Two years ago Y Combinator invested in Justin Kan and Emmett Shear’s calendaring company, Kiko, which eventually folded after Google Calendar launched in 2006. The Kiko guys have returned to the startup scene since their acquisition on eBay with two new partners and a new quirky live blogging startup, Justin.TV, also funded by Y Combinator. Justin.TV is a website entirely devoted to chronicling the life of one of the company’s founders, Justin Kan, around day and night via web cam. This might sound a lot like JenniCam circa ’96, ill-fated DotComGuy, or marketing ploy OurPrisoner, but some really cutting edge mobile technology sets the show apart. Justin won’t be chained to his house like these previous cam shows. Instead, armed with a head-cam, batteries, and 4 EVDO cards, he will roam free, streaming video across the mobile network and onto their own live flash content distribution platform. On the site, you can watch the live feed of what Justin sees and hears, and chat, call, or text message him. The site also features a calendar that serves as his TV guide, listing his plans for the upcoming days. There are a couple boundaries about what Justin will film. He won’t be filming in the bathroom and will do his best to respect people’s wishes to not be on camera. His plans this afternoon will be to get a new wardrobe, and carry out some interviews with founders of other startups based out of San Francisco, such as ShoutFit, PairWise, and LicketyShip. Justin.TV will sink or swim based on having interesting content, and while mobility spices up that scenery a bit, the life of a web entrepreneur is no episode of 24. As an answer to this, Justin is trying to keep his schedule interesting and East Coast time zone compatible, but will also feature archives of his most interesting content. The archives will be in the form of his personal blog, which will include his selected videos, and a raw archive of Justin’s life that viewers will soon be able to pick apart and mash together. The long term goal of the project is to create an affordable live mobile video platform they can use to recruit other live bloggers. They already have plans to loan out the technology to a group tracking the Iowa local caucuses and have also set their sights on tracking some musicians. http://justin.tv/widgets/embedded.swf → Read More
We have a new podcast up on TalkCrunch – an interview with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss. Tucows just acquired one year old Ajax calendar Kiko for $250,000 on ebay. We spoke for about twenty minutes on his reasons for buying the company and what he plans on doing with it. Elliot also talks for a few minutes about the bidding drama on ebay, where the sale price increased by over $100k in the last two minutes of the auction. I think the transaction, and others like it, might signal a trend in the new web. Is eBay the investment bank of Web 2.0? New companies are easy to start, easy to fund and (now) easy to sell for a few hundred grand on eBay…this might be the way many of these small companies eventually find liquidity. Previous TechCrunch posts on Kiko are here. → Read More
Online calendering company Kiko.com has decided to call it quits and put the site up for auction on eBay. They are also offering to export or delete user accounts. It looks like the Deadpool may gain another member. The Massachusetts company was backed by Paul Graham’s YCombinator, offered some very cool features, an API and guts made of Ruby on Rails – but in the end it just petered out. We posted on them a number of times at launch, Robert Scoble also applauded them but warned of an uphill battle against entrenched calender vendors. Even beyond that competition the online calendering space is probably overloaded already. If you needed tangible proof, well here you go. It looks like they just weren’t able to monetize their free consumer subscriptions and never actualized the enterprise solution they sought. The eBay auction asks for a $50k starting bid and reports that the site is currently getting about 40,000 visitors per month. We’ve been hearing about more and more companies put on eBay for auction lately, but this one’s got a particularly somber feel to it that seems to warrant a deadpool post. It’s a good looking service though, so perhaps some one else will pick it up and run with it. Kiko interface designer Richard White has a euglogy here. Update: See this post on the acquisition of Kiko’s assets. → Read More
Kiko (see our post below), an ajax calendar application, is working now and we were able to grab a screenshot. First impression: Kiko is a usable calendaring application with nice sharing features. Try it. → Read More
Company: Kiko Launched: August 31, 2005 Location: Cambridge, MA. Overview: Online calendar solutions are launching quite regularly now – see Trumba and Hula for examples. But while Trumba is charging $40 a year, and Hula is an open source project, not an application that we can just use, Kiko seems to be free, simple to use, and ajax based. At least, I can’t find anything on the site referring to a fee. I haven’t been able to test the product because when I try to create a user account a I get an error, and the demo link on the home page doesn’t seem to work. Since they launched only yesterday, perhaps they are getting a bit more traffic than they expected. When it’s working and/or I’ve had a chance to talk to the founders, I’ll write a full review. For now, Kiko promises to work like a “native application” – click, drag, drop, etc., and to put everything you need on a single page dashboard. Interface Click On Anything – Everything is interactive. Right click it, drag it – it all works the way you expect from a native application. Everything’s On One Page – Manage your groups, view your calendar, and create and tag your appointments all from one page. Be Soothed By Kiko’s Pleasant Colors – Pastels are good for the soul. They also promise future functionality that includes import/export functionality to iCal and Outlook, and mobile versions. Marc Hedlund also wrote about Kiko. Thanks for Ivan Pope at FeedNation for emailing me about this. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
