative approach. Here you need a good business model. User growth is great, but you need a solid business behind it to get funded. So maybe Southeast companies will have a longer lifespan because they’re build more on business fundamentals.”

As for MailVu, “What you see now is the tip of the iceberg,” says Fitzpatrick. “We didn’t design this to be a video mail company. That’s just our first product.”

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MailVu makes video email easy, business apps on the way

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