For the past two years, we’ve been tracking the team behind Scoopler. Originally a Y Combinator company that was one of the first startups in the “realtime search” space, they eventually pivoted last year to become a realtime celebrity geo-stalking service called JustSpotted — yes, really. Today, they’re shutting down both services, as they note on their site. But they don’t say why. Well, we know why. The team has been hired by Google to work on Google+.
To be clear, Google did not acquire either JustSpotted or Scoopler, instead the acqui-hired the team consisting of AJ Asver, Dilan Jayawardane and Benjamin Tauber, the founders of Scoopler, Inc. “We’re looking forward to AJ, Ben, and Dilan joining Google and we think they’ll be a great addition to our team,” a Google spokesperson tells us.
Scoopler/JustSpotted had raised funding Y Combinator, Ron Conway, Michael Birch, Avalon Ventures, and a few others. No word on what was a part of the deal, but one has to assume those guys got paid back the nearly $1 million they put into the startup.