The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘while-the-site’

Betable, where users can literally place a bet on anything and have their friends bet with them, has secured a $3 million first time funding led by Atomico, the venture fund set up by former Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Former Skype chief strategy officer Geoffrey Prentice joins the board. It’s an unusual move for a VC house to back what is in effect a gambling site, but Betable is presumably in the ’social’ space sufficiently enough for Atomico to feel comfortable with the investment.

While the site is built almost entirely in the US, the CEO and founder Christopher Griffin based and launched the company in the UK where gambling laws are more more conducive to gaming sites than the US. It will compete to some extent with another UK-based social betting site founded by Americans, Smarkets, but where the latter is more for regular gamblers, Betable is designed to be a more casual “Twitter for Betting”. Griffin hopes the site will attract the normal bets made between office workers or between university students (betters have to be over 18).

Wesabe, an online personal finance site that looked to help users better keep track of their spending trends, is shutting down. The startup’s homepage now consists of a letter to Wesabe users instructing them to download their account information by July 31, at which point nearly all of the service’s features will be taken offline and data deleted. The lone feature that will remain online indefinitely is the site’s ‘Groups’ page, where members can trade advice about their finances (this part of the site is being taken over by one of Wesabe’s current customers).

In the letter, Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund writes that the site has been operating on a shoestring budget lately, which has led to both some poor customer experiences and the potential for security issues, which is why they’re pulling the plug:

In recent months Wesabe has been operating on a shoestring budget, with support from some of the developers and operations people who made up our core team. While the site has remained online and we continue to hear from people who find it helpful, we have not been able to provide the support people need to use it for something so central as financial management. I’ve felt especially terrible that some members have a good initial experience but then hit a problem, often after investing many hours, and aren’t able to get help with it. That’s obviously a bad experience, and not what we want to offer. Also, because Wesabe stores such highly sensitive data, continuing to operate the service with shoestring operations and security staff is not acceptable, and we do not want to continue accepting new accounts if we cannot guarantee the security level we believe our service requires.

Wesabe was showing some growth in April 2009 when it launched its iPhone app, but traffic has dropped steadily since then. The site has largely been overshadowed by competitor Mint, which launched at (and won) TechCrunch50 and later went to on be acquired for $170 million by Intuit.

We’ve been covering the site since 2006. In Feburary 2007 it raised $700,000 from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later that year raised $4 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures.

Wesabe has been added to the Deadpool.

Bloglines, the troubled RSS feed reader, has been down for the past 24 hours. The outage has even created buzz on Twitter (which goes to show some people still use it). When you visit Bloglines, the site has a message up that says it is down temporarily and will be “back shortly.” But with the site’s tumultuous history, you have to wonder how much longer Bloglines has before IAC will finally put it out of its misery.

Bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams.

Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. And we recently heard that IAC was strongly considering shutting it down. At that point, IAC decided not to shutter the service but was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines.

While the site could be on its way to the deadpool, the cause for the outage could also be a product update. While we’re hoping it’s the latter, it’s going to take more than a feature update to revive the dying RSS service.

We’ve contacted IAC for comment and will update with a response.

UPDATE: IAC’s PR rep emailed us this response: “Bloglines is down for scheduled maintenance. We regret any inconvenience to our users and it should be back up soon.”

However, despite it’s being a “scheduled maintenance,” the rep could not provide the time when it is scheduled to be back up again.

Earlier we made fun of Bing for going “dark” today to save energy in a way that doesn’t at all save energy. But Foursquare has an actual way to do that: take down the entire service.

Yesterday, Foursquare had some downtime. That’s nothing new, startups have downtime all the time — see: Twitter, that was their M.O. for about a year — but the reason for Foursquare’s appears to be a little humorous.

While the site is back up and running now, it appears that Foursquare forgot to renew their domain name, which expired on March 25. As a result, GoDaddy, the registrar, pulled the site and put up their own landing page. Which some people noticed on Twitter and other tipped us about.

Luckily for Foursquare, registrars like GoDaddy tend to give you several notices before they pull down your domain and actually put it back up for sale. It looks like Foursquare was able to grab it quickly and get it back up there. Still, this seems like a rather large oversight from a company supposedly raising a new $10 million round of funding that would put its valuation near $80 million on paper.

Let’s hope some of that money goes toward a new position: master of the domain.

Interestingly, after its first round of funding, the first thing Foursquare did was purchase the foursquare.com domain. Previously, the service was found at playfoursquare.com. So what happened here is probably that the team forgot to change the email notifications from whoever owned the domain originally to one of their email addresses. At least, I hope that’s what happened.

Also worth noting: co-founder Dennis Crowley originally wanted to name his first startup Foursquare, but couldn’t obtain the domain, so he went with Dodgeball instead (which later sold to Google). You’d think that Crowley would at least cherish the domain a bit more.

[thanks TJ]

Seattle-based startup HelpHive lets consumers find rated and reviewed home service professionals, such as plumbers, landscapers, handymen and more. Exclusive to the greater Seattle area, HelpHive integrates with social networks, like Facebook, to help homeowners to find reviews from friends, colleagues and neighbors.

Today, the site is launching a monetization strategy called “Referral Pro” Plans which charges businesses in exchange for promotion and advertising. Businesses pay $99 per year to receive increased promotion on HelpHive.com with increased promotion in search for keywords related to the service businesses provide, on the home page, on their specific service page (e.g. for an Electrician, on the Electricians page etc.) and on unclaimed business pages in their service category (i.e. a business in the paid plan would appear on pages of other unclaimed businesses that provide the same service). Businesses who are participating in this program are also required to pay 5 percent of any total transactions for booked jobs to HelpHive (if the job was through HelpHive’s platform).

HelpHive of course doesn’t charge the businesses who don’t participate in the program, but the startup’s CEO Karim Meghji claims that the promotion is a pretty big incentive for businesses to pay out. I’m not so sure about that, but HelpHive does have over 7600 vendors listed on the site from the Puget Sound area. While the site is currently limited to Seattle, Meghji says that they plan to unroll HelpHive to other metropolitan areas in the near future. The startup faces competition from Angie’s List, Merchant Circle, and Service Magic. There’s also TechCrunch 50 winner RedBeacon, which not only lets you find providers, but also enables pricing and booking of services.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Gyminee, a fitness-oriented social network that was part of the TechStars class of 2008, has closed a $525,000 seed funding round led by FF Angel LLC, with a number of angels including Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon) and Tim Ferriss also participating. Alongside the funding news, Gyminee is also announcing a total rebranding - the company will henceforth be called DailyBurn (which is significantly easier to spell), and the site has seen a complete redesign.

Gyminee first launched in late 2007, coming out of beta in January 2008 (the company had launched before it joined the TechStars program). Since then it has grown to 125,000 members, and while the site has to deal with some users dropping off as they get lazy and stop exercising, it reports that active users have managed to shed an average of 6.2 pounds of fat, or gain 5.75 pounds of muscle, depending on their goal.

The overall purpose of the site is to help you lose weight and gain muscle by tracking every aspect of the food you consume and your workouts, all presented in a very attractive interface. The site offers a database of thousands of foods, allowing you to quickly figure out how many calories you’ve eaten throughout the day. You can input stats from your daily exercise regime (number of miles run, bench-press weight, etc.), so you can track your progress over time on slick graphs. The site’s social features allow users to share exercise plans and try to motivate each other.

DailyBurn generates revenue by offering a set of premium features, which include a meal planner, more nutrition stats, and exercise plans created by fitness professionals, as opposed to other users. CEO Andy Smith says that the premium plan has been seeing a high conversion rate, which helped make the company appealing to investors. The company will soon be releasing a native iPhone application that will allow you to update your workout profile on the go, and will also be opening up its API to third parties.

Other fitness startups include Fitbit, ZodBod, and watchMEmelt.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0