Google Answers to be shut down

 Google today announced that they are planning to shutdown their 4+ year old service Google Answers soon. Sometime later this week users will not longer be able to ask question from the Google Answers researchers. Also researchers will not be able to answer existing questions by the end of the year.

Any question asked by a user at Google Answers used to cost $2.50. Obviously the financial motivation, price per question, and quality of answer would never be able provide a sustainable ecosystem. Variable pricing model of Amazon Mechanical Turk or free answers from Yahoo Answers seem to be a better solution, although we are still not sure about the success status of Amazon service.

From Google’s perspective, shutdown of Answers will save few of it’s smart engineers from maintaining an application that did not scale well in terms of revenues.

Links:
Google Answers

 

Tags: StartupSquad, Google, google+answers, yahoo+answers, dealpool

DropSend on the block

Carsonsystems is planning to sell DropSend, which is a webapp that enables users to send large files. Carsonsystems team wants to concentrate on their existing products including Amigo, which they had launched recently.

DropSend is a multi-user application that allows users to send files upto 1 GB in size. You either send files using the online tool, or install DropSend application on your desktop to upload files. DropSend plans are from free to $99/month depending upon the number of files  you can send and the diskspace you need.

For more details checkout DropSend blog.

Other players providing similar services include Pando, and Goowy

Links:
DropSend
Carsonsystems

Tags: StartupSquad, Deadpool, onlinestorage, storage

Walmart Social Networking site shuts down

Walmart has shutdown its crappy social networking site The Hub. The Hub was supposed to be competing with MySpace and provide a safer place for young people to interact. As it stands right now, the idea never clicked and instead got beat around in the blogosphere. Walmart should better stick with what it does best, instead of trying to be a media mogul. Most of these experiments by big corporates are bound to fail sooner or later.

Below is what shows up at The Hub, before the page redirects to Walmart.com

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Links:
The Hub

Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, SocialNetworking, Walmart

Rallypoint prepares to shutdown

Rallypoint, the web-based collaboration software which was launched late last year, has announced that they will be shutting down in another 15 days.

The Rallypoint team is sorry to say we will be shutting down within the next 15 days. This is a decision not easily made because we have grown quite attached to our community of users. Although we are proud to have come this far with the product, our personal obligations do not allow us to continue developing Rallypoint toward our ultimate vision.

Your accounts will be accessible for the next 15 days if you need to get information out of them. During this time you may export your pages into Word, PDF or Open Office format.

I had used Rallypoint for sometime last year, and found it to be reasonable offering compared to those times like tagging, user groups, recent pages,….. Now after 1 year, and more than 10 offerings in the field of Team and Collaboration software, with the likes of CentralDesktop, Quickbase, DreamTeam, it is really difficult for startups to survive without adding features rapidly. In the case of Rallypoint there were hardly any code updates since the start of this year that made the direction pretty clear.

This is the third in list of Exit2.0. First kiko.com, second Hucabuck, and now Rallypoint. iRows is getting ready to exit about which i had written about here.

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Links:
Rallypoint
Announcement

Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, Rallypoint, Collaboration, Exit2.0