Occasionally, we get emails from people about a startup or service shutting down (usually because they were users and received an email notification about the impending death of said company or product). We don’t always write a post about those, because, well, the majority of startups in this world happen to die trying to make a difference.
That said, we got multiple ones today, so here’s a rundown of three recent deadpool entries: → Read More
The music industry lawyers just put another notch on their wall. After ten years of existence, peer-to-peer music sharing service LimeWire is joining Napster, Kazaa, and all the rest. It will abide by a court-ordered injunction today and begin to disable the file-sharing and music-searching features of its P2P software. Years of legal battles and the prospects of paying astronomical fines finally did the service in. We are putting it in the deadpool.
The company, LimeCompany, will soldier on. Transitioning to a music store or legal streaming music service, however, will be tough. It fought a good fight, and lasted longer than most other P2P services. Partly that was because there was usually a bigger P2P sharing service freaking out the music industry. Once the lawyers got rid of those, they finally got around to LimeWire. → Read More
Video micro-messaging is hard. Remember when Seesmic was supposed to be the Twitter of video before it mothballed that idea and morphed into a family of realtime streaming apps instead? Now 12seconds.tv, which launched in 2008 with the simple idea of leaving short, public, 12-second video messages for people on the Web, is calling it quits.
The team tried to pivot, introducing an early video messaging iPhone app tied to Twitter, which prefaced Apple’s own FaceTime, but was asynchronous. It never really caught on. It took Apple, with its marketing muscle and deep device integration, to make video messaging cool. And even now I’m not sure how many people really want to make video phone calls. → Read More
According to a company blog post, social bookmarking and search tool Xmarks is shutting down in 90 days.
Following a rebranding from Foxmarks last year, Xmarks, a social bookmarking and search tool, had been growing steadily in users. After the addition of its search feature last March, Xmarks now had 2 million active users and had bookmarked 1 billion URLS. Xmarks is free as a plug-in to users (and was available on IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). → Read More
Cuil, the much maligned search engine that at one time had hopes of toppling Google, has gone offline. And from what we hear from former employees, it’s not just a temporary outage, it may be done for good. Those employees who are still with the company apparently weren’t paid this week, and they’re starting to say they’re looking for new jobs.
The company had raised $33 million in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. we first started covering Cuil in late 2007 when it was in stealth. It launched in July 2008 but a month later their VP Product had bailed. By December 2008 it had little traffic and since then things have only gotten stranger.
To be clear, we’ve confirmed nothing right now except that the site is down, the rest of what we’re hearing is from former employees. We’ll update as we hear back from the company and/or investors. Meanwhile, it’s in the DeadPuil. → Read More
It’s ironic that Microsoft chose the day before the anniversary of the 9/11 disaster to announce the shuttering of Vine – the service was built to help people in exactly those types of situations. We first wrote about Vine in April 2009 – it was an ambitious new service to help keep friends and family in touch during emergencies:
Vine is designed to keep family and friends in touch when other communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient. Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone or other key communication infrastructures, and Vine is designed to be as hardy as possible to keep people connected. Vine can be accessed via a desktop client (Windows only for now), text message or email.
Here’s the email Microsoft sent out announcing the shutdown of the service on October 11: → Read More
It’s finally happened. Bloglines,the troubled RSS feed reader owned by IAC, will officially be shut down, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The site has had a tumultuous history, so it’s unsurprising that IAC has finally put the platform out of its misery. Bloglines, which is actually operated by IAC Q&A property Ask.com, will be informing users of the news today and will officially be shut down on October 1.
Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams. Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. While we’ve heard in the past that IAC was considering shutting down the site, the company held off on killing the site permanently and was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines. → Read More
When Six Apart launched Vox, a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor David Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an “amazing blogging platform,” he said, because “Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them.”
Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart.
What they’re not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens. → Read More
Buxfer is a social payments service that launched in 2007 as part of that class of new Y Combinator companies. The site is still live and working, but a user, Sean Leather, emailed us to say it’s a bit of a ghost town.
The blog has been taken down and was last updated in 2009. The last tweet was on October 9, 2009, six days after their first tweet. And users are wondering if the site is dead over on Get Satisfaction.
So what happened? The two founders, Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe, took jobs at Facebook. Bhramabe joined Facebook way back in October 2008, as noted on Buxfer’s About page. But according to Pandit’s LinkedIn profile, he too left the company in June and has been full time at Facebook since late 2009. → Read More
Wesabe, an online personal finance site that looked to help users better keep track of their spending trends, is shutting down. The startup’s homepage now consists of a letter to Wesabe users instructing them to download their account information by July 31, at which point nearly all of the service’s features will be taken offline and data deleted. The lone feature that will remain online indefinitely is the site’s ‘Groups’ page, where members can trade advice about their finances (this part of the site is being taken over by one of Wesabe’s current customers).
In the letter, Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund writes that the site has been operating on a shoestring budget lately, which has led to both some poor customer experiences and the potential for security issues, which is why they’re pulling the plug: → Read More
Not that it should be a big surprise to anyone, but Radar, the social photo sharing site is entering the deadpool. An email sent out to users over the weekend confirms that May 26 at noon Pacific Time will be the end.
As I said, this shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that Shutterly bought Radar parent Tiny Pictures back in September of last year. Shutterfly is much, much larger than Radar ever was, so it makes sense to incorporate the best features of Radar into that product rather than keeping it alive as a standalone service. → Read More
EventVue set out three years ago to transform the way people interact with and network during events. Today, sadly, they have announced they are shutting down.
In an overlay message that appears now on the main site, co-founders Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser write: → Read More
At least Yahoo is consistent. At a time when many tech companies are starting to launch new projects again, and excitement is building, Yahoo keeps shutting things down.
The latest is their Shopping API, which they announced on their developer network blog today would be killed on March 11, 2010. Why? Well, Yahoo decided to enter into an agreement with PriceGrabber to power the same thing for the Yahoo Shopping area. The worst part is that not only is Yahoo shutting their own service down, but developer’s currently using the Yahoo Shopping API can’t even transition to Yahoo’s new method smoothly. As Yahoo notes, any developer that wishes to continue to display results from Yahoo Shopping will have to apply to PriceGrabber to get permission. Lame. → Read More
Right Media, the ad exchange that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for a reported $680 million in cash and stock, has recently seen its founder Michael Walrath walk away from his job as Yahoo’s SVP of Advertising Strategy.
When the announcement of Walrath’s departure was made, Yahoo at the same time declared that it would be shifting strategy for Right Media by placing more emphasis on serving as a high-quality, premium marketplace rather than contuining to be an exchange platform for high volumes of ad networks, including many small ones (zing).
They’re now making good on that promise by confirming that Right Media’s DMX (Direct Media Exchange) platform will be shut down on January 31, 2010. → Read More
It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.
And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication. → Read More
DotBlu, which we first covered in 2007 when it was called BluBet, had some of Silicon Valley’s highest profile angel investors backing it. But it wasn’t enough, and company hit the deadpool earlier this week.
Investors in an early angel round included Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom and Eventbrite), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive). A later $2 million round was funded by Maples Investments and DE Shaw.
The company first launched as an online betting service and then changed its name and focus to social gaming. But on October 16 the company shut everything down with a brief note to users: “Dear dotblu members: dotblu.com is down indefinitely. A big thanks to each of you for being part of our community for the past two and a half years.” The note also asks users to stay in touch via their Facebook fan page. → Read More
Storytlr, a nifty web application centered around the concept of lifestreaming, will cease to exist at the end of this year. In a blog post, the two guys who built the service jointly announced the decision to stop operating Storytlr on December 31st 2009.
Unfortunately, all data that doesn’t get backed up by its users in the next ten weeks will be wiped out, although there is a simple tool that allows for easy export of all data and soon users will also be able to download a zip archive of their binary files (images etc.). → Read More
As the current hot platform of choice for a lot of developers, we’re not seeing too many Twitter apps just yet in the Deadpool. But one, TwitApps, will hit it tomorrow, the developer is notifying users.
The service was a useful one that allowed you to get an automated email with all your @replies and follower notifications from Twitter. But it would appear that the developer simply got fed up trying to build a new version while continuing to “fire-fight problems” with Twitter’s API. Here’s the core part of the developer’s statement: → Read More
Socializr, the online event organization tool that first went into private beta in 2006, isn’t in good shape.
We’ve heard from a couple of sources that Socializr has laid off most or all of the staff and that the site is running on autopilot. The company confirms cost reductions but won’t go into more detail on the scope of the layoffs. From founder Jonathan Abrams: → Read More
Lookery, a startup that focuses on collecting demographic data about users and sites around the web and then selling this information to ad networks to target users, is heading to the deadpool. In a blog post, Lookery’s CEO Scott Rafer confirmed that the startup will be shutting its doors after launching in 2007.
Lookery initially started as an ad network for social applications on Facebook, and quickly encountered the troubles of making money off ads on social networks. Lookery ran a promotion for advertisers, offering a guarantee of 12.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs) in January of 2008. Lookery also made a bold play for ads on traffic from European markets, guaranteeing 25 cents per thousand impressions per advert from European traffic. But things clearly weren’t working out — by July, Lookery was downgrading its guarantee offering 7.5 cents per ad impression, cutting its rates nearly in half. → Read More
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