It’s the way of many acquisitions – a startup gets bought, and a couple of years later, after the earnout expires, the founders get an itch to start something new.
AOL acquired Goowy, a creator of Flash widgets, in early 2008. Now, we’ve confirmed, the core team – Alex Bard, Gary Benitt and Jeremy Suriel, have left AOL to start their next company, Assistly. Brad Birnbaum, formerly the CTO of… → Read More
Funny how we receive tips sometimes. Yesterday we covered the latest Startup2Startup meetup, and a certain ChrisATSo33t commented on the story pointing to the latest quarterly report (PDF) of Luxembourg-based VC firm Mangrove Capital Partners in which they state that Paris-based portfolio company Jooce would be “closing its doors” during the month of February.
We’ve now entered the month of… → Read More
Eight months after acquiring San Diego-based startup Goowy, AOL has decided to shutter its Yourminis personalized homepage. Notice that the two-year old Flash-based service would be shut down entirely on October 27th went out to users today in an email. It encourages them to export their OPML files and content for migration over to myAOL, iGoogle, or Netvibes: → Read More
Personalized desktops are a crowded space. Startups compete for attention against the big three of myYahoo, iGoogle and Live. TechCrunch last covered Yourminis in November 2006 with Michael describing it as a solid product, however it’s not a name many would recall in the space. Since then Yourminis, a service from Goowy media has taken a different approach to most of its competitors. Today… → Read More
YourMinis is a Flash-based customizable homepage product that will compete for users with a number of similar products that use Ajax – Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google, Live.com and more. This was launched by a startup called Goowy, which created a flash-based productivity suite (email, calendar, IM, etc.) last year – see here for our Goowy coverage. Goowy CEO Alex Bard gave me a demo of… → Read More
San Diego-headquartered Goowy (a Mark Cuban investment) just publicly launched the enhanced IM and storage products that I tested last month. Goowy users now have Meebo-like IM funtionality built directly into their Goowy desktop, and 1 GB of free online storage via a partnership with Box.net. Goowy has also rolled out significant enhancements to their email client, including a three-pane view… → Read More
Goowy is slowly rolling out its new web instant messaging and online storage services to users. I showed screen shots (provided by Goowy) earlier this month, and have now had a chance to use the features directly. My overall impression: Goowy is turning into a very nice Flash-based desktop replacement, but has some issues to work out on performance. Instant messaging compatibility is good (think… → Read More
Goowy is turning into a lot more than just another ajax/flash home page – its a full on desktop platform that is shaping up to be the best competitor to Microsoft’s Live.com. I’ve written about Goowy, which is Flash based, a number of times (scroll down after clicking link), and had a chance to see a current product demo at an event last week. Goowy is now preparing to roll out… → Read More
Alex Bard’s flash-based desktop replacement Goowy, based in San Diego, has impressed me from the start. We originally profiled Goowy on August 17, 2005 and again a couple of weeks ago. Today Goowy released further functionality. First, they increased storage from 100 MB to 2 GB. While that storage is only for use with email now, they will soon be releasing a virtual file storage product… → Read More
Goowy is a browser based desktop tool built on Flash. See our August 17, 2005 profile of Goowy for additional information. Until recently, Goowy’s main draw (other than it is extremely fast) was a very nice email application. Goowy also allows access of your regular email account in the Goowy UI via pop. New Features Goowy has launched new applications on their flash platform. The two key… → Read More
Company: Goowy Founded: August 2004 Launched: April 2005 Location: San Diego Overview: Goowy has rebuilt a number of commonly used applicatons (like email) in Flash. It includes traditional web services such as email, contacts, calendar, games and widgets. Goowy is highly interactive and, as you’d expect with a flash application – fast. Visually it is a very beautiful site as well, and… → Read More
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