Songbird, an early digital music service that aimed to compete against the iTunes, Pandoras and Spotifies of this world with an open source platform, is shutting down on June 28, after running out of money and failing to find a buyer. The startup, backed by Sequoia, Atlas Venture and Phillips, had raised at least $11 million and is planning to formally announce the news on its own site later… → Read More
Better Place, the Tel Aviv- and based electric car battery technology company that’s raised more than $800 million in venture capital funding since its 2007 inception, confirmed today that it has filed a court motion to dissolve and liquidate the company after attempts to raise more funds fizzled. The impending bankruptcy was first reported by Fortune’s Dan Primack last week.
The official… → Read More
Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the Cambridge, MA cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down TweetBackup, a company originally founded in Sweden that Backupify acquired in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Tweetbackup has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting… → Read More
Tallygram, a Facebook-based friend finding app created by dating site OKCupid, has shut down, saying that the community never grew large enough to sustain the site. Tallygram, which originally billed itself as “a better way to surf Facebook,” first opened for business in November 2012. → Read More
Formspring, a startup that helped pioneer the “ask me anything” format of anonymous Q&A online, is shutting down. The San Francisco company announced the news in a blog post this afternoon.
The closure of the Q&A platform will occur March 31st, and users will be able to export their data until April 15th, Formspring’s founder and CEO Ade Olonoh wrote in the closure announcement. → Read More
Ebay, the online marketplace that recently added a redesign reminiscent of Pinterest to enhance a personalized experience for its users, is paring down in other areas. Among them, the site has discontinued its Instant Sale service, a program for users to quickly trade in used consumer electronics for cash, with the electronics then resold by eBay working with a third party. Instant Sale, eBay… → Read More
Updated. Memolane, the startup that helped users archive and explore social network activity across different platforms, is shutting down. The company announced the closure in a blog post published this afternoon.
The shutdown will be quite abrupt: Memolane accounts and content are set to be deleted tomorrow, February 22. All Memolane content is pulled in from existing social networking sites… → Read More
Intuit’s Mint has one less competitor now. Adaptu, a Portland-based startup that positioned its mobile wallet as an alternative to Mint, is closing its doors. The company announced the change via its website and in emails to its subscriber base. According to the company, the decision was made because Adaptu didn’t want to have to transition away from its free model in order to remain in… → Read More
BetaBait, a service that connects startups with people to try and test early “beta” versions of web and mobile apps, is shutting down effective February 1st, 2013.
The company, which first launched a year ago in December 2011, announced the closure in an email sent to users. → Read More
Sometimes startups shut down fast, and in the case of new online scrapbooking maker Irrive, which only launched this past September, the company had barely even gotten started before closing up shop. According to CEO Steven Cohn, who sold his last startup to LivingSocial, he made the decision to quickly pivot (his word, not mine, by the way), because even though Irrive’s metrics were good, the… → Read More
Hackulous, the company behind the popular (and controversial) app Installous which let people easily download pirated apps on jailbroken iOS devices, has shut down.
In what iDownloadBlog’s Sebastien Page has called “a small victory against app piracy,” the Installous app is also no longer available for use. → Read More
We’ve received word that Verelo, a Toronto-based startup that provides website monitoring services, is shutting down. The company announced the news today in an email to users signed by co-founder Andrew McGrath. The company, which provided uptime and performance analytics as well as malware detection and site health monitoring services, stopped billing several weeks ago and plans to return… → Read More
I spoke to a person inside The Daily who held a $40,000 reporter position for the now shuttered “daily iPad newspaper.” While not completely blindsided, they had little inkling of what was going on inside the paper but there was always an undercurrent of doubt. “When the layoffs happened in the summer,” they said, “you saw it coming. People were dropping off.” → Read More
Profig, the Y Combinator-backed virtual phone system startup that launched out of the accelerator program’s summer class this August, has shut its doors after fewer than three months on the market. Its homepage is now a (pretty) 404 page and there is no way to sign up for the service anymore. → Read More
We knew that the Dailybooth team, creators of photo sharing app Batch, moved on to greener pastures at Airbnb. The acquisition was to bolster the mobile apps and presence for Airbnb. What we didn’t know is what the fate of its products would be, but now we do.
Today, the “Batch team” sent out an email to its users informing them that they should download their photos, because the service will… → Read More
EggDrop, a mobile marketplace application with over half a million downloads, is shutting down. The company will inform its current user base via email on Friday. According to CEO Dan Zheng, EggDrop was the recipient of a Cease & Desist letter from Craigslist a few months ago, but that’s not the primary factor in his decision to close up shop – instead, it was slower than expected growth… → Read More
Last year, BlackBerry maker RIM acquired the social calendaring app Tungle.me. Since then, the Tungle team mostly focused on the BlackBerry Calendar app for RIM’s less than successful Playbook tablet. Now, the team that built Tungle is working on the native Calendar app for the upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system. → Read More
Fluent is shutting down, or so you may have heard. It’s no surprise that a startup has failed – most do. It’s no surprise that an ambitious, bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew startup that went so far as to proclaim it was inventing “the future of email” is shutting down – that’s a hefty order for anyone to fill. And it’s no surprise that a company based in Australia (which to most VC’s may as well… → Read More
Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up… → Read More
Daily deal community for website owners Startups.com is shutting down. In an email sent out to its mailing list subscribers, founder Gonzo Arzuaga admits that the company just “couldn’t make a go of it.”
“We didn’t achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves when we launched only 1 year ago. So, with regret, this news of our departure from the realm of Daily Deals,” writes Arzuaga. “This… → Read More
Everyone out of the pool! Google is shutting it down. As announced late last year, Google Wave is now in the final stages of its life and became read-only yesterday. Come April 30 the Wave pool will be shut down forever. It was fun while it lasted. → Read More
Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.
Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small… → Read More
San Francisco-based HiGear, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service focused on luxury vehicles, is shutting down due to theft incidents involving its members’ cars. According to CEO Ali Moiz, the company will send out an email tomorrow to its members with a full explanation. The news may come as a shock to some, given that HiGear was seemingly doing so well in recent months. The company had expanded… → Read More
Back in early 2009, I wrote about an Italian startup called BeeTV, which showcased some impressive TV recommendation technology. The goal was to sell that technology to telcos and cable operators, but this proved to be a very difficult task for a small, scrappy upstart. This led to BeeTV changing course and trying its hand at making consumer-focused products, like an iPad app for watching and… → Read More
Brandstack. Pitched as some sort of haven for designers, it was a marketplace in which creative types could sell off their logo concepts as they came to mind, rather than on “spec work” conjured up by a client. The goal? Less unpaid work (and fewer “amateur submissions”) than contest-based crowdsourcing sites like 99designs.
Alas, Brandstack is now officially destined for the deadpool — and… → Read More
A reader tells us Yap Voicemail, a mobile voicemail transcription app for iPhone and Android phones, will soon be no more.
Indeed, a message on the Yap Voicemail product page informs users that the service, which converts voicemails into text, thus making it easier to access, search and respond to voicemail messages from a mobile device, will be discontinued on October 20, 2011.
Yap… → Read More
Notifo, a YC-backed company we once described as a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything”, is shuttering the windows and heading for the deadpool.
The idea was simple enough: Notifo would pipe real-time notifications from just about anywhere — be it Twitter, or Hacker News, or Github, or Facebook, or any Growl-compatible app on your computer — to your mobile device, long before… → Read More
So long, Twezr, it’s been fun. The mobile social contacts application Twezr is being shut down after having a fairly well-received launch back in November 2010. The app, for those unaware, was based on a great idea: it was a social address book. It aggregated all the activity from your phone’s contacts (e.g., phone calls, SMS’s, voicemails) alongside their social networking activity (e.g. → Read More
MyNines, a startup that made its debut back in 2009, has gone belly up. The company, which we likened to a ‘Kayak for private sales’, wasn’t able to secure the financing needed to sustain the business.
MyNines aimed to help consumers sort through the daily flash sales sites by aggregating products for sale and offering users the ability to search and filter by designer, category, highest… → Read More
It wasn’t even a month ago when we broke the news that beRecruited would be acquiring former Y Combinator startup Fanvibe. At the time, Fanvibe’s Vishwas Prabhakara, set to become the new CEO of beRecruited with the deal, said that Fanvibe would continue to operate with its roughly 100,000 users. What a difference a few weeks make.
Effective immediately, Fanvibe will cease operations… → Read More
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