Ignition Corp. reported its first investment in the wireless market-second-round financing for etrieve Inc., a provider of e-mail messaging solutions for mobile customers.
“Ignition’s philosophy on venture-capital investing is what we call a 2.0 version,” said Sarah Van Dyck, vice president of marketing for etrieve. “Ignition takes a very holistic-partnership approach. They don’t just put someone on the board of directors. They roll up their sleeves and get involved in a company across the board.”
This second round of financing netted etrieve $13 million just in time for public launch of its e-mail services, following six weeks of beta testing.
According to etrieve, its service allows e-mail messages sent to a desktop mail box to be accessed from wireless or wireline phones. Users are required only to register their e-mail accounts on etrieve’s Web site and download a desktop helper to their fixed computer terminal.
The service converts e-mail messages from text-to-speech, allowing customers to listen to their messages and attachment files. If they want to reply, the service records the message as a wav file and sends it to the desired recipient. If a hard copy of a message or attachment is needed, users can forward the message to a fax machine for a printout.
In addition, etrieve allows messages to be prioritized by sender or if a message is extremely important, the service can page a user’s wireless device and push the message to them.
The service also synchronizes with the original mailbox on the user’s desktop so when a message is deleted using etrieve, it is also deleted from the desktop mailbox.
As Van Dyck noted of etrieve’s philosophy, “Technology is only as good as it is simple.”
