Kiko Flatlines

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.