Synapse Corporate Solutions has decided to sell off its productivity suite, SynapseLife, by putting it up on eBay yesterday. It therefore enters the TechCrunch Deadpool of dead or dying companies. The auction has started at $50,000. The eBay auction has become a cheap way for small companies to make an exit or sell of their lagging technology (see Kiko and Zookoda). SynapseLife has had a tough time, being sandwiched between more robust productivity management applications like Zimbra, Scrybe, and even the hipper Goowy. Co-founder Daniel Rust says the sell off is so they can move away from the competitive corporate solutions market and focus on their Down2Night nightlife SMS alert product. Down2Night alerts users to special events and deals happening at venues in their area (currently only for San Francisco and Seattle). The company’s team of 4, along with some sub-contractors, has been working on SynapseLife since last July. The value of the sale will mostly be attributed to the application’s technology, but the service has also attracted 4,500 users. → Read More
The guys over at Synapse Life (a productivity suite) released today a new mobile nightlife service called Down2Night. Down2Night lets you use your cell phone to post and receive notices of events that are going on at your favorite local venues. Seattle is the first city covered by the service. We covered Movoxx earlier, but their SMS service is for nightlife deals instead of coupons. Down2Night adds a web interface that lets you add events and chose the venues you want to receive updates from. Each night of the week you choose, Down2Night will send updates of the top voted event for each venue you’re subscribed to. The top event can be something listed by the venue’s owner, or even a big birthday bash being held that night. As the service grows, the most likely business model is the local advertising market. Everyone, though, is eager to get a hold of the elusive 18-35 crowd that makes up Down2Night’s target market. So far the mobile components for services like Upcoming.org or Yelp haven’t begun to offer voting or subscriptions, but I suspect it won’t be long. → Read More
The guys over at Synapse Life (a productivity suite) released today a new mobile nightlife service called Down2Night. Down2Night lets you use your cell phone to post and receive notices of events that are going on at your favorite local venues. Seattle is the first city covered by the service. In contrast to a mobile coupon service like Movoxx, which pushes their nightlife deals to your phone, Down2Night has a web interface that lets you pick venues, add, and vote for the events that show up on your phone. Each night of the week you choose, Down2Night will send updates of the top voted event for each venue you’re subscribed to. The top event can be something listed by the venue’s owner, or even a big birthday bash being held that night. As the service grows, the most likely business model is the local advertising market. Everyone, though, is eager to get a hold of the elusive 18-35 crowd that makes up Down2Night’s target market. So far the mobile components for services like Upcoming.org or Yelp haven’t begun to offer voting or subscriptions, but I suspect it won’t be long. → Read More
Synapse is a business-focused Ajax productivity suite (think Zimbra – email, calendar, etc.) that we covered back in August when it first launched. It’s easy to ignore Syanapse – the corporate website screams 1998 – but we’ve taken the time to look at the actual application and have come away surprisingly pleased. Version 2 will be released in the next few days and includes a browser toolbar extension and tools for importing/exporting calendar, OPML and other data. They only offer a hosted, free version currently. The dashboard has a Netvibes, module based look and feel where email, calendar, RSS reader, bookmarking, todo list, basic cash flow ledger (?) and coworkers are shown (see image). Click on a module and the application pops up. The service also works very well on mobile devices. The problem with SynapseLife is that it isn’t nearly as robust as Zimbra for the enterprise, and not as cool as Goowy for the consumer. And Google continues to domainate this space anyway – Google Calendar and Gmail are best of class online applications. SynapseLife’s best shot at success may be the fact that they will soon be releasing an API, allowing third parties to create modules for the service, and to pull SynapeLife into other apps. This is a self-financed team of four developers – so they are nimble enough to change direction over time as well. If you’re interested in other organizational solutions, check out yet-to-launch LifeIO and the much anticipated Scrybe. → Read More
SynapseLife is a suite of integrated online applications for managing various parts of your life. The company is currently accepting email addresses for beta release notification on the first of October. SynapseLife is the first consumer play of Synapse Corporate Solutions, a four person Seattle team founded by Daniel Rust and Mark Michael. The basic applications will be free with premium applications available. There’s eight ajax applications scheduled to be in the initial release. A contacts manager, calendar, email broadcast tool, to-do lists, a financial ledger, a feed reader, favorites and tagging. All of the applications will be fully accessible by mobile device; there will be three versions of the site, a text only version for simple phones, a version with more graphics for PDAs and the basic browser version. The contacts manager will integrate with the email broadcast service, for sending email blasts to groups of people. Emails will go out through SynapseLife but will have your regular email as the reply to address. The calendar app will include the ability to create events and manage RSVPs – invitees will receive emails containing a link to a page for your event where they can provide information like the number of guests they’ll be bringing. The RSS feed reader aims to be highly customizable and there’s an online bookmarking function. Content throughout the suite will be searchable by tags. The company plans to release an API to allow other functionality to be added or for Synapse to be plugged in to other systems by third party developers. The personal applications described above will be free and users will have the option to pay for additional features aimed at small business and entrepreneurial needs. Those features will be based on the company’s legacy web service, which will be upgraded for the demanding Web 2.0 aficionado. This is a great example of the kind of lightweight bundle of applications I expect to see a lot more of in the future. Yahoo! Mobile offers a similar but different feature set. → Read More
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