firedrop! zaplet!

In a weird blast-from-the-past moment, TechCrunch reported yesterday that hot mail startup Xobni has licensed the IP from Zaplet (nee Firedrop, and most recently bought by MetricStream), a company we started from Reactivity nearly 10 years ago. TC has bits and pieces of the story, and gets most of the basics of the history right. Seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago when Mike Hanson and Brian Roddy and I were brainstorming about live HTML in e-mail and when Mike mocked up the first one — as we were searching for names, we started with Zimlet or Zaplet or Zammogram, among many other very bad names. Then Brian Axe took it and started to build a business case, recruited Dave Roberts, got some mad Firedrop namage & logo help from Gentry, and was away to the races. (And IIRC, the Reactivity Austin team of Lynn and Dave and others built the screenshots showing up on TC now.)

Anyway, it’s neat to see that another piece of Reactivity technology is still breathing — and hopefully will be put to good use at Xobni.

3 comments

  1. John,

    Nice to know about the revival of Zaplets. I used Zaplets extensively during 2000. I always wondered what happened to Zaplets. Even now I just did a curious search and found this article.

    Looking forward to the re launch. 🙂

  2. John,

    Nice to know about the revival of Zaplets. I used Zaplets extensively during 2000. I always wondered what happened to Zaplets. Even now I just did a curious search and found this article.

    Looking forward to the re launch. 🙂

  3. Zaplet bought back memories rom the 2000 era.
    what happened to their effort to use ZAPLET for governance in a SOX environment?