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 early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type. → 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 to L.A. in November, and was planning expansions to additional markets, including Portland and San Diego, by year-end.
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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 sharing TV experiences with friends. They also secured more funding, bringing its total raised to over $10 million.
Alas, this morning CEO Yaniv Solnik informed me that they’ve failed to gain significant traction with the new strategy, and that they’ve subsequently ran out of cash. The company will be ceasing operations soon. → 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, according to the founder, it’s all because of credit card fraud. → 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 Voicemail has been added to the TechCrunch deadpool. → 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 most of these services had apps that could handle that duty themselves. Later down the road, Notifo doubled down their server’s functionality by tossing in free user-to-user chat.
Alas, the product just never managed to find a userbase. → 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., Facebook and Twitter updates)
Now the company is removing its app from the iTunes App Store and working to build a new location-based photo sharing app called Spotpix instead. → 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 discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed.
We received an email from CEO and cofounder Apar Kothari, who has moved on a VP role at private sale shopping destination site Rue La La, where she will be heading up business development and strategic partnerships. → 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, Prabhakara confirms. Why the sudden change of heart? The ongoing NFL and NBA lockouts have effectively destroyed the point of the service, Prabhakara says. → Read More
Companies, like visitors of Chinese take-away restaurants, come and go. Today, we have the unfortunate duty to report that two fine young Internet startups have not survived the never-ending battle for users, relevance and dollars that rages Web-wide.
Making its way to the deadpool are JamLegend, which aimed to compete against Rock Band and Guitar Hero with an interesting online music game, and Skribit, which hoped to help out poor bloggers and website owners suffering from writer’s block. → Read More
Looks like Google Tags wasn’t the only product on the chopping block today — now Google Video, the mostly-forgotten service that was once YouTube’s rival, is getting the axe too.
Google just sent out an email to users who have previously uploaded content to the service informing them that on April 29 2011, the site will no longer host any more videos. Users are being encouraged to download and reupload their files to YouTube. The news was first reported yesterday by CenterNetworks.
Google actually stopped allowing uploads to Google Video back in May 2009, but existing videos have played fine until now. → Read More
Back in June of 2009, then-new CEO Tim Armstrong made two acquisitions to move AOL into the local space: Patch and Going. While the verdict is still very much out on Patch, it’s clear that AOL is at least committed to it. Going? Not so much.
Going will “going away” (they made the joke, not me) on May 1, 2011. The reason? “AOL’s refocusing”, the team explains in an email sent to users today. → Read More
When Twitter bought Mixer Labs in December, 2009, it inherited the startup’s then-recently launched GeoAPI, which offered a platform for building geo apps. The GeoAPI combined a places database of 16 million businesses with a reverse-geo-coder and support for geo-coded Tweets, Flickr photos, and even an iPhone SDK. Twitter kept the GeoAPI going after the acquisition—but that ends at the end of March.
According to a developer who used to build his product on the GeoAPI, Twitter is shutting it down for outside developers. It is too much of a hassle to maintain, apparently. Twitter will still use it internally for its own apps. (Note that this GeoAPI is not the same as Twitter’s more limited Geotagging API, which is still fully functional). So far no announcement on this. It’s going in the deadpool. I’ve reached out to Twitter for a comment. → Read More
Social calendaring service Mixin will soon be no more. In an email to its users, the Swiss startup has announced that the service, which was launched back in 2008, will be unceremoniously shut down on the 18th of February due to lack of significant revenues.
All data will be deleted, although users are given the opportunity to export their current agenda items. We’re putting Mixin in the deadpool. → Read More
Anchor Intelligence, a service that detects click fraud, is heading to the deadpool, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. We first wrote about the company in December 2007.
The company has raised $6 million in venture capital – all of it prior to 2008 – plus another million dollars or so in debt from Western Technology Investment.
The company has been trying to raise a new round of venture capital and almost succeeded in early 2010, sources say, but for a variety of reasons the deal never closed. Facebook was also close to acquiring the company in the Summer, say multiple sources. The deal, like many other Facebook acquisitions, would have given investors some of their capital back, with lucrative stock-based compensation going to founders and employees. → Read More
Another major magazine will stop printing its editions and move completely online. U.S. News & World Report, the USA Today of weekly news magazines, will no longer be found on subscriber’s mailboxes after its December issue. According to an employee memo obtained by Poynter Online’s Romeneso blog, subscribers will no longer get print issues.
Instead, U.S. News & World Report will focus all of its efforts on its Website, and on occasional print issues sold at newsstands for its annual lists and guides, including Best Colleges. Those tend to sell well. But the main thrust going forward will be on the Web and digital products. From the memo: → Read More
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
