Thanks for bringing light to this matter. We were surprised that instead of admitting a mistake and pulling down the site, Ankesh Kumar and Rajiv Dutta decided to argue that we no longer had a claim to the name since we had released the source code of SocialMail. Shortly after our conference call (on the same day no less), Ankesh registered the SocialMail mark with the USPTO. We feel that action proves Ankesh and his team were acting in bad faith when they suggested they didn’t realize we had been operating under the SocialMail brand a year before he launched this November. Anyway, the saga continues and they still have not removed the site. Again, thanks for the note.

Facts:

Monday 12/4 I spoke to Alex who expressed his concern. We said although we felt their was no conflict, RSS to email feeder, vs. a web collaboration app, we would consider changing the name.

The following came to our attention the next day from their website:

” This morning while I was driving to work I was considering how much time we should invest in the free feed tools we built over the past year including FeedVault, PodServe, FrankenFeed, elfURL, InstantFeed, QwikPing and SocialMail. They need a lot of work to be relevant, but we are super busy working with our paying social media clients. Do we have the time to support a suite of tools that were very hot a year ago, but cooling off by the day?”

We questioned is this a business they were continuing with. We are still confused, but decided that the name was not that important to us. Which I informed Alex of yesterday. We are moving over to http://www.grouptivity.com in the next few weeks.

That decision was made 12/11, 7 days after my initial conversation with Alex.

Alex and Ankesh - thank you both for the added information. It seems that this will soon be resolved.

They never released the domain name, despite their agreement to the contrary…