SteekR

» see steekr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

SteekR was an online drive with a French accent and, most of the time, somebody else's logo on the front of it. Steek started in Bordeaux at the top of the decade and spent two years building before it sold anything. The first product out the door in 2004 was Yellow Backup, pointed at small offices. Then the company found the business it was actually good at, which was supplying storage to telecom operators who wanted something to put in the subscriber menu.

SteekR, launched on 15 February 2007, was the one with Steek's name on the door. The white-label editions went everywhere else: Neuf Cegetel sold the same thing as Neuf Giga and Orange's Voila portal called it MaClé. By the end of that year Netvibes had Steek's storage wired into its user pages, and a deal with PNY bundled online space with retail USB sticks. When F-Secure bought the company the partner list ran to five operators, SFR, Virgin Media, TDC, Singtel and Terra, with more than 2.2 million active users between them.

The money was small and pointed the right way. A 2.5 million euro Series A came from Innovacom in 2006. Revenues for 2008 grew more than 300% to 2.5 million euros against a net loss of 0.7 million, carried by a staff of 50. F-Secure announced the acquisition on 10 July 2009 and paid 27.5 million euros cash and debt free, with up to 2.5 million more riding on how the business did in 2010.

None of this ever reached a Turkish subscriber, and the partner list is the reason. Steek sold through operators, and no operator in Turkey bought it. A storage locker attached to your broadband account was a European carrier idea in those years; where I was it eventually turned up anyway, several years later, wearing Google's branding instead of SFR's.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the name on the door ~

The company had already swapped its own name once. Until March 2008 it traded as Agematis, which is the name on the 2007 press coverage of Neuf Giga and the Netvibes deal. In March 2008 it announced that everything would run as Steek from then on, and the following month shipped SteekR V2 with a heavier Web 2.0 lean.

Its Wikipedia article and its acquirer cannot agree on when any of this began. The article body says the company was founded in 2001 and spent its first two years in research; F-Secure's own press release says Steek SA was founded in 2002 in Bordeaux. Both are in print, neither cites the other, and the infobox sides with the buyer.

~ the switch-off ~

F-Secure ran SteekR for two and a half more years, then mailed its users a newsletter on 6 October 2011 saying the service would be discontinued on 31 December. The crawl record matches to the week. steekr.com served its own 8 KB front page, titled "steekR : your secured online space", every month through 27 December 2011, and from 3 January 2012 every request to it is a redirect. What F-Secure had actually bought was the operator relationships and the backup engine, which it went on selling as F-Secure Online Backup for years after the consumer brand went away.

steek.com still answers, in the thinnest possible sense. It is 114 bytes of HTML whose only instruction is to send the browser to a page called /lander, which is what a parked domain looks like when the registrar is doing the parking. The brand went in 2011, and the address it used is now inventory.

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