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