Looks like troubled Lycos Europe is killing more than just Lycos Mail and Tripod. The company is also shuttering Jubii, a service that was never covered by TechCrunch, although we did mention them as a competitor to Zenbe when that company took the beta tag of its social communication platform.
Jubii was a former Danish search company acquired by Lycos Europe in 2000 which was ultimately relaunched for the U.S. market with a social software product that integrated chat, text messaging, file-sharing, storage, blogging, e-mail and mobile communications (Webware reviewed the service extensively). The name Jubii was chosen because Lycos Europe was barred from selling itself in the States using its own name (more information in this March 2007 article by the New York Times). Ironically, the last sentence of that article went something like this, quoting former CEO Christoph Mohn:
“Give us two or three years. You’ll see a lot different Lycos Europe than you see now.”
Well that’s true, but not in a good way.
According to the Wikipedia entry for Jubii, the service was put up for sale in September 2008, but the homepage now reads:
Dear User,
This service will remain available only until 15 February 2009. After this date, all accounts will be closed, and any stored content and access authorizations related to your e-mail account will be deleted in accordance with legal requirements. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Jubii e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.
We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.
Your Jubii Mail Team
One more for the deadpool, and it won’t be the last.
Update: the Danish version of Jubii changed hands to a private investor this month and will be kept alive.