It must be disconcerting to a big Internet company to shut down a whole website and nobody even notices. Not even a short note on Twitter from a concerned user until now. But that’s what apparently happened.
At some point Yahoo shut down Bix, a karaoke and contest website that they acquired in late 2006. Yes, at some point in 2006 someone at Yahoo said “Karaoke? Contests? We gotta own that!”
We… → Read More
In an e-mail to its user base and with a short notice on its main website, FreeYourID has announced that it will be shutting down its service after nearly two years and a half in business. After August 15, the web service will be discontinued without a hint of explanation about the reason for the folding, although we suspect it may have something to do with VeriSign taking over the service’s main… → Read More
An Update to our post yesterday about Sequoia-funded search startup SearchMe. The company needs a new round of financing or a quick acquisition to stay online, but so far neither are happening. CEO Randy Adams wrote to me this morning with an update on where things stand. I reprint most of it below with his permission. Bottom line, The site may go offline at least temporarily tomorrow if a buyer… → Read More
Back in 2007 I did a column on TBD, a social network aimed at baby boomers. I’d spent some time looking at the space, and thought TBD was the best designed site, avoiding Eons age restrictions and fascination with death and building something a bit broader than Gather. The site borrowed heavily from what worked on sites like Yelp and Facebook, the design was delightful and it gave you fun… → Read More
At the beginning of last year, Yahoo made a fairly large acquisition with the purchase of online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks. Under the terms of the agreement, which we reported as a rumor the same day the papers were signed, the company acquired the startup for approximately $160 million. At the time, the press release touted the acquisition to lead to an… → Read More
So much for zipping through airport security for people willing to pay $199 per year and have their fingerprints and iris images scanned to be pre-approved.
Clear, the largest company to leverage the Registered Traveler program in the U.S., has “ceased operation” as of 11 pm PST today and their parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., is in the deadpool. They were “unable to negotiate an… → Read More
One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.
Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool… → Read More
Well, this is a bummer. Flowgram, a promising startup that launched last July, is a goner.
The service let users create screencasts with live websites, and the early beta users really liked it:
What you see above is not a video or a slide show, it is a Flowgram. If you click on it, you will be taken to a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you… → Read More
Great idea, good execution, reasonable traction, no future. That’s what it boils down to with the latest entry to the deadpool: Totlol, a video destination site that aggregates the best videos suitable for kids from YouTube with the help of a community of parents and toddlers, is closing down. When Erick reviewed the service back in November 2008, he deemed the service an impressive alternative to… → Read More
The allure of building a business around user-generated content is fading fast. SplashCast, a company which launched two years ago around the notion of helping consumers put together videos, text, graphics, and music in embeddable broadcast “channels,” is discontinuing its original product. “Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0… → Read More
In April we reported that San Francisco based mobile startup Kadoink was heading towards the deadpool. Not because they ran out of money, but because Hercules Technology Growth Capital, one of their backers, had seized the company and was shutting it down.
CEO Scott Cahill confirmed the shutdown yesterday in an email to investors, saying that Hercules had “foreclosed on its collateral and has… → Read More
Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now “officially out of business” and winding down.
From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds… → Read More
Yahoo 360, which was supposed to close early last year, is finally officially shutting its doors on July 13, according to a blog post written on the site today. The social network/blogging service that nobody really used (except in Vietnam) steadily lost its steam, especially in the U.S. According to ComScore, Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April. But only 982,000 of… → Read More
Trusera, a health 2.0 community where users can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions, is officially closing its doors on May 27, according to a blog post on the site. We originally reported on Trusera’s possible shutdown in March, when the startup was nearly out of money.
Founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, Trusera launched almost a year ago. Trusera… → Read More
Okay, this one took a little longer than I predicted, but VOIP service Foonz is suspending its service. More than a year ago, its chief marketing officer decided to shift focus to another startup. That wasn’t a good sign. Foonz has been using up its minutes since then.
Today, its users received the following notice that the service is being suspended: → Read More
In news that should come as a surprise to no one, troubled news aggregation site Tailrank is officially headed to the Deadpool, as its parent company looks to sell off its assets. The company behind the site has decided to cut its losses and to concentrate its efforts on Spinn3r, the platform used to power Tailrank that allows researchers and developers to tap into the service’s volumes of blog… → Read More
Conde Nast is shutting down its glossy business magazine Portfolio, two years after its launch. Conde Nast famously poured $100 million to launch the publication, which went on an expensive hiring spree in 2007 in its attempt to take on Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. The magazine always seemed to me to have an unhealthy fixation with Wall Street and the hedge fund boom over other… → Read More
Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be… → Read More
Kadoink, a text messaging marketing startup based in San Francisco, has been seized by creditor Hercules Technology Growth Capital after failing to maintain the financial requirements of a $2.5 million line of credit. CEO Scott Cahill says that there is still a “substantial amount of cash remaining” that is being returned to Hercules, and that they are looking for a strategic buyer to keep the… → Read More
TV advertising startup Spot Runner really is running on fumes. According to a lawsuit filed by one its irate investors, advertising giant WPP, Spot Runner has “expended all but approximately $20 million of its investor capital, while losing money at the rate of $35-$45 million a year.” The company has raised $100 million since 2006, and at one point employed more than 500 people before a string… → Read More
Yahoo’s closure of their Jumpcut video service feels like the slow peeling off of a bandaid. In December they announced that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.”
Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down. From an email they sent out to users today:
Dear Jumpcut… → Read More
AOL’s Propeller launched in 2006 as a “Digg Killer” – a Digg like site with editorial oversight that had massive netscape.com traffic directed to it. All those Netscape users were used to seeing a standard news page, though, and didn’t quite know what to do at the new site.
A variety of changes were made over time, including paying news submitters to lure them from Digg, changing the name to … → Read More
When SMS reminder service Kwiry launched back in December, 2007, I wondered whether anyone would use it. We now have our answer: not enough people to keep it going. The company sent out a notice today to users, also on its Website, that it will be shutting down on April 23, 2009.
Kwiry allowed you to text a keyword from your phone and get back an email with links to search results for that… → Read More
In the world of Web video, either you are YouTube or you are in trouble. Today, well-funded video site Veoh laid off 25 people, the company confirmed today. The layoffs were brought on by a restructuring, as the company shifts focus away from its standalone site, says founder and now-reinstated CEO Dmitry Shapiro. Shapiro replaces former CEO Steve Mitgang. With both today’s layoffs and cutbacks… → Read More
It is going to take more than just an open search platform to take on Google. Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced today that he is shutting down Wikia Search, the company’s experiment in creating better search results through crowdsourcing. Wikia Search attempted to port the Wikipedia model over to search by allowing anybody to modify results by including new links or moving natural results… → Read More
SeeqPod has decided to sell its source code to developers to spawn more clones, one of the media search startups that built upon its API is apparently calling it quits: Streamzy, which we profiled in July 2008, is selling itself on eBay at a starting bid of $1,000, provided it’s not a lame April Fools joke (the bidding ends April 1).
Update: Streamzy co-founder Brian Krantz says it’s definitely… → Read More
Busy day for the deadpool. Earlier today we had to drag a startup out of there, and now three others are tumbling into it (although one might still be saved in time).
Here’s a quick overview:
Popular game-centric file download service FileFront is closing down on March 30.
- Cruxy, a nearly 5-year old provider of marketing, monetization and analytics tools for digital creators ranging from film… → Read More
Yahoo is cutting more fat today by closing its travel bargains website FareChase, which it originally acquired back in July 2004 and re-launched two years later. The company will be announcing the shut-down later today, and will start redirecting visitors of the service to its main travel site soon.
The service let customers perform comparative searches for pricing on flights, hotels, cruises and… → Read More
Music startups sure don’t seem to have it easy these days. Lawsuit after lawsuit is raining down on some of them, and legal threats, fierce competition but evidently also the economic downturn and the decline in digital advertising spending is forcing some companies to shut down altogether. The latest company to suffer that fate is venture capital-backed SpiralFrog, which quietly hit the deadpool… → Read More
Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service, which has been providing developers with programmatic access to millions of thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index since July 2006. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009. The service hits the … → Read More
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