Email helper Cc:Betty ditches Betty, becomes Threadbox

Cc:Betty, a services that helps users stay on top of their communication and projects by organizing their email, had one of the most memorable names among the startups I’ve covered at VentureBeat, but now it’s ditching that name in favor of a new one — Threadbox.

Why the change? Well, the Cc:Betty name was cute, but not necessarily a great fit as the product found that its real audience was business users. Chief executive Michael Cerda writes:

We’ve found our branding/packaging to work well for the casual, more personal use cases. But for the majority, the workplace oriented user, the branding/packaging while cute, needed to be reeled in a bit. And we love naming and branding, so we came up with Threadbox.

To this end, Cc:Betty is becoming Threadbox. No, it’s not a new company, but it’s a new and improved product, packaged with functionality YOU have asked for.

The service collects all your emails, organizes those each conversation into a single view, then highlights important content like documents and locations. The old name came from the fact that you sent emails into the Cc:Betty system by cc’ing “betty@ccbetty.com.” And Cerda had some fun with the name, dressing someone as Betty to promote the company at tech events.

Threadbox seems like an appropriate name too, since it organizes your email around conversation threads, and presumably it will be an even better fit when the company unveils its redesigned service. Unfortunately, Threadbox also feels more like a generic startup name (a similar-sounding company called Threadsy launched last year too). But at least I won’t have to wonder anymore if I should feel uncomfortable about the Cc:Betty name’s whiff of old-fashioned sexual politics.

Cc:Betty launched at DEMO, the technology conference co-produced by VentureBeat, and has raised $2 million in funding. Here’s a video from the company that takes jabs at existing collaboration tools like Basecamp and Google Wave and previews the new Threadbox service.