_,..-''~~``-..__
,' ',
/ \
| |
| ____ ___ ____ |
| | _ \ |_ _| | _ \ |
| | |_) | | | | |_) | |
| | _ < | | | __/ |
| |_| \_\ |___| |_| |
| |
| . s o . |
| |
|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · dead internet statistics · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 321 graves in this section, sorted newest first
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Spirit Airlines 📖 1992 - 2026 at 3 a.m. eastern on 2 may 2026 spirit stopped flying, and the last airplane in the yellow paint had already come down at dallas fort worth after midnight. thirty four years earlier it was a michigan charter operator running gamblers to atlantic city. in between it taught every large american carrie |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Foundation 📖 2021 - 2026 the designer-favorite ethereum nft marketplace ran the second curated wave of digital art from 2021 onward. blackdove agreed to buy it in january 2026 and walked away in april after due diligence. founder kayvon tehranian came back to handle the wind-down. roughly $230 million in primary sales and a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Arkham Exchange 📖 2024 - 2025 arkham exchange was the trading subsidiary of arkham intelligence, the blockchain analytics company. it launched as a crypto derivatives venue in october 2024, expanded into us spot trading in early 2025, added a mobile app and a moonpay fiat onramp in late 2025, and shut on 15 december 2025 after r |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Good Glamm Group 📖 2017 - 2025 good glamm group was india's first beauty-commerce unicorn, founded in 2017 by darpan sanghvi as the direct-to-consumer brand myglamm. it grew into a "house of brands" holding company that stacked owned d2c products under one parent alongside a portfolio of digital media properties. between 2020 and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1670-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Hudson's Bay Company 📖 1670 - 2025 charles ii handed a charter to his cousin prince rupert and seventeen other men on 2 may 1670, giving them the trade of every river draining into hudson bay, which turned out to be roughly a third of canada. the company outlived the fur trade by turning into a department store chain, and then it ran |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Builder.ai 📖 2016 - 2025 builder.ai raised over 450 million dollars on the pitch that an AI called natasha could build your app. wall street journal exposed in august 2019 that a lot of the AI was actually about 700 human coders in india. the company kept going for another six years anyway. a lender seized 37 million from i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
RTFKT 📖 2020 - 2025 benoit pagotto co-founded rtfkt studios in january 2020 with steven vasilev and chris le as a digital fashion studio building nft sneakers and ar try-on filters. an early collaboration with the artist fewocious in february 2021 sold seven hundred pairs of digital sneakers for 3.1 million dollars in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Cruise 📖 2013 - 2024 cruise was a general-motors-owned autonomous ride service that ran driverless robotaxis in san francisco and a handful of us metros. on 2 october 2023 a cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian for about 20 feet after another car hit her; the california DMV pulled the permits three weeks later and cruise |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Coinbase NFT 📖 2022 - 2024 coinbase nft was coinbase's attempt at an OpenSea competitor for its already-signed-up user base. it launched to public beta in may 2022 with a waitlist of over three million and averaged a four-digit weekly user count within months. by early 2024 the daily trading volume was measurable in tens of d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
eBags 📖 1998 - 2024 ebags was the online luggage store americans went to for two decades. samsonite bought it in 2017, spent a few years turning off every brand that was not its own, then closed the site and moved the good bags under its own name. the store did not fail. it got absorbed until there was nothing left to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Vroom 📖 2013 - 2024 ally financial suspended the credit line that paid for vroom's inventory in january 2024, and the retail side was wound down inside a week. the company had gone public in june 2020 at twenty-two dollars a share, closed its first day up a hundred and seventeen percent, and shifted almost seventy-five |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Zulily 📖 2010 - 2023 zulily sold clothes for moms and kids through daily flash sales, deals that showed up in an early-morning email and were gone by the next day. it launched in 2010 out of seattle, went public in 2013, and for a while was one of the bigger e-commerce stories in the country, valued in the billions. it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Bittrex 📖 2014 - 2023 bittrex launched in 2014 out of bellevue with three ex-amazon security engineers running the stack. its pitch was a us exchange that listed more tokens than coinbase but ran the security with the rigor amazon had drilled into its founders. it worked for a long stretch. then the sec sued in april 202 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Coinbase Pro 📖 2015 - 2023 three names in eight years, and the last one ended by being absorbed. the terminal opened in january 2015 as coinbase exchange, took the name gdax in 2016, then became coinbase pro in may 2018, and for most of that run it was where anyone serious about a limit order went while the consumer app handl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Reddit Community Points 📖 2020 - 2023 the fortnite subreddit beat the cryptocurrency subreddit at crypto. when reddit launched community points in may 2020, r/fortnitebr had created 8,666 token wallets within days against 2,073 on r/cryptocurrency. the program ran three and a half years, migrated to arbitrum nova to make the fees surviv |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
WeWork 📖 2010 - 2023 wework was supposed to be the office of the future. it sold hot desks like a tech company sells software. by 2019 it carried a 47 billion dollar valuation. by november 2023 it was in chapter 11, with adam neumann long gone and softbank's 18 billion dollar bet effectively zero. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Book Depository 📖 2004 - 2023 the whole product was one line of copy: free delivery worldwide, no minimum order. if you lived outside the english-speaking world that line was the difference between owning an english book and not owning it. andrew crawford left amazon in 2004 and built the thing, amazon bought it in july 2011 and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
JD.ID 📖 2015 - 2023 jd.id was the indonesian storefront of jd.com, china's number two online retailer, launched in 2015 to take on the local giants. it raised its way to unicorn status and promised same-day delivery across the islands. but shopee and tokopedia owned the market, jd.com decided southeast asia was not wor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
TigerDirect 📖 1985 - 2023 two dead american retail chains are buried at this address. systemax bought the compusa and circuit city names out of their wreckage and folded both into the tigerdirect site at the end of 2012, which made one mail-order catalog company the last place either brand still answered. pcm bought the reta |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Freshly 📖 2012 - 2023 nestle paid $950 million for freshly in october 2020, with up to $550 million more promised against targets, and shut it twenty-six months later. the company had spent a decade turning a 2012 idea into a million cooked meals a week, shipped refrigerated to american doorsteps for people who wanted di |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
NetMarket 📖 1994 - 2023 on 11 august 1994 a man in philadelphia named phil brandenberger paid twelve dollars and forty-eight cents for a sting cd, and the new york times ran it the next morning as the first retail transaction on the internet protected by encryption anyone could actually get hold of. the store was netmarket |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
uBid 📖 1997 - 2022 ubid was the second-place auction site of the dot-com era. founded in 1997 by gregory knox jones as a subsidiary of creative computers, it ran consumer auctions on overstock electronics and treated the catalog like a tv shopping channel. the december 1998 ipo priced at $15 and closed its first day a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Baidu Nuomi 📖 2010 - 2022 it opened on 23 june 2010 as nuomi.com, owned by the company behind renren, and sold 152,165 discounted cinema tickets on its first day. baidu paid $160 million for most of it in 2013 and bought the rest a few months later, then robin li stood up in 2015 and promised twenty billion yuan over three y |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
elevenia 📖 2014 - 2022 elevenia was an indonesian online marketplace, launched in march 2014 as a joint venture between the carrier XL axiata and south korea's SK planet, whose 11st marketplace gave it both its model and its name. it grew into roughly the third-biggest marketplace in the country before shopee and tokopedi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
FTX 📖 2019 - 2022 ftx was the polite-feeling crypto exchange that hosted over a million customers and bought naming rights to the miami heat arena. then in november 2022 a coindesk article surfaced showing alameda research was holding most of its balance sheet in ftx's own token. eight days later the company was in d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Argo AI 📖 2016 - 2022 argo ai was ford and volkswagen's shared bet on level-4 self-driving. it peaked in july 2021 at a 12.4 billion dollar valuation with lyft joining as a small third partner. ford pulled the plug on 26 october 2022 after concluding profitable robotaxis were too far away. vw walked out the same day. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Fabric.com 📖 1999 - 2022 amazon bought fabric.com in 2008 and ran it for fourteen years before closing it during a cost-cutting autumn in 2022. the last order went through on 20 october. the site had been cutting cloth to order out of kennesaw, georgia since 1999, for a customer base that needed to know the weight and the d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
GittiGidiyor 📖 2001 - 2022 gittigidiyor was ebay in turkey for eleven years and the auction site everyone in the country used before that. it lost the market to trendyol and hepsiburada, super-apps that ate categories instead of hosting them. ebay closed it in september 2022 rather than keep funding a marketplace that had sto |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
EachNet 📖 1999 - 2022 eachnet was china's first large consumer auction site, started in shanghai in august 1999 by two harvard graduates who had watched ebay work in america. ebay took a third of it in 2002 and the rest in 2003, spending around $180 million to own the leader of a market it then lost. taobao, launched by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Celsius Network 📖 2017 - 2022 celsius advertised 17% yields on dollars and bitcoin. that was the whole pitch, written across every podcast ad and every "ama with alex" livestream from 2018 onward. customers wired in real money, the company lent it to crypto hedge funds and yield farms, and the cash flow worked while crypto price |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Three Arrows Capital 📖 2012 - 2022 three arrows capital was a fx-arb shop in singapore that pivoted to crypto in 2017 and rode the cycle to a claimed 18 billion dollars in net asset value. the fund put roughly $200 million into luna in february 2022 and lost the position when the terra ecosystem collapsed in may. on june 27 2022 a bv |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Terra / Luna 📖 2019 - 2022 terra was a south korean blockchain project whose stablecoin ust was kept at a dollar by burning and minting its sister token luna. the design worked while people kept depositing into the anchor protocol at a 19.5% yield. on may 7 2022 a few large addresses pulled their ust out, the peg slipped, the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1925-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Howard Johnson's 📖 1925 - 2022 lake george, new york had the last one, and when it stopped serving in 2022 a chain that carried over a thousand restaurants in 1975 was down to zero. howard deering johnson borrowed two thousand dollars in 1925 for a drugstore in quincy, doubled the butterfat in the ice cream and got twenty-eight f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1946-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Alitalia 📖 1946 - 2021 roughly thirteen billion euros of italian state money went into this airline across seven decades and none of it bought a profitable position that held. the last flight was a delayed a320 up from cagliari, landing at fiumicino just after eleven at night on 14 october 2021. the next morning ita airwa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Tokusen Ichiba (クロネコヤマトの得選市場) 📖 1997 - 2021 yamato transport's first own-brand product was not a shipping service. it was toilet paper, put on sale in june 1997, and you bought it from the driver who was already coming to your building anyway. bottled water from toyama followed the next year. the line ran twenty-four years and finished as fiv |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
LiveLeak 📖 2006 - 2021 liveleak hosted the video the cable networks would not show. iraq war footage, the saddam execution clip, russian dashcam crashes, every bodycam shooting before the major platforms decided what to do with any of it. hayden hewitt closed it in may 2021 and redirected the domain to a safe-for-work clo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Fry's Electronics 📖 1985 - 2021 fry's was a us pc-parts chain whose stores were theme-park sets dressed up as a giant motherboard or a 1950s ufo crash site, with a grocery-store aisle full of cables next to the potato chips. it ran from 17 may 1985 to the morning of 24 february 2021, when all 30 remaining locations did not open an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Bimeks 📖 1990 - 2021 kadıköy, around 1990. two brothers opened a shop selling computers, and it grew into the first technology retail chain in turkey and then the first one listed on the istanbul stock exchange. at the top there were 135 stores across 60 cities. from 2016 they closed one at a time until there was nothin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Family Video 📖 1978 - 2021 charles hoogland opened the first store in springfield, illinois in 1978 and the family never sold the buildings, which is the whole reason the chain was still standing in 2020 after blockbuster and hastings had both gone. at its peak it ran around 800 stores across the midwest. covid closed the the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Groupon Japan 📖 2010 - 2020 groupon japan was bought rather than built. a tokyo clone called qpod launched in june 2010 and groupon acquired it two months later, renaming it and running it hard through the deal boom. then it sold discounted osechi boxes for new year 2011 that arrived late and looked nothing like the photograph |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Blanja.com 📖 2014 - 2020 the indonesian state phone company and ebay put a marketplace together and gave it the address of telkom's old portal. six years later telkom's own annual report showed 3.2 million people had registered and about sixty-two thousand of them opened it in a given month. it stopped taking orders on 1 se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Sorabel 📖 2014 - 2020 sorabel was an indonesian fashion shop that lived on your phone, cheap women's clothes with a trick attached: the courier waited at your door while you tried the pieces on, and you paid only for what you kept. it started in 2014 as sale stock, run by a married couple out of a garage in jakarta, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Mistergooddeal 📖 2000 - 2020 two million euros bought a twenty-year-old french e-commerce brand in 2014, which tells you most of what the last decade had been like. mistergooddeal started in january 2000 selling end-of-line stock nobody else wanted, got large enough for m6 to buy it in 2005, and was absorbed into darty's legal |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Wirecard 📖 1999 - 2020 wirecard was a bavarian payment processor that faked the third of its revenue that made it look serious. when the auditor finally refused to sign off on €1.9 billion in filipino escrow accounts that did not exist, the whole thing folded inside a week. markus braun got arrested. jan marsalek boarded |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Surgisphere 📖 2008 - 2020 an open letter with more than two hundred signatures on it, posted on 28 may 2020, is what took this apart. the arithmetic in a lancet paper on hydroxychloroquine did not survive anyone checking it against public records, and the company that supplied the data refused to let it be audited. sapan des |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Jet.com 📖 2015 - 2020 jet.com was the most expensive customer-acquisition deal in walmart's history. marc lore launched it in july 2015 as an amazon-shaped discount marketplace with a real-time pricing engine. walmart bought the whole company in august 2016 for 3.3 billion dollars to get lore as head of us e-commerce. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Stupid.com 📖 1997 - 2020 gary apple wrote sitcoms for a living, and the shop he started put its own review on the front page: a complete waste of perfectly good technology. it sold chocolate reindeer poop and rubber chickens, with copy that made fun of you for buying them. by 2011 it was being run from tennessee. in late 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
AtlasGlobal 📖 2001 - 2020 the reason the airline gave when it stopped flying in november 2019 was the cost of operating out of istanbul's new airport, on top of a currency that had been falling for two years. it came back three weeks later and stopped again on 7 january 2020. the a330s went back to their lessors at the end o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Brandless 📖 2017 - 2020 brandless was the softbank-funded dtc generics store that priced almost everything at three dollars and used a clean white-label visual to imply you were paying for the goods, not the brand. tina sharkey and ido leffler launched it on july 11 2017 out of san francisco. softbank's vision fund put in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Jabong 📖 2012 - 2020 jabong was rocket internet's fashion store for india, launched in january 2012 out of gurugram and built to the same blueprint the company was running in half a dozen other countries. it grew fast on discounts and advertising and never found a year where the money made sense. myntra bought it for se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Adayroi 📖 2014 - 2019 adayroi was vingroup's attempt to build vietnam's amazon. the conglomerate that makes everything from apartment towers to electric cars launched it in august 2014 as a marketplace promising verified goods and real origins in a market full of neither. it grew to millions of monthly visitors and never |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Fotolia 📖 2004 - 2019 adobe paid eight hundred million dollars in cash for fotolia in december 2014, kept it open as a separate storefront for another four years, then folded the library into adobe stock and closed the shop on 5 november 2019. what the money bought was thirty four million files and the people who kept up |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Thomas Cook Airlines 📖 1999 - 2019 at around two in the morning on 23 september 2019 the thomas cook group went into compulsory liquidation, and the airline stopped flying in the middle of its own schedule. thirty five aircraft were parked wherever they had landed and 21,000 people across sixteen countries lost their jobs. the civil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Amazon China 📖 2000 - 2019 amazon did not enter china by building. it bought joyo.com in 2004 for seventy-five million dollars, the biggest online bookseller in the country at the time, and then spent fifteen years turning it into a smaller and smaller version of amazon.com in chinese. share went from around fifteen percent t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
HomeShop18 📖 2008 - 2019 network18 launched india's first round-the-clock television shopping channel on 9 april 2008 and built a website and later an app behind it, but the customer it kept was the one watching free satellite with no browser anywhere in the house. revenue peaked at about 449 crore rupees in the year to mar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Jet Airways 📖 1992 - 2019 a consortium of indian banks turned down an emergency loan on 17 april 2019 and jet airways stopped flying that night, with the last aircraft coming into mumbai from amritsar. naresh goyal had built it from an air taxi license in 1992 into more than a fifth of the indian domestic market. the paperwo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
QuadrigaCX 📖 2013 - 2019 quadrigacx was the canadian bitcoin exchange whose ceo gerald cotten died on a honeymoon trip to india in december 2018 and apparently took every cold wallet password with him. the company announced his death in january 2019. by february it had frozen withdrawals and filed for creditor protection in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Bluefly 📖 1998 - 2019 an off-price designer fashion site that launched in 1998 and refused to die for twenty years, outliving nearly every dot-com it started with. amazon and the flash-sale sites wore it down. on the first of february 2019 it filed chapter 7 and shut the same day, with no warning to anyone holding an ord |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Lesara 📖 2013 - 2019 around a hundred million euros went into this one, from northzone and mangrove and vorwerk among others, and the last thirty million of it arrived in july 2018. a month later the company opened a forty-million-euro warehouse in erfurt. on 9 november 2018 roman kirsch filed for insolvency at the berl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Munchery 📖 2010 - 2019 munchery was the san francisco bay food story. you ordered a chef-made meal off an app by six pm and a refrigerated van or cyclist delivered it before nine. the meal was chilled, not hot. you reheated it yourself. tri tran and conrad chu founded the company in 2010 out of san francisco. munchery rai |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
NexTag 📖 1999 - 2018 nextag opened in may 1999 as a place to haggle with sellers over the price of a computer, then turned into a price comparison engine, which for about a decade was one of the better businesses on the web. providence equity bought two thirds of it in june 2007 at a valuation near one and a quarter bil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
MatahariMall 📖 2015 - 2018 mataharimall was lippo group's half-billion-dollar attempt to build the alibaba of indonesia, an everything-store marketplace launched in 2015 with a war chest most local rivals could only dream of. the money did not buy the win. lazada and tokopedia were burning just as hard, and mataharimall never |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Theranos 📖 2003 - 2018 theranos was a blood-test startup that for a while was the most valuable private healthcare company in america. it claimed to run hundreds of tests from a single finger-prick drop. it could not run them at all. elizabeth holmes is in federal prison until 2032. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Shoes of Prey 📖 2009 - 2018 jodie fox wanted a pair of shoes that did not exist. in 2009 she and two co-founders built a web tool that let anyone draw their own, with a factory behind it to make the result. 25.9 million dollars went in over six rounds, nordstrom among the investors, on the idea that mass customization was wher |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Brookstone 📖 1965 - 2018 brookstone started in 1965 as pierre and mary de beaumont's mail-order operation, run for five hundred dollars out of a berkshires farmhouse and advertised through a popular mechanics classified. the first retail store opened in new hampshire in 1973. by the late 1990s the chain had around 150 store |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
PriceMinister 📖 2000 - 2018 priceminister was the french marketplace, founded in paris in august 2000 and open to the public from 16 january 2001, sitting between buyers and sellers of new and secondhand goods without ever holding the stock itself. it went from fifteen thousand members in 2001 to ten million by 2009 and turned |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Quicksales 📖 2005 - 2018 two melbourne men opened oztion in 2005 as an australian alternative to ebay and spent three years going nowhere in particular. then in may 2008 ebay announced that australian sellers would have to take paypal and almost nothing else, and 28,000 people signed up to oztion in six weeks. the regulator |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Lashou 📖 2010 - 2018 lashou was china's number one daily deals site for about one quarter. it raised $110 million in april 2011 at a valuation of $1.1 billion. that october it filed to list in new york, calling itself the biggest group-buying service in the country, and a month later the roadshow was pulled over the acc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Virgin America 📖 2007 - 2018 richard branson was never allowed to own more than a quarter of the voting stock, because american law will not let a foreigner control an american airline. the thing he could not own ran purple cabin lighting and a touchscreen that let you order a drink without speaking to anybody, and it lost mone |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Jichitai Tokusen Store (自治体特選ストア) 📖 2011 - 2018 takeo city in saga prefecture opened it on 7 november 2011, and the mayor registered the trademark in his own name. the idea was that japanese local governments would run their own online shops and sell regional produce directly to the country, and more than twenty councils had signed up at the peak |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Yepme 📖 2011 - 2018 yepme started in 2011 as an online clothes shop in gurgaon and turned itself into a private-label fashion brand you could not escape on indian television. it raised real money, seventy-five million dollars from a malaysian state fund at the top, and spent it buying customers and opening stores it di |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Bitconnect 📖 2016 - 2018 bitconnect promised a "trading bot" that paid one percent compounded daily, which is mathematically a ponzi. for about eighteen months in 2016 and 2017 millions of people sent in real bitcoin and got bcc tokens back. when texas and north carolina issued cease-and-desist orders in january 2018 the pr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Nerve.com 📖 1997 - 2018 a smart new-york webzine about sex, launched by two people who thought the internet needed better writing on the subject than what was already out there. it lasted 21 years. the personals product outgrew the magazine, got sold up the chain, and the archives went dark under an IAC dating brand. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
NCIX 📖 1996 - 2017 ncix sold computer parts to canadians for twenty one years, first by mail order out of richmond and later from ten stores across two provinces. it hired a product manager named linus sebastian to talk about the parts on camera, which is where linus tech tips came from and how most of the world knows |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Air Berlin 📖 1978 - 2017 on 27 october 2017 an airbus a320 flew munich to berlin tegel under the callsign ber4evr, and germany's second-largest airline was finished. etihad had bought into air berlin in 2011 and spent six years funding a turnaround that never arrived, then closed the tap in august 2017. a 150 million euro l |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Half.com 📖 1999 - 2017 half.com was the polite cousin of ebay. josh kopelman launched it in april 1999 as a fixed-price marketplace for used books and used cds. ebay bought it a year later for around 350 million dollars and let it run as a separate site for sixteen years before quietly absorbing the catalog and turning th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Sprig 📖 2013 - 2017 sprig cooked meals in its own san francisco commissary kitchen and delivered them by car within fifteen minutes of the order. gagan biyani founded the company in 2013 with nate keller and nick ramirez, raised about fifty-six million dollars from greylock and accel and battery and others, and announc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Maple 📖 2015 - 2017 maple was a new york city food delivery startup founded in april 2015 by caleb merkle and akshay navle, with a commissary kitchen in lower manhattan and an iphone app that did the ordering. menus rotated daily and prices were flat. delivery ran in fifteen minutes. the company raised about twenty-nin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Diapers.com / Quidsi 📖 2005 - 2017 marc lore and vinit bharara built diapers.com because amazon was not yet thinking about diapers in 2005. by 2010 amazon was thinking about diapers extremely hard, undercutting them at deliberate losses until quidsi sold for $545 million. seven years after that amazon shut it down anyway, citing lack |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
LivingSocial 📖 2007 - 2017 livingsocial was a daily-deals site out of washington dc. amazon led a 175 million dollar round into it in 2010, and by 2011 the company was being talked about at a six billion dollar valuation with nearly seventy million members. five years later it sold to its main competitor for nothing. by march |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1921-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
RadioShack 📖 1921 - 2017 radioshack started in 1921 in boston as a marine-radio supply shop and peaked at over 8,000 stores in 1999 with a house-brand catalog covering audio gear and antennas. the company filed chapter 11 in february 2015 after eleven straight loss quarters and filed again in march 2017 once the first restr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Beepi 📖 2013 - 2017 beepi was a peer-to-peer used car marketplace in the san francisco bay area, founded by ale resnik and owen savir in 2013 after resnik bought a used car that caught fire two days later. cars got a 240-point inspection and a ten day return window. the company raised about a hundred and fifty million |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Shoes.com 📖 2012 - 2017 sean clark started shoeme.ca out of a vancouver basement in 2012 because zappos had left canada, buying shoes at retail to fill the first orders and reaching a million dollar run rate inside a year. roger hardy, fresh from selling coastal contacts for $430 million, bought it in july 2014 along with |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
ideeli 📖 2006 - 2016 ideeli ran as a women's flash-sales fashion site out of new york from 2006, founded by paul hurley and mark uhrmacher on a daily-discount email list against the gilt and rue la la wave. revenue hit 77 million in 2010, inc magazine called it the fastest-growing company in the country a year later. gr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
NetGrocer 📖 1996 - 2016 netgrocer sold groceries by mail order before anybody had a word for it. one warehouse in new jersey next to a fedex hub, stocked with seven thousand things that could not spoil, shipped anywhere in the lower forty-eight in one to four days. it filed for a thirty-eight million dollar nasdaq listing |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Wikimart 📖 2008 - 2016 wikimart was founded in 2008 by kamil kurmakayev and maxim faldin, two russians who met at stanford and came home to build the marketplace layer for russian e-commerce. tiger global put in thirty million dollars, sales reached a hundred and thirty million by 2013, and around two million products wer |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Drugstore.com 📖 1998 - 2016 drugstore.com was the late-1998 pitch that you would order toothpaste from a bellevue warehouse instead of walking to the pharmacy. amazon took a minority stake and put bezos on the board. the company survived the dot-com bust, went public in 1999 at a $600m valuation, and eventually sold itself to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Play.com 📖 1998 - 2016 three men in their late twenties started a mail order shop on jersey in 1998 and turned a customs rule into a national habit. anything under fifteen pounds posted from the channel islands arrived without vat, so britain bought its dvds from a rock in the sea and got free delivery on top. the treasur |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Justcoin 📖 2013 - 2016 oslo, may 2013: andreas brekken and klaus bugge lund open a bitcoin exchange trading against the norwegian krone. in late october 2014 their bank closes the company account, no other norwegian bank will take a crypto business, and trading stops on the 29th with customers given until 11 november to w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Take Eat Easy 📖 2013 - 2016 one hundred and fourteen venture funds said no. the one that said yes, a french state-owned logistics group, signed a term sheet in march 2016 and then spent three months on due diligence before its board withdrew the offer. the company had agreed to exclusivity and had no plan b. it passed one mill |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kaymu 📖 2013 - 2016 kaymu was rocket internet's marketplace for the parts of the world the big western sites mostly ignored. it launched in 2013 in nigeria and pakistan on the same day, an ebay-style place to buy and sell in markets where a lot of people were coming online for the first time, and it grew to more than t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Move Loot 📖 2013 - 2016 $21.8 million went into a company whose real job was carrying other people's sofas down other people's stairs. four friends started move loot in 2013 with a storage unit, got into y combinator's winter 2014 batch, and grew it across six american metros before the warehouses and the trucks cost more |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Other Music 📖 1995 - 2016 fifteen east fourth street, december 1995. a few clerks out of kim's underground opened a shop directly across from the tower records that should have crushed it, then watched tower go under and kept selling records for another decade. the weekly staff-review email traveled a great deal further than |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Ensogo 📖 2009 - 2016 ensogo was southeast asia's biggest daily-deals site, born in thailand around 2009 as a local copy of groupon and, for a few years, the place people bought discounted dinners and spa vouchers by the million. livingsocial bought it in 2011, then it passed to an australian group that listed it on the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
TinyOwl 📖 2014 - 2016 tinyowl was an indian restaurant ordering app started in 2014 by graduates of iit bombay, funded to around twenty-seven million dollars by sequoia and matrix, and finished inside two years. it hired hundreds of people it could not pay for and lost money on every order it delivered. after the second |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
PepperTap 📖 2014 - 2016 peppertap started taking grocery orders in gurgaon on 26 november 2014 and raised around fifty million dollars from sequoia and saif partners on the way to seventeen cities and twenty thousand orders a day. in february 2016 it pulled out of six of those cities in one move. it stopped delivering enti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kitchensurfing 📖 2012 - 2016 chris muscarella and borahm cho started it in 2012 out of a brooklyn townhouse as a marketplace where you booked a chef days ahead for a dinner party. by 2015 it was an on-demand service instead, a chef at your door with the shopping already done, around twenty-five dollars a head. tiger global and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Dabs.com 📖 1987 - 2016 two men in bolton started a computer-book imprint in 1987 and named it after their own initials. by 2008 dabs.com was turning over about 200 million pounds a year selling parts to british enthusiasts, and bt had owned it for two years. on 11 april 2016 bt retired the name and told everyone to re-reg |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tencent Paipai 📖 2005 - 2016 paipai was tencent's answer to taobao, a c2c marketplace launched in 2005 that had every advantage on paper. it rode qq's hundreds of millions of users straight to the top of the traffic charts and still never beat the site that got there first. tencent handed it to jd.com in the 2014 deal that made |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Chaos.com 📖 1995 - 2016 sydney, 1995: rob appel started selling cds over the internet as chaos music market, four years before anyone in australia had a reason to trust that. the company rode ozemail's subscriber base up, floated on the asx in december 1999 for a$15 million with malcolm and lucy turnbull attached to it, an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1859-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
A&P 📖 1859 - 2015 fifteen thousand seven hundred and nine stores in 1930, selling $2.9 billion of groceries, which made it the largest retailer anywhere. a&p worked out that a grocery store could run on a thin margin and a fast shelf, then spent the next forty years losing the format it had invented to people who rea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1939-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
US Airways 📖 1939 - 2015 flight 1939 left philadelphia on the evening of 16 october 2015 and landed back at the same airport before six the next morning after going around by charlotte then phoenix then san francisco. the number was the founding year. what began as an airmail operation in 1939 spent seventy-six years changi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Molotok.ru 📖 1999 - 2015 the russian ebay, named for the auctioneer's hammer, opened in december 1999 with a pager sold for eight hundred rubles. at its height it carried fifteen million lots and a quarter of a million people a day. the polish allegro group bought control in 2009 and rebuilt it in allegro's image, and by 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Homejoy 📖 2010 - 2015 homejoy was an on-demand home cleaning marketplace founded in 2010 in san francisco by adora and aaron cheung, y combinator alumni who pivoted from a cleaning company to a software platform within the first year. by 2014 the service was running across thirty plus cities in the us, uk, canada, france |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Geeknet 📖 1993 - 2015 a stanford graduate student named larry augustin started selling linux workstations in november 1993. the company he built off that changed its name four times and posted the largest first-day gain in the history of the american stock market on the morning it went public, 698 percent above an offer |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Piperlime 📖 2006 - 2015 gap needed something that looked like a startup, so in 2006 it made one up: a name with no meaning attached to a shoe shop with no shelves, fronted by celebrity stylists choosing the front page. it worked well enough to earn a real store in soho by 2012 and never well enough to matter, topping out u |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Karmaloop 📖 1999 - 2015 karmaloop was the online store that sold streetwear to a generation raised on hip-hop and skate culture, run out of boston by greg selkoe from 1999. at its peak in 2013 it moved about 127 million dollars a year and helped push underground brands into the mainstream. then it spent the money on ventur |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Insound 📖 1999 - 2015 sixteen years of selling records over the web, profitable for most of them, and the end arrived as a tweet about corporate cost-cutting. warner's ada bought the brooklyn shop in january 2008 and disbanded it on 19 march 2015. the name came back that october as a discount outlet, then quietly became |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Fab.com 📖 2010 - 2022 jason goldberg pivoted his stalled gay social network fabulis into a daily flash-sale design site in june 2011, and fab.com became the fastest e-commerce startup ever to a million users. it raised about $196 million and crossed a one-billion paper valuation in 2012. then the model bent. flash-sale i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
dELiA*s 📖 1993 - 2015 delias was a catalog before it was a website, and for a stretch of the 90s it was the way american teenage girls found clothes. it started in 1993 aimed at a group the catalog industry ignored, young women, and by the end of the decade it was mailing tens of millions of copies a year. the web versio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
GAW Miners 📖 2014 - 2015 the sec put it plainly in december 2015. gaw miners sold far more mining power than it owned and paid the early buyers out of what the later buyers handed over, which is the definition rather than an accusation. more than 10,000 people bought hashlets between august and december 2014, about $20 mill |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SkyMall 📖 1990 - 2015 skymall was a mail order catalog with one distribution deal behind it: the seat pocket in front of a passenger who had nothing else to do for four hours. that put it in front of about eighty-eight percent of american air travelers at around twenty million copies a year, and it sold garden yetis to p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
iVillage 📖 1995 - 2014 ivillage was a us women's portal that ran from 1995 to 2014. its march 1999 ipo was one of the loudest dot-com first-day pops, with shares priced at twenty-four dollars closing near one hundred on day one. by december 2000 the same stock was under a dollar. nbc universal bought the company in may 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MSN Autos 📖 1995 - 2014 carpoint launched as one of the first wave of microsoft web properties in october 1995, before the .com era was a category. it was a car-shopping portal that let americans research and price vehicles through a microsoft url. carpoint became msn carpoint when bundled into the msn channel network, the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Loserkids.com 📖 1999 - 2014 kids kept telling blink-182 on tour that there was no skate shop anywhere near where they lived, so in june 1999 mark hoppus and tom delonge opened one on the web with dylan anderson. loserkids sold band merchandise next to birdhouse decks and whatever else fit a southern california idea of what a t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Yebhi 📖 2009 - 2014 yebhi came out of an online shoe shop called bigshoebazaar and grew into one of india's early fashion e-tailers, selling clothes and accessories out of gurgaon from 2009. it raised about eighteen million dollars at its 2012 peak, narayana murthy's catamaran among the backers, and claimed around 1.5 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
ZipRealty 📖 1999 - 2014 ziprealty was a discount real-estate broker that ran an in-house salaried-agent model instead of the commission-only industry norm. it launched in 1999 and went public in 2004 before realogy acquired it in 2014 for $166 million. the brand and site were folded into coldwell banker over the following |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
eCOST.com 📖 1999 - 2014 a closeout electronics retailer that pc mall started in torrance in 1999, cut loose in 2005 and took back six years later for a fraction of what it had been worth. it went public in 2004 and the spin-off completed on 11 april 2005, with about 180 million dollars a year walking out the door. pfsweb p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Tokobagus 📖 2005 - 2014 two dutch founders started a classifieds site in denpasar in 2005 and turned it into the address indonesians typed when they wanted to sell a car. by 2013 it was carrying a billion page views a month and fifty thousand new ads a day. naspers put money in, took full control, and on 20 may 2014 replac |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Mt. Gox 📖 2010 - 2014 mt. gox was the bitcoin exchange that turned from a magic the gathering card-trading site into the place where seventy percent of the world's bitcoin moved. then in february 2014 it stopped letting people withdraw, then it stopped letting people trade, then it filed for bankruptcy with about 850,000 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Blockbuster 📖 1985 - 2014 blockbuster opened its first store in dallas in october 1985 and grew into a 9000-store chain by the mid-2000s. it passed on buying netflix for fifty million dollars in 2000 and was filing chapter 11 ten years later. dish network paid 320 million for the wreckage in april 2011 and closed the last 30 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Indiaplaza 📖 1999 - 2013 fabmart opened in bangalore in june 1999 and was the first real online store in india, which meant it had to build the payment method and the delivery arrangement itself because neither existed to buy. the physical half was sold to the aditya birla group in 2006 and became a supermarket chain. k vai |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Bazar 📖 2012 - 2013 fourteen thousand listings. that was the entire inventory of yahoo! japan's third shop on the day the company announced it was closing, five months into the eight months it got. yahoo! bazar opened on 1 october 2012 selling at fixed prices, sold to sellers as simpler than yahoo! auctions and to buye |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Better Place 📖 2007 - 2013 better place was shai agassi's plan to fix electric vehicles by separating the battery from the car. battery swap stations would let drivers exchange a depleted pack for a charged one in three minutes, paid via subscription instead of car ownership. the model raised roughly $850 million and deployed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
UGO Networks 📖 1997 - 2013 ugo started in '97 as unified gamers online and became undergroundonline in 1999. hearst bought the network in july 2007. ugo bought 1up and electronic gaming monthly from ziff davis in january '09, then ign bought ugo from hearst in may '11. the new ziff davis under j2 then bought ign in '13 and ki |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yardsellr 📖 2010 - 2013 three former ebay executives started this in san francisco in october 2009 and spent the next three years trying to turn the facebook news feed into a storefront. by the end of 2010 a million and a half people were following its categories and accel had put in $5 million. then other companies starte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Buy.com 📖 1997 - 2013 buy.com launched in 1997 as scott blum's plan to win e-commerce by selling below cost and making the money back on ads and services. it sold $125 million in its first full year and beat compaq's record for first-year sales, then rode the dot-com bubble to a 2000 ipo. the below-cost model bled money |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Loosecubes 📖 2010 - 2012 brooklyn, june 2010. campbell mckellar and anna thomas built a marketplace out of a fact every office already knew about itself, which is that there are always chairs nobody is sitting in. by 2012 loosecubes had around 1,400 listed workspaces, 25,000 members across more than sixty countries and $7.8 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
CompUSA 📖 1984 - 2012 compusa was the place you walked into in the us to buy a beige tower or a stack of cd-r media. the format never really reached turkey. the brand was on its way out by the time best buy and online retail finished it. systemax bought the wreckage in early 2008 and folded the name into tigerdirect in n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Kingfisher Airlines 📖 2005 - 2012 six thousand people stopped being paid in march 2012 and kept flying anyway until the pilots walked out at the end of september. vijay mallya's airline was named after his beer. it ran the best cabin in india for seven years then went down owing state banks more than any other borrower in the countr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Endless.com 📖 2007 - 2012 endless was amazon's first separately-branded ecommerce site, launched in december 2007 as a shoes-and-handbags property positioned against zappos. amazon shut it down on 27 september 2012 and folded the inventory into amazon.com/fashion. the experiment had proven that fashion shoppers would buy fro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Zecco 📖 2006 - 2012 forty free stock trades a month, no minimum balance, paid for by advertising on the website. that was the offer in july 2006 and it held for about fifteen months before the conditions started arriving. by march 2009 you needed 25,000 dollars in assets to qualify for ten, and on 30 march 2011 the fre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
aQuantive 📖 1997 - 2012 aquantive was the seattle ad-tech holding company microsoft paid six billion for in august 2007 as the biggest cheque in microsoft's history at that date. it owned razorfish on the agency side and atlas on the ad-server side. microsoft never made the integration work. on 2 july 2012 the company disc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Schlecker 📖 1975 - 2012 fourteen thousand shops across ten european countries, most of them small and staffed by two people. anton schlecker built the chain out of ehingen from 1975 and ran it as a sole proprietorship, which meant he was personally liable for all of it and also that nobody outside could see the books. dm a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Gaopeng 📖 2011 - 2012 a hundred million dollars, half of it groupon's and half of it tencent's, bought sixteen months of chinese group buying and about two percent of the market. gaopeng.com went live on 27 february 2011 and tencent took the servers down within hours, because groupon had launched the joint venture withou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! China Mall 📖 2010 - 2012 on 1 june 2010 yahoo! japan and alibaba opened two shopping sites on the same day, one pointing each way across the east china sea. the japanese half carried roughly fifty million taobao listings, their descriptions run through machine translation, with an agent in china who paid the seller and clea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
2xMoinsCher 📖 2001 - 2012 a french marketplace for used goods that solved the trust problem with a bank account instead of a reputation score. you paid the site rather than the stranger, and the seller only got paid once you had the thing in your hands. it reached twelfth place among french e-commerce sites by 2004 and was b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1934-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Continental Airlines 📖 1934 - 2012 on paper continental is the airline that survived. the merged company kept its operating certificate and its legal incorporation, then painted united's name on every tail. the last flight to carry the continental code left phoenix on 3 march 2012 and landed in cleveland as united 1267. seventy seven |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1946-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Malév Hungarian Airlines 📖 1946 - 2012 budapest woke up on 3 february 2012 without a flag carrier. four weeks earlier the european commission had ruled that every rescue hungary pushed into malev between 2007 and 2010 was illegal state aid, and ordered 38 billion forints repaid. there was no version of the airline that could produce 38 b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Kangurum 📖 2000 - 2012 migros started selling groceries over the web in 1997, and by 2000 decided the thing to be was a mall rather than a shop. kangurum opened on 24 february that year with partner firms filling out a catalog that went well past food. it ran for twelve years as a java storefront with other migros brands |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Borders 📖 1971 - 2011 borders started as a single used-book shop in ann arbor in 1971 and grew into the world's second-largest bookstore chain over the next thirty years. amazon ran its online storefront from 2001 to 2008. by then the e-reader transition had already started and borders had nothing to answer it with. the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1853-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Brentano's 📖 1853 - 2011 a newsstand outside the new york hotel on broadway, opened in 1853 by an austrian immigrant named august brentano. that was the start of it. the bookshop it grew into lasted 158 years and died twice, once as an independent company in the 1982 bankruptcy and the 1984 liquidation, and once as a store |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Swoopo 📖 2005 - 2011 the model was pay-per-bid: every bid cost real money, and every bid reset the clock. if you were the last person standing, you got a laptop for eleven dollars. if you were not, thirty dollars in bid credits was gone forever. once the venture money ran out and the math on stalled auctions caught up, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Hollywood Video / Movie Gallery 📖 1988 - 2010 hollywood video was mark wattles's portland video-rental chain that started in 1988 and grew to about 2,000 stores by the early 2000s, the second-largest chain in the us behind blockbuster. movie gallery, a rural-and-small-town chain from dothan alabama, bought the company in april 2005 for around 8 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1926-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Northwest Airlines 📖 1926 - 2010 the last flight under the northwest code was 2470 from los angeles to las vegas on 31 january 2010, and by the time it landed the reservation systems had already been cut over to delta. the airline was 83 years old. it started carrying mail between minneapolis and chicago in 1926 and bought republic |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Suncoast Motion Picture Company 📖 1986 - 2009 suncoast was a 90s and 00s american mall video retailer, peaking around 400 stores before the streaming era. parent musicland filed bankruptcy in 2003, best buy spun the chain off, trans world entertainment took over in 2006, and the 2009 closure of 150 locations ended the mall-chain identity. two s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Quixtar 📖 1999 - 2009 on 1 september 1999 amway launched a separate internet company and kept its own name off it. quixtar sold the same products through the same distributors, ordered from a website instead of a paper catalog, and by 2001 it had absorbed amway's entire north american business. it cleared over a billion |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1949-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Circuit City 📖 1949 - 2009 circuit city peaked at 567 stores and was the largest us consumer-electronics chain by revenue through much of the 1990s. in march 2007 management fired about 3,400 of its highest-paid floor staff to cut payroll and sales kept sliding through the rest of that year. the company filed chapter 11 on no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1922-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
KB Toys 📖 1922 - 2009 kb toys started in pittsfield massachusetts in 1922 as kaufman brothers, a wholesale candy company. it pivoted to wholesale toys in 1946 and to mall retail under the kay-bee toy and hobby brand in the 1970s. peak hit in 1999 at 1,324 stores in 44 states with about 1.6 billion in revenue, by which po |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
eBay Express 📖 2006 - 2008 ebay express was a fixed-price marketplace that ebay launched in april 2006. it took the inventory ebay sellers had already posted with buy-it-now pricing and surfaced it through a clean amazon-style storefront with unified checkout. it launched with about ten million listings on day one. ebay shut |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
CMGI 📖 1986 - 2008 cmgi started as a company that sold mailing lists of university professors to textbook publishers and ended up, for about eighteen months, the purest way an american could bet on the internet itself. it owned pieces of lycos and altavista, and it put its name on the new england patriots' stadium. be |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1889-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Washington Mutual 📖 1889 - 2008 on a thursday night, after the west coast branches had closed for the day, the office of thrift supervision took washington mutual away from its shareholders and handed the bank to the fdic, which sold it to jpmorgan chase before morning for 1.9 billion dollars. depositors had pulled 16.7 billion ou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1850-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Lehman Brothers 📖 1850 - 2008 a dry goods store on commerce street in montgomery, alabama, taking raw cotton as payment because the customers had no cash to give. that was the 1840s, and the firm that grew out of it filed for bankruptcy shortly before one in the morning on 15 september 2008 with $639 billion in assets against $6 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
DeRemate 📖 1999 - 2008 deremate launched in 1999 as the regional latin american online-auction marketplace competing with mercadolibre, founded by alec oxenford and others out of buenos aires. it ran across argentina, chile, mexico and colombia through the 2000s as the second-place player in each market. on 26 august 2008 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
theGlobe.com 📖 1995 - 2008 theglobe.com was the dot-com bubble's IPO mascot. two cornell undergraduates, stephan paternot and todd krizelman, launched it on april 1, 1995 as a student-built community portal of personal homepages and chatrooms. on november 13, 1998 the stock went public at a target price of 9 dollars, opened a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Bidville 📖 1999 - 2008 bidville never reached turkey at any meaningful scale. it was one of the late-1990s eBay alternatives that the US trade press kept hopeful coverage on for years. ubid acquired the auction assets in july 2006, ran them as a sister site, and announced the shutdown on 5 june 2008 after no buyer materia |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
QXL 📖 1997 - 2008 qxl was britain's big bet that europe would run its online auctions on a homegrown site instead of an american one. tim jackson, an ex-journalist, started it in 1997, took it public in 1999 near a four-hundred-million-dollar valuation, and in 2000 merged with the german auction site ricardo to build |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1923-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Bear Stearns 📖 1923 - 2008 two dollars a share, for a firm whose stock had been $172 sixteen months earlier and $93 six weeks earlier. that was the price jpmorgan agreed on sunday 16 march 2008, with the federal reserve bank of new york standing behind $30 billion of assets nobody else would put a number on. the cash pile wen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1932-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Tekel 📖 1932 - 2008 the republic bought out the ottoman tobacco régie in 1925 and ran tobacco and alcohol as a state monopoly under the name tekel from 1932. it made the cigarettes everyone in turkey smoked and the rakı everyone drank. it also bought the leaf crop from tens of thousands of small growers at a guaranteed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sharper Image 📖 1977 - 2008 sharper image started in 1977 as richard thalheimer's san francisco mail-order side hustle selling a runner's chronograph out of his apartment. by the late nineties the brand was running close to 187 stores across 38 us states and the ionic breeze air purifier accounted for roughly forty percent of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
VerticalNet 📖 1995 - 2008 verticalnet ran 43 trade portals for industries nobody writes nostalgia posts about, water treatment and solid waste handling among them. the pitch was that every business-to-business market would move online through a neutral middleman, and for about a year the market believed it hard enough to val |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Yukos 📖 1993 - 2007 the russian state took this one apart on purpose and never especially hid it. yukos came out of the 1995 loans-for-shares auctions, where mikhail khodorkovsky's bank menatep paid $310 million for 78 percent of a company sitting on reserves worth many times that. by 2003 it was pumping about 1.7 mill |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
NetBank 📖 1996 - 2007 netbank started in february 1996 as atlanta internet bank, the first FDIC-insured online-only bank in the united states. it grew to about $2.5 billion in assets and over a hundred thousand depositors. then the subprime mortgage business it had pivoted into early-2000s collapsed. on september 28 2007 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Globix 📖 1989 - 2007 globix started in manhattan selling apple hardware to printers and ended up owning twenty eight thousand miles of fiber and a million square feet of data center. the market put $2.5 billion on it in 2000. eighteen months later that number was $5.87 million and it was in chapter 11, killed by $600 mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Aucland 📖 1999 - 2007 fabrice grinda and sacha fosse-parisis launched aucland in april 1999 and within a year it was one of the three largest auction sites in europe, funded by europ@web, the internet arm of the luxury magnate bernard arnault. its rival was ibazar, and when ebay bought ibazar in february 2001 the french |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Coliseum Books 📖 1974 - 2007 the northwest corner of 57th street and broadway held a general bookstore from 1974 until the lease ran out at the end of january 2002. george leibson reopened coliseum books on west 42nd near bryant park in june 2003 and never found the same customers there. bankruptcy came in october 2006 and the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
GoTrump.com 📖 2006 - 2007 gotrump.com was a travel booking site launched at trump tower on 24 january 2006 with the tagline "the art of the travel deal". underneath it was travelocity, whose search and booking technology it licensed the same way dozens of other sites did, with sixty thousand hotels in the inventory and a sec |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1951-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Sam Goody 📖 1951 - 2006 sam goody started as a manhattan discount record shop in 1951, became the largest mall music retail chain in the us by the mid-eighties under musicland ownership, and peaked at over 800 sam goody storefronts inside a 1300-store musicland portfolio. best buy bought musicland in january 2001 for $685 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1960-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Tower Records 📖 1960 - 2006 tower records grew out of a drugstore in sacramento in 1960 when russ solomon started selling 45s out of his father's pharmacy, and by the 1990s the chain ran flagships from west hollywood to tokyo shibuya. file sharing and amazon hit at the same time. the us chain filed chapter 11 on august 20 2006 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Lik-Sang 📖 1998 - 2006 lik-sang was the hong kong import retailer founded in 1998. it sold region-free console hardware, mod chips, imported japanese games, and accessories to a global customer base before regional console releases caught up. sony computer entertainment europe filed psp-import suits in 2005 and won in the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
USinternetworking 📖 1998 - 2006 in 1998 a company in annapolis decided that business software should be rented over a wire instead of installed off a disc, and the market agreed hard enough to triple the stock on its first day of trading. the category was called the application service provider and it did not survive the crash. us |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
livedoor Auction 📖 2004 - 2006 takafumi horie put thirty of his own possessions on it at a starting price of one yen, which is how livedoor announced an auction site in february 2004. it charged nothing to list and nothing to bid, and it copied yahoo! auctions closely enough that moving across was supposed to require learning not |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1927-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Varig 📖 1927 - 2006 otto ernst meyer founded varig in porto alegre on 7 may 1927 and for most of the twentieth century it was the only brazilian airline anyone outside brazil ever flew. deregulation arrived in 1990 and gol arrived in 2001, and the company filed for judicial recovery in june 2005. on 20 july 2006 a judg |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Juniper Bank 📖 2000 - 2006 richard vague opened juniper bank in wilmington, delaware in january 2000 with money from benchmark capital and a plan that had no branches anywhere in it. the product was co-branded credit cards, airtran airways and harvard among the names on the plastic, sold and serviced entirely over the web. ca |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Purple Skirt 📖 1999 - 2006 tracey ullman launched a fashion site in november 1999, at the last moment when a famous person with an idea could get a retail website funded without being asked a hard question about it. purple skirt sold clothes and ran styling columns written by the people who dress actors for a living. it laste |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
EB Games (US brand) 📖 1977 - 2005 electronics boutique started as a calculator and gadget kiosk in the king of prussia mall in 1977, founded by james j. kim. it rebranded to eb games in 2000 as the chain pivoted hard into console software. gamestop completed a $1.44 billion acquisition on october 8 2005, then converted all us eb gam |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Totality Corporation 📖 1999 - 2005 it started in san francisco in 1999 as mimecom and sold remote management of the servers and applications underneath large e-commerce sites. in 2000 it raised a hundred million dollars in a second round, the largest of that year except for the one loudcloud had just closed. mci announced the purchas |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Granville Technology Group 📖 1994 - 2005 britain's largest computer manufacturer was a mail-order operation in a converted mill town in lancashire, selling under the names time and tiny to people buying their first pc. tahir mohsan started it in 1994 and by 2003 it was turning over 207 million pounds. two years later the bank stopped proce |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Reflect.com 📖 1999 - 2005 reflect was procter & gamble's late-dot-com bet on mass-customization. it launched in late 1999 and offered around fifty thousand variations of cosmetic and personal-care products built to your specifications. p&g sank about $60m into it across three funding rounds. the model never scaled into a pro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
The Romp 📖 2000 - 2005 fifteen million dollars of private money went into a website that made flash cartoons, and for about a year it looked like the right call: 600,000 registered accounts by march 2001 and a paid tier that signed 11,000 people in three weeks. two months later the co-founder said out loud that original p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Cdandco 📖 1995 - 2004 the commercial court put cdandco into receivership on 18 april 2001 and handed the business to rue du commerce two months after that. before the fall it had been the french cd-rom shop, a printed mail-order catalog started in 1995 that moved onto the web in 1997 and collected something over a hundre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Commerce One 📖 1994 - 2004 commerce one was the loudest bubble-era b2b exchange story. founded in 1994 as distrivision, renamed in 1997, ipo'd in july 1999 and rose 190 percent on the first trading day. peak market cap of $21.5 billion in 2000. by october 2004 it filed for bankruptcy. the patents went to novell for $15.5 mill |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Whitehouse.com 📖 1997 - 2004 the most famous mistype on the late-1990s american web. dan parisi bought the domain in 1997, briefly ran it as a political-satire idea, then turned it into a paywalled adult portal once the typo traffic became too valuable to ignore. by 2003 it earned him about one million dollars a year. he closed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Digex 📖 1991 - 2003 digex started in a maryland basement in 1991 as one of the east coast's first commercial internet providers, and ended up running the websites of martha stewart and nike. intermedia bought it in 1997 and spun the hosting half back out as a public company in 1999. the stock touched about 160 dollars |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
NetSlaves 📖 1998 - 2003 netslaves went up in october 1998 after new york book agents told steve baldwin and bill lessard that their idea worked better as a magazine article. so they published it as a website and let the readers write the rest. it ran on horror stories from inside the internet industry at the exact moment t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1857-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Bethlehem Steel 📖 1857 - 2003 the towers of the golden gate bridge were fabricated from plate rolled by a company in the lehigh valley that also delivered 1,121 ships during the second world war. at its height bethlehem put out around twenty three million tons of steel a year and employed roughly three hundred thousand people. i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
divine, inc. 📖 1999 - 2003 a man who had just sold his software company for three and a half billion dollars built an incubator in chicago and put thirty-eight people on the board, one of them michael jordan. it went public in july 2000, four months after the market turned, and spent the next two years buying the corpses of o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Pyra Labs 📖 1999 - 2003 pyra labs was a four-person company that built blogger out of leftover code for a project-management tool nobody wanted. it ran out of money in 2001, lost almost all of its staff in a single bad week, and limped along until google bought it in february 2003. the brand died the same day. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Lokau 📖 1999 - 2002 lokau was the brazilian auction site that launched in july 1999 from sao paulo. iBest bought it in 2001 and made it the portal's exclusive auctions channel. in december 2002 mercadolivre signed a strategic deal with iBest to take over administration of lokau, with around one million lokau accounts s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
LetsBuyIt.com 📖 1999 - 2002 the swedish group-buying dot-com johan stael von holstein founded in april 1999. floated on the german neuer markt in july 2000 just after the dot-com crash started. ran out of cash by december and got rescued by german investor kim schmitz, who turned out to be an insider-trading fraudster. the ger |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
CDNow 📖 1994 - 2002 cdnow was the first place you could buy a cd online with a credit card, before amazon had a music store and before napster made the whole question moot. it ran for about six years on its own, got cracked open by the dot-com bust, sold to bertelsmann for $117 million, then quietly became a redirect t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Viant 📖 1996 - 2002 june 1999 to september 2002 is the whole arc: an ipo, a market cap over two billion dollars by christmas, then three years of layoffs and a stock-for-stock exit worth a rounding error against the peak. viant's stock stopped trading after the close on 27 september 2002, absorbed by divine. divine fil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
PurchasePro.com 📖 1997 - 2002 charles e. johnson jr was worth about 1.26 billion dollars on paper in december 1999, three months after taking a las vegas company public on the idea that hotels should buy their towels and soap through a website. purchasepro's software licenses turned out to be sold in exchange for purchase commit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Datek Online 📖 1996 - 2002 datek online sold stock trades over the web for $9.99 at a point when a full-service broker still charged you a hundred dollars and a phone call, and it got there because the people who built it had spent the early nineties abusing the nasdaq's small order execution system for a living. the same two |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Lante 📖 1984 - 2002 fifty four dollars and ninety four cents on 11 february 2000, up from a twenty dollar offer price, one of the loudest first days of the entire bubble. lante was a chicago consultancy mark tebbe had been running quietly since 1984 that rewrote itself as an internet firm at exactly the right moment an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1913-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Arthur Andersen 📖 1913 - 2002 on 14 march 2002 the justice department indicted an accounting firm rather than the people inside it, and the clients began leaving that same week. the conviction came on 15 june and the cpa licenses went back on 31 august, taking 28,000 american jobs with them. the supreme court reversed it unanimo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
WorldCom 📖 1983 - 2006 worldcom was a long-distance reseller that bernie ebbers built out of a hattiesburg coffee shop in 1983 and grew into the second-largest carrier in the us on a wave of merger debt. by 2000 it owned uunet and a large share of the internet backbone. between 1999 and 2002 the company booked about eleve |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Scient 📖 1997 - 2002 eric greenberg walked out of viant in 1997 with a severance check and used it to fund the firm that would spend the next three years beating viant. by the autumn of 2000 scient was billing a hundred million dollars a quarter with eleven hundred people on the payroll. fifteen months later its quarter |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
StarMedia 📖 1996 - 2002 starmedia was the pan-latin-american portal play, in spanish and portuguese, founded in august 1996 by fernando espuelas and jack chen in new york. it floated on nasdaq on 25 may 1999 as STRM at fifteen dollars a share, peaked above $3.8 billion in market cap, ran latinmail and latinchat before the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1934-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Service Merchandise 📖 1934 - 2002 service merchandise opened as a tennessee five-and-dime in 1934 and rebuilt itself in 1960 as a catalog-showroom chain where customers wrote item numbers on carbon-paper forms, handed them to a clerk, then waited for a conveyor belt to deliver their watch or toaster from a hidden warehouse. peaked a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1931-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Swissair 📖 1931 - 2002 chf 123 million was still in the accounts on 2 october 2001, which ernst & young established afterwards. it did not matter at 15:45 that afternoon, when the fuel suppliers wanted cash up front and the airline switzerland called the flying bank put its entire fleet on the ground in front of the world |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1936-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Ansett Australia 📖 1936 - 2002 reg ansett was licensed off the hamilton to melbourne road route in 1935, so he bought an aircraft and flew it instead, starting on 17 february 1936. sixty five years later air new zealand owned the airline and put it into voluntary administration on 12 september 2001 with nothing left to fly on. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
ArsDigita 📖 1997 - 2002 thirty-eight million dollars arrived in 2000 and the founders were out of the management structure within months. arsdigita sold database-backed community websites and gave the software underneath away, which worked until professional managers decided the giveaway was the problem. by february 2002 t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
NextCard 📖 1996 - 2002 nextcard was the first credit card you could apply for on a web page and be approved for while the page was still open. jeremy and molly lent started it in 1996 and took it public in may 1999 at twenty dollars a share, and the stock traded past fifty. the approvals were fast because not much was bei |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Beyond.com 📖 1994 - 2002 beyond.com started life in 1994 as software.net, the first serious attempt to sell programs over the wire instead of in a box on a shelf. by 1999 it had passed a million customers and about 37 million dollars a year in sales, half of that from downloads, and it was losing very nearly as much as it t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
MightyWords 📖 2000 - 2002 barnes & noble put twenty million dollars into mightywords in june 2000 and owned fifty-three percent of it by september. the company sold documents longer than a magazine article and shorter than a book, which was a real gap in publishing and still is. by the end of 2001 it had thirty thousand of t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Fatbrain.com 📖 1983 - 2002 a bookstore opened in sunnyvale in march 1983 selling nothing but computer books, down the road from where fry's would open two years later. it registered clbooks.com in 1991 and took orders by email before there was much of a web to put them on. the online half eventually swallowed the shops and re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Egghead.com 📖 1984 - 2001 victor alhadeff opened the first egghead software store in bellevue washington in 1984 with backing from paul allen. by 1989 the chain had 206 stores up and down the us. in january 1998 egghead closed all 80 of its remaining stores in a single announcement and bet the company on egghead.com. it last |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
AdCritic.com 📖 1999 - 2001 two hundred thousand people registered to watch advertising nobody was paying them to watch, which sounds like a business and was not one. every view was a video file leaving a server at a cost, and nothing came back the other way. akamai stopped carrying the traffic in december 2001, and three mont |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1953-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Demirbank 📖 1953 - 2001 halit cıngıllıoğlu ran a bank his family had founded in istanbul in 1953 with money from iron merchants, and by 2000 it had 198 branches and stood fifth among turkey's private banks. the trade underneath it was borrowing overnight to hold turkish government paper for the spread. when the interbank m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Enron 📖 1985 - 2001 andrew fastow ran the off-balance-sheet partnerships that held enron's debt, and he ran some of them for his own account. the company booked nearly $101 billion of revenue for 2000 and collected fortune's most innovative company award six years running. jeff skilling resigned on 14 august 2001 and d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
DrKoop.com 📖 1998 - 2001 drkoop.com was a dot-com health portal fronted by c. everett koop, the bowtie us surgeon general from the eighties. it launched as personal medical records inc in 1997, relaunched as drkoop.com in march 1999, ipo'd in june 1999 at nine dollars and peaked at $45.75 a share. by december 2001 it had fi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1930-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
TWA 📖 1930 - 2001 carl icahn took control of twa in 1985 and took it private three years later, leaving the airline roughly $540 million deeper in debt. the carrier that had passed pan am across the atlantic in 1969 went through two bankruptcies in the nineties and a third in january 2001. american airlines bought th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
iPublish 📖 2000 - 2001 thirteen million dollars bought time warner an e-book imprint and about eighteen months of it. the writers did the reading for free: you rated other people's submissions to earn a look from an editor, and whatever floated to the top got a 24 percent royalty. larry kirshbaum closed it on 5 december 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1923-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Sabena 📖 1923 - 2001 a recapitalization was signed in july 2001 and the money never moved. that is the whole ending. belgium's flag carrier had spent six years under swissair ownership, and when the swiss ran out of cash the belgians went down five months ahead of them. the brussels court ordered the liquidation on 6 no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Cyberian Outpost 📖 1995 - 2001 the connecticut e-tailer that sold computer hardware in eleven languages to a hundred and forty countries before the bubble burst. the 1999 super bowl gerbil-cannon ad made the brand more famous than the store. fry's electronics bought what was left in november 2001 for $21 million and folded the ou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
8848.com 📖 1999 - 2001 8848 opened on 18 may 1999 and was the first online store in china with real inventory behind it, named for the height of everest in meters. by early 2000 it was moving more than ten million yuan a month across sixteen categories, shipping through the four hundred physical shops its parent already r |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Sportal 📖 1998 - 2001 sportal was a british company that built and ran the official websites of europe's biggest football clubs, founded by rob hersov in the late nineties under the name pangolin. bskyb and silvio berlusconi's fininvest put money in, it was valued at $170 million in december 1999, and in the summer of 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Inside.com 📖 2000 - 2001 inside.com was a media-industry trade journalism subscription site from kurt andersen and michael hirschorn. it launched in may 2000 on $35 million of dot-com money, never broke a few thousand subscribers at $199 a year, and was killed by steven brill in october 2001 after he canceled the print edit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Open Market 📖 1994 - 2001 in may 1996 a cambridge software company sold shares to the public, more than doubled on the first day and closed with a market capitalization of 1.2 billion dollars for a product that almost nobody outside a corporate purchasing department would ever see. open market built one of the first commerci |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
first-e 📖 1999 - 2001 first-e opened in september 1999 as europe's first internet-only bank, run out of dublin by an irish incubator called enba, trading on a banking license that belonged to banque d'escompte in paris. it took 250,000 customers in britain and germany on rates the branch banks could not match, because it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Contentville 📖 2000 - 2001 cbs took thirty-five percent of contentville and paid for it in advertising inventory rather than cash, forty million dollars of airtime over three years. nbc and primedia topped the pile past a hundred million. steve brill opened the store on 12 july 2000 selling magazine articles at $2.95 and doct |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
e-Stamp.com 📖 1999 - 2001 e-stamp shipped postage to a PC over a phone line in 1999. it was the first company the USPS approved for internet postage, and it shipped a usb hardware vault that customers had to plug in to print stamps. stamps.com shipped without the vault. e-stamp's customers chose the simpler product within a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Exodus Communications 📖 1994 - 2001 two engineers started a company in 1994 on the idea that other people's servers belonged in a building with better power and better bandwidth than any office could buy. by 2000 exodus was worth about thirty-two billion dollars and ran forty-four data centers holding the machines behind much of the v |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
biztravel.com 📖 1996 - 2001 in the week after 11 september 2001, bookings fell by as much as seventy percent and a travel company in philadelphia closed the site it had bought two years earlier. biztravel.com ceased all operations on the 21st and left a letter on its front page saying so. its best idea was a guarantee that pai |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Netfolio 📖 1999 - 2001 james o'shaughnessy wrote what works on wall street, sold his mutual fund family in 2000, and put the proceeds behind an idea he called the personal fund: your own basket of stocks, picked by his quantitative screens, owned outright instead of through a fund shared with thousands of strangers. it co |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Wingspan Bank 📖 1999 - 2001 bank one built an internet-only bank in 1999 and pointed the advertising at itself: if your bank could start over, this is what it would be. it spent something like 150 million dollars getting 225,000 people to open accounts, a great many of which held the hundred dollars the sign-up bonus put there |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Beenz.com 📖 1998 - 2001 beenz tried to be money for the web before money for the web was a thing anyone had figured out. it raised about $100m, signed up 15 country offices, printed press releases about a frictionless cross-border currency, and then the dot-com window closed and nobody wanted any of it. it was an idea abou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Flooz.com 📖 1999 - 2001 flooz wanted to be a parallel currency for the web. you bought credits with a card or received them as a corporate gift voucher, then you spent the balance at a list of partner shops. it raised tens of millions and ran prime-time ads with whoopi goldberg. it never persuaded enough merchants or enoug |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
HomeRuns.com 📖 1996 - 2001 homeruns began in 1996 as an experiment by hannaford bros, a supermarket chain that wanted to know whether people would order groceries through a web browser. it delivered in boston and later in washington, ran out of warehouses rather than store shelves, and outlived almost every online grocer of i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Webvan 📖 1996 - 2001 webvan was supposed to deliver your groceries to your front door inside a 30-minute window. it raised hundreds of millions in venture capital, IPO'd in late 1999 at a valuation over $4.8 billion, then burned through almost $800 million in around 18 months building warehouses faster than it could acq |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
iBazar 📖 1998 - 2001 ibazar was the european person-to-person online auction site that beat ebay to the french market by three years and led the peer-to-peer auction category in seven of the eight european countries where it operated. pierre-françois grimaldi launched it in october 1998 under a parent called téléstore. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Ready2shop.com 📖 1999 - 2001 ready2shop.com was a british fashion advice site founded in november 1999 by trinny woodall and susannah constantine, backed by j.h. whitney and atlas venture. it made deep staff cuts in november 2000 and ran out of money not long after. dissolution came at the end of july 2001 with a reported ten m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
HomeGrocer.com 📖 1997 - 2001 terry drayton and three co-founders started homegrocer in 1997 in bellevue washington with peach-decorated refrigerated trucks and a same-day grocery model. it went public in march 2000 at a 288 million valuation, then sold to webvan in september 2000 for 1.2 billion in stock. webvan switched the ho |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Automatic Media 📖 2000 - 2001 automatic media was what happened when two of the best-known webzines on the english-language web stopped being able to pay for themselves separately. suck.com and feed merged into one company in july 2000 with four million dollars from lycos ventures behind them, on the theory that shared overhead |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
X.com 📖 1999 - 2001 x.com launched on 7 december 1999 in palo alto as an online bank that also sold mutual funds and would move money to another person if you typed their email address. it paid twenty dollars to anyone who opened an account and ten more for every referral, and it bought a small bank in la jara, colorad |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
CyberRebate 📖 1998 - 2001 joel granik incorporated cyberrebate on may 16, 1998 with joseph lichter plus athan vadiakas as cofounders. the company listed consumer goods at three to ten times manufacturer's list price and promised a 100 percent rebate by mail thirteen weeks after purchase. by january 2001 cyberrebate was the t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Bibliofind 📖 1996 - 2001 in march 2001 bibliofind said somebody had been inside its servers since october and had taken about 98,000 credit card numbers. two months later the site was gone. amazon had bought it in 1999 and then left it running under its own name, twenty million out-of-print books listed by four thousand dea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
marchFIRST 📖 2000 - 2001 in december 1999 a chicago consultancy called whittman-hart agreed to buy a california web shop called usweb/cks in a stock deal worth 5.7 billion dollars. the combined company took the name marchfirst on 1 march 2000, after the date it was incorporated, and called itself the largest internet servic |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Kozmo.com 📖 1998 - 2001 kozmo promised free one-hour delivery of videos and pints of ice cream, by bike messenger, in eleven american cities. the unit economics never worked. they raised about two hundred and fifty million dollars from amazon and starbucks, then burned through it in three years. layoffs in april 2001 took |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
NBCi 📖 1999 - 2001 NBCi was an old tv network's attempt to be a web portal in 1999, stitched together from snap.com plus xoom.com plus a webmail buy and IPO'd at $76 a share. eighteen months later NBC was buying the same shares back at $2.19 to wind the whole thing down. nbc.com reverted to promoting tv shows, which i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
EToys.com 📖 1997 - 2001 etoys was the first online toy store to matter. it went public on january 4 1999 at twenty dollars and closed the day at seventy-six. for a few months in 1999 the company was worth more on paper than toys r us. two christmas seasons in a row exposed the operational gap: orders came in faster than wa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
CompuBank 📖 1998 - 2001 compubank opened in houston in october 1998 as the first american bank the comptroller of the currency chartered to operate solely on the internet. it never built a loan book, and a bank that does not lend is a website holding your money for free. by early 2001 it had 57,000 accounts and 75.7 millio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
PlanetRx 📖 1998 - 2001 planetrx was one of the online drugstores the late nineties produced on the theory that americans would rather order a prescription from a website than walk into a pharmacy. it went public in october 1999 and then moved its whole operation from san francisco to memphis to sit beside the fedex hub, w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
CyberCash 📖 1994 - 2001 cybercash was the 1994 startup that wanted to be the credit-card layer of the early web, before visa and mastercard had figured out their own online story. its consumer wallet went nowhere. its merchant software, ICVerify, got hit by the y2k bug on day one of 2000. chapter 11 followed in march 2001, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
GovWorks.com 📖 1998 - 2001 govworks raised seventy million dollars to let americans pay parking tickets through a website. the camera crew filming it for a sundance doc kept rolling through three years of staff revolts and board firings, ending in chapter 11. by the time the documentary hit theaters in may 2001 the company wa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Buena Vista Internet Group 📖 1997 - 2001 disney gathered its online units under one name in the late nineties and called it buena vista internet group. when the infoseek purchase closed in july 1999 the whole thing was reorganized into a company called go.com, and disney shareholders voted that november to give it a stock of its own. it tr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
govWorks 📖 1998 - 2001 a film crew was in the room for most of it, which is the only reason anybody remembers a company that sold municipal payment software. kaleil isaza tuzman, tom herman and chieh cheung started it in may 1998 as public data systems, raised over $70 million, and had 250 people by april 2000. by novembe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
AllAdvantage 📖 1999 - 2001 alladvantage was the most plausible-sounding bad idea of the 1999 internet: install a desktop ad bar on your browser, and we will pay you per hour you spend online. ten million people signed up in eighteen months. they paid out one hundred sixty million dollars, then the bubble closed, then they wen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Natural Wonders 📖 1986 - 2001 a bankruptcy judge in oakland authorized the going-out-of-business sales on 28 february 2001, ten weeks after the chapter 11 filing and five months after the company borrowed fifty five million dollars to buy a competitor. the chain sold telescopes and wind chimes out of 309 mall storefronts and had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Broadband Sports 📖 1998 - 2001 a santa monica content network for jock-blogging that started life as athlete direct. it raised more than $60 million, locked in the digital rights for more than 250 athletes from kobe bryant to troy aikman, signed an espn co-programming deal in november 2000, then shut every site down on 16 februar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
MVP.com 📖 1999 - 2001 mvp.com was three of the most famous athletes in the world lending their faces to an online sporting-goods store. the money was real, sixty-five million from benchmark and freeman spogli, plus an eighty-five million dollar promotional deal with cbs and its sportsline unit. the shoes did not move fas |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Entertaindom 📖 1999 - 2001 kevin tsujihara took this site over in april 2000, twelve years before he ran warner bros outright. entertaindom was time warner's attempt to build an entertainment network for the web out of its own vault, and it opened on 29 november 1999 with flash cartoons and a browser sniffer at the door. the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Mercata 📖 1998 - 2001 mercata launched in may 1999 with a slogan that read like a pitch deck: "the more people who buy, the lower the price." vulcan ventures, paul allen's investment vehicle, owned about 55%. the model was a group-buy auction in reverse, where consumers committed to buy a vcr or a dishwasher and the pric |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
MobShop / Accompany 📖 1998 - 2001 accompany, inc launched in october 1998 in san mateo, founded by jim rose, salim teja and jonathan ehrlich as a consumer group-buying platform. shoppers pooled orders to unlock volume discounts on electronics and small appliances. accompany rebranded to mobshop in march 2000 and raised $35 million t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
World Online 📖 1994 - 2001 world online sold internet access across fifteen countries and was worth twelve billion euros for about one afternoon. the float on 17 march 2000 was the largest europe had ever seen and it turned into the largest embarrassment in it. three months earlier the founder had quietly sold most of her sta |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Speedyclick.com 📖 1998 - 2001 speedyclick opened in glendale around 1998 and paid people in a currency called speedybucks for sitting on its pages playing blackjack and bingo. you cashed them out for clothing or a mousepad, or you traded them with other members in a bartering area built to look like ebay. a million registered ac |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Stan Lee Media 📖 1998 - 2000 on 15 december 2000 the company suspended operations and laid off nearly all of its roughly 140 staff, and four days later it was done. it had been worth more than $300 million in february of that year and was worth about $1.69 million when nasdaq halted the stock on 18 december at thirteen cents a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Cobalt Networks 📖 1996 - 2000 mountain view, 1996: a few engineers out of apple's hardware group built a small blue linux server for people who did not want to spend a weekend installing apache. it sold well enough, and then the market decided that a company with 22 million dollars of annual revenue was worth six billion. sun mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Chemdex 📖 1997 - 2000 david perry founded chemdex in september 1997 to move the catalog of laboratory chemicals and equipment onto the web and take a fee on every purchase order that went through it. it sold $29,000 of anything in 1998, went public in july 1999 and touched $243 a share on 25 february 2000, worth roughly |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Petopia.com 📖 1999 - 2000 the second pets.com. petopia raised one hundred fourteen million dollars from petco and tcv and the usual venture row, launched in august 1999, hit two hundred employees inside a year. shipping cat food cost more than selling it. petco bought the assets on december 5 2000 and pointed the domain at p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Streamline.com 📖 1993 - 2000 streamline.com was founded in 1993 by tim demello in westwood, massachusetts as a subscription grocery delivery service for boston suburbs. the model was a $30 monthly fee plus weekly delivery into a refrigerated box installed in the customer's basement or garage. it added the dot-com suffix and wen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Garden.com 📖 1995 - 2000 garden.com was an austin-based online gardening retailer started by cliff sharples and his wife lisa with their wharton classmate jamie o'neill in 1995. it raised over a hundred million dollars across private rounds and a september 1999 ipo. the stock hit a fifty-two-week high of fifteen dollars by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Pets.com 📖 1998 - 2000 the online pet supply store that became the face of the dot-com bust. amazon owned a majority stake. a sock puppet with a microphone did super bowl ads. the company went public in february 2000 at eleven dollars a share, then shut down nine months later in november. for a generation of business stud |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
MotherNature.com 📖 1996 - 2001 mothernature.com was a concord massachusetts online retailer of vitamins and supplements. it went live in 1996 and ipo'd in december 1999 at the tail end of the dot-com window. the company spent seventeen million dollars on advertising in 1999 alone. by q1 2000 it was posting a quarterly net loss of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Furniture.com 📖 1998 - 2000 furniture.com was a framingham massachusetts online furniture retailer backed by cmgi and a venture syndicate. it raised twenty-seven million dollars in june 2000 as a bridge to its planned ipo. it withdrew the ipo the same month citing market conditions. the follow-on round never closed. the compan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Urban Box Office 📖 1999 - 2000 ubo raised more than forty million dollars in 1999 to build a network of websites for what its own pitch deck called the urban mindset, took several floors in manhattan, and hired hundreds of mostly very young people, many of whom had never had an office job before. it launched late. its creative fo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Eve.com 📖 1998 - 2000 eve.com sold luxury beauty products on the early american web. mariam naficy and varsha rao founded it in 1998, sold it to bill gross's idealab for $110 million in 2000, then watched idealab shut it down on 20 october 2000 when the parent stopped having money to spare. 164 layoffs. the eve.com brand |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
MyLackey.com 📖 1999 - 2000 two former echange executives started mylackey in seattle in april 1999 to run errands for people who worked too many hours. contractors in branded shirts collected dry cleaning and walked dogs at going rates, and the company kept the difference. it raised 6.5 million dollars in the spring of 2000 a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Boxman 📖 1997 - 2000 boxman was europe's answer to buying music online, founded in sweden in 1997 and run out of london, selling cds into eight countries at a moment when almost nobody on the continent had typed a card number into a web form. its shareholder register held roxette and ace of base alongside bernard arnaul |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Priceline WebHouse Club 📖 1999 - 2000 webhouse club was jay walker's bet that priceline's name-your-price model would work for anything, including groceries and gasoline. it launched in november 1999, ran for less than a year, and closed in october 2000 after burning somewhere between $200 and $360 million. the math never made sense. a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Kibu.com 📖 1999 - 2000 a teen-girl web portal funded by jim clark and kleiner perkins to $22 million. it went online in may 2000 and laid off all 65 staff on 2 october, 46 days after the official launch party. management said they were not out of money. they just did not see how to raise more. that was the dot-com bust ta |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Pop.com 📖 1999 - 2000 pop.com was a $50 million spielberg-katzenberg-grazer-howard short-video venture funded by paul allen, announced in october 1999, and dissolved twelve months later without ever publicly launching. it was supposed to put one-to-six-minute "pops" of celebrity-driven comedy on broadband connections tha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Urbanfetch 📖 1999 - 2000 ross stevens launched urbanfetch in 1999 as the manhattan rival to kozmo.com with the same promise: any low-value impulse item delivered by bike messenger in under an hour, no delivery fee, no minimum order. the loop covered dvds and small impulse goods out of local warehouses. kozmo sued for copyin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Productopia 📖 1998 - 2000 twenty two million dollars bought editorial advice across 634 product categories and a san francisco office that was empty by the first week of october 2000. productopia wanted to be the trusted voice standing between you and the checkout button. the money ran out before the trust arrived. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Gazoontite 📖 1998 - 2000 thirty-one million dollars of venture capital went into a company that sold pillowcases and air filters to people who could not breathe. the web site stopped taking orders in early october 2000 and the company filed for chapter 11 the same month. three of the five retail stores survived the bankrupt |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Pseudo.com 📖 1993 - 2000 pseudo.com was the first serious attempt at internet television, founded in new york by josh harris in 1993, six years before broadband was something most people had at home. the company ran live shows out of a soho loft and burned through about $32 million before the dot-com crash caught up with it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Miadora 📖 1999 - 2000 fifty-one million dollars in roughly eighteen months, against an average order over eight hundred. miadora sold fine jewelry online out of san mateo and bought jewelry.com in february 2000 to own the obvious address. none of it mattered once the lender moved to foreclose and the next round failed to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Efdex 📖 1999 - 2000 tim carron-brown had the idea in the mid-nineties: put the whole food and drink trade onto one electronic exchange with prices updating by the minute, the way the financial markets already worked. to get members aboard, efdex shipped them a pc and a satellite dish for nothing. by september 2000 the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Auction Universe 📖 1997 - 2000 the parent company of the los angeles times built an auction site in 1997 and pointed it at ebay. auction universe ran city-by-city auction pages for affiliated american newspapers, which was a better idea than it sounds, because nobody wanted to ship a used sofa across a continent. classified ventu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Living.com 📖 1999 - 2000 living.com was an austin-based home-furnishings dot-com that raised over a hundred million dollars and lasted thirteen months. amazon signed a five-year exclusive partnership in february 2000 and took an eighteen percent stake plus warrants. the amazon home living store opened in may 2000 powered by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Value America 📖 1996 - 2000 value america wanted to be the store that sold everything, wiring you straight to the manufacturer so nothing ever sat in a warehouse. it went public in april 1999 and closed its first day worth two and a half billion dollars, a company that had never once turned a profit. the supply chain it promis |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Clickmango.com 📖 1999 - 2000 clickmango raised its funding in eight days in the autumn of 1999, on a plan to sell vitamins and health products to british households over the web. joanna lumley fronted the launch in january 2000. by the spring the site was taking about two thousand pounds a week against a hundred thousand pounds |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Pandesic 📖 1997 - 2000 intel and sap started pandesic in august 1997 to sell smaller companies a complete e-commerce operation in one package, the software bundled with the machines it ran on. it had around forty customers by mid 1999 and about four hundred employees across three continents by the end. the chief executive |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Reel.com 📖 1996 - 2000 a video store owner's recommendation cards, rebuilt as a website, with a shop bolted on because nobody pays for advice. it worked well enough that hollywood entertainment bought it for $96.9 million in 1998, one month before amazon started selling video and took the whole category in six weeks. by 1 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Pixelon 📖 1998 - 2000 pixelon was a 1998 startup that promised dvd-quality streaming over a 56k modem. the founder "michael fenne" was actually david kim stanley, a convicted felon hiding from a 1989 fraud sentence in tennessee. the company spent around sixteen million dollars on a las vegas product launch in october 199 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Epidemic Marketing 📖 1999 - 2000 a denver company that installed a plug-in called epinabler into your mail program and paid you a commission when somebody clicked the ad it stapled to the bottom of your outgoing messages. the recipient got no say. it opened in september 1999, raised seven point six million dollars, spent one point |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Toysmart 📖 1998 - 2000 toysmart was a us-only online toy store that ran out of money during the 2000 dot-com crash and tried to sell its customer database to pay its creditors. the ftc sued it for breaching its own privacy policy. the case became the first federal precedent on what a dead website owes its old customers. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Boo.com 📖 1999 - 2000 the dot-com era's most expensive flameout. ernst malmsten and kajsa leander raised $135 million between 1998 and 2000 to build an online fashion retailer with a 3d virtual model and offices across eight countries. the site launched six months late on 3 november 1999 and barely worked on a 56k modem, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Digital Entertainment Network 📖 1998 - 2000 DEN was supposed to be the MTV of the internet. niche-channel streaming video aimed at young men, funded by microsoft and intel and NBC, with a $75 million IPO scheduled for october 1999. instead the IPO collapsed when child-rape lawsuits hit the founders. the company died in may 2000 with no shows |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Red Rocket 📖 1998 - 2000 four in the afternoon, eastern time, on 5 may 2000. that is when viacom switched off its online toy store and pointed redrocket.com at a notice page sitting on nick.com. anything already ordered was promised by the following wednesday, and there was a phone number for questions. toys r us bought wha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
StockGeneration 📖 1998 - 2000 sg ltd sold shares in eleven companies that did not exist, from a website registered in dominica under a gambling license. one of the eleven was advertised as rising ten percent a month, with prices published a month ahead and a written promise that a round could never take more than five percent of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Tradex Technologies 📖 1996 - 2000 in december 1999 ariba agreed to buy tradex for about 1.9 billion dollars in stock. by the time the deal closed on 8 march 2000 those same 19 million shares were worth 5.6 billion, and daniel aegerter, who had started the company in tampa at twenty seven, was a billionaire on paper. ariba took a 1.4 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Confinity 📖 1998 - 2000 at a restaurant in woodside, california in july 1999, a venture capitalist held a palmpilot up to another palmpilot across the table and beamed 4.5 million dollars of investment money over infrared in front of the press. that was the launch of paypal, and the beaming was the product. the email versi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Computer.com 📖 1999 - 2000 computer.com was the dot-com that exists in business-school slides as the company that spent half of its $7 million in venture capital on super bowl xxxiv ads, then got bought by office depot before the end of the same year. it was supposed to be a general-purpose website that taught people about co |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
OnSale.com 📖 1995 - 1999 onsale.com was jerry kaplan's auction site launched in may 1995, four months before ebay went public on the web. it ran the "yankee auction" format on consumer electronics and excess computer hardware, the company acted as the seller rather than a peer-to-peer marketplace. it merged with egghead.com |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Healtheon 📖 1996 - 1999 healtheon was the third internet company jim clark started, after silicon graphics and netscape. clark and pavan nigam founded it in early 1996 to put healthcare paperwork onto the web. the ipo cleared in february 1999 and the stock ran 400 percent on its first trading day. nine months later the com |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Alando 📖 1999 - 1999 alando was an ebay copy built in berlin by six people in their twenties, three of them the samwer brothers, and it went online on 1 march 1999. it was in german and it was there first, which in 1999 was the whole argument. ebay agreed to buy it on 30 may, closed on 22 june for about $43 million, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Zip2 📖 1995 - 1999 before paypal, before tesla, before spacex, before the public musk era, there was a small office in palo alto where elon musk and his brother kimbal were selling business directory software to the new york times. the company was called zip2. compaq bought it in february 1999 for 305 million dollars |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
ComputerLand 📖 1976 - 1999 hayward, california, september 1976: ten thousand dollars went into a store called computer shack, radio shack's lawyers made it change the name, and inside eight years the chain was doing 1.4 billion a year and had been handed the ibm pc to sell. what took it apart was not a competitor. it was a lo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Starwave 📖 1993 - 1998 paul allen paid for a company outside seattle that decided a sports fan wanted a newspaper with no bottom to it, and then built the page that proved it. espnet sportszone went up in 1995 and taught the web a habit it still has, which is leaving one window open and hitting reload until a number chang |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
DigiCash 📖 1989 - 1998 digicash was the amsterdam-based startup david chaum founded in 1989 to commercialize blind-signature cryptography as anonymous digital cash. ecash worked. only one US bank (mark twain) and one european bank (deutsche bank) ever ran live trials. after three years and roughly five thousand customers, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
ValuJet Airlines 📖 1993 - 1997 on 11 may 1996 a dc-9 went into the everglades because somebody had loaded expired chemical oxygen generators into the forward cargo hold as company material. all 110 people aboard died. the faa grounded the airline a month later and let it fly again in september with fifteen aircraft instead of for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1970-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Amdahl Corporation 📖 1970 - 1997 the man who designed the ibm system/360 walked out of ibm in 1970 and spent the next five years building a machine that ran ibm's own software faster than ibm's did, in a third of the floor space, for about the same money. that was the entire business: the customer was locked in by his software and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1879-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
F. W. Woolworth Company 📖 1879 - 1997 nothing on the counter cost more than ten cents, and the fixed price was the whole invention when frank woolworth got his second store working in lancaster, pennsylvania in june 1879. by the 1979 centennial guinness had it down as the largest department store chain in the world. on 17 july 1997 the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
The Spot 📖 1995 - 1997 scott zakarin was working at a los angeles ad agency in 1995 when he pitched a serialized drama that would live entirely on a website. five attractive housemates in a santa monica beach house, each posting a diary entry about the same events, with photographs and replies to reader email. it drew abo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Book Stacks Unlimited 📖 1992 - 1997 charles stack ran a bookstore out of a dial-up bulletin board in cleveland from 1992, three years ahead of amazon, on an idea he had in 1991 because walk-in stores never carried every book on a subject. it moved onto the web as books.com in 1994, listed half a million titles, and drew half a million |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Stratton Oakmont 📖 1989 - 1996 on 5 december 1996 the national association of securities dealers expelled the firm, fined it $500,000 and ordered restitution, which put it out of business. the people who wrote that decision described it as one of the worst actors in the securities industry. what it is actually remembered for is n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Global Network Navigator 📖 1993 - 1996 gnn was the first commercial web publication and carried the first clickable banner ad. o'reilly launched it in may 1993, aol bought it for $11 million in june 1995, then folded the brand into a flat-rate aol dial-up bundle at the end of 1996. by early 1997 the subscribers were being migrated onto a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Carolco Pictures 📖 1976 - 1995 10 november 1995 is the chapter 11 filing, and the pirate film everybody blames opened on 22 december, six weeks after the studio was already in court. two foreign-sales agents built carolco by selling territory rights at cannes before a frame was shot, which funded first blood and then a $102 milli |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1762-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Barings Bank 📖 1762 - 1995 account 88888 was opened in singapore as a place to park settlement errors and used instead to bury losses that eventually reached £827 million. the kobe earthquake on 17 january 1995 destroyed the position it was hiding. britain's oldest merchant bank, 233 years old and once counted by a french for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Cannon Films 📖 1967 - 1994 in 1986 the company released forty-three films, more than any studio in hollywood, and owned a british cinema chain it had bought that april for £175 million. the money came from selling territories at cannes off a poster and a title, before a frame existed, with each year's deposits paying for the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1927-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Pan Am 📖 1927 - 1991 the worldport at jfk had a roof that reached out over the aircraft so nobody walked to the door in the rain, and delta owned it by the end of 1991. united had taken the pacific routes six years before that for $750 million. juan trippe's airline put scheduled passenger service across two oceans and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1958-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Interflug 📖 1958 - 1991 on 30 april 1991 a tupolev tu-134 flew vienna to berlin-schönefeld, and east germany's airline was finished. lufthansa had offered to buy all of interflug in july 1990 and the federal cartel office blocked the deal a month later, which left the treuhand holding an airline nobody was permitted to wan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1935-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Drexel Burnham Lambert 📖 1935 - 1990 michael milken ran the high yield desk out of beverly hills, three time zones from the head office, and in 1986 the firm he worked for earned more money than any other investment bank in america. four years later it could not find $300 million to repay commercial paper that came due on a monday morn |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1962-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Filmation 📖 1962 - 1989 on 3 february 1989 group w closed the studio, one day before a new federal law would have required sixty days of notice for a mass layoff. the timing is the story. filmation had been making american television cartoons since 1962 without sending the work overseas, which made it expensive in a busine |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1928-|
| 1982|
|_____|
|
Braniff International Airways 📖 1928 - 1982 deregulation arrived in october 1978 and harding lawrence answered it by adding routes faster than braniff could pay for them. fuel prices and twenty percent interest on the airline's credit finished the arithmetic. howard putnam came over from southwest in 1981 and found the money already gone, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1966-|
| 1982|
|_____|
|
Laker Airways 📖 1966 - 1982 pan am cut its cheapest transatlantic fares by up to two thirds in october 1981, british airways and twa matched within weeks, and laker's cash inflow halved over the winter. when mcdonnell douglas and general electric put together a rescue, british caledonian and the other european dc-10 operators |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 1977|
|_____|
|
Byte Shop 📖 1975 - 1977 paul terrell gave steve jobs a card at a homebrew computer club meeting in 1976, and a few months later ordered fifty assembled apple i boards at five hundred dollars each. that purchase order is what jobs took to a parts supplier to get thirty days of credit, which is how the first apples got built |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 1976|
|_____|
|
Penn Central 📖 1968 - 1976 february 1968 put the pennsylvania railroad and the new york central under one roof, and the roof came down twenty eight months later. the halves never integrated. union contracts clashed and the two freight-tracking systems could not read each other, so cars went into the wrong yards and stayed the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1867-|
| 1969|
|_____|
|
The Pullman Company 📖 1867 - 1969 at its 1929 peak this company could put more than 150,000 people to bed on a moving train every night, which made it the largest bed operator on earth without owning a building. george pullman's arrangement was that the railroads ran the trains and pullman owned the cars. it staffed them too, and so |