Deadpool: Pownce
Stephanie Booth mentioned the Pownce acquisition and shut-down today:
[from The Pownce Blog » Blog Archive » Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart by Leah Culver]We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.
We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.
We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.
Sounds like some sort of Pownce-ish microstreaming is coming to various (all?) Six Apart products, but the existing service is deadpooled. Considering that Pownce seems to have gotten stuck in second gear over a year ago, no surprise I guess.
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Deadpool: Chirp Desktop
I was wandering through my applications folder, trying to take out the trash. I couldn't even remember what Chirp was. I clicked and it opened up, and started by displaying a spinning arrow. Nothing happened.
A quick search led me to discover that Chrip was a social networking based app, a screensaver that would display Flickr pictures and Facebook posts from friends. It is dead now, shut down by Comcast who cannibalized some of its technology:
[from Comcast's thePlatform Buys Social Media Developer Chirp | Digital Media Wire]While Chirp has launched applications that combine social networking with media consumption, thePlatform said it will not continue Chirp's existing services, but will instead build new community and content discovery features using Chirp technology into its media publishing system.
This happened in the summer and I missed it all.
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RSSCalendar Reaches The End Of The Road
RSSCalendar, an online calendar application dating back to 2004, is up for sale on eBay.
RSSCalendar joins SynapseLife and Kiko in taking the eBay exit path. Interestingly the sale creates a hat trick in starting prices: all three listed with starting bids of $50,000.
RSSCalendar is a collaborative calendar application that supports the creation of RSS feeds and includes import support for Outlook and ICal. Developer John Pacchetti had previous listed the service for sale of the TechCrunch forums in March. Although Pacchetti is aiming to sell the site as an ongoing concern, RSSCalendar now tentatively enters the TechCrunch Deadpool.
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Tags: deadpool, rsscalendar, techcrunch-deadpool, failed-company, web2.0, rss-calender
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Playing Softball With Social Networking Insiders
Is it me, or is the NYTimes playing footsy with tech insiders instead of asking hard questions? The puff piece by Brad Stone in today's NY Times makes me want to cancel my subscription.
[from Social Networking’s Next Phase by Brad Stone]The new social networking players, which include Cisco [buying Tribe.net] and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.
“The existing social networks are fantastic but they put users in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Andreessen, who this week reintroduced Ning, his third start-up, after a limited introduction last year. “They are restrictive about what you can and can’t do, and they were not built to be flexible. They do not let people build and design their own worlds, which is the nature of what people want to do online.”
Let's start with Ning, which Stone suggests has been reintroduced this week. Hold on. I was at Web 2.0 Summit last fall, where is was reintroduced. And I wrote about it at the first launch back in October 2005 (a lifetime ago: it was on my old Corante blog), and then I was involved in the discussion of Ning's deadpool status in January 2006.
It's truly wearisome to have Andreesen pitching the same story about Ning in March 2007, 18 months after initial launch, and 6 months after the relaunch at Web 2.0. But the strangest thing is that Stone doesn't mention any of these dates, or any of the web discussion about Ning.
The story also gladhands the acquistion of Five Across and Tribe.net by Cisco. Even if social networking is in the future for clients of Cisco's hardware, are these technologies likely to form the platform for the next generation solutions that major media and entertainment companies are going to demand? Shouldn't that question at least be asked?
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Browster in DeadPool
San Francisco based Browster definitely appears to be dead, as GigaOm reported earlier this week. I have been unable to get a confirmation (or any response) from emails sent to CEO Scott Milener and one of the investors in the company, and the site has been up and down (mostly down) for the last few days.
Browster’s browser plugin let uses preview sites on search results and some other sites without clicking through to them. Our previous coverage is here. We’ve also covered competitor Cooliris.
The fact that everyone connected with the company is being so quiet about this is a little odd, given that the site is down. Based on his LinkedIn profile, Milener is on to his next company, Vieweo. Browser is not mentioned at all.
Browster raised $5.8 million in a Series A round of funding just a year ago, and had closed at least one previous angel round with a number of individuals and funds.
Browster is now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.
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Tags: cooliris, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
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FilmLoop Dips Toes Into The DeadPool
Palo Alto-based FilmLoop has reportedly layed off most of its staff of 30 employees after attempts to sell the company failed. This comes just eight months after they raised $7 million in venture capital from ComVentures. Co-founder Prescott Lee and a handful of core technical staff remain.
FilmLoop’s service allows users to create photo slide shows and view them via a desktop application or on websites. Competition is crushing - Slide, RockYou and Photobucket, among others, all offer competing services, and FilmLoop is dead last in user adoption.
Insiders are saying that FilmLoop made crucial early mistakes v. its competitors. While Slide and RockYou focused first on giving users the ability to easily embed slide shows into MySpace and other social networks, FilmLoop only added this functionality recently. They missed the social networking opportunity, and by the time they had products to compete with the others, it was too late.
The company is said to have “a couple of million dollars” still left in the bank and is going to continue to keep the service live. It’s unclear though that this market niche can support this many players, particularly since heavyweight Photobucket has started to focus on this as well. A final nail in the coffin - there is next to zero revenue being generated by these products, which are offered to customers for free.
Based on this news we have tentatively added FilmLoop to the TechCrunch DeadPool. Our previous coverage of FilmLoop is here.
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Tags: slide, rockyou, photobucket, myspace, socialnetworking, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
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RawSugar In DeadPool
RawSugar (the site is currently down), a company with offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, is closing shop (also reported by Steve Rubel and Rafael Sidi) and will enter the TechCrunch DeadPool. RawSugar can mosts easily be described as a del.icio.us competitor.
This is a company we’ve been tracking since August 2005. This is also one of the companies that I met with during my trip to Israel last year.
RawSugar never raised a big round of funding and simply ran out of money, it seems. And while this is a bit sad to see, the good news to come out of this is that the people working on the project can now move on to their next idea. It’s the way things go.
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Tags: del.icio.us, bookmarking, tags, tagging, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, israel
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Flock Ditches Shadows Bookmarking Service
In a blog post yesterday, Flock announced that it will no longer support the Shadows bookmarking service (Shadows is a product of Pluck) in the upcoming Flock 2.0 release. A number of angry Flock users commented on the post, wanting to know why.
Co-founder Geoffrey Arone stepped in with an explanation:
“Shadows is owned by the Pluck Corporation, who is doing quite well in their core business focused around social media. However, they have decided to de-emphasize the Shadows bookmarks product to focus on their other products.”
This looks to go beyond a simple partnership expiring - Pluck has been phasing out consumer facing products for some time (they announced their RSS reader will be shut down in January 2007) in favor of its new Blogburst publishing platform. CEO Dave Panos told me Blogburst is “getting 100% of our attention” and “we haven’t added any new capabilities [for Shadows] since this Spring.”
That leaves Flock users with just one choice for social bookmarking: del.icio.us. Something tells me they’ll make do somehow.
And Shadows enters the TechCrunch DeadPool.
More Flock coverage here.
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Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
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Odeo Bought Back From Investors
Odeo as we know it is gone. After announcing itself in February 2005, the company raised a $5 million venture financing with Charles River Ventures and a bevy of angel investors. After a private beta period, the company launched in July 2005.
It’s now a little over a year later and Odeo now faces dozens of competitors, including iTunes. Founder Evan Williams has spoken publicly about the company’s mistakes, has shut down one service and has launched another. If anything, Odeo gives every indication of going sideways.
Instead of a dramatic business change along with a new round of financing, Odeo has kicked out its investors and is going it alone. Evan Williams along with Biz Stone and all other current Odeo employees have created a new company called Obvious Corp. This new company has purchased the assets of Odeo, Inc. (including Odeo and Twitter) from the investors and other shareholders. Evan told me “I decided to buy the assets myself and make Odeo and Twitter part of a new entity with a new structure and new model.”
The buyout price is undisclosed, but is presumably a little more than the $5 million in capital the company raised - Evan says it is “enough for the VCs and angel investors to be made whole (i.e., they get their money back), and the common shareholders (including co-founder Noah Glass) to make a modest gain.”
What’s the new Model? Evan says this:
Everyone I know in the web world either works for one of the Internet giants and wants to be in a startup or is in a startup that wants to be bought by an Internet giant. The grass is always greener, of course, but I believe there’s room for a different model for building and running web properties. Obvious will be a kind of product lab, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. There are many details to be figured out, but the general idea is to simply build and launch things that we want to exist in the world, with a high degree of freedom. And to do so cheaply and quickly, with self-organized teams that can leverage each other’s technology, talents, and traffic. Rather than looking to be acquired, we plan to make money from the services and share it with the people who contribute. Occasionally, it may make sense to spin things out into their own entities, which get outside investment, but the company is not an incubator.
More from Evan in his blog post here.
Our previous coverage of Odeo is here.
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Tags: techcrunch, podcast, podcasting, web2.0, web_2.0
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LiveLocker Calls It Quits, Enters DeadPool
We’re adding LiveLocker to the list of TechCrunch DeadPool companies as well as the next service to try to sell itself on eBay (see previous list of companies selling on eBay here).
The eBay listing is here, and our profile on the company from March 2006 is here. LiveLocker could best be described as a del.icio.us/digg combination for rich media (video, audio and photos). The service never took off, obviously. The eBay listing states a $5,000 minimum price, and includes “the domain name, all website code and graphics, backend database, etc.” as well as source code for the unlaunched next version of the service. They also state that “existing traffic is minimal.”
Who’s next?
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, ebay
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