Cash-Starved Ambient Industries Folds Location Browser App Flook

Nearly two years ago, Ambient Industries raised capital to boost development and marketing of its iPhone app Flook, a location-based social discovery application. Alas, they never got the kind of traction needed to develop a business model solid enough to make enough money from the app.

Yesterday, the people behind Flook sent an email to users announcing that the app will be retired “some time in the next 30 days” (after February 25th). From the message:

Why? Well, as you can imagine it costs quite a bit of money to run all the machines and robots that make up flook, and unfortunately we have just run out.

We built flook as a great experiment, and loved every bit of it. Over 100,000 of you used flook over the years, we got some great press and it gave us so much pride to see the many ingenious ways you all contributed to flook.

All good things have to come to an end however, and we just didn’t manage to get flook to where we wanted it to go, but we are so very thankful for your support on our journey.

Ambient Industries is offering users a way to export their Flook cards, comments and data.

The company was founded by Jane Sales, Tristan Brotherton and Roger Nolan. Sales and Nolan were both previously founders of Symbian Software.

What remains unclear is whether Ambient Industries is calling it quits as a whole, or if they’re merely terminating Flook to focus on the development of other smartphone software.

Either way, Flook has come tumbling down into the TC Deadpool.