─── THE LATE 2010s WING ───
the big platforms finish the job. the small web thins out and the acquisition graveyard fills up.
1805 dead. ordered by year of death, newest first.
pre80s | 80s | 90s | 00s | 10s (2010-2014 · [2015-2019]) | 20s
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2019-12-31
Adobe Encore (2003 - 2019)
encore was the DVD authoring tool inside the adobe video catalog. you finished a film in premiere, you opened encore, you laid out a menu with chapters and a...
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2019-12-31
BlackBerry World (2009 - 2019)
blackberry world was rim's app marketplace for blackberry os and later blackberry 10 devices. it launched as blackberry app world on april 1 2009, it rebranded...
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2019-12-31
Turbolinux (1992 - 2019)
turbolinux was the linux distribution built for east asian languages from the start. it began as pacific hitech in salt lake city in 1992 selling shovelware...
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2019-12-31
Amazon Underground (2015 - 2019)
amazon underground was a strange 2015 experiment. amazon launched an android app store where the apps were fully free forever, in-app purchases included, and...
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2019-12-31
The Witches' Voice (1997 - 2019)
witchvox was a directory before it was anything else. two people in florida built a place where a pagan in a small town could post a listing and be found by...
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2019-12-31
Ambient Orb (2002 - 2019)
a hundred and fifty dollars bought a frosted glass ball in 2002 that glowed a color instead of showing a number. green for a market going up and red for one...
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2019-12-31
Himabu (2015 - 2019)
on 30 october 2019 nanameue announced it was closing the biggest students-only app in japan, with two months of notice and roughly eight million registered...
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2019-12-31
Sandstorm Oasis (2015 - 2019)
about two hundred people were paying six dollars a month for oasis when kenton varda decided he no longer felt right taking the money. oasis was the managed...
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2019-12-31
Light L16 (2015 - 2019)
sixteen small camera modules behind one piece of glass, fused by software into a 52-megapixel file, sold for $1,699 from july 2017. support ended at the end of...
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2019-12-29
OpenAirplane (2013 - 2019)
one checkout instead of a new one at every counter. that was the whole product. a pilot flew a universal pilot checkout in a given make and model at a member...
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2019-12-20
YNN (2011 - 2019)
forty-seven prefectures, one comedy act living in each of them, all of them filming. yoshimoto kogyo opened its own video-on-demand service three weeks after...
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2019-12-19
Craftster (2003 - 2019)
leah kramer wrote craftster herself in 2003 because the craft web she could find was aimed at a different kind of crafter than the one she was. it became the...
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2019-12-19
The Inquirer (2001 - 2019)
mike magee had already co-founded the register when he walked out in 2001 and started a second tech tabloid with the strapline "news, reviews, facts and...
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2019-12-18
Monster Hunter Frontier Z (2007 - 2019)
capcom took monster hunter off the living room floor and put it on a japanese pc server in june 2007, then charged a monthly fee to play it, which no other...
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2019-12-17
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...
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2019-12-16
Mozilla Thimble (2012 - 2019)
one and a half million projects had to move house. thimble was mozilla's teaching editor, markup on the left and the finished page on the right, redrawing...
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2019-12-16
X-Ray Goggles (2014 - 2019)
hover over anything on any page and the goggles showed you the tag holding it up. click, type over it, publish the result at a mozilla address, send the link...
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2019-12-16
Comic Book DB (2005 - 2019)
the closing notice promised a new and improved tool for collectors. seven years later there is no tool, and the catalog that thousands of readers spent fifteen...
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2019-12-15
StuffIt (1987 - 2019)
stuffit was the mac's .sit. born as shareware in 1987 under raymond lau, a stuyvesant high school student in queens. aladdin systems took it commercial. allume...
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2019-12-15
Yahoo! Blog (Japan) (2005 - 2019)
yahoo! blog was yahoo japan doing what every yahoo did in 2005, which was ship a blog platform because blogs were what the internet wanted that year. it was...
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2019-12-15
Google Correlate (2011 - 2019)
google trends tells you what a search term did over time. correlate did the same arithmetic pointing the other way, so you uploaded a data series and it handed...
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2019-12-15
Plays.tv (2015 - 2019)
dennis fong called it instagram for gamers, which in 2015 meant a windows client that sat behind your game recording everything and let you keep the last...
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2019-12-13
Moshi Monsters (2008 - 2019)
moshi monsters was the london kid mmo from mind candy. you adopted one of six monsters, raised it inside monstro city, earned rox by solving small puzzles and...
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2019-12-13
Coolest Cooler (2014 - 2019)
coolest cooler was a cooler with a built-in blender and a bluetooth speaker, funded on kickstarter in 2014 for over $13 million from 62,000 backers, a record...
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2019-12-09
GameRankings (1999 - 2019)
gamerankings launched in 1999 and averaged every review it could find into a percentage score. no taste hierarchy, no weighted metascore. cbs interactive owned...
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2019-12-05
Dragon's Dogma Online (2015 - 2019)
capcom took the pawn system from dragon's dogma, the one where your companion learns how you fight and other players borrow it while you are offline, and...
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2019-12-05
Chainer (2015 - 2019)
chainer came out of a tokyo company in june 2015 with an idea nobody else had shipped: build the computation graph while the code runs, instead of describing...
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2019-12-04
CBS Corporation (2005 - 2019)
the redstone family took one company apart in 2005 and put it back together in 2019, and the second cbs corporation is the piece that existed in between. it...
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2019-12-03
Google Fusion Tables (2009 - 2019)
a 2009 google labs project that let anyone turn a csv into an embeddable map or chart. journalists used it to visualize war deaths for the guardian in 2010 and...
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2019-12-02
Ameba Pigg (2009 - 2019)
ameba pigg was japan's biggest virtual community that nobody outside japan knew about. it ran on flash. ten million people made an avatar there and furnished a...
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2019-12-02
Pigg World (2012 - 2019)
december 2016 is when pigg world stopped getting anything new, and it kept running for three more years anyway. cyberagent built it as a town building game...
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2019-12-02
drawr (2008 - 2019)
flash is what killed this one, and the closure notice says so directly. drawr ran from october 2008 to 13:00 on 2 december 2019, eleven years of a browser...
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2019-12-02
freeml (1997 - 2019)
japan kept running mailing lists for twenty years after everywhere else moved to forums and then to feeds, and freeml was where most of them lived. gmo media...
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2019-12-01
Ofo (2014 - 2019)
ofo was the yellow dockless bike-share that came out of peking university in 2014. at peak in 2017-2018 it had about ten million bikes on the ground across 250...
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2019-12-01
Skype Lite (2017 - 2019)
microsoft launched skype lite in mumbai in february 2017, a 13mb android build aimed at the cheap-phone-and-slow-network reality of indian users. satya nadella...
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2019-12-01
Moikrug (2005 - 2019)
moikrug, "my circle", was russia's professional network, a place to map your work contacts by degrees the way linkedin did, connections of connections. it went...
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2019-12-01
Vidivodo (2006 - 2019)
vidivodo opened in december 2006 with an english interface, a webcam recorder and a slogan that told turkish users to create their own tv. a court order took...
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2019-12-01
iOffer (2002 - 2019)
seventeen years of haggling ended when the card companies stopped answering. ioffer ran a marketplace with no bidding and no clock in it: a seller posted an...
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2019-12-01
Viggle (2012 - 2019)
you held the phone up to the television and the app listened, worked out what was on and paid you points that turned into gift cards. robert f. x. sillerman,...
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2019-12
OnlinePizza (2005 - 2019)
three students in linköping started taking pizza orders over the web in the summer of 2005, and by the end the service carried more than 1,400 restaurants...
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2019-11-30
Google Express (2013 - 2019)
google launched the service in march 2013 as google shopping express, a same-day delivery pilot in the san francisco bay area for items from target, walgreens...
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2019-11-30
The 405 (2008 - 2019)
oliver primus published the first piece on april 28, 2008 and was still the editor on the day it closed. the 405 covered independent music out of london for...
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2019-11-30
vcash (2017 - 2019)
a cashback war killed this one. digi launched vcash in november 2017 as one of the first malaysian e-wallets and switched it off two years later, on 30...
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2019-11-27
Plated (2012 - 2019)
two harvard business school classmates worked out that the expensive part of dinner is not the food, it is deciding and shopping. plated shipped the decision...
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2019-11-22
Murfie (2011 - 2019)
murfie was the audiophile mail-in cd locker. you sent your physical discs to madison wisconsin, the company ripped them to flac and held them in a warehouse,...
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2019-11-22
Google Bulletin (2018 - 2019)
bulletin appeared in january 2018 as a google pilot in nashville and oakland, a phone app for writing up a school game or a road closure and publishing it to...
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2019-11-20
Microsoft HealthVault (2007 - 2019)
healthvault was microsoft's bet that consumers would assemble their own electronic medical record by hand and store it in a microsoft cloud. it shipped in...
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2019-11-17
Google Touring Bird (2018 - 2019)
touring bird was a google area 120 incubator project for tours and city activities. it stealth-launched in paris in april 2018 and opened publicly in september...
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2019-11-17
PirateBox (2011 - 2019)
david darts was teaching at nyu when he put a cheap router and a usb stick in a lunchbox in 2011 and released the whole design under the free art license....
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2019-11-15
Kuniao Browser (2019 - 2019)
for a few days in november 2019 there was an advertised, legal way to read twitter from inside china. kuniao was a windows browser from a fuzhou company that...
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2019-11-13
Human Head Studios (1997 - 2019)
twenty-two years of independence ended the day after rune ii went on sale. six people out of raven software set up in madison, wisconsin in 1997 and spent two...
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2019-11-12
FedBizOpps (1998 - 2019)
every american federal contracting opportunity above $25,000 had to appear on one website first, and from october 2001 to november 2019 that website was...
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2019-11-07
CrowdRise (2010 - 2019)
edward norton ran the 2009 new york city marathon for a kenyan conservation trust, put up a page to collect the pledges and pulled in one point two million...
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2019-11-06
Insignia Connect (2016 - 2019)
best buy put its house brand on a line of smart plugs, a light switch, a wifi camera and a freezer, ran the cloud for them for about a year and a half, and...
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2019-11-05
Star Ocean: Anamnesis (2016 - 2021)
square enix built a mobile gacha game to celebrate twenty years of star ocean and filled it with characters from every entry in the series, with motoi sakuraba...
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2019-11-05
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...
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2019-11-01
Qtrax (2008 - 2019)
qtrax sold the dream every downloader wanted in 2008: music that was free and also legal, blessed by the labels. the labels said they had blessed nothing, some...
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2019-11-01
WikiTribune (2017 - 2019)
jimmy wales announced wikitribune in april 2017 as a fix for fake news: paid journalists writing alongside volunteer editors, every article carrying its own...
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2019-11-01
Weatherzone Forums (2001 - 2019)
on 3 july 2019 a weatherzone staffer named todd baker posted that the forum would close, thanked the moderators, and gave two dates: read-only on 29 july, gone...
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2019-10-31
Mozilla Lightbeam (2011 - 2019)
the firefox extension that drew a constellation of every third-party tracker following you across the web. atul varma built it in 2011 as an experiment named...
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2019-10-31
Openload (2015 - 2019)
openload was the streaming-tier cyberlocker of the late 2010s. it hosted pirated films and shows for embedded players on hundreds of streaming aggregators. by...
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2019-10-31
Nat Geo Your Shot (2013 - 2019)
disney inherited national geographic in the fox deal and decided a photo community with its own website was redundant next to an instagram account. your shot...
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2019-10-30
Withoutabox (2000 - 2019)
four hundred thousand filmmakers had an account, and for most of them this was the only route into a festival that did not involve a padded envelope and a...
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2019-10-28
RawGit (2013 - 2019)
4.2 billion requests in its final month, run by one person who had a handful of minutes a week for it. rawgit let you point a script tag straight at a file in...
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2019-10-26
picosong (2010 - 2019)
an unreleased kanye west track leaked onto picosong on 12 july 2019. the shutdown notice went up eight days later, and the riaa's subpoena to the registrar is...
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2019-10-25
Facebook Spaces (2017 - 2019)
facebook spaces was facebook's first social-vr product. it launched in beta at f8 on april 18 2017 for the oculus rift and htc vive. you built an avatar from...
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2019-10-25
Oculus Rooms (2016 - 2019)
oculus rooms was a free social-vr hangout that let four people sit together in a virtual apartment. it shipped on gear vr in december 2016, expanded to rift in...
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2019-10-25
RED Hydrogen One (2018 - 2019)
a cinema-camera company decided to make a phone and priced it like a luxury object. the pitch was a 3D screen that added a little depth to a little content and...
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2019-10-23
PandoDaily (2012 - 2019)
pandodaily was the tech blog sarah lacy started after leaving techcrunch, funded by the same silicon valley figures it covered. it broke uber culture stories...
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2019-10-23
Koubachi (2009 - 2019)
zurich, 2009: an ETH spin-off decided a houseplant should be able to ask for water. the sensor it built worked for ten years, sold through Apple stores across...
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2019-10-22
Mobango (2006 - 2019)
mobango was a uk-registered mobile content portal that ran out of london from 2006. you uploaded ringtones and wallpapers and small java games through a wap...
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2019-10-21
Rapidvideo (2014 - 2019)
warner bros. and netflix went to a german court, and the hollywood trade groups arrived with a list of demands: take down and stay down, plus content-id style...
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2019-10-20
Safari Extensions Gallery (2010 - 2019)
apple opened the gallery on 28 july 2010 alongside safari 5.0.1 with about a hundred curated extensions in it, and for nine years it was the only sanctioned...
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2019-10-16
Discord Store (2018 - 2019)
the discord store was discord's attempt to sell pc games directly through the chat client. it opened as a closed beta on august 9, 2018, expanded to all users...
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2019-10-16
Google Datally (2017 - 2019)
datally was google's android data-saver aimed at emerging markets where mobile plans were small and metered. it shipped out of the next billion users group on...
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2019-10-16
Share-Online.biz (2007 - 2019)
for more than a decade share-online was where the german-speaking internet parked files that were too big to email and too hot to host under a real name....
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2019-10-15
Google Daydream (2016 - 2019)
daydream was google's second swing at mobile vr after cardboard. you slid a compatible android phone into a soft fabric headset called daydream view and paired...
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2019-10-15
Google Clips (2017 - 2019)
a small camera you were supposed to set down and forget, so an algorithm could pick out the moments it judged worth saving. the idea was that you would stop...
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2019-10-15
Ditty (2015 - 2019)
you typed a sentence and ditty sang it. zya licensed real recordings through sony/atv and emi, so the melody under your message was an actual hit, and the...
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2019-10-14
Note to Self (2012 - 2019)
299 episodes across seven years and two names. it began on 10 september 2012 as new tech city, a wnyc show about technology in new york, and became note to...
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2019-10-09
Portalarium (2009 - 2019)
richard garriott started portalarium in austin in september 2009 and spent its first years on facebook games, one of them a zynga collaboration about garage...
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2019-10-07
Apple Dashboard (2005 - 2019)
dashboard was the floating widget plane that lived behind a keystroke on every mac from 2005 to 2019. apple shipped it with tiger, disabled it by default in...
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2019-10-07
iTunes (2001 - 2019)
itunes died on a mac, but it died for everyone who ever owned an ipod. by 2019 it had bloated into several products glued into one window. the catalina release...
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2019-10-07
Sorenson Video (1998 - 2019)
sorenson vision of salt lake city licensed compression work out of utah state university, and apple put the result inside quicktime 3 on 30 march 1998. eleven...
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2019-10-02
Pottermore (2011 - 2019)
a million accounts got in early through the magical quill challenge in august 2011, and the site that opened to everyone the following april was the only place...
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2019-10-01
Kwick! (1999 - 2019)
a south-german social network for teenagers. launched 1 december 1999 in stuttgart, ran for two decades, peaked around 1.5 million registered accounts. the...
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2019-10-01
AlphaDream (2000 - 2019)
tetsuo mizuno had been square's second president and chihiro fujioka had co-directed super mario rpg, and in january 2000 the two of them opened a studio in...
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2019-10-01
Zimbra Desktop (2008 - 2019)
four owners in eleven years, and not one of them wanted to maintain the desktop client. zimbra desktop put the whole web mailbox on your machine and let you...
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2019-09-30
Jaunt VR (2013 - 2019)
100 million dollar bet on the idea that hollywood was about to need a cinematic vr studio. arthur van hoff and others founded jaunt in september 2013. disney,...
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2019-09-30
Sony Sketch (2014 - 2019)
twenty-three million sketches sat on sony's servers the week the company switched the online half of the app off. the drawing tools stayed on your phone and...
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2019-09-30
Meekan (2014 - 2019)
30 september 2019 is printed on meekan.com and has been since the month it closed. doodle bought the tel aviv chatbot in 2016, kept its founders, and three...
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2019-09-29
Baidu Browser (2011 - 2019)
baidu shipped a desktop browser in july 2011 that ran two rendering engines at once, webkit for the modern web and trident for the chinese banking sites that...
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2019-09-26
CyberBunker (1995 - 2019)
cyberbunker sold server space out of a decommissioned nuclear command post and advertised that it would refuse nothing except child pornography and terrorism....
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2019-09-23
Qingwen (2015 - 2019)
zhu zhouyi ran acfun, china's first danmaku video site, then left in 2015 with some of the old staff to build a place where people wrote light novels. three...
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2019-09-23
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...
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2019-09-22
DeBuzzer (דה באזר) (2010 - 2019)
on 22 september 2019 ronen dorfan posted a note titled moving house, stay with us, and an israeli sports site that had spent nine years building an address...
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2019-09-19
Kiwibox (1999 - 2019)
three carnegie mellon graduates built a site in 1999 so that american teenagers would have somewhere to write, and it was still running twenty years later....
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2019-09-19
Find My Friends (2011 - 2019)
find my friends was apple's app for watching where your contacts were. it arrived on 12 october 2011, a few hours ahead of ios 5, and for its first four years...
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2019-09-18
Lyrebird (2017 - 2019)
three doctoral students at a montreal machine learning lab worked out how to copy a person's voice from one minute of recorded audio, and in april 2017 they...
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2019-09-14
MoviePass (2011 - 2019)
moviepass launched in 2011 as a moderate monthly pass priced like one or two movie tickets. in august 2017 helios and matheson bought it and dropped the price...
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2019-09-13
Human Headphones (2016 - 2019)
twenty-four days after the headphones reached the public, the board handed the company to a receiver and laid off twenty-five of its thirty staff. human inc...
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2019-09-09
Daqri (2010 - 2019)
daqri sold a $9,000 ar helmet to industrial customers and burned $275m trying to make the unit economics work. the demos were always impressive. the budget...
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2019-09-09
TinyPic (2004 - 2019)
tinypic was the no-account image host you used because nothing else was simpler. you uploaded a file and copied the [img] tag straight into your forum post....
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2019-09-07
Microsoft Zo (2016 - 2019)
zo was tay's replacement and tay's opposite. where tay learned to post racist tweets in sixteen hours, zo was tuned to refuse to talk about politics or...
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2019-09-05
ThinkProgress (2005 - 2019)
judd legum started thinkprogress inside the center for american progress action fund in 2005, and for a decade it was one of the largest political news sites...
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2019-09-04
Jeremy Renner Official (2017 - 2019)
jeremy renner official was one of a long production line of single-celebrity apps built by a company called escapex, which ran the same software under a...
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2019-09-03
Android Beam (2011 - 2019)
android beam let you put two phones back to back and push whatever was on the screen across, using nfc for the handshake and bluetooth or wifi for the actual...
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2019-09-01
ESPN The Magazine (1998 - 2019)
disney-espn's answer to sports illustrated. first issue shipped 11 march 1998 with a foldout cover of kobe bryant, alex rodriguez, kordell stewart plus eric...
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2019-09-01
POPLINE (1973 - 2019)
popline was the reproductive health literature database, more than 370,000 records reaching back to 1827, run out of johns hopkins on usaid money from 1978...
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2019-09-01
BluWiki (2004 - 2019)
in november 2008 apple's lawyers told a one-man wiki host that a page about how ipods talk to itunes was a copyright violation, and the pages came down. the...
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2019-09
Distribber (2009 - 2019)
distribber sold independent filmmakers a way onto itunes and the other video stores for one upfront fee instead of a permanent cut of the takings. you paid,...
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2019-08-31
kizasi (2005 - 2019)
the slogan was: from blogs, know the topic, find the sign. kizasi.jp read about 250,000 japanese blog entries every day and ran a time-series co-occurrence...
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2019-08-30
TNTVillage (2005 - 2019)
a million users, said the publishers' association when it sued. the site's own counter said 610,000, and its statute said nothing newer than twelve months and...
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2019-08-28
Skepticality (2005 - 2019)
derek colanduno and robynn mccarthy built an audio magazine about skepticism in 2005, a year before skeptic magazine adopted it as the official podcast and...
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2019-08-23
Wikilivres (2006 - 2019)
new zealand lets copyright expire fifty years after the author dies. the united states does not, and wikilivres existed inside that gap. yann forget started it...
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2019-08-20
In.com (2008 - 2019)
mumbai, august 2008: web18 put an entire portal behind a two-letter domain, and by the september comscore numbers in.com was the second most visited site in...
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2019-08-19
PledgeMusic (2009 - 2019)
fans paid a year ahead for records that did not exist yet, and the money went into the company bank account rather than a segregated one. when the volume...
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2019-08-16
Pacific Standard (2008 - 2019)
pacific standard was a santa barbara nonprofit longform magazine funded by sara miller mccune of sage publishing. it launched in 2008 as miller-mccune,...
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2019-08-16
GPSies.com (2006 - 2019)
alltrails announced on 30 july 2019 that it had bought gpsies, and inside three weeks the german site was gone and its members were logging in somewhere else....
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2019-08-15
niconare (2015 - 2019)
seven weeks after dwango finished rebuilding it, dwango announced it was closing it. niconare was a slide host with niconico comments flying over the page,...
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2019-08-07
Linux Journal (1994 - 2019)
linux journal launched in march 1994 with a cover-story interview with linus torvalds, founded by phil hughes and bob young as the first magazine devoted...
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2019-08-06
Vreal (2015 - 2019)
seattle, 2015: a company bet that watching other people play games would move into the headset. vreal streamed the entire 3d scene rather than a flat video, so...
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2019-08-05
Google Trips (2016 - 2019)
google trips was a mobile app that turned the reservation emails in your gmail into a day-by-day trip itinerary, with offline maps and city guides for two...
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2019-08-05
Kwesé Sports (2015 - 2019)
strive masiyiwa announced kwese in december 2015 and spent four years buying the rights africa was already watching on somebody else's satellite. premier...
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2019-08-05
MapR (2009 - 2019)
the warn notice came first. on 13 may 2019 john schroeder told his staff and the state of california that mapr would close and lay off 122 people by 14 june...
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2019-08-03
Green Recorder (2017 - 2019)
one person maintained it, unpaid, for two and a half years. mohammed hanny sabbagh wrote the first linux desktop recorder that could capture a wayland session,...
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2019-08-01
Google Hangouts on Air (2011 - 2019)
hangouts on air was the thing the white house used to do president obama town halls inside a chat window. it was also the thing every solo creator used to run...
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2019-08-01
Viewster (2007 - 2019)
a zurich company spent twelve years building the thing everybody says they want, a legal streaming service that costs nothing and does not ask who you are. no...
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2019-08-01
Tomnod (2010 - 2019)
eight million people signed on in march 2014 to look for a missing airplane one satellite tile at a time, and the servers gave out at a hundred thousand visits...
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2019-08-01
Handy (Tink Labs) (2012 - 2019)
terence kwok dropped out of school in chicago and spent the next seven years giving away phones in hotel rooms. at the end of 2018 handy sat in 600,000 of them...
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2019-07-31
UltraViolet (2011 - 2019)
ultraviolet was a digital movie locker run by a consortium of hollywood studios. you redeemed a printed code from inside a blu-ray case and the movie became...
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2019-07-31
Rabb.it (2014 - 2019)
rabb.it let strangers and friends share a virtual browser and watch the same video together with voice and webcam in the corner. it peaked at around 3.6...
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2019-07-30
Cartoon Doll Emporium (2005 - 2019)
seventy million visits a year went through a site whose entire purpose was letting eleven year old girls put outfits on a drawing. it sold in 2009 for a...
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2019-07-26
Hatena Diary (2003 - 2019)
hatena diary was the flagship blogging service of hatena co, kyoto's reply to livejournal and movable type. it launched out of beta on march 13 2003 and ran...
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2019-07-26
Worlds Adrift (2018 - 2019)
worlds adrift was a physics sandbox mmo set on floating islands, where you scavenged wrecks for parts and welded your own airship out of them. it was the first...
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2019-07-21
Red Karaoke (2007 - 2019)
red karaoke let anyone sing into a browser and a microphone and keep the recording, twelve years before that was a normal thing to do. it reached fourteen...
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2019-07-18
Dogster & Catster (2004 - 2019)
dogster launched in january 2004 as a social network for dogs, or really for the people who wanted a profile page for them. ted rheingold built it in san...
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2019-07-18
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,...
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2019-07-18
PullString (2011 - 2019)
two pixar veterans spent eight years building a tool for writing characters that answer back, and apple bought the team in february 2019. the free tier had...
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2019-07-17
Google Dragonfly (2017 - 2019)
google spent two years building an android search app for china that would quietly remove results about human rights and peaceful protest, tie every query to a...
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2019-07-16
Surfingbird (2011 - 2019)
march 2011, two engineers out of mail.ru's blogs team put up a russian answer to stumbleupon: press the button, get one page chosen for you, rate it, press...
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2019-07-15
Peerio (2015 - 2019)
vincent drouin built peerio in montreal in 2014, with cryptocat's nadim kobeissi alongside him, as a messenger and file locker where the encryption happened...
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2019-07-01
ThinkGeek (1999 - 2019)
thinkgeek launched august 13, 1999 out of virginia, founded by willie vadnais, jen frazier, jon sime, and scott smith as the e-commerce arm of geeknet. it sold...
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2019-07-01
Back to My Mac (2007 - 2019)
apple shipped it with leopard in october 2007 as the feature that made two macs on two different networks behave like they were sitting on the same one. it...
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2019-07-01
Kylo (2010 - 2019)
a browser for the couch, with buttons sized to be read from across a room and a $99 pointing mouse sold beside it. kylo shipped on 19 march 2010 and hulu...
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2019-07-01
Proximus Skynet (1995 - 2019)
belgacom started an internet arm in 1995 and named it after the machine that starts the war in the terminator films, and nobody inside the company stopped...
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2019-07-01
Szortal (2011 - 2019)
four people started a polish portal for very short fantasy fiction in 2011, and a year later added a free monthly that ran to sixty-seven numbered issues....
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2019-07-01
Sanalpazar (2009 - 2019)
three percent seller commission and twelve installments at the cash price was the whole pitch, aimed straight at gittigidiyor. gold internet teknolojileri...
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2019-07-01
Ambrosia Software (1993 - 2019)
rochester, new york, a year out of RIT, and andrew welch turned an asteroids remake he had written for the mac into a company. ambrosia sold shareware on...
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2019-07-01
WebCite (1997 - 2019)
over two hundred scholarly journals were routing their cited links through webcitation.org by 2008, which is as close to famous as this piece of academic...
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2019-07-01
reegle (2006 - 2019)
vienna ran a search engine for clean energy for thirteen years and then replaced it with a frameset. reegle indexed the renewable energy and efficiency...
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2019-07-01
LISWiki (2005 - 2019)
john hubbard registered liswiki.org in june 2005, installed mediawiki on it and told other librarians it was there. fourteen years later he turned it off for...
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2019-07-01
Hello Barbie (2015 - 2019)
seventy five dollars bought a barbie with a microphone in her necklace and a wifi chip in her back. you held the belt buckle, the doll recorded you, and...
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2019-06-30
Yahoo View (2016 - 2019)
yahoo view was the place hulu sent its free tier to die in public. it streamed the last five episodes of network shows for a US-only audience for almost three...
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2019-06-30
Amazon Storywriter (2015 - 2019)
amazon storywriter was a free cloud screenwriting app amazon released in 2015 as part of the amazon studios pitch pipeline. it handled the master scene...
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2019-06-30
BT MyDonate (2011 - 2019)
bt built a donations platform in 2011 and took no commission on it, which in british fundraising was the entire point, because everybody else was keeping a...
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2019-06-30
WatchESPN (2011 - 2019)
the first screen was not a game, it was a list of pay-tv providers. authentication was the product: espn had promised the cable industry that streaming would...
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2019-06-30
Engrade (2003 - 2019)
a high school student wrote a gradebook in 2003 because the one his school used was bad, gave it away free, and watched teachers adopt it district by district...
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2019-06-28
Atlas Reactor (2016 - 2019)
twenty seconds was how long each player had to lock in a move, and then all eight moves resolved at once. trion worlds released atlas reactor on 4 october 2016...
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2019-06-27
Koinex (2017 - 2019)
on 27 june 2019, at two in the afternoon india time, koinex stopped trading. it had been the country's largest digital asset exchange, with over a million...
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2019-06-25
OUYA (2013 - 2019)
ouya was the kickstarter darling of 2012, a 99-dollar android microconsole that promised to break the console oligopoly. it raised 8.6 million dollars in a...
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2019-06-25
Drive.ai (2015 - 2019)
frisco, texas got the first self-driving passenger service in the united states that any member of the public could ride, in may 2018, and the vans were...
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2019-06-25
NRATV (2016 - 2019)
an oklahoma city advertising agency called ackerman mcqueen built and ran the national rifle association's television channel, and when the two of them stopped...
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2019-06-25
Minecraft: Story Mode (2015 - 2019)
about twenty five people were still at telltale after the september 2018 layoffs, and one of the jobs they stayed on to finish was the netflix version of...
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2019-06-24
Amazon Restaurants (2015 - 2019)
amazon launched restaurants in seattle in september 2015 as a perk for prime now subscribers. it pushed into about twenty us metros plus london over the next...
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2019-06-24
Paye ta shnek (2012 - 2019)
anaïs bourdet was a graphic designer in marseille who opened a tumblr in 2012 and started posting, word for word and with nothing added, what men said to women...
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2019-06-24
ReDigi (2011 - 2019)
capitol records sued redigi in january 2012, three months after it opened. the company had built a marketplace for reselling digital music you had legally...
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2019-06-21
Ruuh (2017 - 2019)
two million people in india talked to her, and the conversation count passed 150 million before microsoft switched her off. ruuh arrived on facebook messenger...
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2019-06-19
Carrot Rewards (2016 - 2019)
a government bought behavior change from a startup and paid for it in loyalty points people already collected. it worked well enough to reach 1.1 million...
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2019-06-19
SpiderNode (2016 - 2019)
702 commits landed on mozilla's spidernode in the first three months of 2017 and then the graph went flat. it was node.js rebuilt on spidermonkey, the...
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2019-06-19
Comodo IceDragon (2012 - 2019)
comodo shipped a firefox fork for seven years and then simply stopped. version 65.0.2.15 went up on the company forum in june 2019 and nothing followed it, no...
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2019-06-14
Nuntii Latini (1989 - 2019)
finland, september 1989: the national broadcaster starts reading the week's world news in classical latin, five minutes at a time. it ran for thirty years and...
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2019-06-12
Facepunch Forums (2004 - 2019)
garry newman started a forum in 2004, around the time he started the mod that made his name, and he spent the last year of its life saying out loud that he was...
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2019-06-06
Facebook Graph Search (2013 - 2019)
facebook announced graph search on 15 january 2013 and called it a third pillar of the site. you typed a sentence at it, photos of my friends taken in london,...
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2019-06-06
MyLifeIsAverage (2009 - 2019)
two million stories went into mylifeisaverage and not one of them was about anything. that was the entire specification. guru khalsa and enrico mills were...
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2019-06-06
Ghostbin (2013 - 2019)
644,000 pastes were sitting on ghostbin at the end of 2018, which is when dustin howett told people the site would either close or change beyond recognition....
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2019-06-05
LemonStand (2009 - 2019)
mailchimp and shopify broke up in public in march 2019, and the week before that happened mailchimp had quietly taken the team behind a small shopify...
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2019-06-01
Serif PagePlus (1990 - 2019)
serif wrote pageplus in nottingham in 1990 and sold it for under a hundred pounds, at a moment when the professional alternative cost about as much as the...
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2019-06-01
Peel Smart Remote (2009 - 2019)
a hundred and twenty million registered users and a hundred billion remote commands, and almost nobody chose to install it. peel came preloaded on samsung and...
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2019-06-01
TouchDevelop (2011 - 2019)
microsoft research asked whether you could write a working program on a phone using only your thumbs, and then spent eight years answering yes. touchdevelop...
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2019-06-01
InterGalactic Medicine Show (2005 - 2019)
orson scott card started a webzine in 2005 to buy short science fiction at professional rates, named it after a throwaway line in one of his own books and...
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2019-06-01
Hater (2017 - 2019)
brendan alper left goldman sachs to write comedy and hater started as one of the bits. the app showed you a card with something on it, you swiped in one of...
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2019-06-01
KidsCom (1995 - 2019)
a milwaukee company called circle 1 network put a site for eight to fourteen year olds online in february 1995, when there was almost nothing else on the web...
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2019-06-01
PaigeeWorld (2012 - 2019)
$3,500 a month was the number it could not reach. a million registered users, twenty million drawings, 150,000 people still logging in monthly, and a goodbye...
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2019-06-01
Stringify (2014 - 2019)
comcast bought an automation app in 2017 and spent two years working out that it did not want to run one. stringify let you draw a whole flow across your...
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2019-06-01
Mediaset Premium (2005 - 2019)
italy got a second pay-tv platform in january 2005 and it did not need a dish. you bought a card, slotted it into a decoder and watched serie a through the...
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2019-05-31
BlackBerry Messenger (2005 - 2019)
the messenger that came with every blackberry. for a few years, around 2009 to 2012, having a BBM PIN to share was a corporate status symbol. read receipts and...
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2019-05-31
Tetris Friends (2008 - 2019)
honolulu, january 2006: the people who own tetris set up tetris online, inc. to be the official game on the internet, and tetrisfriends.com was the result,...
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2019-05-31
DVD-RAM (1996 - 2019)
the notice that ended it is one page on panasonic.jp, and the useful part is the product list: two cartridge models and three bare ones. that was the entire...
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2019-05-30
Leap Motion (2013 - 2019)
leap motion built a small usb hand-tracker that the demos always made look like the future. holz had started the optics in 2008. the controller shipped in july...
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2019-05-30
YouTube Gaming (2015 - 2019)
youtube announced a gaming app at e3 in june 2015 and shipped it that august, in the us and uk first, with a page for each of twenty-five thousand games. it...
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2019-05-28
Texture (2012 - 2019)
texture was the netflix-for-magazines that condé nast, hearst, meredith, news corp, time inc and rogers media built together as next issue media in 2010. the...
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2019-05-24
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...
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2019-05-21
Antergos (2012 - 2019)
alexandre filgueira released cinnarch in may 2012 as an arch linux derivative for the cinnamon desktop, then renamed and expanded it to antergos in 2013 with a...
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2019-05-20
BeeTalk (2013 - 2019)
beetalk was garena's attempt to own chat in southeast asia, launched out of singapore in 2013 with a shake-the-phone feature borrowed from wechat and a map of...
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2019-05-16
Direct (Instagram standalone app) (2017 - 2019)
instagram built a second app that opened straight into the camera, so you could message people without ever seeing the feed. it was never released everywhere....
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2019-05-16
Waffle.io (2013 - 2019)
broadcom finished buying ca technologies in november 2018. ca had bought rally software in 2015, and rally had built waffle.io as an accelerator project in...
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2019-05-15
Cryptopia (2014 - 2019)
a christchurch altcoin exchange that peaked at 1.4 million users and listed roughly 900 different coins. hacked in january 2019 for around nz$24 million, went...
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2019-05-15
Excelsior JET (2000 - 2019)
a company in novosibirsk spent nineteen years selling the one thing java desktop developers actually wanted, which was a way to ship an application as a real...
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2019-05-15
İlkposta (2001 - 2019)
on 8 april 2019 a blogger page nobody was reading carried the notice. mail service would stop on 15 may and every account would be deleted a month after that,...
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2019-05-13
Age of Empires: Castle Siege (2014 - 2019)
17 september 2014: microsoft put the age of empires name on a free-to-play castle builder and launched it, of all places, on windows 8.1 and windows phone....
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2019-05-08
RSSOwl (2004 - 2019)
benjamin pasero started writing a feed reader in java in 2003 and kept it alive for a decade, including a full rewrite onto the eclipse rich client platform....
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2019-05-07
DeepDotWeb (2013 - 2019)
deepdotweb sat on the ordinary web, indexed by google, and told you which darknet markets were up and how to reach them. it ran for five and a half years on...
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2019-05-07
Utrip (2011 - 2019)
a 94-page acquisition agreement was two days from signing when an oversight board inside the buyer declined to approve it, and utrip was out of money the same...
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2019-05-01
MiGente.com (2000 - 2019)
migente sat in the community connect portfolio next to blackplanet and asianavenue, three ethnically-focused social networks built before the facebook era...
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2019-05-01
Global Wrestling Network (2017 - 2019)
anthem launched gwn on 10 october 2017 as an alternative to the wwe network, at $7.99 a month, with the impact tape library and a pile of independent...
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2019-05-01
Brigade (2014 - 2019)
san francisco spent five years and about nine million dollars of sean parker's money on an app for arguing about politics with strangers who could be matched...
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2019-05-01
99.se (2002 - 2019)
three editors ran scandinavia's oldest apple forum, and in the spring of 2019 the parent company looked at the numbers and decided it had never once paid for...
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2019-05-01
Thud (2017 - 2019)
two million dollars of elon musk's money hired the editor in chief and the managing editor of the onion away from chicago. what came back was a fake dna...
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2019-04-30
Dream Market (2013 - 2019)
dream lasted five and a half years, which for a market of this kind is an absurd number. silk road managed two and a half, alphabay under three. it survived...
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2019-04-30
Disney Digital Network (2017 - 2019)
nobody ever signed up for disney digital network. it was the box disney put its internet acquisitions in on 2 may 2017, holding maker studios and the editorial...
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2019-04-29
Anki (2010 - 2019)
three carnegie mellon robotics phds founded anki in 2010 and raised about 182 million dollars to build cute home robots. they shipped overdrive (a...
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2019-04-29
Anki Cozmo (2016 - 2019)
a small robot with treads and a little animated face, made by a startup that hired pixar and dreamworks animators to give it a personality. cozmo used a camera...
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2019-04-29
Blox.pl (2004 - 2019)
warsaw, march 2004: agora, the publisher of gazeta wyborcza, opens a blog host inside its gazeta.pl portal. by the middle of 2006 blox held more than 90,000...
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2019-04-26
Sinemia (2014 - 2019)
sinemia launched in 2014 in turkey as a subscription movie ticket service and expanded internationally over the next four years. it ran cheaper plans than...
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2019-04-25
LucyPhone (2010 - 2019)
six million minutes on hold by 2013, every one of them served by a robot so that a person did not have to. two brothers in richmond, virginia built it in 2010...
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2019-04-24
Daum Storyfunding (2014 - 2019)
in september 2014 a korean portal started letting readers pay journalists for stories that no newsroom had commissioned. newsfunding took in 2.5 billion won...
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2019-04-23
Laundroid (2015 - 2019)
a machine the size of a refrigerator needed five to ten minutes to fold one t-shirt, and that was the demo. seven dreamers showed it in tokyo in october 2015...
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2019-04-22
Couple (2012 - 2019)
couple launched in march 2012 as pair, out of y combinator, and it was a messenger that only worked between two people. a hundred thousand users signed up in...
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2019-04-17
Chitika (2003 - 2019)
a contextual ad network out of massachusetts that ran for 16 years serving text ads to the long tail of the blog web. bloggers who could not get into adsense...
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2019-04-17
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...
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2019-04-12
Noddle (2011 - 2019)
four million british people had a free look at their own credit file because callcredit decided in 2011 that charging for it was the worse business. noddle...
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2019-04-11
Google Cloud Messaging (2012 - 2019)
announced at google i/o on 27 june 2012 as the replacement for android's c2dm service, gcm was the thing that actually delivered your notifications for the...
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2019-04-10
Sola (2014 - 2019)
the app had three names in five years and the first one was the good one. launched in november 2014 as plague, where a post you made spread to the four nearest...
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2019-04-09
Adobe Shockwave Player (1995 - 2019)
shockwave was the heavier cousin of flash. you needed it for certain web games and certain interactive sites that required a real 3d runtime. by 2019 nobody...
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2019-04-09
Shockwave.com (1999 - 2019)
the game portal that ran on the shockwave plugin, the older sibling of flash. launched by macromedia in 1999. peak 22 million users by 2005. it hosted...
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2019-04-09
Opera Turbo (2009 - 2019)
https killed it, quietly and without a notice. opera turbo sent your page requests through opera's own servers, which fetched everything, recompressed the...
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2019-04-09
Microsoft Notification Protocol (1999 - 2019)
1999 to 2019, and almost nobody who spent those years inside it ever saw its name. msnp was the line-based text protocol that msn messenger spoke to...
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2019-04-08
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...
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2019-04-08
Orcs Must Die! Unchained (2016 - 2019)
patrick hudson, the ceo of robot entertainment, opened the closing letter with the words it's painful to even write this. unchained was the free-to-play third...
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2019-04-08
MangaX (2016 - 2019)
ten minutes and twenty-six seconds separate the last two posts on magia inc.'s website. the first announces that rakshasa street volume two has gone on sale in...
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2019-04-04
Yahoo Squirrel / Yahoo Together (2018 - 2019)
squirrel was an invite-only group messaging app yahoo opened in closed beta on may 8, 2018, two months before pulling the plug on yahoo messenger itself. it...
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2019-04-04
alaMaula (2009 - 2019)
four men in cordoba built a free classifieds site at the end of 2009 and sold it to ebay inside two years. alamaula was the door ebay walked through to reach...
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2019-04-02
Google+ (2011 - 2019)
Google's serious attempt at a Facebook competitor. circles were the new feature. hangouts was bundled in. it had 500 million accounts on paper, and almost...
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2019-04-02
Inbox by Gmail (2014 - 2019)
inbox by gmail was google's redesign of email around bundles and snooze. it launched in october 2014 as invitation-only, opened to the public in may 2015, and...
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2019-04-02
Hacking Team (2003 - 2019)
a hacker calling himself phineas fisher took over the company's twitter account on 5 july 2015 and posted a torrent of four hundred gigabytes pulled straight...
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2019-04-01
Microsoft Hover! (1995 - 2019)
the bumper-car capture-the-flag game microsoft bundled on the windows 95 cd-rom edition to justify the new disc format. three maze worlds, a red hovercraft, a...
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2019-04-01
Bragi Dash (2014 - 2019)
bragi was a danish-german hardware startup founded by nikolaj hviid in 2013. the dash launched on kickstarter in february 2014 and hit its $260,000 goal in...
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2019-04-01
TVCatchup (2007 - 2019)
tvcatchup streamed around fifty free-to-air british channels live into a browser, for nothing, to anyone with a uk ip address. its entire legal existence...
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2019-04-01
News Deeply (2012 - 2019)
lara setrakian had reported the middle east for abc news and bloomberg and came away convinced that the problem with crisis coverage was that it arrived in...
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2019-04-01
Tictail (2011 - 2019)
shopify paid a reported fifteen to twenty million dollars in november 2018 for a swedish company that had raised thirty-three, took the team, and closed the...
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2019-04-01
Roodo (2003 - 2019)
on 1 october 2003 a taiwanese auction site called 當舖網 changed its name to 樂多, and fifteen years later everything carrying that name went read-only and then...
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2019-04-01
YotaPhone (2013 - 2019)
fifty million dollars bought a phone with a screen on each side, one of them electronic paper that kept showing you things after the battery died. it came out...
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2019-04-01
PlayDota (2009 - 2019)
a server error that nobody came back to fix. playdota opened in may 2009 when icefrog moved the official dota community off a domain that had ended up with...
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2019-03-31
Yahoo GeoCities Japan (1997 - 2019)
yahoo geocities japan launched september 1997 under yahoo japan, three years after the original us geocities and one year before yahoo bought the parent...
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2019-03-31
Iris by Lowe's (2012 - 2019)
a home-depot-shaped retailer decided the connected home was a next-decade category and launched a hub of its own two years before amazon put a microphone in...
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2019-03-31
Red Room (Akai Heya) (2003 - 2019)
a free geocities japan homepage called the contents of the refrigerator, run by a flash author known as o-toro, held one of the most-forwarded horror shorts...
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2019-03-31
KidsClick (2017 - 2019)
seventy-five million american households could pick up kidsclick on the day it launched in july 2017. sinclair built it with toon goggles and mgm distribution,...
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2019-03-31
Context.IO (2011 - 2019)
bruno morency started with a gmail extension for finding attachments and turned it into the thing developers actually wanted, which was an http api that...
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2019-03-30
CiteULike (2004 - 2019)
citeulike let you save a paper's citation straight off the journal page and tag it, then look at who else had saved the same thing. richard cameron built it in...
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2019-03-29
Apple AirPower (2017 - 2019)
airpower was a wireless charging mat with around twenty coils that apple showed off on stage at the iphone x event and then could not actually build. it stayed...
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2019-03-29
DJMax Technika Q (2013 - 2019)
neowiz pulled a rhythm game off both app stores on 28 february 2019 and switched off its servers a month later. technika q was the phone version of a korean...
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2019-03-28
Yahoo! Japan Bookstore (2011 - 2019)
on 11 march 2019 every product page in yahoo! japan's bookstore started redirecting to a different shop, and three weeks later the store itself closed. it had...
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2019-03-28
Sailor Moon Drops (2015 - 2019)
three million downloads across three and a half years was not enough to keep a match-three puzzle alive on one of the most recognizable licenses in anime....
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2019-03-27
Hatena Haiku (2007 - 2019)
microblogging had a fork in it around 2007 and almost nobody remembers there was a choice. twitter said a post belongs to a person and you follow people....
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2019-03-27
Ganfyd (2005 - 2019)
only a registered medical practitioner was allowed to edit it, and 449 of them did, across six countries. a server failed on 27 march 2019 in a way that could...
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2019-03-25
Drawn to Death (2017 - 2019)
jaffe made god of war and twisted metal, then left sony to start his own studio and came back with a four player arena shooter drawn to look like a bored...
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2019-03-20
dailymile (2008 - 2019)
the homepage is still up, and it still says the same four lines: dailymile has shutdown, thanks to all who were a part of our global community of athletes,...
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2019-03-20
21st Century Fox (2013 - 2019)
71.3 billion dollars, arrived at after comcast spent six days forcing the price up by nearly twenty. the thing being bought was a holding company murdoch had...
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2019-03-18
Panda TV (2015 - 2019)
panda tv opened on 21 september 2015 as wang sicong's answer to twitch, funded out of a chinese property fortune and stocked with streamers signed away from...
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2019-03-14
Google Allo (2016 - 2019)
google allo launched in september 2016 as the smart messenger that would make google assistant feel like a person you texted with. ten million people tried it...
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2019-03-14
Google Image Charts (2007 - 2019)
you made a chart by writing a url. size, type and the numbers themselves all went into the query string, and a google server sent back a png you could drop...
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2019-03-13
Google Spotlight Stories (2013 - 2019)
spotlight stories was google's in-house immersive-film studio inside the advanced technologies and projects group. jan pinkava founded it at motorola mobility...
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2019-03-12
Keecker (2012 - 2019)
pierre lebeau left a product manager job at google in 2012 to build a robot that followed you from room to room and projected films onto the ceiling. it took...
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2019-03-06
Ace of Spades (2011 - 2019)
ben aksoy put a free voxel shooter online in april 2011, terrain you could dig through and rifles pointed at other people digging. two and a half million...
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2019-03-05
Bullet Messenger (2018 - 2019)
bullet messenger, later renamed liaotianbao, was a chinese chat app that luo yonghao of smartisan launched in august 2018 to take a run at wechat. it signed up...
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2019-03-04
Jibo (2014 - 2019)
the home social robot that announced its own death. jibo was a swiveling white robot about the size of a desk lamp, with a single round face-screen and a head...
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2019-03-01
Amazon Dash Button (2015 - 2019)
amazon's five-dollar reorder button. it shipped the year of the first echo and died the year alexa got reorder built in. germany ruled it illegal for hiding...
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2019-03-01
PlayStation Vita (2011 - 2019)
the vita was sony's bet that you could still sell a dedicated three-hundred-dollar handheld in the year of the iphone 4s. it shipped with a 5-inch oled and...
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2019-03-01
Google Pinyin (2007 - 2019)
four days after it shipped in april 2007, users found sogou's dictionary sitting inside google's one, and google china admitted it had used "non-google...
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2019-03-01
Pararea (2017 - 2019)
the parent company was called metaverse four years before facebook changed its name. 超元域 (beijing) technology built pararea, a free social vr platform that...
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2019-03-01
Listbox (1996 - 2019)
fastmail bought listbox in november 2015 and took three years to decide it did not want to be in the newsletter business. the discussion-list half was handed...
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2019-02-28
Microsoft Wallet (2016 - 2019)
microsoft wallet was a contactless payment app for windows 10 mobile, a phone platform that had almost nobody on it. it launched on june 21 2016 for insider...
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2019-02-28
WWE Immortals (2015 - 2019)
warner bros took the injustice: gods among us mobile game, pulled batman out of it and put the undertaker in, then let the concept artists go as far as they...
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2019-02-28
Magine TV (2013 - 2019)
television rights are sold one country at a time, and magine spent six years finding out what that costs. stockholm, 2013, a cloud tv service with a working...
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2019-02-28
IBM Watson Workspace (2016 - 2019)
the memo said the product was innovative and agile, and that it had not resonated with clients. ibm announced the end on 16 january 2019 and switched the...
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2019-02-25
Facebook Moments (2015 - 2019)
facebook moments was the standalone photo app facebook shipped on june 15 2015. it ran facial recognition on your camera roll, grouped photos by which facebook...
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2019-02-21
Onavo (2010 - 2019)
onavo was the israeli mobile analytics company that facebook bought in october 2013 and used to watch what competing apps were doing for the next five years....
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2019-02-15
Atlassian Stride (2017 - 2019)
stride was atlassian's rebuild-from-scratch answer to slack, the supposed future of team chat at the company that already owned hipchat. it launched in...
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2019-02-15
HipChat (2010 - 2019)
hipchat was a chat room with green check marks for engineers, then a brand atlassian bought, then a brand atlassian replaced, then a brand atlassian sold to...
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2019-02-15
ARKive (2003 - 2019)
christopher parsons ran the bbc natural history unit and wanted one permanent record of every animal on the red list before the film stock aged out. he died in...
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2019-02-14
Ooyala (2007 - 2019)
ooyala was the plumbing behind other people's video players. broadcasters and publishers paid it to host and measure their video, and if it worked you never...
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2019-02-13
Microsoft DreamSpark / Imagine (2008 - 2019)
every computer science student between 2008 and 2017 had a DreamSpark login. bill gates announced it at stanford in february 2008, free visual studio, sql...
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2019-02-13
RockYou (2005 - 2019)
rockyou made the widgets that covered myspace and then facebook, super wall and glitter text among them, and for a while in 2007 it was the biggest application...
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2019-02-12
iPass (1996 - 2019)
ipass started in january 1996 selling a single idea: one account and one client program that let a company's travelers get online in any country and have it...
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2019-02-07
BharatStudent (2007 - 2019)
a company in hyderabad called northgate technologies built a social network for indian students in 2007 and it worked for a while: bharatstudent was routinely...
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2019-02-05
Cryptocat (2011 - 2019)
cryptocat launched may 19, 2011 as a browser-extension encrypted chat written in javascript by nadim kobeissi out of montreal. it spiked into mainstream press...
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2019-02-04
Marvel Avengers Academy (2016 - 2019)
4 february did a lot of work in this one. the game launched on that date in 2016, and on the same date two years later it tore out its own city-building loop...
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2019-02-04
Google+ Comments on Blogger (2013 - 2019)
switching your blogspot comments to google+ in 2013 looked like a free upgrade. five days of notice in january 2019 ended it, the widget came out of blogger...
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2019-02-01
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...
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2019-02-01
Chariot (2014 - 2019)
chariot was a shuttle startup that ford bought for sixty-five million dollars in 2016, betting that a car company should also sell rides to people who did not...
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2019-02-01
Battlestar Galactica Online (2011 - 2019)
a licensed 3d space combat mmo that ran inside a browser tab, built in oslo by artplant and published out of hamburg by bigpoint. you picked colonial or cylon...
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2019-02-01
Yokoku.in (予告.in) (2008 - 2019)
on 11 june 2008 japan's internal affairs minister said the government would need several hundred million yen to build software that could detect crime threats...
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2019-02-01
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...
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2019-02-01
ZX Spectrum Vega+ (2016 - 2019)
£513,000 from around 4,500 backers in early 2016, and roughly 400 handhelds ever reached anybody. retro computers ltd missed every delivery date it set across...
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2019-02-01
Herotopia (2010 - 2019)
the enemy in this one was called the bully bunch. herotainment built a flash world where children picked a superpower and went after a gang whose crimes were...
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2019-01-31
Demon Internet (1992 - 2019)
demon internet is the reason a generation of britons got online without watching a meter. from june 1992 it offered the uk's first flat-rate home dial-up, ten...
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2019-01-31
UOL Blogs (2004 - 2019)
the first notice went up in april 2018 and gave everyone until 1 july. that date was then pushed back four separate times across the following eight months...
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2019-01-31
UOL Fotoblog (2004 - 2019)
brazil had fotolog, which was free and enormous and died in 2016. uol had this, which came with your subscription and outlasted it by three years. fifteen...
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2019-01-31
Norton Core (2017 - 2019)
it was shaped like a geodesic dome and designed to be left out in the open, because symantec's theory was that people would trust a router they could see. time...
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2019-01-30
Wii Shop Channel (2006 - 2019)
nintendo's downloadable storefront on the wii. opened with the console november 19 2006. you bought wii points with a credit card or a paper card from a...
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2019-01-30
HTTP Public Key Pinning (2015 - 2019)
after a dutch certificate authority was breached in 2011 and used to forge google certificates, the web wanted a way for a site to tell browsers which keys to...
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2019-01-28
Yahoo! Japan Bulletin Board (1998 - 2019)
twenty years of japanese web argument ended on a monday in january 2019, and the only part kept alive was the part about money. yahoo! japan opened the board...
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2019-01-24
xDedic (2014 - 2019)
a russian-speaking marketplace that sold remote desktop access to servers whose owners had no idea they were for sale. in may 2016 it listed 70,624 of them...
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2019-01-24
MP3Lizard (2000 - 2019)
petteri pyyny turned it off on 24 january 2019 and wrote the notice himself, which is unusual for something nineteen years old. mp3lizard began in 2000 as a...
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2019-01-22
High Fidelity (2013 - 2019)
high fidelity was philip rosedale's second swing at the metaverse. founded 2013, $70 million across four rounds, an open-source vr stack with...
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2019-01-22
Adobe Story (2010 - 2019)
adobe story was the screenwriting app inside the creative cloud subscription. fountain-style formatting in the browser plus metadata that flowed into premiere...
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2019-01-22
Mozilla Test Pilot (2016 - 2019)
the firefox program where mozilla shipped half-finished features to a hundred thousand opt-in users and watched what happened. it ran from may 2016 to january...
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2019-01-22
Pagedraw (2016 - 2019)
four points on hacker news the night it went up, and 343 five weeks later when a stranger resubmitted the same unchanged page. the notice underneath was the...
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2019-01-21
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....
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2019-01-18
Machinima (2000 - 2019)
the gaming video empire that deleted itself. machinima started in 2000 as a community for machinima, films shot inside game engines, then became one of the...
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2019-01-17
Do Not Track (2009 - 2019)
do not track was one line your browser could attach to every request, saying you did not want to be followed around. nothing in the web made anyone read it,...
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2019-01-16
Hyper.sh (2015 - 2019)
on 21 december 2018 the hyper crew emailed its customers to say new signups were already closed and the platform would be deleted on 15 january. the farewell...
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2019-01-15
YouTube Video Annotations (2008 - 2019)
annotations were clickable boxes drawn on top of a youtube video, shipped in june 2008 and switched off at 15:00 utc on 15 january 2019. they were the only...
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2019-01-15
Osterhout Design Group (1999 - 2019)
ralph osterhout spent twenty years building night vision for soldiers before he tried to sell augmented reality to everyone else. microsoft paid him around...
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2019-01-11
Chromecast Audio (2015 - 2019)
a thirty-five dollar disc with a headphone jack on one side and a micro-usb port on the other. you pushed it into the back of whatever amplifier or powered...
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2019-01-11
Zuji (2002 - 2019)
sixteen airlines and travelocity went in together in 2002 to build the booking site asia did not have, and for most of that decade zuji was the one people in...
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2019-01-08
AOL Portfolios (2000 - 2019)
aol portfolios was the personal stock-tracker inside the aol finance portal. you created named watchlists tagged with your buy prices and got back a daily...
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2019-01-07
Datex-P (1980 - 2019)
the west german post office opened a packet network in august 1980 and it outlived almost everything ever built on top of it. compuserve came into germany...
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2019-01-07
Aapeli.com (2002 - 2019)
finland had a browser game site that market research once placed second among young people's best known online brands, behind google and ahead of everything...
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2019-01-07
Daum Agora (2004 - 2019)
in the summer of 2008 the candlelight crowds in seoul carried a flag naming agora as the holy ground of debate. that was a discussion board on the daum portal,...
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2019-01-07
UOL Forums (2001 - 2019)
the notice went up at the end of october 2018 and carried two dates. on 3 december the boards went read-only, and on 7 january 2019 around 18:00 utc the dns...
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2019-01-01
2go (2007 - 2019)
2go launched in 2007 out of johannesburg, built by computer science students at the university of the witwatersrand. it ran on j2me feature phones at a time...
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2019-01-01
Comic Genesis (Keenspace) (2000 - 2019)
comic genesis was the free webcomic hosting platform keenspot launched in june 2000 as keenspace. it ran as the open-hosting layer under the invite-only...
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2019-01-01
Tea Party Community (2013 - 2019)
ken crow founded tea party community in november 2012 with the selaty father-son team. the public site launched on february 2, 2013 as a facebook-styled...
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2019-01-01
Tout (2010 - 2019)
michael downing launched tout in april 2010 around two patents he had developed at sri international. the pitch was a video-only twitter where every post had...
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2019-01-01
Wonkblog (2011 - 2019)
wonkblog started as ezra klein's policy blog inside the washington post in september 2011 and became a small newsroom of five by 2013. klein left in january...
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2019-01-01
Redbook (print) (1903 - 2019)
redbook launched in chicago in may 1903 and ran 115 years across four owners: mccall corporation from 1929, norton simon then charter through the 1970s, hearst...
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2019-01-01
Nimbuzz (2006 - 2019)
nimbuzz was the app that promised to hold all your messengers at once, right when holding all your messengers stopped mattering. it arrived for the smartphone...
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2019-01-01
WebQQ (2009 - 2019)
tencent put qq inside a browser tab in september 2009, for everybody who could not install anything: school computer rooms, and the enormous chinese internet...
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2019-01-01
ZipcodeZoo (2004 - 2019)
it launched on 26 september 2004 with one goal, a web page for every living thing science had named, and it got most of the way there by refusing to generate...
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2019-01-01
Field Trip (2012 - 2019)
niantic's first product was not a game. field trip launched on android in the united states on 27 september 2012 and pushed cards at you about the building you...
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2019-01-01
Drip.fm (2012 - 2019)
ten dollars a month, and a record label sent you everything it put out. ghostly international built the thing for its own catalog in 2012 and then rented the...
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2019-01-01
TangoCity (2011 - 2019)
buenos aires had a cable channel that played nothing but tango, founded by juan fabbri in 1995 and called sólo tango. it went off air in january 2011 and came...
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2019-01-01
Fisher-Price Smart Toy (2015 - 2019)
ninety-nine dollars bought a teddy bear that learned a child's name and favorite color and kept both of them on mattel's servers. a rapid7 researcher was...
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2019-01-01
CogniToys Dino (2015 - 2019)
three developers out of a new york app shop won ibm's watson mobile developer challenge in 2014 and cashed the prize in on a toy instead of an enterprise...
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2019-01-01
Biquge (2011 - 2019)
four hundred thousand pirated novels on a single mirror, two point one billion clicks: those are the numbers a beijing court cited in 2025, six years after the...
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2019-01-01
Tapingo (2012 - 2019)
grubhub announced it was buying tapingo on 25 september 2018 and had switched the app off within a year. what it bought was the order-ahead system on more than...
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2019-01-01
ScraperWiki (2009 - 2019)
channel 4's venture arm put money into a liverpool startup in december 2009, on the theory that journalism needed scrapers more than it needed another...
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2019-01-01
Sorenson Squeeze (2001 - 2019)
every web video team of the flash decade had a machine in the corner running batch jobs in squeeze overnight. sorenson media shipped it on 29 october 2001 as...
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2019-01-01
Digital Universe (2006 - 2019)
december 2005 was when the press release went out, and the phrase in it was the pbs of the web. joe firmage had made a fortune at usweb and lost the job over a...
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2019-01-01
SovArch.ru (2008 - 2019)
denis romodin and alexander strugach put a catalog of soviet architecture on the russian web in january 2008, with nikolai kalashnikov credited beside them on...
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2019-01-01
Horseland (1998 - 2019)
eight million accounts, most of them girls somewhere between ten and twenty two, spent two decades breeding and showing virtual horses on a site that began in...
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2019-01-01
YossarianLives (2012 - 2019)
joseph heller supplied the name and the whole attitude. daniel foster-smith and j. paul neeley built a search engine that refused to give you what you asked...
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2019-01-01
Angry Birds Go! (2013 - 2019)
130 million people downloaded a free angry birds kart racer and most of the writing about it is about the upgrade counter. exient built it for rovio and it...
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2019-01-01
ZCast (2016 - 2019)
the last week of january 2019 is when the plug came out, and seven days later spotify announced it was buying anchor. zcast was an israeli app for broadcasting...
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2019
Weblogs.com (1999 - 2019)
weblogs.com was the switchboard of the blog era and almost nobody who depended on it ever visited it. your publishing software sent it a ping when you posted,...
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2018-12-31
CoveritLive (2007 - 2018)
coveritlive was the live-blogging widget every news site embedded for years to cover apple keynotes and election nights. founded in toronto in 2007 and bought...
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2018-12-31
Hi5 (2003 - 2018)
the social network that was massive in turkey from 2005 to 2009. before Facebook localized to turkish and took the audience, Hi5 was where every turkish high...
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2018-12-31
Skylanders (2011 - 2018)
toys for bob shipped skylanders spyro's adventure in october 2011 with a portable game console accessory, a plastic spyro figurine, and a portal-of-power that...
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2018-12-31
Voilà (1998 - 2018)
the french web portal and search engine that was the default homepage for a generation of french users in the late 1990s and early 2000s. owned by France...
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2018-12-31
Kaixin001 (2008 - 2018)
kaixin001.com launched march 2008 in beijing, targeting the chinese urban white-collar 20-something demographic that renren did not own. it ran on social games...
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2018-12-31
Google Search Appliance (2002 - 2018)
the google search appliance was a literal yellow 1u rack server that ran google search inside a company's own data center. it shipped in 2002 on rebadged dell...
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2018-12-31
Wikipedia Zero (2012 - 2018)
wikipedia zero was a wikimedia foundation program that paid nothing and asked mobile operators to waive the data charges on wikipedia. it started in malaysia...
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2018-12-31
WiBro (2006 - 2018)
korea set aside a hundred megahertz of spectrum for it in february 2002 and had commercial service running by june 2006, which was years ahead of lte anywhere....
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2018-12-31
Edline (1997 - 2018)
blackboard bought a school portal in 2011 and switched it off on the last day of 2018, having renamed it blackboard engage somewhere in the middle. for most of...
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2018-12-31
Macaw (2014 - 2018)
invision bought the people who made macaw in january 2016 and the program stopped changing that same month. it kept its download link for almost three more...
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2018-12-28
BOLT! Super 4G (2013 - 2018)
pt internux launched bolt on 14 november 2013 and sold indonesia its first 4g connection, a modem you bought once for a network that only reached jakarta and...
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2018-12-28
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...
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2018-12-28
OSCAR protocol (1997 - 2018)
aol built it to carry aim in 1997 and then spent a decade defending it, locking out microsoft and trillian and anyone else who tried to sign in with software...
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2018-12-27
Torrents.md (2006 - 2018)
270,000 registered members in a country of under three million people, and in december 2018 the volunteers running it decided they had finished the job. the...
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2018-12-26
Zhengtu Online (2006 - 2018)
shi yuzhu built a game in shanghai that cost nothing to enter and then charged for everything inside it. zhengtu went into open beta in november 2005 promising...
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2018-12-25
World of Speed (2017 - 2018)
announced in february 2014 and not playable until august 2017, by which point the studio that announced it had moved on and saber interactive was finishing the...
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2018-12-22
Call of Duty: Heroes (2014 - 2018)
on 22 december 2018 the servers stopped answering and a call of duty game became unopenable on every phone that still had it installed. heroes arrived in...
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2018-12-21
Tipeez (2009 - 2018)
tipeez opened on 15 december 2009 as the first turkish web portal built for children and teenagers, a licensed local edition of the israeli tweegee network. it...
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2018-12-20
Topix (2002 - 2018)
topix was the comment section for every american small town. rich skrenta and his open-directory-project veterans launched it in 2002 as a news aggregator and...
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2018-12-20
Club Penguin Island (2017 - 2018)
disney closed a twelve year old virtual world with a lot of childhoods inside it and replaced it, the same week, with a mobile game built in unity. the players...
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2018-12-16
Cydia (2008 - 2018)
jay freeman, the developer known as saurik, shipped cydia in february 2008 as a graphical front end to apt for jailbroken iphones and ipod touches. through the...
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2018-12-16
Super Best Friends Play (2011 - 2018)
on sunday 16 december 2018 a video called "super best friends (final)" went up, and woolie madden's segment gave the reason in one line: matt and pat are no...
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2018-12-14
Babble.com (2006 - 2018)
the couple who built nerve.com, an internet sex magazine for people who read, had a baby and built a parenting magazine next. babble launched in december 2006...
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2018-12-13
Apple Music Connect (2015 - 2018)
connect was the social tab inside Apple Music when the service launched in June 2015. the idea was that artists would post photos, videos, lyric drafts, and...
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2018-12-13
Layar (2009 - 2018)
layar was the june 2009 amsterdam augmented-reality browser founded by raimo van der klein with claire boonstra and maarten lens-fitzgerald. the app let third...
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2018-12-11
Firefox Live Bookmarks (2004 - 2018)
0.01 percent of firefox sessions were still touching feed previews when mozilla decided to pull the whole subsystem out. live bookmarks had shipped in firefox...
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2018-12-10
Aviary (2007 - 2018)
aviary was the photo editor inside other apps. tap edit on flickr or twitter around 2014 and the surface underneath was aviary's. adobe bought the company in...
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2018-12-10
Infinity Blade (2010 - 2018)
infinity blade was the game that proved an iphone could run unreal engine 3, made by twelve people at chair entertainment and released on 9 december 2010 for...
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2018-12-01
Ampergram (2013 - 2018)
ampergram turned instagram's hashtag firehose into a typographer's parts bin. you tagged a photo of a letter you found in the world with #ampergram and the...
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2018-12-01
HighBeam Research (2002 - 2018)
patrick spain sold hoover's, bought elibrary and encyclopedia.com off tucows, and in august 2002 turned the pile into a subscription archive. around eighty...
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2018-12-01
JRockit (2000 - 2018)
a java virtual machine written by students out of stockholm that was faster than sun's on server workloads, mostly by refusing to interpret anything. bea...
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2018-12-01
DealDey (2011 - 2018)
dealdey was nigeria's groupon, founded in 2011 by sim shagaya and built on the same promise as every other daily-deals company of that decade. it raised five...
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2018-12-01
Guitar Hero Live (2015 - 2018)
activision's fix for a genre it had already worn out was to stop selling songs and start broadcasting them. guitar hero live shipped in october 2015 with a...
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2018-12-01
Extrasolar (2014 - 2018)
nine hundred dollars a month was the running cost of an imaginary planet. extrasolar gave you a rover on epsilon prime and a camera to point, and the...
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2018-11-30
Rookie (2011 - 2018)
rookie was an online magazine for teenage girls that tavi gevinson started in 2011 when she was fifteen, already famous from her style-rookie blog. it ran...
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2018-11-30
NetEase Blog (2006 - 2018)
netease opened its blog service on 1 september 2006, in the years when a chinese portal without one looked unserious. it announced the end on 20 august 2018...
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2018-11-30
Kudzu.com (2005 - 2018)
a newspaper company built a review site. cox enterprises launched kudzu in atlanta in june 2005, named after the vine that grows over everything in the...
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2018-11-30
Plex Cloud (2016 - 2018)
26 september 2016, and the pitch was that you could finally turn the old box in the corner off. plex would run your server for you and read the files out of...
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2018-11-30
Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown (2015 - 2018)
six thousand and three people put $558,863 into a shadowrun mmo in august 2012. what shipped in april 2015 was a turn-based tactics game that could not be...
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2018-11-29
FilmStruck (2016 - 2018)
filmstruck was the streaming service for people who wanted to watch old hollywood, foreign cinema, and the criterion catalog in one place. it ran for two years...
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2018-11-28
WildStar (2014 - 2018)
wildstar was carbine studios' science-fantasy mmo for ncsoft, shipped on june 3, 2014 with a subscription model and a sharp art style. the subscriber base did...
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2018-11-28
CeBIT (1986 - 2018)
cebit began in 1970 as the office-technology hall of the hannover fair and was cut loose as its own show in 1986, at which point it became the week every march...
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2018-11-27
Seatwave (2006 - 2018)
ticketmaster bought seatwave's operating assets in november 2014 and switched the brand off four years later, on the same day it switched off get me in. a...
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2018-11-21
Xbox SmartGlass (2012 - 2018)
the second-screen app that microsoft shipped in 2012 as the answer to what your phone should do while the xbox was on. it turned an ios or android or windows...
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2018-11-20
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...
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2018-11-20
Marumaru (2013 - 2018)
marumaru opened in june 2013 and became the biggest illegal manga site in south korea, carrying links to around 42,000 translated japanese works and drawing...
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2018-11-18
Fine Uploader (2010 - 2018)
eight thousand github stars did not produce a second maintainer. andris valums wrote the original upload library in 2010, a wisconsin company called widen...
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2018-11-16
Quizzle (2008 - 2018)
one of the first american sites to hand out a credit score without charging for it, launched in 2008 out of dan gilbert's group of companies, the same group...
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2018-11-16
Google Contact Lens (2014 - 2018)
brian otis announced the lens on google's blog in january 2014 and shelved it himself, as verily's chief technical officer, in november 2018. between two...
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2018-11-15
inthemix (1999 - 2018)
two people in sydney started putting up photographs from club nights in 1999 and the forum that grew around the photographs became the place australian dance...
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2018-11-14
2 Dope Queens (2016 - 2018)
jessica williams and phoebe robinson taped it at union hall in brooklyn, two hours at a time, and wnyc cut each night down to about an hour. it went to number...
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2018-11-08
Findx (2016 - 2018)
in november 2018 a small Danish company gave up on the hardest and most expensive part of search, which is having an index of your own. findx had crawled the...
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2018-11-06
Defy Media (2013 - 2018)
defy was the holding company nobody outside the youtube creator world could keep straight. it owned smosh, clevver, screen junkies, the escapist, and a long...
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2018-11-06
Break.com (1998 - 2018)
break started in 1998 as big-boys.com, a humor site for american men aged eighteen to thirty-five, comedy clips and flash games and stunt videos. it renamed to...
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2018-11-06
Gurl.com (1996 - 2018)
three graduate students at nyu built it in 1996 as a thesis project and it turned into the place american teenage girls went to read the things print magazines...
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2018-11-05
ScrappleFace (2002 - 2018)
"axis of weasels" was written on a blog run by one man in pennsylvania in january 2003, and within weeks it was in the wall street journal and in australian...
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2018-11-01
WarCry Network (1999 - 2018)
warcry went up on 21 may 1999 as a portal for a kind of game that did not yet have a settled name, and spent nineteen years running news and reference...
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2018-11-01
Sonic Jump Fever (2014 - 2018)
sega's british mobile studio shipped this on 10 july 2014 as the follow-up to sonic jump, a vertical climber you steered by tilting the phone. it passed ten...
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2018-10-31
Kuri (2015 - 2018)
kuri was a mayfield robotics home robot. wheels and eye-cameras with no arms, a vocabulary of burbles instead of words. unveiled at ces 2017 as the cute side...
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2018-10-24
Just Survive (2015 - 2018)
daybreak put h1z1 on steam early access in january 2015 and sold a million copies in two months. in 2016 it cut the game in half, sending the battle royale...
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2018-10-22
CrashPlan for Home (2007 - 2018)
crashplan for home was code42's consumer cloud backup product, launched in 2007 out of minneapolis. the differentiator was the free tier, which let users back...
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2018-10-22
DragonDictate (1990 - 2018)
nine thousand dollars in march 1990 bought a copy of dragondictate and a headset microphone, and in return you had to talk like a machine, leaving a gap after...
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2018-10-19
Super Deluxe (2007 - 2018)
super deluxe was turner broadcasting building an internet comedy network twice, ten years apart, and shutting it down both times. the first one launched in...
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2018-10-19
Lenny Letter (2015 - 2018)
the announcement came on 18 october 2018 and the final issue went out the following day. lenny letter had run three years as an emailed magazine, reaching...
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2018-10-18
Path (2010 - 2018)
the social network with a 50-friend cap. founded by an early facebook employee. the pitch was that big networks are exhausting and small networks are real. the...
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2018-10-16
DramaFever (2009 - 2018)
dramafever opened in august 2009 as the legal way to watch korean television with subtitles, built for an audience that had been getting the same episodes off...
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2018-10-16
Google News & Weather (2014 - 2018)
8 october 2018 was supposed to be the end. the app went dark, came back on the ninth as though somebody had noticed, and was switched off again on the...
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2018-10-13
Myo (2013 - 2018)
myo was a gesture-control armband from thalmic labs, a startup in kitchener, ontario. it read the faint electrical signals your forearm muscles make when your...
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2018-10-13
Space Soldiers (2014 - 2018)
five players published a statement on 13 october 2018 saying their long term plans no longer matched the organization's, and by the end of that day there was...
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2018-10-10
Astro (email app) (2017 - 2018)
slack announced its biggest acquisition to that point on 24 september 2018 and switched the acquired product off sixteen days later. astro was an email client...
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2018-10-02
SuperSU (2012 - 2018)
every rooted android phone needed something standing between apps and the su binary, deciding which ones got to be root and which got a denial. from march 2012...
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2018-10-01
Yam Tianku (2005 - 2018)
yam tianku was where a lot of taiwan kept its blogs after the first wave of hosts, a free service with unlimited photo albums bolted onto one of the country's...
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2018-10-01
Everyplay (2012 - 2018)
unity bought everyplay in 2014 to turn gameplay video into a checkbox in the build settings, then switched the hosting off four years later with 38 million...
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2018-10-01
TF2 Outpost (2011 - 2018)
2011 was the year valve made team fortress 2 free and the hats became the actual economy. outpost was where you posted what you had against what you wanted,...
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2018-09-30
Adobe Edge Inspect (2012 - 2018)
adobe edge inspect was a desktop and mobile pair that let a web designer push the same url to a phone, a tablet, and a laptop at the same time and watch the...
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2018-09-30
Apple iPhoto Books (2002 - 2018)
apple iphoto books was the photo-book printing service apple ran out of iphoto and then photos for sixteen years. you would lay out a hardcover album inside...
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2018-09-30
Curators of Sweden (2011 - 2018)
in december 2011 the swedish institute and visitsweden handed the @sweden account to an ordinary person for a week, then to another one the week after, and...
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2018-09-25
Java Web Start (2001 - 2018)
java web start shipped with java 2 standard edition 1.4 in march 2001. it defined a small xml file called a .jnlp that a web page could link to. when a user...
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2018-09-25
JavaFX (2008 - 2018)
javafx shipped as javafx 1.0 in december 2008 under sun microsystems, with its own javafx script language and a promise to make rich java client apps...
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2018-09-21
Telltale Games (2004 - 2018)
telltale was founded in july 2004 by three former lucasarts adventure-game devs in san rafael, california. the walking dead season one in 2012 turned the...
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2018-09-18
Capcom Vancouver (2004 - 2018)
158 people lost their jobs on 18 september 2018, when capcom closed the only development studio it had outside japan. the building had opened in burnaby in...
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2018-09-18
OpenLava (2011 - 2018)
ibm's lawyers won. on 18 september 2018 a us court handed ibm a permanent injunction against teraproc, and a free job scheduler that research sites had been...
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2018-09-17
Demonoid (2003 - 2018)
the semi-private bittorrent tracker that ran on invite codes and strict ratio enforcement, with a forum culture more careful than the pirate bay's. it hosted...
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2018-09-15
QQ Pet (2005 - 2018)
qq pet lived in the corner of the qq instant messenger. you fed it, played with it, sent it to school, watched it grow. it was tencent's tamagotchi inside a...
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2018-09-15
Thunderclap (2012 - 2018)
thunderclap sold a single trick. you lent it your twitter or facebook account, it collected pledges until a campaign hit its target, and at the appointed...
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2018-09-14
LawBreakers (2017 - 2018)
cliff bleszinski left epic games in 2012 and came back with boss key productions in 2014 to build lawbreakers, a zero-gravity hero shooter that shipped 8...
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2018-09-14
Airware (2011 - 2018)
jonathan downey was the son of two pilots and he raised a hundred and eighteen million dollars from kleiner perkins and caterpillar to put an operating system...
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2018-09-11
Terrarium TV (2016 - 2018)
nitroxenon shut it down himself, which almost never happens in this category. no court order was published and no studio claimed the kill. the developer said...
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2018-09-05
Conkeror (2004 - 2018)
shawn betts had already written a window manager with no mouse in it. conkeror was the same idea pointed at the web: emacs key bindings, plus numbered labels...
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2018-09-04
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...
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2018-09-01
Racked (2007 - 2018)
racked was the shopping-and-retail blog that came out of the curbed network. lockhart steele started it in new york in 2007, added la and san francisco...
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2018-09-01
PenToy (2012 - 2018)
a notice went up on the front page on 31 july 2018 giving the site one month, and the reason printed on it was resource integration. pentoy had run since 2012...
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2018-09-01
Dollz Mania (2001 - 2018)
the gifs are still there. every html page on the site answered 403 by april 2019, while the doll images they used to sit on kept returning 200 to anyone who...
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2018-08-31
Spolužáci.cz (1999 - 2018)
a school-only social network that existed for 19 years on a single premise: find the people you sat next to in primary school. czech-speakers used it as a...
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2018-08-31
GameFly Streaming (2015 - 2018)
gamefly streaming was the second life of a dvd-by-mail rental company. it launched in april 2015 on amazon fire tv, then expanded to samsung smart tvs and a...
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2018-08-31
FORA.tv (2005 - 2018)
brian gruber had been the first marketing director at c-span, and in 2005 he set out to do for the lecture hall what c-span did for congress. fora.tv filmed...
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2018-08-30
Snapcash (2014 - 2018)
snapcash was the moment snapchat decided it wanted to be venmo. square ran the rails, snap ran the UX, the two carried it for four years. when venmo had...
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2018-08-30
DaWanda (2006 - 2018)
dawanda was germany's etsy, a berlin marketplace where people sold handmade and one-off things to a couple of million buyers across the german-speaking web. it...
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2018-08-30
Phase One Media Pro (2011 - 2018)
on 30 august 2018 phase one stopped selling media pro and pointed everybody at capture one instead. the program had been a mac shareware gallery called iview...
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2018-08-30
P3P (2002 - 2018)
the w3c obsoleted p3p on 30 august 2018, noting that fewer than six percent of the ten thousand busiest websites still published one and that no browser was...
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2018-08-28
Tez (2017 - 2018)
google's payments app for india, built on the country's own instant transfer rails instead of on card networks. its one real invention was cash mode, which...
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2018-08-27
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...
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2018-08-21
MixBit (2013 - 2018)
the two people who built youtube tried to build it again, smaller and stranger, and this time almost nobody showed up. mixbit was a good idea about remixing...
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2018-08-20
Google Goggles (2010 - 2018)
google goggles was the moment your phone camera became a search box. you pointed it at a landmark, a barcode, a wine label, a page of text, and goggles tried...
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2018-08-20
Highrise (2007 - 2018)
highrise was 37signals's small-shop CRM. it launched on 20 march 2007 as the third product after basecamp and backpack. it was spun off as its own company in...
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2018-08-16
Redcore (2018 - 2018)
on 15 august 2018 redcore announced a series c of 250 million yuan and described itself as the first fully homegrown chinese browser, engine included. on 16...
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2018-08-13
Darkwarez.pl (2006 - 2018)
on 13 august 2018 a polish warez forum holding two and a half million registered accounts went dark in the middle of a civil case, taking its file host...
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2018-08-09
EmuParadise (2000 - 2018)
emuparadise pulled its entire rom and iso library on 9 august 2018, eighteen years after founder masj started it in march 2000. nintendo had just won a $12.2...
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2018-08-09
Mobage West (2011 - 2018)
mobage west was DeNA's attempt to take its japanese mobile-social gaming playbook to iphone and android in the west. the platform ran on the plus+ network that...
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2018-08-07
FunOrb (2008 - 2018)
funorb was jagex's casual-games portal for the runescape crowd, launched in february 2008 with a few dozen java titles like arcanists and armies of gielinor....
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2018-08-07
Dartium (2012 - 2018)
"this version of dartium has expired" is the last thing most people ever saw from it. dartium was a chromium build with google's dart vm wired in, so a...
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2018-08-06
RuneScape Classic (2001 - 2018)
the original RuneScape, before RuneScape 2 (2004) and Old School RuneScape (2013) split the player base into three distinct games. classic ran for 17 years...
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2018-08-06
Project Wonderful (2006 - 2018)
ryan north, the man who writes dinosaur comics, spent 2006 building the ad network he wished existed. you bid by the day for one specific box on one specific...
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2018-08-02
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...
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2018-08-02
Musical.ly (2014 - 2018)
musical.ly launched in shanghai in 2014 as a fifteen-second lip-sync video app aimed at us teenagers. it hit two hundred million registered users by may 2017...
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2018-08-01
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...
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2018-08-01
The ISO Zone (2009 - 2018)
nintendo filed against loveroms and loveretro in an arizona federal court in july 2018 and never had to file against anybody else. inside six weeks emuparadise...
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2018-08-01
Chit Chat City (2010 - 2018)
a sole proprietorship on rue saint-hubert in montreal ran a 3d city for eight years, where you drew your own avatar instead of picking one off a rack. it...
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2018-08-01
Tindeck (2003 - 2018)
an eu copyright directive that had not passed yet killed tindeck. savvas dimitriou had run free audio hosting since 2003, half a million tracks uploaded by...
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2018-07-31
go90 (2015 - 2018)
go90 was verizon's attempt to be the place us millennials watched short video on their phones. the name referenced rotating the phone ninety degrees to...
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2018-07-31
Wikispaces (2005 - 2018)
wikispaces launched in march 2005 in san francisco as a hosted wiki anyone could spin up in a minute. it found its market in k-12 classrooms, where every...
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2018-07-31
Etsy Wholesale (2014 - 2018)
etsy wholesale was the experiment where the craft marketplace tried to grow up into a b2b channel and ran into the same wall every consumer marketplace finds...
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2018-07-31
Moves (2013 - 2018)
moves tracked your whole day without asking you to wear anything or press a start button. protogeo built it in helsinki, then facebook bought the team in 2014...
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2018-07-31
Puzzle Fighter (2017) (2017 - 2018)
20 april 2018 is when capcom announced it was switching puzzle fighter off, five months after putting it out. the mobile reboot of super puzzle fighter ii...
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2018-07-30
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...
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2018-07-30
Titanfall: Assault (2017 - 2018)
eleven months and twenty days after launch, every server for titanfall's only mobile game went dark. respawn and a studio called particle city had taken a...
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2018-07-26
Otto Radio (2015 - 2018)
samsung's venture arm backed it, uber put it in front of passengers, and the whole thing lasted about three years. otto radio tried to assemble a personalized...
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2018-07-24
DoubleClick (1996 - 2018)
doubleclick was the dot-com era ad-serving company that survived long enough to become the load-bearing wall of google's ads business. google bought it in 2008...
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2018-07-22
Gas Powered Games (1998 - 2018)
chris taylor came out of cavedog with total annihilation behind him and started gas powered games in redmond in may 1998. dungeon siege and supreme commander...
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2018-07-17
Yahoo! Messenger (1998 - 2018)
the messenger with the loudest possible attention-getter (the BUZZ feature shook your whole window with sound). its emoticon library was unmatched. yahoo...
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2018-07-10
Plenti (2015 - 2018)
one loyalty currency spendable at both a gas station and a department store had been working in britain and canada for years before american express tried it...
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2018-07-09
Tesco Direct (2006 - 2018)
500 jobs and a 650,000 square foot shed in milton keynes went with it. tesco launched direct in september 2006 as a catalog and a website for the things that...
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2018-07-08
Radical Heights (2018 - 2018)
boss key productions had one commercial failure behind it and about five months to answer it, so radical heights went onto steam in april 2018 as an unfinished...
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2018-07-02
tbh (2017 - 2018)
tbh was an iphone-only compliments app that asked you to pick which of four schoolmates was kindest, smartest, prettiest. it shipped in georgia in august 2017,...
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2018-07-01
Fantage (2008 - 2018)
a kids' virtual world that ran for ten years out of a fort lee new jersey office, backed by nexon money, with a customizable avatar and a town map and...
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2018-07-01
Otto (2016 - 2018)
otto was a self-driving trucking startup founded in january 2016 by anthony levandowski and lior ron after they left google. uber acquired it in august 2016...
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2018-07-01
Peperonity (2002 - 2018)
peperonity was one of the first and largest places you could build your own mobile page from the phone itself, no computer needed. it ran out of berlin, a...
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2018-07-01
Smotri.com (2003 - 2018)
smotri.com was one of russia's first attempts at a homegrown youtube, a moscow video-hosting site that let people upload and watch clips and run their own live...
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2018-07-01
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...
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2018-06-30
StumbleUpon (2002 - 2018)
you installed the browser toolbar. you set up a few interests. you clicked the stumble button. you got taken to a web page somebody else had liked, matched...
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2018-06-30
PureVolume (2003 - 2018)
purevolume was the indie-scene music platform that ran parallel to myspace from thanksgiving eve 2003 until june 30 2018. unsigned bands uploaded mp3s,...
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2018-06-30
TBS OnDemand (2009 - 2018)
paravi killed this one on purpose. tbs put its own back catalog online on 3 february 2009, old dramas and music specials sold by the episode, with a ¥900...
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2018-06-30
Technics Tracks (2015 - 2018)
two countries and three and a half years. panasonic brought technics back in 2014 and built a hi-res download shop to go with the hardware, then closed it on...
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2018-06-29
Radical.fm (2013 - 2018)
thomas mcalevey's ad-free personalized-radio service, funded on a pay-what-you-want tip-jar model instead of ads or subscription. launched on iphone in august...
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2018-06-29
戒赌吧 (Jiedu Ba) (2010 - 2018)
fourteen million people followed a baidu forum whose stated purpose was helping each other stop gambling, and ninety million posts in, xinhua published an...
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2018-06-29
Skynetblogs (2003 - 2018)
on friday 29 june 2018 proximus closed the blog platform of its skynet brand, a free host that had been running since 2003 and counted 142,937 blogs in august...
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2018-06-29
Lumo Lift (2014 - 2018)
an assignment for the benefit of creditors ended lumo bodytech on 29 june 2018, and with it a seven-year attempt to sell posture as a product. the lift was a...
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2018-06-28
Tripsta (2005 - 2018)
tripsta started in athens in 2005 as travelplanet24 and grew into the largest ecommerce business in greece, selling flights in more than 45 countries and 34...
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2018-06-25
search.cpan.org (1999 - 2018)
graham barr wrote it in early 1999, on a solaris machine at washington university in st. louis, and it answered for nineteen years. by the end most of the site...
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2018-06-21
Smyte (2014 - 2018)
twitter announced the acquisition at six in the morning pacific time on 21 june 2018 and smyte's api stopped answering roughly thirty minutes later. the...
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2018-06-19
Favstar (2009 - 2018)
favstar took twitter's favorite counter and turned it into a scoreboard. it launched in july 2009 and became the home page of english-language joke twitter,...
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2018-06-15
Fieldbook (2015 - 2018)
jason crawford spent five years building a spreadsheet that was secretly a relational database, and in may 2018 he published the number that ended it: under...
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2018-06-13
Live.ly (2016 - 2018)
live.ly was musical.ly's live video spinoff, launched at vidcon on 24 july 2016 and past periscope on the ios charts inside three months. it worked. that is...
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2018-06-05
Alioth (2003 - 2018)
alexander wirt sent the mail at 21:49 on 5 june 2018, subject line "its dead jim - alioth is gone". for fifteen years alioth had been debian's own sourceforge,...
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2018-06-01
Facebook Trending Topics (2014 - 2018)
facebook trending topics was the right-rail headline list that lived on the facebook web home page from january 2014 to june 1 of 2018. the feature was...
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2018-06-01
Epitonic (1999 - 2018)
epitonic opened on 8 march 1999 giving away music that nobody had to steal: cleared mp3s from more than four hundred independent labels, with a writeup next to...
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2018-06-01
Mindenkilapja.hu (2004 - 2018)
in february 2004 the address was still a coming-soon splash with one picture on it, promising a framework where anybody could put up their own page in about a...
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2018-06-01
Code School (2011 - 2018)
gregg pollack was running a web consultancy in orlando when he put out a free ruby tutorial with zombies in it, and the tutorial got big enough to become the...
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2018-06-01
Appcanary (2015 - 2018)
github shipped free security alerts for vulnerable dependencies in november 2017, and seven weeks later it hired the two people who had been selling that as a...
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2018-06-01
The World Weekly (2013 - 2018)
seventy-five thousand free copies went out at london members' clubs and transport hubs in january 2013, backed by three city financiers and promising a...
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2018-06-01
Penny (2015 - 2018)
alex quach and mitchell lee built a money app that would not let you type. everything penny said to you came out of thirty-four thousand words of handwritten...
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2018-05-31
Flipnote Hatena (2008 - 2018)
the nintendo DSi animation app. you drew flipbook-style animations on the touchscreen, frame by frame, then uploaded them to the flipnote hatena network. kids...
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2018-05-31
Kindle Scout (2014 - 2018)
kindle scout was amazon's crowd-vote publishing arm. authors uploaded a manuscript and a five-thousand-word excerpt, readers spent thirty days voting on which...
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2018-05-31
Mirage: Arcane Warfare (2017 - 2018)
torn banner had sold millions of copies of chivalry, so it followed with the same first person melee combat plus spellcasting, in a setting borrowed from...
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2018-05-31
Sponavi Live (2016 - 2018)
five hundred yen a month if you were a softbank customer and three thousand if you were not, which tells you most of what the service was for. softbank and...
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2018-05-31
BandPage (2010 - 2018)
facebook let outside developers add custom tabs to a page, and rootmusic used that opening to become the music tab: half a million artists ran their facebook...
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2018-05-29
Poncho (2013 - 2018)
a beverage brand that sold its drinks over sms bought poncho in may 2018 and turned the weather off in the same week. the cat had been forecasting since 2013,...
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2018-05-25
Klout (2008 - 2018)
the influence score that turned every twitter and facebook account into a number between 1 and 100. joe fernandez and binh tran launched klout in late 2008 and...
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2018-05-25
Foodspotting (2009 - 2018)
foodspotting launched in late 2009 in san francisco, founded by alexa andrzejewski, soraya darabi, and ted grubb as a dish-level discovery app where users...
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2018-05-25
Gulli.com (1998 - 2018)
gulli started in 1998 as a german scene site and turned into the country's main news portal for file sharing and computer security, with a forum that passed a...
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2018-05-24
Loadout (2014 - 2018)
edge of reality shipped it on steam on 31 january 2014 as a free third-person shooter whose actual product was the gun builder. you assembled weapons out of...
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2018-05-23
Bamtoki (2016 - 2018)
thirty-five million visits a month made bamtoki the thirteenth most popular website in south korea, and every page on it was somebody else's comic. a...
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2018-05-22
Hungryhouse (2006 - 2018)
shane lake and tony charles built hungryhouse out of a 2003 project that became a public takeaway-ordering site in 2006. the founders went on dragons den in...
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2018-05-21
Docker Cloud (2016 - 2018)
sixty days of notice was the whole story here. docker announced on 20 march 2018 that the cluster and application management services in docker cloud would...
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2018-05-19
The Listserve (2012 - 2018)
five graduate students at new york university asked what an ordinary person would say with one shot at a large audience, then built the smallest possible...
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2018-05-17
TVShowsOnDVD.com (2001 - 2018)
gord lacey started tvshowsondvd.com in november 2001 as a list of which television series had been pressed onto disc and which had not. it became the reference...
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2018-05-17
Socialcast (2008 - 2018)
socialcast was a facebook for the inside of a company: one feed for the whole organization, plus a version you could run on your own servers. vmware bought it...
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2018-05-16
Storify (2010 - 2018)
storify was the way a newsroom turned a twitter thread into something a reader could scroll. every embed depended on a service that adobe eventually owned,...
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2018-05-15
Lycos Mail (1997 - 2026)
one of the first free webmail services on the open web, launched october 1997 out of pittsburgh. lycos itself was sold to terra networks in 2000, to daum in...
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2018-05-15
Google Play Newsstand (2013 - 2018)
google play newsstand was the android magazine and news aggregator that lived between november 2013 and may 2018, born from the merger of google play magazines...
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2018-05-15
Gemnasium (2011 - 2018)
github shipped free security alerts for dependencies at the end of 2017 and gemnasium's churn doubled within months, because nearly all of its paying customers...
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2018-05-14
Universal Jobmatch (2012 - 2018)
from march 2013 a jobcentre adviser could instruct you to use this website, and refusing could cost you your benefits for as long as three years. universal...
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2018-05-11
Producteev (2008 - 2018)
a bootstrapped task manager out of new york, launched on stage at leweb in december 2008, built around a grid of project boxes you could fill by email or by...
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2018-05-09
Miitomo (2016 - 2018)
miitomo was nintendo's first real smartphone app, built with dena, launched in japan on march 17 2016 and worldwide two weeks later. it used mii avatars to run...
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2018-05-02
Polymer (2013 - 2018)
polymer was google's bet that the browser's native web-components spec would eat half of what react was doing. you wrote custom html elements with shadow dom...
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2018-05-02
Cambridge Analytica (2013 - 2018)
up to eighty-seven million facebook profiles ended up inside a political consultancy that almost none of those people had chosen to deal with. the harvest ran...
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2018-05-01
Xmarks (2006 - 2018)
xmarks was the bookmark sync utility for the years when firefox, chrome, safari and internet explorer all still mattered and none of them synced with each...
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2018-05-01
Microsoft Office Mix (2014 - 2018)
microsoft's startup business group built a powerpoint add-in for teachers in 2014. it added screen recording, inking, narration, and interactive polls to a...
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2018-05-01
Blinkbox (2007 - 2018)
a uk transactional video-on-demand service that michael comish and adrian letts launched in october 2007. tesco bought an eighty percent stake in april 2011 to...
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2018-05-01
Roku SoundBridge (2003 - 2018)
roku made a network music player in 2003 before it made the streaming stick. m1000 and m2000, vacuum fluorescent display and ethernet in the back, reading...
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2018-05-01
InvisionFree (2002 - 2018)
invisionfree spent over fifteen years handing anyone a free message board with a few clicks. it ran on invision power's forum software and hosted more than six...
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2018-05-01
vSide (2007 - 2018)
a 3d virtual world built around music and looking cool, the kind of place teenagers logged into after school to stand around a broadcast dj set. doppelganger...
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2018-05-01
WikiAnswers (2002 - 2018)
it started as faq farm in 2002 and ran on one argument: a question should have a single answer that everybody edits, not fifty answers that everybody votes on....
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2018-05-01
Mugobi (2009 - 2018)
in february 2018 eyal shamy posted on the official blog that the servers of a nine-year-old children's virtual world would go dark on 1 may. he wrote that the...
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2018-05-01
Network Awesome (2011 - 2018)
on 1 january 2011 two people started a television channel with no television in it. network awesome put up a programmed day of old documentaries and public...
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2018-04-30
Vine Camera (2017 - 2018)
vine camera was the bone twitter threw at vine users after killing the social side of vine on january 17, 2017. the app that the original vine icon updated...
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2018-04-30
Tunngle (2009 - 2018)
tunngle was a virtual lan. it installed a network driver that made a room of strangers on the internet look to your computer like machines plugged into the...
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2018-04-30
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer (1997 - 2018)
a .ppt file was useless on a machine without powerpoint on it, and microsoft's answer was a small free program that could put one on screen and print it, and...
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2018-04-30
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack (2006 - 2018)
twenty million people downloaded it in its first twelve months, by hand, one at a time, because microsoft deliberately refused to push it through windows...
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2018-04-30
Mozilla Webmaker (2012 - 2018)
mozilla announced webmaker on 22 may 2012 with a goal stated plainly: move people from using the web to making it. the program produced thimble and popcorn...
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2018-04-27
Yandex.Fotki (2007 - 2018)
yandex ran a photo host for eleven years, and for the middle stretch of that it was where a good part of the russian-language web kept its pictures. by 2018...
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2018-04-27
Kephost.com (2008 - 2018)
752,593 images is what archive team managed to pull off kephost.com before the end, out of a library taking nearly two thousand uploads a day. the hungarian...
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2018-04-26
Apple AirPort (1999 - 2018)
apple airport was the home wifi router that mac households bought because it looked like apple hardware and worked with the rest of the apple stack. it ran...
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2018-04-26
Apple Time Capsule (2008 - 2018)
time capsule was apple's wifi router with a backup drive built in. you plugged it in once and time machine started shipping hourly snapshots over the air. it...
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2018-04-26
Paragon (2016 - 2018)
paragon was epic games' third-person moba, built on unreal engine 4, with a real early-access following in 2016 before it lost the studio's attention. epic put...
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2018-04-26
Warner Archive Instant (2013 - 2018)
on 26 april 2018 warner bros switched off the streaming service it had built out of its own back catalog. warner archive instant opened to the public in april...
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2018-04-24
Casio Exilim (2002 - 2018)
eleven point three millimeters was the number. that was the thickness of the ex-s1 in june 2002, when every other digital compact was closer to thirty, and...
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2018-04-24
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....
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2018-04-23
TravBuddy (2005 - 2018)
travbuddy was a social network for travelers, built by two brothers in 2005. you found someone heading where you were heading, and you kept a blog of your...
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2018-04-22
Spinlister (2011 - 2018)
a board of investors in santa monica decided in march 2018 that spinlister was not going to raise again, and the peer-to-peer bike rental marketplace closed on...
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2018-04-18
Pokémon Brick Bronze (2015 - 2018)
the pokémon company filed one notice and a game with twenty-two thousand people inside it disappeared the same day, badges and purchases included. brick bronze...
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2018-04-18
Intel Vaunt (2018 - 2018)
a class-one laser in the rim of an ordinary-looking pair of glasses painted a small red display onto the wearer's retina. no camera, no speaker, nothing for...
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2018-04-17
Mangamura (2016 - 2018)
mangamura was japan-only at the language layer. two years of scanlated manga piracy that pulled 98 million visits in january 2018 alone, cost the manga...
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2018-04-11
Workopolis (2000 - 2018)
workopolis was what canada had instead of monster. it came out of a globe and mail careers site in 1999, took its name when torstar joined in 2000, and spent...
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2018-04-10
Neihan Duanzi (2012 - 2018)
neihan duanzi was a chinese joke and short video app, launched in march 2012 as one of bytedance's first products. its users called themselves duanyou, put...
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2018-04-08
SmallWorlds (2008 - 2018)
smallworlds launched in 2008 from auckland, new zealand. outsmart games built a flash-based browser virtual world aimed at teenagers and young adults, with an...
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2018-04-06
Backpage.com (2004 - 2018)
backpage was an american classifieds site that started as a craigslist imitator inside the village voice newspaper chain. it spent fourteen years splitting...
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2018-04-05
Polyvore (2007 - 2018)
polyvore was the place a generation of women learned to think in mood boards before instagram and pinterest were the only places left. you clipped a dress off...
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2018-04-04
Poema.pl (2000 - 2018)
arkadiusz kuryłowicz ran a polish poetry site for eighteen years and then switched it off in stages. logins went dead at 21:56 on 31 march 2017, which ended...
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2018-04-03
COSMiQ (2006 - 2018)
lycos europe put up a question and answer site called lycos iq in january 2006 to go after yahoo answers. lycos europe then dissolved, and the site did not....
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2018-04-03
MotiFake (2006 - 2018)
for twelve years the black border with the white caption was a format anyone could make, and motifake was where the people who made them went. it called itself...
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2018-04-03
BlogBridge (2003 - 2018)
the man who invented the pivot table put eight years into a java feed reader for people who followed hundreds of blogs at once. pito salas started it in 2003,...
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2018-04-02
Steam Machine (2015 - 2018)
steam machine was valve's bet that a linux pc with a steam controller could replace the xbox in the living room. fourteen pc vendors built the first wave that...
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2018-04-02
Tor Messenger (2015 - 2018)
tor messenger was the tor project's attempt at a secure-by-default chat client. it was an instantbird fork that forced every message through tor and turned on...
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2018-04-02
Mollom (2008 - 2018)
mollom read every comment before it posted and decided whether a person had written it. when it was confident it let the text through or dropped it silently,...
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2018-04-02
Flipnote Gallery: World (2013 - 2018)
on 8 september 2017 nintendo put a notice on its japanese support site giving a paid service seven more months. flipnote gallery: world was where you uploaded...
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2018-04-01
Ustream (2007 - 2018)
ustream was a live-streaming platform that ran from 2007 to 2018. it carried obama press calls and the 2012 hugo awards ceremony that got famously cut off...
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2018-04-01
Flipagram (2013 - 2018)
flipagram turned a set of photos into a short video set to music, and it hit number one in the us app store within a week of its november 2013 relaunch....
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2018-04-01
Bloglovin' (2007 - 2018)
bloglovin was the follow button for the blog era, a swedish reader that started in 2007 and let you keep a feed of the blogs you liked without opening a dozen...
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2018-04-01
MOOMA (2001 - 2018)
yoav kutner was an israeli radio presenter and critic, and the encyclopedia he built inside mooma was for a long time the only serious written record of...
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2018-04-01
Google Site Search (2008 - 2018)
for ten years, if a company's website had a search box that actually returned the right page, there was a fair chance google was being paid to run it. site...
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2018-04-01
Microsoft Excel Viewer (1997 - 2018)
seventy-four megabytes, and all it would do was show you a spreadsheet. nothing could be edited or saved, and a macro-enabled file would open but the macro...
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2018-04-01
Political Scrapbook (2009 - 2018)
in april 2018 a note went up saying the scrapbook team were taking a break to work on other projects, and nobody ever posted again. laurence durnan had run the...
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2018-04-01
StreetLend (2013 - 2018)
a ladder gets used twice a decade and costs real money, and that is the entire argument for borrowing one. chris beach built streetlend in 2013 as a london...
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2018-04-01
CoinTouch (2014 - 2018)
a european privacy law came into force on 25 may 2018 and one of the things it removed from the web was a free, no-custody bitcoin matching service run by one...
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2018-04
Hyde Park (hydepark.co.il) (2000 - 2018)
a london park gave it the name and the argument: anyone can stand up, anyone gets to talk. two israelis in their twenties put that on the web in may 2000 and...
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2018-03-31
Apparatus (2011 - 2018)
the swedish android sandbox puzzle game from 2011. you used a hammer to pin planks and wheels together. you connected motors and batteries. you tried to get a...
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2018-03-31
Adobe LiveCycle (2004 - 2018)
adobe livecycle was the enterprise pdf-forms server that ran inside banks and government agencies for about a decade. adobe rebranded it to experience manager...
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2018-03-31
Chikka (2000 - 2018)
chikka was a philippine messenger that bridged the web and the phone network, letting you sit at a pc and send a free text to someone's mobile even when they...
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2018-03-31
Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII (2004 - 2018)
square enix built a real final fantasy for japanese phones in 2004, an action rpg about the turks, set six years before the events of final fantasy vii,...
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2018-03-31
Pornokitsch (2008 - 2018)
anne c. perry and jared shurin ran a genre fiction blog out of london for ten years under a name that means, more or less, trash that people love. it won the...
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2018-03-31
Watch Me! TV (2006 - 2018)
fuji television's answer to youtube was a video site where a human looked at your clip before anybody else could. it opened in july 2006, three months before...
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2018-03-30
Firefox Marketplace (2012 - 2018)
on 29 march 2016 mozilla switched off payments and every platform except firefox OS, which had itself been cancelled a few months earlier. what remained ran...
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2018-03-30
Republika.pl (1999 - 2018)
about a thousand people a month were still logging in when onet closed republika www on 30 march 2018. in 2003 the same service had counted more than 300,000...
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2018-03-30
HuffPost Arabi (2015 - 2018)
london and istanbul were picked on purpose. arianna huffington said in the launch post that staying outside anyone's censorship was the point, and the arabic...
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2018-03-30
Josephine (2014 - 2018)
alameda county spent 2016 telling oakland home cooks that selling dinner to a neighbor was a misdemeanor. josephine, the startup that had signed those cooks...
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2018-03-29
Yahoo! Category (1996 - 2018)
about 800,000 sites, every one of them read by a person before it went anywhere. yahoo japan opened its directory on 1 april 1996 with roughly fifteen thousand...
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2018-03-28
Nintendo Zone (2008 - 2018)
nintendo put wifi hotspots into shops and restaurants so that a handheld would notice them by itself and pull down a demo or a video without anyone typing...
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2018-03-28
Gran Turismo 6 (2013 - 2018)
december 2013 was a strange month for a flagship. the playstation 4 had been on sale for three weeks and polyphony shipped gran turismo 6 for the machine it...
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2018-03-27
Lytro (2006 - 2018)
$140m and a stanford phd that turned into a product almost nobody bought. ren ng's plenoptic math was a real shift in how cameras could think about a scene....
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2018-03-27
Shyp (2013 - 2018)
kevin gibbon's on-demand shipping startup ran couriers as W-2 employees, raised $62 million from kleiner perkins, expanded to five cities and then had to pull...
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2018-03-26
Adobe Muse (2012 - 2018)
muse was adobe's bet that designers would build websites in a tool shaped like indesign. for six years it shipped indesign-style page layouts that compiled to...
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2018-03-26
Digg Reader (2013 - 2018)
when google announced reader would die on 1 july 2013, betaworks said out loud that its rebuilt digg would ship an rss reader before the deadline. they did. it...
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2018-03-20
RequestBin (2011 - 2018)
the oldest archived copy of requestb.in carries a donate box asking for help to "prove that we can sustainably run these kinds of public services for the...
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2018-03-19
123Movies (2015 - 2018)
the streaming-piracy site that briefly outdrew most legal services. operators in vietnam, peak traffic of ninety eight million a month in march 2018. they...
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2018-03-17
KeepVid (2006 - 2018)
on 17 march 2018 the box where you pasted the link disappeared from keepvid.com and a page about copyright took its place. for twelve years the site had done...
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2018-03-15
Phantom Secure (2008 - 2018)
vincent ramos was arrested in a restaurant in bellingham, washington on 7 march 2018, and eight days later the department of justice unsealed an indictment...
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2018-03-08
Yahoo Aviate (2013 - 2018)
aviate was an android launcher that rearranged your home screen based on context, mostly time of day and physical location. ex-googlers founded it in 2013....
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2018-03-08
Alluc (2005 - 2018)
alluc held no files. it indexed other people's streaming links, roughly a hundred million of them across more than seven hundred video hosts, and answered the...
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2018-03-06
Bumpers (2016 - 2018)
two ex-twitter engineers raised a million dollars to make podcasting feel like leaving a voice memo, and for sixteen months it did. the app normalized your...
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2018-03-05
Devilian (2015 - 2018)
a korean studio built an isometric action rpg with an mmo bolted around it, where your character had a human form and a devil form that leveled separately....
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2018-03-01
Project Tango (2014 - 2018)
project tango was google's first serious bet on depth-aware phones. it shipped on a peanut prototype, a yellowstone tablet, a lenovo phab 2 pro, and an asus...
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2018-03-01
Nextbit Robin (2016 - 2018)
the robin was a $399 android phone with 100 gb of cloud storage bolted into the OS. built by ex-android engineers who thought they could kickstarter their way...
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2018-03-01
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...
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2018-03-01
ImageBrief (2011 - 2018)
simon moss started this in sydney in 2011 and moved it to new york a year later, on an idea that reads well on a slide: instead of searching a stock catalog...
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2018-03-01
Blog.onet.pl (2004 - 2018)
in july 2006 a man who had been poland's prime minister until that summer opened a blog on onet's platform, and onet built a zone for well-known bloggers...
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2018-03-01
Sandglaz (2011 - 2018)
one idea, executed narrowly for seven years: a task you did not finish should move itself into next week rather than sit there accusing you. nada aldahleh and...
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2018-03
PhantomJS (2011 - 2018)
phantomjs was a webkit browser with the window taken off, driven entirely from javascript, and for most of the 2010s it was how an automated test actually...
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2018-02-28
Disney Movies Anywhere (2014 - 2018)
disney movies anywhere existed to fix a problem the studios had built themselves. a film bought on itunes stayed on itunes, and the disc in your hand came with...
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2018-02-28
ShortNews (1999 - 2018)
andreas mihalovits and oliver stangl started shortnews in 1999 and it ended up holding the title of oldest user-written news portal in germany, which is the...
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2018-02-26
Stan James (1973 - 2018)
the brand was 45 years old on the day it was switched off. two partners opened a betting shop in 1973 and built the name out of pieces of their own, stan out...
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2018-02-23
PubMed Central Canada (2009 - 2018)
four percent. that is the share of papers from cihr-funded research that ever got deposited into canada's own copy of pubmed central, and it is the number the...
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2018-02-20
Flixster (2006 - 2018)
flixster was a san francisco movie site from 2006 that let you rate films and see what your friends were watching, first as a website and then as a big early...
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2018-02-20
Swype (2009 - 2018)
swype was a touchscreen keyboard that let you type by dragging one finger across the letters of a word without lifting it. it shipped commercially in december...
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2018-02-19
Quagga (2003 - 2018)
a project called zebra was forked by its own contributors and renamed after the quagga, a subspecies of zebra hunted to extinction in the 1880s. for fourteen...
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2018-02-16
Twitter for Mac (2009 - 2018)
twitter for mac started as tweetie 2 for mac, written by loren brichter at atebits, the same developer who built the pull-to-refresh gesture on the original...
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2018-02-16
Norm Macdonald Live (2013 - 2018)
thirty nine episodes made across four and a half years for jash, a comedy network that had launched at sxsw sixteen days before the first one went up. a desk,...
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2018-02-15
DittoTV (2012 - 2018)
a broadcaster built an app that sold you its competitors' channels, which is a strange thing for a broadcaster to do and the only reason the app was worth...
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2018-02-15
SUSE Studio (2009 - 2018)
in july 2009 novell put a linux image builder on the open web, and for the first time you could assemble a distribution by ticking boxes in a browser and then...
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2018-02-14
Microsoft BizSpark (2008 - 2018)
bizspark was the startup-tier sibling of dreamspark. three years of free microsoft developer licenses for any company under one million dollars in revenue and...
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2018-02-13
Caller's Bane (2013 - 2018)
bethesda's lawyers looked at a card game from the minecraft studio and saw the elder scrolls. notch offered to settle it with a quake 3 match and got no reply,...
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2018-02-12
Oddshot (2015 - 2018)
twitch shipped clips in may 2016, and oddshot had twenty-one months left after that. a small helsinki company had built the thing everyone used to save a forty...
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2018-02-11
Verrit (2017 - 2018)
65.8 million was hillary clinton's popular vote total in 2016, and peter daou built an entire media company addressed to that number. verrit served political...
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2018-02-08
Pledgie (2007 - 2018)
mark daggett and garry dolley met working at revver and shared a taste for ruby. what they built in 2007 was a donation page you could embed anywhere as a...
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2018-02-06
Wileyfox (2015 - 2018)
wileyfox sold cheap unlocked android phones in britain from august 2015, and its one distinguishing feature was cyanogen os running out of the box instead of...
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2018-02-05
PVP Live (2012 - 2018)
the goodbye was addressed to the #pvpfam and it ran four sentences. pvp live had been an esports news operation out of frisco, texas since 2012, with about two...
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2018-02-04
The Key of Awesome (2007 - 2018)
mark douglas spent eleven years making a music video every week about whatever song was on american radio that week, on a channel that started life in june...
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2018-02-02
AcFun (2007 - 2018)
acfun launched june 2007 as china's first comment-overlay video site. the danmu format put viewer comments scrolling across the playback frame in real time,...
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2018-02-01
Ciao (1999 - 2018)
ciao launched out of munich in november 1999 and grew into the shopping review network of western europe, seven country sites where members wrote about the...
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2018-02-01
dooyoo (1999 - 2018)
dooyoo went online out of berlin in december 1999 and paid people, in points, to write about the things they already owned. at its height it ran in six...
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2018-02-01
Rock Band Network (2010 - 2018)
harmonix opened the rock band network on 4 march 2010 so bands could author their own songs into the game and sell them, splitting the revenue instead of...
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2018-02-01
Hatreon (2017 - 2018)
cody wilson soft launched it in june 2017 as a crowdfunding site with no content rules, built for people patreon had removed. it worked for roughly four months...
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2018-02-01
Wiadomości24.pl (2006 - 2018)
on 22 september 2017 polska press told the seven thousand people who had been writing its news that the site was closing, and gave them three months to...
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2018-02-01
Mapzen (2013 - 2018)
on 2 january 2018 a post went up on the company blog with a sad face in the title. samsung's new york mapping lab had spent four years building search and...
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2018-02-01
A Couple of Guys (1996 - 2018)
a gay newspaper in miami printed the first one in september 1996 and the last one ran in february 2018, which is twenty-one years of the same two men in the...
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2018-02-01
NewsIsFree (1999 - 2018)
12,609 sources, and 271,411 headlines in the previous twenty-four hours: that was the counter at the foot of newsisfree on the last day anybody archived it, 31...
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2018-02-01
Wit.ai Bot Engine (2016 - 2018)
april 2016 was the month everyone decided chatbots were next, and facebook shipped the tool for building them. twenty-two months later it was gone, folded into...
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2018-01-31
The Awl (2009 - 2018)
the awl was a small NYC site that ran on the premise that good writing could still be a business model on the open web. it had a sister network including the...
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2018-01-31
The Hairpin (2010 - 2018)
the hairpin was a women-focused literary blog inside the awl network, founded by edith zimmerman in september 2010 and run out of the same small new york...
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2018-01-31
Microsoft Classroom (2016 - 2018)
a free class hub for office 365 education tenants, opened as a preview on 14 april 2016, where a teacher made a class and handed out assignments that came back...
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2018-01-31
Master X Master (2017 - 2018)
two hundred and twenty four days is how long the global version lasted. ncsoft's moba let you bring two characters into a match and swap between them...
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2018-01-31
Anno Online (2013 - 2018)
blue byte built an anno game that ran inside a flash plugin, on the engine behind die siedler online, and it was good enough to win the deutscher...
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2018-01-31
Time Inc. (1922 - 2018)
the signage came off the lower manhattan building in the first week of february 2018. meredith corporation, an iowa publisher best known for better homes and...
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2018-01-31
GAZOO METAPOLIS (2008 - 2018)
mamoru oshii, the director of ghost in the shell, supervised a virtual city built by a car company for young japanese people who were no longer buying cars....
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2018-01-25
Perpetuum (2010 - 2018)
ten people in budapest spent five years building a single-shard sandbox mmo where you drive a robot across an alien planet and the economy is entirely other...
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2018-01-22
Ando (2016 - 2018)
ando was david chang's bet that delivery food failed because the food was an afterthought, not because delivery was hard. so momofuku built a restaurant with...
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2018-01-19
Facebook M (2015 - 2018)
facebook m was a chat assistant inside messenger that you could ask to book a restaurant or schedule a delivery, and a real human in menlo park would step in...
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2018-01-18
Batoto (2011 - 2018)
batoto was a manga reader that behaved decently in a category that mostly did not. it hosted fan translations and credited the groups who made them, and when a...
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2018-01-18
HuffPost Contributor Platform (2005 - 2018)
arianna huffington's opening move in 2005 was an address book. the huffington post launched with invited bloggers writing for nothing, and thirteen years later...
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2018-01-16
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...
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2018-01-15
Pronoun (2009 - 2018)
it started in 2009 as vook, a company selling books with video stitched into them, and spent six years failing at that before it found the thing it was...
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2018-01-15
知日部屋 (2005 - 2018)
a japanese studies professor at the chinese university of hong kong started a blog in may 2005 and ran it for thirteen years from a tilde path on the student...
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2018-01-10
nrg Maariv (1999 - 2018)
twenty five million shekels went into the june 2004 relaunch that turned maariv online into nrg, and the target was ynet. it never got there. the newspaper...
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2018-01-09
Microsoft Equation Editor (1991 - 2018)
the equation editor shipped with word for twenty seven years and was never the most loved tool in office. you opened it to insert a square root or a summation...
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2018-01-09
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...
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2018-01-08
Sports Illustrated (weekly print) (1954 - 2018)
american sports as a weekly magazine. time inc launched it 16 august 1954 and it ran on that cadence for 63 years. the january 2018 issues shipped biweekly for...
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2018-01-07
GoPro Karma (2016 - 2018)
the karma was gopro's drone. announced september 19 2016, on shelves october 23. on november 8 the company recalled every single unit it had sold (roughly...
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2018-01-07
Bitsquid (2009 - 2018)
two engineers out of the collapsed studio grin started a game engine in stockholm in 2009 and sold it to autodesk five years later. autodesk renamed it...
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2018-01-05
Anime Strike (2017 - 2018)
anime strike was the first branded subscription channel amazon built on its own channels platform, launched on 12 january 2017 at four dollars ninety nine a...
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2018-01-05
Uzbl (2009 - 2018)
gentoo buried it in january 2016 with a mask message saying the project was slowly dying and nothing was happening in the repository. the maintainer agreed,...
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2018-01-03
AOL Reader (2013 - 2018)
when google announced reader would die in july 2013 the whole rss-reader ecosystem scrambled. aol shipped its own reader on 24 june, one week ahead of the...
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2018-01-03
The Superficial (2004 - 2018)
the superficial ran from may 2004 under the tagline because you're ugly, and it was the meanest and funniest of the american celebrity blogs for about a...
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2018-01-03
Parsix GNU/Linux (2005 - 2018)
iran got its own debian derivative on 1 february 2005, and alan baghumian kept it current for twelve years, which is longer than plenty of distributions manage...
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2018-01-01
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (1987 - 2018)
mavis beacon teaches typing was a fictional typing tutor invented in 1987 by the software toolworks. a haitian model named renee l'esperance posed for the box...
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2018-01-01
Microsoft Songsmith (2009 - 2018)
you sang into the microphone and songsmith built a backing track in a genre you picked. the january 2009 launch came with one of the most- mocked infomercials...
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2018-01-01
Mig33 (2006 - 2018)
mig33 was the mobile chat app indonesia ran on before whatsapp arrived. it peaked at 33 million monthly active users across southeast asia and the gulf-state...
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2018-01-01
SiteMeter (1996 - 2018)
for a decade SiteMeter was the small color bar at the bottom of every blogger.com blog. it counted visits, plotted referrers, and gave you a dashboard for...
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2018-01-01
SecuROM (1998 - 2018)
securom was the sony dadc pc-game copy protection that shipped in 1998 and inherited the new-title business from safedisc and starforce in the mid 2000s. the...
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2018-01-01
Fullscreen (streaming) (2016 - 2018)
a subscription video service that cost about five dollars a month and aimed straight at teenagers, built around the youtube-style creators that fullscreen...
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2018-01-01
Peeple (2015 - 2018)
peeple was pitched in 2015 as a yelp for human beings, a place to leave star reviews on people whether they consented or not. the internet reacted the way you...
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2018-01-01
StartCom / StartSSL (1999 - 2018)
startcom handed out ssl certificates for nothing from 1999, years before any serious authority thought that was a survivable business. it charged you to revoke...
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2018-01-01
Biip.no (2005 - 2018)
biip was norway's biggest online hangout for teenagers, a community that at its height signed up more than four hundred and fifty thousand of them, close to a...
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2018-01-01
Lanyrd (2010 - 2018)
lanyrd started as a honeymoon project in june 2010 and launched that september at a conference in brighton. it signed in with twitter and read who you...
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2018-01-01
Voddler (2009 - 2018)
voddler's argument was that it would never have to pay for delivery at netflix scale, because the audience would do the carrying. vnet was a controlled...
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2018-01-01
Z Launcher (2014 - 2018)
nokia closed the sale of its handset division to microsoft in april 2014 and announced an android launcher in june. it was a real piece of software rather than...
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2018-01-01
RocketHub (2009 - 2018)
fifteen million dollars is what efactor group paid for rockethub on 15 april 2015, and three years later the brand was switched off. it was the third-place...
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2018-01-01
ExpressCard (2003 - 2018)
thirty-four millimeters wide, with one lane of pci express and one usb port wired to the back of it. expresscard was the 2003 replacement for the pc card slot,...
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2018-01-01
Foodily (2011 - 2018)
february 2011, two former yahoo marketers with five million dollars from index ventures and one idea: recipe search was already solved, recipe trust was not....
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2018-01-01
Catahya (2002 - 2018)
a stockholm association affiliated with sverok ran the largest fantasy site on the swedish internet for most of the 2000s, then kept running it for another...
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2018-01-01
Hevre (חבר'ה) (2001 - 2018)
1.2 million registered users in a country of seven million, found by asking people one question: which year did you finish school, and which unit were you in....
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2018-01-01
BIBSYS (1972 - 2018)
trondheim, february 1972: two university libraries and a computing center started automating their card catalogs together, and what they built ended up holding...
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2018-01-01
Crypto AG (1952 - 2018)
the cia and west germany's bnd bought this swiss company in june 1970 for 5.75 million dollars and spent the next fifty years selling compromised cipher...
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2018-01-01
This Is Why You're Fat (2009 - 2018)
"where dreams become heart attacks" was the subtitle, and for most of 2009 it was one of the most visited jokes on the english-speaking internet. two media...
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2018-01-01
SurfPatrol (2010 - 2018)
eighty nine percent of the browsers that visited surfpatrol in 2011 came back with at least one known hole in them, and nearly half came back with more than...
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2018-01-01
LinkExpats (2007 - 2018)
four thousand members in february 2011, eight hundred of them in the united arab emirates, which is why an abu dhabi newspaper ended up writing about a site...
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2018-01-01
Feral Audio (2012 - 2018)
on 21 december 2017 a musician published an account of a relationship with dustin marshall, who had co-founded feral audio five years earlier. marshall...
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2018
Begun (2002 - 2018)
andrey andreev built the runet's first traffic counter in 1999, sold it, and in 2002 built the runet's first contextual advertising network. google offered...
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2017-12-31
Dial-up Internet (1979 - 2010s)
the way most of the world got online from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. the 14.4k modem became 33.6, then 56k. the handshake sound is one of the few...
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2017-12-31
Motion Twin (Flash era) (2001 - 2017)
a small french collective that made hammerfest, mush, dinoparc, and a stack of other browser games in the early 2000s. the flash games died when flash died....
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2017-12-31
Plaxo (2002 - 2017)
plaxo was the contact-updater service that mailed your friends to ask them to refresh their phone numbers in your address book. for two years the inbox-spam...
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2017-12-31
The Real Tooth Fairies (2008 - 2017)
the kids' tooth fairy site. you took a quiz, got matched to one of six fairies, and got to explore their world. each fairy had a song and a storybook. there...
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2017-12-31
Microsoft Groove Music (2012 - 2017)
groove music was the third name microsoft tried for the same streaming-music service it had been trying to keep alive since the zune. it started as xbox music...
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2017-12-31
Cidco MailStation (1999 - 2017)
the mailstation was a battery-powered email-only countertop appliance, shipped by cidco in late 1999 at around a hundred dollars plus an annual service fee. it...
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2017-12-31
HowAboutWe (2010 - 2017)
howaboutwe tried to make online dating less about the profile and more about the date itself. you would post a sentence beginning with how about we, and people...
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2017-12-31
Meez (2006 - 2017)
meez was a teen virtual world made in san francisco for an american audience. ninety percent of its users lived in the us. burak was twenty-two and halfway...
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2017-12-31
Naymz (2006 - 2017)
naymz built a public credibility score it called repscore and asked the english-speaking internet to care. about 1.8 million people did. burak, twenty-two and...
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2017-12-31
Microsoft Bing Audio (2011 - 2017)
bing audio was the shazam-equivalent microsoft built into windows phone 7.5 and shipped from september 27 2011 onward. it was a microsoft-developed audio...
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2017-12-31
WhatsApp for BlackBerry (2010 - 2017)
whatsapp launched in 2009 on iphone, then spent the next year shipping native clients for the platforms that owned the rest of the global phone market. the...
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2017-12-31
Esmas.com (2000 - 2017)
esmas was televisa's portal play for the spanish-language web. it launched in 2000 as a one-roof aggregator for shopping, classifieds, dating, horoscopes,...
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2017-12-31
Sony Media Go (2009 - 2017)
sony's answer to itunes for anyone locked into the sony hardware world. it moved music and video onto the psp, the vita, the walkman, the xperia, all from one...
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2017-12-31
Figment (2010 - 2017)
figment was a place for teenagers to write fiction and put it in front of other teenagers who wrote fiction. two new yorker staffers built it in 2010, and it...
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2017-12-31
Queer Lala Times (2013 - 2017)
queer lala times was a chinese-language queer magazine published by the chinese lala alliance from 2013, and it never had a website: it lived on douban and...
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2017-12-31
Pyro Studios (1996 - 2017)
pyro studios was a madrid company that made a world war two tactics game nobody had asked spain for and sold five million copies of the series. commandos ran...
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2017-12-31
Hello Kitty Online (2008 - 2017)
hello kitty online was a free-to-play mmorpg out of hong kong, made by sanrio digital with typhoon games, built around farming and crafting instead of combat,...
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2017-12-31
CloudPets (2015 - 2017)
a mongodb holding 821,000 accounts sat on a public ip with no password on it, and shodan indexed it on christmas day 2016. the voice messages themselves, 2.18...
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2017-12-31
Edusim (2007 - 2017)
a kansas education service center spent a decade arguing that the whiteboard at the front of the room was a 3d surface, not a projector screen. edusim was that...
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2017-12-31
TitanPad (2010 - 2017)
on 14 april 2010 etherpad.com stopped letting anyone create a new pad, because google had bought appjet and was switching it off. michael prokop, christian...
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2017-12-31
TmBox (2012 - 2017)
two hundred million plays went through a japanese upload box that never asked you to make an account, because your twitter account was the account. when...
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2017-12-31
The Outliner of Giants (2009 - 2017)
a web application for people who think in nested lists, which is a smaller audience than it sounds and a more stubborn one. it ran from 2009 on google's app...
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2017-12-29
Gratipay (2012 - 2017)
152 thursdays in a row it paid people, and then one thursday it did not. stripe had told gittip that what it was doing looked like money transmission under...
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2017-12-27
Another Round (2015 - 2017)
two buzzfeed staff writers started a drinking podcast in 2015 and spent three years turning it into the place where black american writers said what they...
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2017-12-25
Zeropaid.com (2000 - 2017)
on christmas day 2017 zeropaid started returning a database connection error, and that was the end of it. nothing was announced, and one of its own writers...
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2017-12-16
Grams (2014 - 2017)
grams appeared in april 2014 and indexed the tor drug markets the way a search engine indexes anything else, down to an ad system and a logo drawn in google's...
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2017-12-15
AOL Instant Messenger (1997 - 2017)
the AOL Instant Messenger. the running yellow guy was its mascot. it was the messenger of every american millennial after school in 2003. in turkey we mostly...
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2017-12-15
Vidme (2014 - 2017)
vidme was the youtube competitor with reddit voting on top, the one that thought a creator-first revenue split could pry monetization away from google. it...
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2017-12-15
CodePlex (2006 - 2017)
codeplex was microsoft's open-source project host. launched in beta may 2006, public june 27 2006. it ran on tfvc and mercurial first, added git later. peak...
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2017-12-15
Docs.com (2010 - 2017)
docs.com was two different microsoft products wearing the same address. the first launched on 21 april 2010 at facebook's f8 conference, a fuse labs project...
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2017-12-15
Uclue (2007 - 2017)
google answers stopped taking new questions on 30 november 2006 and put a few hundred paid researchers out of work overnight. roger browne, one of them, had a...
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2017-12-15
CompuServe Forums (1981 - 2017)
thirty-six years is a long run for anything with a login on it. the forums opened in 1981 as special interest groups, eight of them, and grew into thousands of...
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2017-12-15
FeedSync (2005 - 2017)
ray ozzie posted a thing called really simple sharing on 20 november 2005, three weeks into his job as microsoft's chief software architect. the idea was that...
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2017-12-11
Origami Flowers (2009 - 2017)
the small mobile flower-growing series. you tended an origami rose, daisy, iris, orchid, sunflower, or tulip. the games connected to a shared server, which...
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2017-12-11
Nana10 (1999 - 2017)
gadi shamshon and zev alon started nana in 1999 inside an israeli isp's offices in haifa, and for most of two decades it was one of the places the hebrew...
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2017-12-10
Alto Mail (2012 - 2017)
aol built an email client that did not want to give you an email address. alto opened on 18 october 2012, invitation only, and logged into the gmail or yahoo...
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2017-12-08
Dev Bootcamp (2012 - 2017)
three people in san francisco started a nineteen-week program in february 2012 that would take somebody with no background and try to make them employable as a...
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2017-12-06
Ghost in the Shell: First Assault Online (2015 - 2017)
a july 2017 patch called renewal is what finished this one off. nexon and neople built a free-to-play shooter inside the ghost in the shell: stand alone...
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2017-12-05
Verizon.net Email (2000 - 2017)
the company that took over verizon's mail in 2017 was aol, which verizon itself had bought two years earlier. the mx record for verizon.net moved onto aol's...
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2017-12-01
AOL Radio (2001 - 2017)
aol radio launched on october 16 2001 as radio@aol, a 200-station streaming service bundled inside the aol 7.0 client. the audio backend came from spinner, the...
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2017-12-01
Doppler Labs Here One (2013 - 2017)
doppler labs was a new-york-based hearables startup founded in 2013 by noah kraft and fritz lanman. it raised over $50 million from universal music, live...
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2017-12-01
Leeroy Jenkins (2005 - 2017)
a guild called pals for life uploaded forty five seconds of a raid falling apart on 11 may 2005 and the name became a word for anyone who charges in without...
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2017-12-01
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...
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2017-12-01
Classic Shell (2009 - 2017)
classic shell was a free windows utility by ivo beltchev that put an old fashioned start menu back on a system that had taken one away. it launched on 29...
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2017-12-01
Develop (1996 - 2017)
a monthly magazine about making games rather than buying them, which meant nobody outside the industry ever picked it up and everybody inside it read the...
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2017-12-01
Facebook Ticker (2011 - 2017)
facebook switched the ticker on for everyone on 20 september 2011, a strip down the right side of the page that showed friends' activity as it happened instead...
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2017-12-01
Cocadaboa (2001 - 2017)
rio de janeiro, 2001: an economist by training named wagner martins starts a humor site with a handful of friends and signs it mr. manson. the disclaimer said...
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2017-12-01
Filsh (2007 - 2017)
three million people a month pasted a video link into filsh.net and got a file back, which made a small company in the ruhr the market leader for video...
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2017-12-01
Russkiy Kurier (2003 - 2017)
igor golembiovsky was removed from novye izvestia in 2003 after the paper ran a piece about a cult of personality forming around putin. he took the newsroom...
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2017-12-01
Gimme Bar (2010 - 2017)
a bookmark points at a page, and then the page changes. gimme bar saved the thing itself, the image file rather than the address it was living at, into a...
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2017-12-01
Style Jukebox (2013 - 2017)
timișoara, romania is where two people built a cloud locker for the kind of listener who still owned their music and cared what bitrate it was in. ionuț antiu...
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2017-11-30
Geekadelphia (2007 - 2017)
on 29 november 2007 two friends in philadelphia started a blog to have somewhere to put the silly videos they were making. ten years and one day later the last...
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2017-11-29
SaveUp (2011 - 2017)
seven million dollars of venture funding went into a product whose entire thesis was that americans would save more if saving felt like a lottery ticket. from...
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2017-11-28
Pop Up Archive (2012 - 2017)
oakland, 2012: two berkeley information-science students turned a master's final project into the company that transcribed public radio's back catalog....
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2017-11-27
Marvel Heroes (2013 - 2017)
marvel heroes was diablo by another name with the full marvel roster as playable characters, and for four years it actually worked. then sexual-misconduct...
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2017-11-25
ooVoo (2007 - 2017)
the group video chat people used because skype's free tier only worked for small calls. up to twelve callers at once on every platform that mattered, including...
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2017-11-23
Fatso (2004 - 2017)
a dvd and blu-ray rental service that ran through new zealand post, started in auckland in 2004 by rob berman of westside media. you paid a monthly fee, kept a...
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2017-11-23
Moldovan Wikipedia (2004 - 2017)
article 13 of moldova's constitution says the state language functions on the latin alphabet, and that single clause did most of the argument's work. a...
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2017-11-17
Toy Freaks (2012 - 2017)
six point nine billion views, and then a termination notice one day after youtube rewrote the rule it fell under. toy freaks ran from 2012 to 17 november 2017...
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2017-11-17
Emberlight (2014 - 2017)
270 target stores carried the emberlight socket, a threaded adapter that sat between a lamp and an ordinary bulb and made the bulb dimmable from a phone. atif...
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2017-11-16
Bluegogo (2016 - 2017)
a little over a year is the whole life of china's third-largest bike-share company. li gang, who made carbon racing bicycles at speedx, had around 70,000 blue...
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2017-11-14
Firebug (2006 - 2017)
joe hewitt shipped firebug as a firefox extension in january 2006 and it changed what a web page was to work on. before it you read view-source and guessed....
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2017-11-14
Vimperator (2007 - 2017)
vimperator turned firefox into a modal editor. the toolbars went away and a command line took their place at the bottom of the window, where you typed what you...
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2017-11-14
Firefox Legacy Add-ons (2004 - 2017)
firefox 57 shipped on 14 november 2017. it was the fastest firefox in years, and it was also the release that broke every extension written against xul. the...
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2017-11-14
Lucifox (2011 - 2017)
a swedish developer working as ordbrand built an e-book reader that lived inside a firefox tab and named the whole family of it after a seventeenth century...
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2017-11-14
Fasterfox (2005 - 2017)
the settings window had five presets and the last one was called extreme, with help text admitting it went past what the specifications asked for and raised...
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2017-11-10
60dB (2016 - 2017)
60db was a short-form audio app that played you a personalized stream of news and stories, each one kept short and tuned to what you listened to. it came from...
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2017-11-10
Xaphir (2017 - 2017)
xilopix spent eight years in épinal building a search engine that refused to rank by popularity. xaphir went live on 9 may 2017 with 169 million pages indexed...
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2017-11-08
Miiverse (2012 - 2017)
miiverse was a social network where the main form of expression was a doodle drawn on a wii u gamepad. it had heavy moderation and a per-game community...
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2017-11-08
Seeso (2016 - 2017)
seeso was nbcuniversal's attempt at a comedy-only streaming channel. evan shapiro launched it on january 7 2016 at $3.99 a month with snl and parks and rec in...
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2017-11-07
Nintendo TVii (2012 - 2017)
nintendo tvii was a tv-discovery feature for the wii u gamepad. it shipped in japan on december 8 2012 and in north america on december 20 the same year....
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2017-11-06
Ameba Now (2009 - 2017)
ameba now was cyberagent's twitter clone for japan, built around the celebrity accounts that already lived on the ameba blog side. it launched in december 2009...
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2017-11-06
Anarchopedia (2004 - 2017)
a serbian anarchist named miloš rančić started anarchopedia on 30 september 2004 as a wiki that refused the neutral point of view on purpose. it ran in a dozen...
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2017-11-02
DNAinfo (2009 - 2017)
dnainfo was a joe ricketts hyperlocal news network covering new york city and chicago. it launched november 2009 in manhattan, expanded to chicago in 2012,...
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2017-11-01
Doppler Labs (2013 - 2017)
doppler labs wanted to put a computer in your ear, a way to edit the live sound of the world the same way you edit a photo. it raised over fifty million...
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2017-11-01
Junglee (1996 - 2017)
junglee died twice under the same owner. amazon bought it in august 1998 for 1.6 million shares, used its database technology to launch a service that searched...
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2017-11-01
BBC Store (2015 - 2017)
the bbc opened its archive as a shop in november 2015 and let you buy an episode and download it to keep. the corporation believed in the idea enough to close...
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2017-11-01
Microsoft Word Viewer (1995 - 2017)
microsoft shipped a free program whose whole job was to open a word file on a machine that had not bought word. it could display a document and print it, and...
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2017-11-01
Kamcord (2012 - 2017)
kamcord began as a piece of code that game developers dropped into their own apps so a player could record the last thirty seconds of play and post it without...
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2017-11-01
Microsoft WebMatrix (2011 - 2017)
visual studio code came out of the same company that made this one, which is the whole story in a sentence. webmatrix shipped free on 13 january 2011 with a...
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2017-11-01
Opinion (2014 - 2017)
a hundred thousand people recorded on it in three years, which was the problem. opinion let you make and publish a podcast from an iphone for free, and the...
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2017-10-31
Bower (2012 - 2017)
twitter's front-end package manager. it solved the problem of managing javascript libraries before npm decided to manage them too, then was deprecated in...
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2017-10-31
Lovefilm (2002 - 2017)
lovefilm was the uk version of the netflix-by-mail loop. you set a queue, red envelopes arrived in the post in turn, you sent them back to get the next one. it...
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2017-10-31
Daisuki (2013 - 2017)
the studios tried to sell anime to the rest of the world themselves. daisuki launched in may 2013, owned by the ad agency asatsu-dk with toei animation and...
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2017-10-30
IBM Bluemix (2014 - 2017)
ibm announced bluemix as an open beta in february 2014, a cloud-foundry-based platform-as-a-service running on softlayer infrastructure. general availability...
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2017-10-30
The Consumerist (2005 - 2017)
consumerist started at gawker media in december 2005 as a blog about being treated badly by companies, and it was very good at it. consumers union bought it in...
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2017-10-27
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...
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2017-10-25
Microsoft Kinect (2010 - 2017)
the depth-sensing camera bar for xbox 360 and xbox one. shipped november 2010, hit 8 million units in 60 days, the fastest-selling consumer electronics device...
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2017-10-18
Instantbird (2007 - 2017)
instantbird was a chat client built on the same engine as firefox, talking to twenty protocols at once through libpurple and through javascript plugins its own...
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2017-10-17
Visceral Games (1998 - 2017)
visceral games started in 1998 as ea redwood shores, an internal ea studio working on tiger woods golf and bond licensed games. the dead space pitch came out...
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2017-10-10
Nokia OZO (2015 - 2017)
eight lenses in an aluminum ball, each with a 195 degree field of view, eight microphones, sixty thousand dollars. nokia built it in 2015 for the professional...
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2017-10-09
FatWallet (1999 - 2017)
a deals forum with a rebate engine bolted on, where american bargain hunters posted every price mistake and coupon code they could find. it was sold up a chain...
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2017-10-08
Windows Phone (2010 - 2017)
microsoft's mobile OS that came after iphone and android were already entrenched. the live tile interface was genuinely interesting. nobody made apps for it...
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2017-10-08
Microsoft Lumia (2014 - 2017)
microsoft lumia was the post-acquisition phase of the nokia lumia line that microsoft inherited when it closed the $7.2B nokia devices deal on april 25 2014....
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2017-10-07
Xbox Live Indie Games (2008 - 2017)
xbox live indie games (xblig) was microsoft's hobbyist-developer storefront on the xbox 360, announced at gdc 2008 and launched on 19 november 2008 as part of...
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2017-10-06
Efritin.com (2015 - 2017)
efritin was a nigerian classifieds site, the local build of the pattern olx and gumtree had already proven elsewhere, run out of stockholm by saltside...
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2017-10-06
Doorman (2013 - 2017)
san francisco, 2013: a company whose entire product was being home when you were not. doorman took delivery of your packages and brought them to your door...
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2017-10-04
Mattel Aristotle (2017 - 2017)
january 2017: mattel walks into ces with a $299 speaker for the nursery, a camera to sit over the crib, and a pitch about a machine that would follow your...
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2017-10-02
IndieBox (2014 - 2017)
indiebox took games that only existed as steam downloads and made them physical again, one a month, in cardboard boxes built to look like 1990s pc software....
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2017-10-02
Tactical Intervention (2013 - 2017)
minh le made counter-strike in a bedroom in 1999 and spent the following decade in seoul making this. tactical intervention came out free to play on 28 march...
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2017-10-01
Newsvine (2006 - 2017)
newsvine was a community-driven news platform that let users write articles and have their columns appear next to associated press wire copy. mike davidson and...
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2017-10-01
Snapchat Spectacles (1st gen) (2016 - 2017)
the first time anyone heard "vending machine for sunglasses" was also the last time anyone wanted one. snap built 800k pairs and sold around a quarter of them....
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2017-10-01
ABCnews.com.co (2016 - 2017)
paul horner registered a domain that read as the real thing to anybody not looking hard at the end of it, copied the network's logo and page layout, and...
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2017-09-30
Raptr (2008 - 2017)
raptr was a gaming overlay and activity tracker built by dennis fong, the ex-xfire founder. it auto-detected what game you were playing, tracked your hours,...
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2017-09-29
Affinity Labs (2006 - 2017)
christopher michel sold military.com to monster in 2004 for forty million dollars, then started a company in 2006 to do the same trick about twenty more times....
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2017-09-28
Theano (2007 - 2017)
theano came out of a university lab in montreal in 2007 and it was the first library that let you write mathematics in python and have it compiled down to the...
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2017-09-28
Snapster (2015 - 2017)
in the summer of 2015 vkontakte started blocking instagram links inside its own network, to push people toward a photo app it had shipped in july. the app was...
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2017-09-27
Breath of Fire 6 (2016 - 2017)
capcom's network game conference in august 2013 is where the series ended, though the dying took four more years to finish. the sixth breath of fire, the first...
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2017-09-27
碧海银沙网 (1996 - 2017)
a directive from guangdong telecom on 13 september 2017 closed four of its regional portals at once, and 碧海银沙 was the oldest of them. it had been the front...
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2017-09-25
Happy Farm (2008 - 2017)
happy farm is the original that most of the world only met through its copy. from november 2008 it let chinese social-network users plant crops and, once they...
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2017-09-25
Dichtbij.nl (2010 - 2017)
seven years of neighborhood reporting went off the internet in one move, and the archive went with it. dichtbij.nl was telegraaf media groep's answer to the...
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2017-09-21
Java Applets (1995 - 2017)
applets were how the web tried to be a real application platform in the 90s. you visited a page, the gray loading rectangle appeared, sun's coffee logo spun,...
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2017-09-20
YouTube Video Editor (2010 - 2017)
for seven years youtube kept a full editing timeline inside the website, and you did not need a program, a license or a machine that could handle video to use...
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2017-09-19
Nigma (2005 - 2017)
two students from the computational mathematics faculty at moscow state university launched nigma on 12 april 2005. it had no index of its own. it queried...
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2017-09-19
Domino's App feat. Hatsune Miku (2013 - 2017)
ios 11 killed it, which is a strange sentence to write about a pizza app. in march 2013 domino's pizza japan and crypton future media shipped an ordering app...
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2017-09-19
Safari RSS (2005 - 2017)
july 2012 is when apple took the feed reader out of safari, seven years after shipping it as a headline feature of tiger. the blue rss button in the address...
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2017-09-18
Shareaza (2002 - 2017)
shareaza was the windows file-sharing client that searched four networks from one box, written by michael stokes in 2002 and released under the gpl in june...
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2017-09-15
TrackID (2005 - 2017)
years before there was an app store to download one from, sony ericsson was shipping a phone that could listen to a room and come back with the name of the...
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2017-09-12
iTunes LP (2009 - 2017)
itunes lp was apple's attempt to make a digital album feel like a packaged record. the format shipped with itunes 9 on september 9 2009 and bundled a small web...
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2017-09-10
SceneAccess (2006 - 2017)
the farewell page carried two dates and nothing else that mattered: 10.10.2006 to 10.09.2017. scc was an invite-only tracker for scene releases that ran for...
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2017-09-08
imgh.us (2007 - 2017)
699,927 images were sitting on it at 11:10 UTC on the morning it was supposed to close. the announcement had gone up seven weeks earlier and gave a reason most...
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2017-09-06
QQ Xuanfeng (2009 - 2017)
qq xuanfeng was tencent's download manager for windows, released in january 2009 out of an older product called super xuanfeng. it pulled files over http and...
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2017-09-06
Nylas Mail (2015 - 2017)
eighty-four dollars a year was the price of the pro tier on an open source mail client, and nylas raised that price on the last holdouts three weeks after it...
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2017-09-04
Torrent Project (2010 - 2017)
eight million torrents in the index and not one of them on its own disk. torrent project was a search box over other people's indexes, which is why it was...
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2017-09-01
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...
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2017-09-01
Juicero (2013 - 2017)
the 400 dollar wifi juicer. a beautifully built aluminum press that crushed proprietary single-serving produce packs with four tons of force, connected to...
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2017-09-01
Afrostream (2015 - 2017)
tonjé bakang spent the summer of 2017 flying between american cities looking for a buyer before the money ran out. afrostream had opened in paris on 1...
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2017-08-31
Wrzuta.pl (2006 - 2017)
wrzuta was poland's youtube, a place to throw up a video or an mp3 and hand someone the link, and for a couple of years in the mid-2000s it was one of the...
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2017-08-31
Livedoor Reader (2006 - 2017)
livedoor reader was japan's answer to the online feed reader, launched in 2006, quick and built for the keyboard in a way power users loved. when google shut...
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2017-08-31
Emil Chronicle Online (2005 - 2017)
headlock built a japanese mmorpg around characters who stayed small and cute while the numbers behind them got very large. gravity and broccoli put it on...
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2017-08-31
indoona (2011 - 2017)
september 2011 is when tiscali decided italy should have its own skype, and 31 august 2017 is when it stopped paying for the idea. indoona did free calls and...
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2017-08-31
BillGuard (2010 - 2017)
sixty million dollars of charges that cardholders did not recognize, found by pooling what strangers complained about online and matching it against your own...
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2017-08-31
CrimeCraft (2009 - 2017)
a box on the shelf at best buy, a monthly fee behind it and sponsored advertising inside the game itself. that was the launch model in august 2009 and it...
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2017-08-26
Empathy (2007 - 2017)
empathy was the chat client gnome shipped by default from version 2.24 onward, and ubuntu and fedora both made it the standard messenger in 2009. it did not...
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2017-08-24
KANOA (2015 - 2017)
twenty five pairs is the number the contract manufacturer actually built, against two years of pre-orders taken at a hundred and fifty dollars a time. a...
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2017-08-22
Adobe SpeedGrade (2012 - 2017)
the lumetri color engine arrived at adobe with the iridas purchase in 2011, and it spent the next six years eating the application it came in with. speedgrade...
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2017-08-21
Whedonesque (2002 - 2017)
a link blog about the work of joss whedon, started in 2002 by two people in the netherlands, which grew into the place his announcements landed first. whedon...
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2017-08-17
Stormpath (2011 - 2017)
on 6 march 2017 okta said it had acquired stormpath, and in the same announcement stormpath told its customers the api would stop answering on august 17. that...
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2017-08-08
Tinder Social (2016 - 2017)
tinder social let you create a group with up to three of your facebook friends and swipe on other groups to plan a real-world hangout. it launched in the us,...
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2017-08-08
Stack Overflow Documentation (2016 - 2017)
documentation was stack overflow's biggest product expansion since launch. the pitch was example-first developer docs, written and edited the same way answers...
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2017-08-06
Pengyou (2008 - 2017)
pengyou was tencent's facebook-shaped attempt to compete with renren in the chinese real-name social-network market. it launched in august 2008 as qq xiaoyou...
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2017-08-04
Facebook Lifestage (2016 - 2017)
lifestage was facebook's video app aimed only at high school students, built by a teenager it employed. michael sayman was nineteen and already a product...
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2017-08-04
Heat Street (2016 - 2017)
news corp launched heat street on 20 april 2016 with louise mensch running it, pitched internally as a libertarian huffington post and written in a looser...
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2017-08-01
CinemaNow (1999 - 2017)
cinemanow was a us video-on-demand service founded in 1999 by curt marvis and bruce eisen, one of the first internet movie storefronts to actually license...
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2017-08-01
Bilddagboken (2004 - 2017)
bilddagboken was the swedish photo-diary community founded in may 2004 by sebastian björkelid and joakim grönvall in gothenburg. it grew into the first big...
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2017-08-01
Gay.com (1994 - 2017)
gay.com was a chat and personals site that for about a decade was the default place gay men in america met each other online. mark elderkin registered the...
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2017-08-01
Toons.TV (2013 - 2017)
rovio launched toons.tv on 17 february 2013 on an argument that made sense at the time. angry birds had passed 1.7 billion downloads, so the games were already...
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2017-08-01
Opera Coast (2013 - 2017)
coast was opera answering a question none of the larger browser companies were asking, which was what a browser would look like if somebody had invented it for...
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2017-08-01
deltathree (1996 - 2017)
on 14 march 1997 the company demonstrated a telephone conversation carried over the internet, which at the time was closer to a stunt than a product....
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2017-07-31
Microsoft Word Flow Keyboard (2016 - 2017)
word flow was microsoft's windows phone swipe keyboard, ported to iphone in april 2016 as a microsoft garage experiment. it lived for fifteen months, never...
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2017-07-31
Pandora Australia (2012 - 2017)
pandora spent its whole life fenced in by music licensing, and australia and new zealand were the only countries outside america it ever managed to open. it...
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2017-07-31
Ozlo (2014 - 2017)
charles jolley left his job running platform at facebook, spent three years building an assistant that read four hundred thousand restaurant menus, and then...
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2017-07-25
BTC-e (2011 - 2017)
btc-e ran for six years as the crypto exchange that did not ask questions. no kyc, no anti-money-laundering, russian ownership, headline low fees. on 25 july...
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2017-07-25
Clipfish (2006 - 2017)
clipfish was germany's homegrown answer to youtube, launched by the broadcaster RTL in 2006. it leaned on music videos and clips from RTL's own casting shows,...
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2017-07-21
Fightland (2012 - 2017)
vice media took $450 million from tpg in june 2017 and cut about sixty jobs a month later. fightland went with them. for five years it had been the strangest...
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2017-07-21
Graphiq (2009 - 2017)
kevin o'connor had already built doubleclick when he started findthebest in 2009 as a machine for comparing anything against anything. the database behind it...
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2017-07-20
Hansa Market (2015 - 2017)
hansa was the third largest market of its kind when the dutch national police took it off two german administrators in june 2017 and then kept it open. for the...
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2017-07-20
The Iron Yard (2013 - 2017)
$15.9 million bought the company behind the university of phoenix a 62 percent stake in a code school running out of greenville, south carolina. that was june...
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2017-07-19
Hackpad (2011 - 2017)
a fast collaborative editor that startups loved for the same reasons every etherpad fork gets loved: real-time cursors and plain text with just enough markdown...
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2017-07-12
Sony Dash (2010 - 2017)
a firmware update on 12 july 2017 turned every connected sony dash into a flashing logo, and there was no way to decline it. the box had arrived at ces in...
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2017-07-11
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (1995 - 2017)
one tree software wrote sourcesafe and microsoft bought the company in 1994, shipping visual sourcesafe 3.1 in february 1995 as the version control that came...
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2017-07-11
ProClarity (1995 - 2017)
boise, idaho is not where business intelligence software is supposed to come from. knosys started there in 1995, renamed itself proclarity in 2001 after the...
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2017-07-07
Firefall (2010 - 2017)
a free-to-play sci-fi mmo shooter that took six years to ship and less than three to run. red 5 studios burned through its money, fired the whole dev team in...
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2017-07-07
Clef (2013 - 2017)
on 6 march 2017 clef gave itself three months to live, then quietly took one more. the login worked by holding your phone camera up to a pattern of bars...
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2017-07-06
Jawbone (1999 - 2017)
jawbone shipped a bluetooth headset that cleaned up call audio with noise gating, then a jambox speaker that defined the portable bluetooth shape for half a...
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2017-07-05
AlphaBay (2014 - 2017)
alphabay took the silk road model and industrialized it. by the middle of 2017 it carried roughly 200,000 users against 40,000 vendors, with somewhere between...
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2017-07-04
Pordede (2013 - 2017)
on 4 july 2017 the pordede account database walked out the door and the site never came back up under its own name. for four years it had been where spain went...
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2017-07-02
Clammr (2015 - 2017)
twenty-four seconds was the whole product. clammr let you drag a window across a podcast waveform, grab the good part, and post it somewhere people would...
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2017-07-01
Harvard Graphics (1986 - 2017)
harvard graphics was the dos presentation tool that sat in every corporate slide deck before powerpoint arrived. software publishing corporation shipped the...
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2017-07-01
Xbox Fitness (2013 - 2017)
microsoft's biggest bet on the Kinect 2.0 sensor as a fitness camera. an xbox one launch title in november 2013 that read your heart rate off skin-tone shifts...
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2017-07-01
Russian Anonymous Marketplace (2012 - 2017)
ramp opened in september 2012, a year and a half after silk road, and it was still running when every market that had copied silk road was gone. it survived by...
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2017-07-01
rlogin (1983 - 2017)
in 1983 berkeley shipped a command that logged you into another machine by having your machine vouch for you, and for a decade that was simply how people moved...
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2017-06-30
Yahoo News Digest (2014 - 2017)
yahoo news digest opened twice a day, with eight summarized stories at 8am and another eight at 6pm. it won the 2014 apple design award. the algorithm came...
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2017-06-30
Tilt (2012 - 2017)
tilt was the social-payments app that thought venmo plus kickstarter was a single product. it raised more than sixty million dollars on that theory. when user...
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2017-06-30
Markafoni (2008 - 2017)
markafoni was turkey's flash-sale fashion site, founded in 2008 by sina afra in istanbul. the south african media group naspers took a stake in 2011 and full...
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2017-06-30
Terra Networks (1999 - 2017)
telefónica spun terra up in 1999 as a dot-com play to be the aol of the spanish-speaking web. it went public near the top of the mania and got fully swallowed...
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2017-06-30
My Coke Rewards (2006 - 2017)
coca-cola started printing codes under bottle caps and inside cardboard packaging on 20 february 2006, and typing them into mycokerewards.com turned trash into...
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2017-06-30
RTL II You (2016 - 2017)
a german broadcaster decided in 2016 that the fourteen to twenty-five audience had stopped turning the television on and could be met on the web instead. rtl...
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2017-06-30
ENSOKU (2014 - 2017)
eleven languages, run out of one japanese office by a company with one product. that is the whole reason this site is remembered at all. shiftone opened ensoku...
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2017-06-30
Eroshare (2007 - 2017)
for ten years eroshare was where people put adult photos and video that no general-purpose host would accept, and by 2017 it was the default file store behind...
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2017-06-29
Yahoo! Japan Translate (2005 - 2017)
the shutdown notice said the role had been completed, which is an unusually plain thing for a company to write about its own product. yahoo! japan translate...
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2017-06-29
Moirai (2013 - 2017)
you walk down into a cave and meet somebody holding a bloody knife. you ask them what they have done, they type an answer, and you decide whether to kill them....
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2017-06-28
Photobucket (2003 - 2017)
the image host that ate forum signatures and myspace pages. you uploaded a photo and pasted the link into your signature. on 28 june 2017 photobucket flipped a...
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2017-06-27
T411 (2008 - 2017)
t411 was what survived quebectorrent, a canadian tracker a court closed in 2008. part of the same team rebuilt it in europe with the torrents and the...
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2017-06-27
Sidewire (2015 - 2017)
the founders wrote that they did not see enough usage to justify continuing to support the site, which is a blunter thing to publish than most companies...
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2017-06-23
Imzy (2016 - 2017)
imzy was a community platform launched in april 2016 by dan mccomas, who had been reddit's product chief until july 2015. the pitch was a kinder alternative to...
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2017-06-23
Shut Up! Cartoons (2012 - 2017)
one hundred million dollars went into youtube's original channel initiative in 2012, and smosh got one of the slots. shut up! cartoons opened on 30 april 2012...
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2017-06-20
grenouille.com (2000 - 2017)
grenouille started in november 2000 as a group of angry wanadoo cable customers who stopped arguing with their isp and wrote software to measure the line...
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2017-06-18
Scrub The Web (1996 - 2017)
twenty one years of taking url submissions ended with a line on the front page saying the domain was for sale and the engine was not. scrub the web came out of...
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2017-06-16
Intel Edison (2014 - 2017)
intel told its purchasing channel first. pcn115579-00 went up on a document server on 16 june 2017, set last orders at 16 september and last shipments at 16...
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2017-06-15
Delicious / del.icio.us (2003 - 2017)
the social bookmarking site with the goofy domain (del.icio.us, before domain hacks were normal). it invented social tagging at scale. yahoo bought it in 2005,...
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2017-06-15
ReBirth RB-338 (1997 - 2017)
propellerhead software put two roland tb-303 bass lines and a tr-808 drum machine on screen in 1997, wired together and running on an ordinary desktop, at a...
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2017-06-15
pixiv Chat (2009 - 2017)
december 2009, and pixiv handed its paying members a white canvas with a timer on it. anybody could walk into the room and draw on the same surface as you, and...
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2017-06-13
Style.com (2000 - 2017)
style.com was where the runway photographs lived. condé nast ran it from the fall of 2000 as the online side of vogue and w, and for fifteen years it was the...
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2017-06-12
Hello Sense (2014 - 2017)
hello sense was a kickstarter-era bedside orb that tracked your sleep through a sound and light sensor on the nightstand plus a little pill you clipped to the...
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2017-06-06
Steam Greenlight (2012 - 2017)
steam greenlight opened on 30 august 2012 and handed the question of what got sold on steam to steam's own customers, who voted on submitted games until valve...
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2017-06-06
SixXS (1999 - 2017)
38,393 people in 140 countries were still running sixxs tunnels in march 2017, which is the month pim van pelt and jeroen massar announced they were closing...
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2017-06-05
SDCH (2008 - 2017)
in september 2008 four google engineers sent the http working group a proposal for compressing the parts of a web page that repeat between responses, not just...
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2017-06-01
Phhhoto (2014 - 2017)
phhhoto was a brooklyn app that let you hold the shutter and get a five-frame loop, a little back-and-forth animation before instagram had one. it grew fast,...
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2017-06-01
Recon Jet (2015 - 2017)
a computer on your face, aimed at cyclists, priced like a bike component. the screen sat below your right eye and told you how fast you were going while the...
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2017-06-01
ZeroPC (2011 - 2017)
san mateo, 2011: a company founded by the man behind eMachines and NComputing decided that the desktop should be a web page. zeropc gave you a start menu,...
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2017-06-01
Dikt.no (2001 - 2017)
77 percent of everything ever published on dikt.no was a poem, which is a statistic only a site built for exactly one purpose can produce. gunnar roland...
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2017-06-01
AgileZen (2009 - 2017)
niki and nate kohari shipped agilezen in july 2009 and sold it to rally software nine months later, which is a fast exit by any standard and a very fast one...
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2017-06-01
Demotivalo.net (2010 - 2017)
hungary built its own demotivational poster site in 2010 and made it big fast: 200,000 facebook followers, a serious number in a language with thirteen million...
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2017-05-31
Guvera (2008 - 2017)
guvera was an australian free music streaming service that ran on brand-sponsored channels instead of running ads against streams. it crossed ten million...
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2017-05-31
muzie (1999 - 2017)
a free artist page and an mp3 upload: that was the whole offer in 1999, and japanese amateur musicians took it for eighteen years. the site launched as...
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2017-05-31
BuyVIP (2006 - 2017)
amazon bought buyvip in october 2010, eleven months before there was an amazon.es, and closed it in may 2017 saying the business still did not make money....
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2017-05-30
Playfire (2007 - 2017)
playfire was a social network for serious gamers, built in london in 2007. it plugged into xbox live and steam and pulled in your achievements and playtime...
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2017-05-28
Phanfare (2004 - 2017)
phanfare was a subscription-only photo and video storage service launched in november 2004 by andrew erlichson and mark heinrich. it targeted the prosumer tier...
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2017-05-26
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...
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2017-05-25
Eureqa (2009 - 2017)
michael schmidt was a cornell graduate student when he pointed a genetic algorithm at motion capture data from a swinging double pendulum and it came back with...
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2017-05-24
Gna! (2004 - 2017)
a code forge for free software, started in january 2004 by loïc dachary and a group of former gnu savannah maintainers who had fallen out with the free...
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2017-05-24
Monstermob (2000 - 2017)
three profit warnings in a single year took ninety percent off monstermob's share price, and the lancaster company that had floated on aim as a ringtone...
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2017-05-22
Minions Paradise (2015 - 2017)
phil the minion sinks the cruise ship in the first thirty seconds and everybody washes up on an empty island. that was the premise, and turning the island into...
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2017-05-18
Ikbis (2006 - 2017)
amman had the arab world's first video and photo sharing site and it opened about eighteen months after youtube did, which for a regional web in 2006 is very...
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2017-05-17
ExtraTorrent (2006 - 2017)
extratorrent ran from 2006 to 17 may 2017 under a single anonymous administrator known as SaM. it sat in the top five torrent indexes globally for most of its...
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2017-05-17
Megalia (2015 - 2017)
megalia grew out of the mers gallery on dc inside in 2015, when women answering a wave of abuse started copying the insults back with the genders swapped. the...
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2017-05-15
FFFFOUND! (2007 - 2017)
ffffound was an invite-only image bookmarking site built by tha ltd in tokyo under yugo nakamura, with yosuke abe and keita kitamura on development. it...
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2017-05-15
Asus ZenWatch (2014 - 2017)
three watches in three years, then nothing. asus put the zenwatch on sale in november 2014 as the cheap way into android wear, a steel rectangle with a leather...
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2017-05-15
Scanadu Scout (2012 - 2017)
an fda rule about investigational devices is what finally switched it off. the scanadu scout was a white puck you held against your forehead to read your pulse...
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2017-05-15
Kadira (2014 - 2017)
arunoda susiripala built kadira alone in colombo and it ended up watching more than five thousand meteor deployments. he announced the shutdown on 30 december...
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2017-05-11
WeeWorld (2000 - 2017)
weeworld was a glasgow company that made cartoon avatars called weemees. mike kinsella and john mcguire founded it on march 20 2000. the actual reach moment...
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2017-05-10
Sina UC (2002 - 2017)
uc was built in 2002 by a small company in guizhou and got its opening when tencent closed free qq registration for the better part of a year. by november 2003...
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2017-05-09
CMIS (2008 - 2017)
the promise was explicit and the people who made it said it out loud: do for enterprise content management what odbc did for databases in the 1990s, so any...
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2017-05-09
Dukgo (2011 - 2017)
the thing that killed it was the promise. duckduckgo would not add any anti-abuse feature that could compromise anonymity, so the abuse kept coming, so the...
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2017-05-08
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...
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2017-05-04
Oculus Story Studio (2014 - 2017)
facebook's in-house vr animation studio. fifty people in a building making short narrative films you could only watch with a rift on your head. they shipped...
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2017-05-03
Al Jazeera Türk (2014 - 2017)
qatar spent years and something like seventy five million dollars building a turkish-language newsroom that was supposed to end in a twenty four hour...
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2017-05-03
PKR.com (2006 - 2017)
pkr was online poker rendered as a room you sat in. your avatar had a face and a wardrobe, and the camera could swing around the table while you folded. jez...
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2017-05-02
About.com (1997 - 2017)
about.com was the human-edited topic-guides site that got eaten by google panda and its own scale. for ten years it sat on top of the search results for any...
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2017-05-02
Maker Studios (2009 - 2017)
maker was the largest youtube multi-channel network of the early 2010s, built on the idea that thousands of creators wanted a middleman between them and...
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2017-05-01
MLKSHK (2010 - 2017)
pronounced milkshake. you dragged an image into your browser and dropped it into a "shake", which was a topic group, and you commented with reaction images. it...
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2017-05-01
LeEco (2011 - 2017)
leeco was a chinese consumer-electronics conglomerate founded by jia yueting in september 2011 around an internet TV business called LeTV. the brand pitched...
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2017-05-01
thesixtyone (2008 - 2017)
james miao and samuel hsiung's gamified indie music discovery site, named after u.s. route 61 (the blues highway). alpha in january 2008 out of y combinator,...
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2017-05-01
Swyp Card (2014 - 2017)
swyp was the qvivr programmable payment card from santa clara, opening pre-orders in 2014 for a device that stored every card in your wallet on one piece of...
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2017-05-01
Azubu (2012 - 2017)
azubu launched in 2012 on lars windhorst's theory that watching other people play video games was about to become a real market. he was right about the market...
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2017-05-01
Style Code Live (2016 - 2017)
thirty minutes live every weeknight at nine eastern, free to watch, with a strip of products under the video that changed as the hosts picked things up. amazon...
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2017-04-30
Bridj (2014 - 2017)
bridj was the clever entry in the on-demand transit boom: instead of fixed routes it used an algorithm to place temporary stops wherever riders asked for them....
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2017-04-30
RoboVM (2013 - 2017)
two acquisitions in six months is what killed it. niklas therning and henric müller built a compiler that turned java bytecode into native iphone code, xamarin...
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2017-04-30
MathJax CDN (2011 - 2017)
in its last measured month cdn.mathjax.org served 3.3 billion requests to 179 million people and shipped 70 terabytes of javascript, and every byte of it was...
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2017-04-28
Yik Yak (2013 - 2017)
the anonymous location-based message board. you opened the app, you saw posts from users physically near you (within 1.5 miles). it was huge on US college...
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2017-04-28
Imhonet (2007 - 2017)
imhonet opened in april 2007 as alexander dolgin's attempt to build one recommendation engine across every kind of culture at once. you rated things, it found...
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2017-04-28
java.net (2003 - 2017)
sun opened it at javaone on june 11 2003 as the place where java projects would live in public, and for thirteen years the reference implementations and the...
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2017-04-24
AllExperts (1998 - 2017)
allexperts ran for over nineteen years on volunteers who answered strangers for free because they wanted to. you posted a question in a category and a real...
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2017-04-20
Plastc Card (2014 - 2017)
plastc was a palo alto smart-card startup founded in 2012 by ryan marquis and mark stubbs. it opened pre-orders at $155 per card on 7 october 2014 and took...
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2017-04-19
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...
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2017-04-17
Google Spaces (2016 - 2017)
google spaces was an app for small group sharing built around chrome and youtube embeds. it launched on 16 may '16. google announced the shutdown on 16...
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2017-04-12
Surprisingly Awesome (2015 - 2017)
twenty three episodes argued that concrete and frequent flyer miles were more interesting than they looked, and the twenty fourth was alex blumberg explaining...
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2017-04-11
Windows Vista (2006 - 2017)
windows vista released to manufacturing november 8, 2006 and shipped to consumers january 30, 2007 after five and a half years of development as longhorn. it...
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2017-04-08
Whirled (2007 - 2017)
whirled was a flash virtual world where almost nothing was made by the developer. players uploaded the avatars and built the rooms, then listed the results in...
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2017-04-05
Ubuntu Touch (2013 - 2017)
ubuntu touch was canonical's bet that the same operating system could run on a phone and a desktop with the same package manager underneath. mark shuttleworth...
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2017-04-01
Pono Player (2014 - 2017)
neil young's high resolution portable audio player. the kickstarter raised $6.2 million in march 2014 and shipped the device to backers in october 2014, with...
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2017-04-01
Kivvi.kz (2009 - 2017)
kazakhstan got its own video site on 2 february 2009, launched as kiwi.kz with hosting from the national telephone company and traffic that cost its broadband...
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2017-03-31
DSi Shop (2008 - 2017)
dsi shop was the digital storefront baked into the nintendo dsi when the handheld launched in late 2008. you bought nintendo dsi points and spent them on...
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2017-03-31
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...
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2017-03-31
Tribe.net (2003 - 2017)
tribe was a 2003 social network out of san francisco, founded by paul martino and mark pincus alongside co-founder valerie syme as a hybrid between friendster...
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2017-03-31
Revision3 (2005 - 2017)
revision3 was the san francisco video network jay adelson, kevin rose and david prager started in april 2005 as a post-digg side project. the pitch was...
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2017-03-31
ComicsAlliance (2007 - 2017)
comicsalliance was a comics-culture site inside aol's editorial network from 2007 onward. laura hudson became editor in 2009 and shaped the site's voice around...
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2017-03-31
Google Map Maker (2008 - 2017)
for nine years google let volunteers draw the map. you added the road that was missing or traced a building off the satellite tile, and once a reviewer signed...
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2017-03-31
Autodesk 123D (2011 - 2017)
autodesk sells CAD by the seat to people whose employer signs the purchase order. 123d was the opposite of that, a free suite aimed at anyone with a 3d printer...
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2017-03-31
Cucumbertown (2012 - 2017)
cucumbertown was a blogging platform built only for recipes, with templates that understood ingredients and a revenue split that gave writers between ten and...
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2017-03-31
Demae Channel (2009 - 2017)
nintendo and denyusha put a food delivery counter into the wii menu on 26 may 2009, free to download and japan only. you typed your address in once, picked a...
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2017-03-31
Kids goo (2001 - 2017)
the shutdown notice was written twice. once in hiragana for the children, to tell them that キッズgoo had been going since 2001 and finished on the 31st of march,...
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2017-03-31
UULA (2013 - 2017)
1.41 million people were paying 504 yen a month for it at the end of january 2015. two years later there were fewer than half that many and avex closed it....
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2017-03-31
BitSnoop (2008 - 2017)
blocked by isps in britain from october 2013, and in italy as well. bitsnoop was a torrent search engine whose crawlers read hundreds of other sites and...
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2017-03-31
Flavors.me (2010 - 2017)
moo.com bought flavors.me in 2012 and closed it in 2017 with a sentence about a change in strategic direction. the product was a single page carrying your...
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2017-03-30
Mad Catz Interactive (1989 - 2017)
a plastic guitar finished it. for almost thirty years mad catz sold the second controller, the one that came out of the drawer when somebody else wanted to...
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2017-03-29
Club Penguin (2005 - 2017)
the virtual world for kids where you were a small flat penguin in a snowy multiplayer town. you waddled around. you played mini-games. you decorated your...
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2017-03-29
Zoomby.ru (2010 - 2017)
zoomby opened on 19 may 2010 as russia's answer to the piracy problem, a free ad-funded site where you could watch russian television legally the day after it...
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2017-03-29
The Deck (2006 - 2017)
jim coudal started it in early 2006 with jeffrey zeldman and 37signals, and daring fireball was the fourth site to join. the rule was one ad per page and no...
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2017-03-24
SourceFed (2012 - 2017)
youtube handed out money in 2012 to get people making channels, and philip defranco used his share to build a news show that did not need him in front of the...
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2017-03-17
App.net (2012 - 2017)
app.net launched on august 8, 2012 from dalton caldwell's mixed media labs, pitched as a paid twitter alternative with no ads. it crowdfunded $750,000 from...
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2017-03-17
DMOZ (1998 - 2017)
dmoz was the volunteer attempt to keep the human-edited directory alive after yahoo's directory turned commercial. tens of thousands of editors classified...
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2017-03-16
Curse Voice (2014 - 2017)
curse voice opened its beta in may 2014 and had a million users inside seven days, because it did something ventrilo and teamspeak had never tried. it read...
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2017-03-15
So.cl (2011 - 2017)
microsoft made a social network. that sentence is most of the reason nobody remembers it. so.cl came out of a research lab, aimed at students, built around...
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2017-03-08
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...
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2017-03-08
Jelly (2014 - 2017)
biz stone left twitter and built jelly with ben finkel as a photo-based question-and-answer app for your social graph. it launched on 7 january 2014, paused...
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2017-03-08
IceRocket (2004 - 2017)
icerocket launched in april 2004 as a search engine for blogs, in the window when the thing google was worst at was telling you what had been written in the...
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2017-03-08
Positron (2016 - 2017)
myk melez wanted what electron gave developers without shipping chromium to get it, so he started a runtime that would take an electron app and run it on gecko...
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2017-03-07
RefME (2014 - 2017)
chegg paid 1.8 million dollars in december 2016 for the assets of a london startup that had raised 5 million and signed up more than a million students....
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2017-03-06
Popular Photography (1937 - 2017)
popular photography was the largest-circulation us camera monthly for most of its eighty-year life, founded by ziff-davis in may 1937 and sold to bonnier in...
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2017-03-03
GhostTunes (2014 - 2017)
garth brooks spent eleven years refusing to put his catalog on itunes, because itunes sold songs one at a time and he sold albums. in 2014 he built his own...
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2017-03-02
TextWrangler (2003 - 2017)
textwrangler was the free mac plain-text editor that people kept open in a second tab while bbedit sat in another. bare bones ran it for fourteen years on the...
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2017-03-01
Ampya (2013 - 2017)
ampya was a television company's attempt at spotify, launched in june 2013 with twenty million tracks and a wall of music videos its rivals had not bothered to...
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2017-03-01
Igloo (2012 - 2017)
$199 for the receiver and $24.99 for thirty days of eleven channels, no contract and no installer on your roof. sky and tvnz built igloo in 2012 for the new...
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2017-03-01
Spark City World (2009 - 2017)
ottawa built a flash city for eleven-year-old girls and kept it running for eight years. fuel industries had the miniclip deal and an ios port, and none of...
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2017-03-01
Fedora Hosted (2007 - 2017)
late 2007 to march 2017, and github was only half the reason. fedora infrastructure worked out in early 2016 that it could not afford to run two forges at...
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2017-02-28
Streetlife (2011 - 2017)
matt boyes launched streetlife in march 2011 as a neighborhood-keyed social network for the uk, built after a 2008 london burglary made him want a way to...
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2017-02-27
VirtualTourist (2000 - 2017)
virtualtourist was a travel community that peaked in the late 2000s with 1.3 million members and 3.7 million photos. two karlsruhe students registered the...
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2017-02-24
AOL Lifestream (2010 - 2017)
aol lifestream was a feed aggregator that lived inside aol desktop after bebo had stopped being interesting. it pulled in updates from twitter and youtube and...
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2017-02-24
HomeHero (2013 - 2017)
a federal labor rule finished this one. an appeals court upheld the us department of labor's home care rule in 2015 and home aides became entitled to minimum...
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2017-02-23
Stayzilla (2010 - 2017)
stayzilla was the indian homestay marketplace yogendra vasupal and rupal yogendra ran out of chennai. the parent company inasra technologies began in 2005 as a...
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2017-02-21
Landmark (2014 - 2017)
landmark was sony online entertainment's voxel building sandbox, first pitched in august 2013 as everquest next landmark, an in-engine content creation tool...
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2017-02-21
The WWW Virtual Library (1991 - 2017)
geneva, 1991: tim berners-lee kept a page of links to every new web server somebody emailed him about. that page became the virtual library, the first index...
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2017-02-20
IMDb message boards (2001 - 2017)
the imdb message boards were the comment forums attached to every title and person page on imdb. they ran from the early 2000s through february 20, 2017, when...
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2017-02-20
EZGenerator (2005 - 2017)
image-line in ghent paid its bills with fruity loops and built a website tool for its own sites on the side, then put it on sale in 2005. twelve years later it...
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2017-02-18
Daum tvPot (2006 - 2017)
daum tvpot launched in 2006 as the video upload and streaming service of daum, then south korea's number-two web portal. it covered user uploads, live...
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2017-02-17
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...
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2017-02-15
Google Now (2012 - 2017)
google now's whole pitch was that you didn't ask it anything. it watched your gmail, your calendar, your search history, your location, and pushed a card...
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2017-02-15
AppGratis (2009 - 2017)
apple pulled appgratis off the app store on 7 april 2013, citing two review guidelines, and a french company that had just raised ten million euros lost its...
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2017-02-13
Google Gesture Search (2010 - 2017)
you scrawled a letter on the screen with one finger and the phone pulled up the contact, app or track that matched, then you kept scrawling until the right...
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2017-02-11
SIGAINT (2013 - 2017)
nobody ever said what happened. the service answered one week in february 2017 and did not answer the next, and the administrators who had given press...
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2017-02-06
Microsoft Photosynth (2008 - 2017)
photosynth launched on august 20 2008 from microsoft live labs as the consumer version of noah snavely's phd work on structure-from-motion at the university of...
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2017-02-06
DivxPlanet (Altyazı.org) (2004 - 2017)
divxplanet was the turkish subtitle archive, started in 2004 and named after the codec that made a film fit on a cd. volunteers translated films and series for...
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2017-02-02
Rounds (2008 - 2017)
rounds was a video-first social app out of tel aviv, built so that a video call was a place you did things together rather than just talked. you could watch...
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2017-02-01
Adobe Contribute (2002 - 2017)
macromedia contribute shipped on 3 december 2002 as a wysiwyg page editor built on the dreamweaver mx engine for non developers who needed to update a website...
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2017-02-01
Epuls.pl (2002 - 2017)
epuls was where polish teenagers lived online before facebook arrived, a social network built on public diaries and clubs, with a points currency called...
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2017-02-01
Modlife (2007 - 2017)
modlife was the software tom delonge built after watching napster take the album business away from his own band. it went into beta in november 2007 and...
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2017-02-01
XO Communications (1996 - 2017)
xo communications was four companies wearing one name. it started as nextlink in the pacific northwest and absorbed concentric network and then allegiance...
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2017-02-01
Quixey (2009 - 2017)
around $130 million went into the proposition that apps needed their own search engine, and for a few years that was a serious question rather than a joke....
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2017-02-01
Oktogo (2010 - 2017)
a polish investment fund took control in 2015 and decided in early 2016 that it would rather find a buyer than put in more money, and no buyer turned up....
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2017-02-01
Map of Russian Science (2013 - 2017)
four hundred and fifty million roubles of ministry money went into a database that decided the lebedev physical institute worked on horticulture, pediatrics...
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2017-02-01
Xombrero (2010 - 2017)
a browser written by openbsd people for openbsd people, whose entire pitch was that firefox was too big to trust and this thing was two hundred kilobytes and...
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2017-02-01
OKNOtizie (2006 - 2017)
salvatore sanfilippo built a social bookmarking site called segnalo in late 2005, and oknotizie came out of it the following year as the italian digg. telecom...
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2017-01-31
Asheron's Call (1999 - 2017)
asheron's call was the third pillar of the founding mmo era, released november 2, 1999 by turbine entertainment under microsoft publishing, ten months after...
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2017-01-31
Beme (2015 - 2017)
matt hackett and casey neistat shipped beme in july 2015. the app made unedited four-second video clips that uploaded to your followers immediately, with no...
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2017-01-31
Wii U (2012 - 2017)
nintendo shipped a console with a screen built into the controller. the marketing made it sound like an accessory and the buying public agreed. 13.56 million...
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2017-01-31
Asheron's Call 2 (2002 - 2017)
asheron's call 2 was the sequel that died, came back, and then died again. turbine launched it in november 2002 as the followup to the original asheron's call....
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2017-01-31
Presto (2014 - 2017)
foxtel built presto in 2014 to defend australian pay television against streaming, sold half of it to seven west media, then bought that half back and switched...
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2017-01-31
humyo (2007 - 2017)
a decommissioned bullion vault held the disk arrays, and that was the detail everybody repeated about humyo while it was alive. the offer was ten gigabytes for...
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2017-01-31
OpenStudy (2010 - 2017)
a georgia tech professor and an emory dean, married to each other, built a place where a student anywhere could ask a question and have it answered by a...
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2017-01-31
Triggertrap (2011 - 2017)
£290,386 came in for a modular camera trigger called ada, against a £50,000 goal, and no ada was ever built. haje jan kamps told the backers on 2 march 2015...
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2017-01-30
Parse (2011 - 2017)
the backend you did not have to build. parse let a mobile developer skip the servers and ship the app, with data storage and push notifications handled by...
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2017-01-29
Fring (2006 - 2017)
fring was an early mobile voip and video chat app founded in tel aviv in 2006. it ran on symbian, blackberry, and later iphone and android, and its trick was...
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2017-01-27
Macromedia Director (1985 - 2017)
director was the authoring tool of the cd-rom decade. macromind shipped it as videoworks on the macintosh in 1985 and renamed it director two years later, with...
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2017-01-27
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...
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2017-01-25
Khabaristan Times (2014 - 2017)
pakistan's news satire desk, run from 2014 by two journalists, pointed most of its jokes at the military and at religious hardliners. on 25 january 2017 the...
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2017-01-23
iFolder.ru (2006 - 2017)
dmitry medvedev was president of russia when moscow police switched off a file host, and two days later his interior minister was told to check whether that...
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2017-01-17
Vine (2013 - 2017)
six seconds. looping video. you opened the app, watched a clip, it played again, you watched it again, you laughed, you swiped. it produced an entire...
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2017-01-15
OneCoin (2014 - 2017)
onecoin was not a cryptocurrency. it was a multi-level marketing sales scheme built by ruja ignatova and sebastian greenwood in sofia bulgaria in 2014, selling...
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2017-01-15
Ekoloko (2008 - 2017)
two israeli businessmen, one out of a voip company and one out of a chocolate chain, opened a virtual world for children in october 2008 and named the planet...
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2017-01-12
Lily Camera (2013 - 2017)
you were supposed to throw it in the air and it would follow you and film. the promo video showed it doing exactly that. the promo video was shot on a gopro...
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2017-01-12
Guerrilla Cambridge (1997 - 2017)
in cambridge, england, one sony studio worked for nineteen years under four names. it began on 15 july 1997 as the bought-out games division of cyberlife...
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2017-01-11
Marvel Super Hero Squad Online (2011 - 2017)
the friendly chibi wing of the marvel license. a browser mmo for kids in the exact window when browser mmos for kids were losing the whole audience to phones....
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2017-01-11
PORT.ro (1996 - 2017)
port.ro went online in june 1996 and spent twenty years being the place romanians checked to find out what was on. it carried the grid for 243 television...
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2017-01-10
Windows Live Mail (2007 - 2017)
the email client microsoft shipped after they pulled outlook express from vista. lived inside the windows live essentials suite from 2007 to 2017. supported...
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2017-01-10
Windows Live Photo Gallery (2007 - 2017)
microsoft's free desktop photo organizer. bundled with vista, offered as a separate download for windows 7 and 8. the face tagging worked surprisingly well and...
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2017-01-10
Windows Live Writer (2007 - 2017)
windows live writer was the desktop blog editor microsoft kept shipping for ten years. wysiwyg editor with image and table support, publishing to blogger or...
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2017-01-10
Windows Movie Maker (2000 - 2017)
windows movie maker shipped on millennium edition in 2000 and turned every kid with a webcam into an editor. the title-card font was a generation's first...
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2017-01-10
Windows Essentials (2009 - 2017)
for about a decade the last step of setting up a windows machine was going back to microsoft to download the parts microsoft had taken out of windows. movie...
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2017-01-09
Agnitum Outpost Firewall (2002 - 2017)
a personal firewall out of st. petersburg that spent a decade at the top of the only scoreboard that mattered, matousec's proactive security challenge, by...
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2017-01-09
GameStick (2013 - 2017)
a games console the size of a usb stick, with a bluetooth controller that the console slid into for storage, funded by 5,600 people on kickstarter in early...
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2017-01-04
Czat.onet.pl (1999 - 2017)
onet closed its chat on 4 january 2017 and never said why. the warning went out in december, the tab came off the portal homepage, and the address started...
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2017-01-02
Musicovery (2006 - 2017)
musicovery was a french music-discovery service built around a 2D mood pad. you clicked a point between calm and energetic and between dark and positive, and...
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2017-01-01
DragThing (1995 - 2018)
dragthing was the dock for mac users who needed more than the dock. james thomson wrote it in 1995, kept it alive through every mac os transition, and finally...
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2017-01-01
LatinMail (1997 - 2017)
latinmail was the spanish-language free webmail starmedia launched in 1997 from manhattan. it beat gmail to market by seven years and the spanish-language...
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2017-01-01
blinkx (2004 - 2017)
blinkx launched in 2004 out of cambridge and san francisco, spun out of the search company autonomy by suranga chandratillake. its trick was searching video by...
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2017-01-01
iloveschool (1999 - 2017)
iloveschool was korea's school-reunion craze, a site that let you type in your school and the years you went and instantly find everyone else who did the same....
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2017-01-01
Makeoutclub (1999 - 2017)
makeoutclub was arguably the first real social network, a 1999 site for the emo and hardcore kids who wanted profile pages with their photo and their record...
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2017-01-01
Screenhero (2013 - 2017)
a screen sharing tool built for two people working on the same code at once, where both cursors were live and either person could click and type on the shared...
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2017-01-01
UppTalk (Yuilop) (2010 - 2017)
yuilop was a free-calling and free-texting app out of barcelona, one of the wave of services that tried to make sms and phone minutes obsolete before whatsapp...
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2017-01-01
WIEM Encyklopedia (1998 - 2017)
poland's national encyclopedia lived on poland's national portal, and for most of nineteen years it was free. it came off a printed set and went online in...
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2017-01-01
Planet Poker (1998 - 2017)
on 1 january 1998 a three-six hold'em game went live and took a five percent rake, and that is the first hand of real-money online poker anyone can point to....
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2017-01-01
Taltopia (2008 - 2017)
los angeles, february 2008: two recent graduates took 800,000 dollars from an angel investor and renamed their site from famesource to taltopia. the idea was a...
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2017-01-01
Marketleap (2000 - 2017)
acxiom had no commercial reason to keep marketleap's tools running and kept them running anyway, for about eleven years, under a line on the front page saying...
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2017-01-01
Bundlr (2010 - 2017)
coimbra is where this one was built, by two founders with fifteen thousand euros of portuguese seed money and an idea worth more than the money it got: a...
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2016-12-31
Yo (2014 - 2016)
yo was a one-button iphone app that sent the word "yo" to a friend as a push notification. there were no other features. it raised one and a half million...
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2016-12-31
Sony SmartWatch (2012 - 2016)
sony got to the smartwatch market three years before apple did, shipped three generations on three different operating systems, and then quietly walked away....
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2016-12-31
51.com (2005 - 2016)
51.com ran as china's second-tier-city social network out of hangzhou from 2005, founded by pang shengdong on a photos and blogs stack with a games layer on...
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2016-12-31
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...
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2016-12-31
Watchever (2013 - 2016)
vivendi built a german-only netflix competitor a year before netflix arrived in germany, at exactly the same 8.99 monthly price. the first year burned sixty...
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2016-12-31
Basis Peak (2014 - 2016)
intel's fitness watch, launched november 2014, killed by an overheating recall in august 2016 and finished off when the sync service went dark on new year's...
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2016-12-31
Basis B1 Watch (2012 - 2016)
the first-generation continuous heart-rate wristband from basis science, launched late 2012 for two hundred dollars, discontinued after intel bought the...
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2016-12-31
Compete.com (2000 - 2016)
compete sold estimates of other people's web traffic. you typed in a domain and it handed back a monthly unique visitor count and a rank, worked out from a...
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2016-12-31
UMD (Universal Media Disc) (2004 - 2016)
the umd was a 60 millimeter optical disc sealed inside a plastic caddy you could not open, holding 900 megabytes on one layer and 1.8 gigabytes on two, and it...
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2016-12-31
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...
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2016-12-31
TakePart (2008 - 2016)
jeff skoll's film company made documentaries with a call to action attached, and takepart was where the call to action lived. it opened in 2008 and grew into a...
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2016-12-31
The European Library (2005 - 2016)
the european library opened on 17 march 2005 and put one search box in front of the catalogs of forty-nine national libraries, which is something no commercial...
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2016-12-31
Bionicle (2001 - 2016)
lego was nearly bankrupt when this launched in 2001, and a line of biomechanical action figures with a mythology attached turned into one of the properties...
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2016-12-31
Boredat (2006 - 2016)
butler library at columbia is where it started, in 2006, as a board you could only reach from a columbia.edu address and named after the building people were...
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2016-12-31
Triond (2006 - 2016)
half the advertising money was the offer, and for a few years around 2009 it was a real offer. triond started in tel aviv in june 2006 and worked like a wire...
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2016-12-31
FinanceWorks (2008 - 2016)
you never chose financeworks. it arrived inside your bank's online login in 2008, pulled your accounts together and drew you a budget, and whether you had it...
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2016-12-31
Breaking News (2007 - 2016)
michael van poppel was a dutch teenager running a one-person news wire when he started the @breakingnews twitter account in 2007. msnbc bought it at the end of...
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2016-12-29
Devil's Third (2015 - 2016)
devil's third spent seven years passing between publishers before nintendo put it out on the wii u in 2015, where the reviews took it apart. the campaign was...
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2016-12-27
Absolute Games (1998 - 2016)
two people bought the domain ag.ru in the spring of 1998 and put the first review up on 8 may. for the next thirteen years absolute games was where...
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2016-12-24
Fever° (2009 - 2016)
fever was a feed reader you installed on your own server and paid for once, thirty dollars, no subscription and no company behind it, just shaun inman, the...
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2016-12-23
CyanogenMod (2009 - 2016)
cyanogenmod was the android rom you flashed when you wanted your phone to be yours. it removed carrier bloat and ran on phones google had stopped updating....
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2016-12-22
ClusterHQ (2014 - 2016)
the board met three days before christmas and voted to stop that afternoon. flocker was the piece that let a docker container keep its data when it moved to...
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2016-12-15
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...
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2016-12-15
Infestation: Survivor Stories (2012 - 2016)
hammerpoint interactive put the war z on steam on 17 december 2012 and valve removed it two days later, because the store page described a game nobody had...
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2016-12-15
Chaku-uta (着うた) (2002 - 2016)
on 3 december 2002 a japanese phone could buy thirty seconds of a real recording for the first time, and what made it possible was carrier billing rather than...
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2016-12-15
BBC Radio Explorer (2014 - 2016)
jason williams built it in the ten percent of the week the bbc gave its engineers for their own ideas. you typed a subject, it searched every program title and...
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2016-12-14
Kemono Friends (mobile game) (2015 - 2016)
on 14 december 2016 nexon turned off a japanese mobile game that had not worked out. on 11 january 2017 the anime adaptation of that same game went to air and...
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2016-12-12
ChaCha (2006 - 2016)
chacha was a us-only sms search service from scott a. jones and brad bostic, launched september 1, 2006 in carmel, indiana. you texted a question to the short...
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2016-12-10
中国穆斯林网 (China Muslim Net) (2003 - 2016)
on 10 december 2016 somebody reposted an open letter to xi jinping, written by chinese students abroad, into the current affairs board of the largest...
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2016-12-09
TiddlySpace (2010 - 2016)
a telephone company paid for this. bt bought jeremy ruston's shop in 2007 and let the resulting open-source team spend years putting tiddlywiki on a server,...
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2016-12-07
Pebble (2012 - 2016 (resurrected 2025))
the kickstarter-funded smartwatch from 2012. the original kickstarter raised 10.3 million dollars when 100,000 was the goal. shipped to backers in 2013....
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2016-12-05
Dot Earth (2007 - 2016)
on 25 october 2007 a new york times science reporter posted about cash prizes for cutting greenhouse gases, and then kept posting for nine years. dot earth was...
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2016-12-01
Ghost Recon Phantoms (2014 - 2016)
a free-to-play cover shooter that ubisoft carved out of ghost recon online and rebranded in march 2014. the tactical shooter niche was already crowded by the...
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2016-12-01
xoJane (2011 - 2016)
xojane was jane pratt's women's website, the online version of the confessional, first-person magazine writing she had built at sassy and jane. it launched in...
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2016-12-01
e-kolay.net (2000 - 2016)
e-kolay was doğan online's portal, launched in 2000 to sell dial-up hours to turkish households that had never been online, advertised by kemal sunal on the...
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2016-12-01
Venere.com (1994 - 2016)
four people in rome started taking hotel reservations over the web in 1995, back when most of the italian hotels they were selling did not have an email...
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2016-12-01
Sugarscape.com (2007 - 2016)
sugar was a british magazine for teenage girls that started in october 1994 and did not survive its readers moving online. the website it left behind opened in...
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2016-12-01
iPredict (2008 - 2016)
simon bridges, then new zealand's associate minister of justice, declined a small wellington prediction market's application for an exemption from anti money...
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2016-11-30
Mozilla Persona (2011 - 2016)
persona was a mozilla foundation project launched july 2011 under the name browserid, a decentralized authentication system built on email-as-identifier with...
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2016-11-30
shomi (2014 - 2016)
rogers and shaw, two canadian cable companies, put their money together and launched a streaming service in november 2014. for the first nine months you could...
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2016-11-30
Aupeo (2008 - 2016)
aupeo was a berlin internet radio startup from 2008 that ended up somewhere nobody plans for: the dashboard. by 2015 it was running in five million vehicles...
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2016-11-30
The UnReal Times (2011 - 2016)
on 30 november 2016 india's best-known satire site stopped publishing, three weeks after demonetisation had handed it more material than it ever had before....
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2016-11-30
ChangeTip (2013 - 2016)
for a few weeks in november 2014, handing a stranger a few cents of bitcoin by replying to them was a thing the english-speaking internet actually did, and...
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2016-11-29
Viadeo (2004 - 2016)
viadeo was the professional network france built before deciding linkedin would do fine. it grew to sixty-five million members and spent a fortune trying to go...
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2016-11-28
Zone Téléchargement (2010 - 2016)
nassau, in the bahamas, is where the domain was registered in march 2010. the people behind it were two school friends from toulouse who later moved to...
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2016-11-23
tape.tv (2008 - 2016)
twenty-two days separated the end of youtube's german licensing war from the end of tape.tv. gema and youtube settled on 1 november 2016 and thousands of music...
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2016-11-23
Beejive (2007 - 2016)
fifteen dollars and ninety-nine cents, in 2008, for a chat program. beejive charged it because beejiveim did something the iphone could not yet do on its own:...
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2016-11-17
What.CD (2007 - 2016)
what.cd was the largest private music tracker in bittorrent history. it opened on october 27, 2007, the same day oink's pink palace got shut down by uk police....
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2016-11-16
Cubby (2012 - 2016)
cubby was logmein's dropbox competitor. its one real differentiator was that any folder on disk could become a sync target without moving into a special inbox,...
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2016-11-16
EX.UA (2009 - 2016)
ex.ua was the largest file host in ukraine, a cyberlocker where a whole country kept and traded its music and its films. it was so woven into ukrainian...
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2016-11-15
Portfolio.com (2007 - 2016)
a hundred million dollars bought condé nast a glossy business monthly in april 2007, eighteen months before the financial system it was covering came apart....
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2016-11-14
Kaneva (2004 - 2016)
kaneva was a free 3d virtual world that ran in the shadow of second life for ten years. you got an avatar, a 3d apartment, a 2d profile page, and embedded...
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2016-11-14
Nitrous.io (2012 - 2016)
two weeks was all the notice anyone got. the announcement went up on 31 october 2016, the boxes were deleted on 14 november, and anything paid after the...
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2016-11-10
Grove.io (2011 - 2016)
three ex-convore founders put grove online in november 2011 selling companies a private irc server with searchable archives, which was a strange thing to sell...
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2016-11-09
Nasty Gal (2006 - 2016)
nasty gal was the los angeles fashion e-commerce brand sophia amoruso built out of a 2006 ebay vintage store. it moved off ebay in 2008 and took index ventures...
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2016-11-08
The Brunei Times (2006 - 2016)
brunei is a small country with a small press, and for ten years this was the paper there that pushed hardest at the edge of what could be printed. the notice...
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2016-11-08
Fetchnotes (2011 - 2016)
two shutdown dates in nine months, which is more than most products get. a pair of michigan undergrads launched fetchnotes in 2011 as a notes app with no...
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2016-11-04
Panoramio (2005 - 2016)
panoramio was the photo layer of the old google earth. joaquín cuenca abela's spanish team launched it on 3 october 2005, google bought it in july 2007 to...
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2016-11-04
Army Attack (2011 - 2016)
digital chocolate closed in april 2014 and army attack kept running for another two and a half years without it. the game came out of the company's helsinki...
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2016-11-04
Mythbuntu (2007 - 2016)
on 4 november 2016 thomas mashos wrote that mythbuntu was finished, and the reason was that a team of roughly ten people had become a team of two. for nine...
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2016-11-01
Demand Studios (Demand Media) (2006 - 2016)
the santa monica content factory that owned the ehow and livestrong property cluster and pumped fifteen dollar articles into it at industrial scale. richard...
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2016-11-01
Hailo (2011 - 2016)
three london cab drivers and three tech founders built the app that let you summon a licensed black cab instead of standing in the rain with your arm out. it...
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2016-11-01
Panfu (2007 - 2016)
panfu was a virtual world for children where you made a panda and explored an island of the same name. a berlin studio launched it in 2007, and by 2009 it was...
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2016-11-01
Livestation (2008 - 2016)
livestation carried live news channels to a computer back when live news was a television arrangement. it came out of skinkers on peer to peer code licensed...
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2016-11-01
HitFix (2008 - 2016)
hitfix launched in december 2008 as an entertainment news site built by two people who had done the job inside much bigger companies. it crossed a million...
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2016-11-01
Vokle (2009 - 2016)
santa monica, june 2008. robert kiraz and edward dekeratry built a browser page that turned anyone with a webcam into a talk show host, with a queue of callers...
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2016-11-01
The Daily Currant (2012 - 2016)
sweden's justice minister once cited a daily currant story about thirty-seven marijuana overdoses in colorado. daniel barkeley's satire blog ran from july 2012...
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2016-11-01
Legitmix (2011 - 2016)
fourteen dollars was roughly what one remix cost you, because you had to buy every song the remixer had sampled before the thing would play. legitmix sold a...
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2016-11-01
Pixelapse (2012 - 2016)
20,541,100 revisions and about 92 terabytes of design files went through pixelapse before it closed on 1 november 2016. it was git for people who work in...
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2016-10-31
Vessel (2015 - 2016)
jason kilar's post-hulu venture vessel launched in march 2015 with a paid early-access video model. you would pay $2.99 a month for a 72-hour head start on...
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2016-10-31
Mobipocket (2000 - 2016)
two people in paris built an ebook reader for palm pilots and psions in 2000, and invented a file format to feed it. amazon bought the company in 2005 and put...
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2016-10-31
NovaLogic (1985 - 2016)
a medical-imaging engineer named kyle freeman worked out how to draw an entire outdoor landscape out of voxels on a 486, and a small calabasas company turned...
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2016-10-31
Might & Magic: Duel of Champions (2012 - 2016)
996 cards across six factions, every deck led by a hero card. ubisoft quebec opened duel of champions to the public on 13 september 2012 as a free-to-play card...
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2016-10-31
Tom Clancy's EndWar Online (2015 - 2016)
ubisoft shanghai spent roughly three years rebuilding a game that had flopped on consoles in 2008, and the rebuild lasted eleven months. the original tom...
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2016-10-31
twitterfeed (2007 - 2016)
five million posts a day went through a service with one employee behind it. mario menti built twitterfeed in 2007 to push blog items into twitter...
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2016-10-23
AllMyVideos (2011 - 2016)
an anti-piracy trade report had put this one at just under a million dollars a year in profit on an 85 percent margin. the man running it said the real number...
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2016-10-20
Mixcrate (2009 - 2016)
mixcrate was where mobile djs put their sets so other people could hear them. it ran for seven years on music nobody had licensed, which is the only way a site...
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2016-10-18
ngmoco (2008 - 2016)
neil young left electronic arts in 2008 and started ngmoco on the bet that the iphone was a games machine rather than a phone with games on it. rolando showed...
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2016-10-17
United Front Games (2007 - 2016)
united front was a vancouver studio assembled in 2007 out of people who had just come off ea black box and rockstar vancouver. it made modnation racers for...
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2016-10-14
Visual Studio LightSwitch (2011 - 2016)
$299 bought a microsoft tool that promised to turn a database schema into a working business application without you writing much of anything. it was aimed at...
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2016-10-11
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (2016 - 2016)
the samsung galaxy note 7 was the flagship android phone of 2016 for about seven weeks. batteries began igniting in september, samsung ran a formal recall and...
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2016-10-06
Mystery Show (2015 - 2016)
the rule was that the mystery could not be solvable by googling it. six episodes went out between may and july 2015, apple named it the best new podcast of the...
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2016-10-05
Shots (2013 - 2016)
shots was a selfie app for teenagers who followed justin bieber, and for a while eight million of them showed up. it stripped out comments and like counts on...
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2016-10-05
Ya.Online (2008 - 2016)
mikhail pishchagin, one of the developers behind the psi jabber client, built yandex a messenger out of psi's own source code and shipped it in september 2008....
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2016-10-04
Meerkat (2015 - 2016)
meerkat is the app that taught everyone what livestreaming felt like on a phone, then watched twitter copy it and shut the door behind. peak hype to obsolete...
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2016-10-04
Google Nexus (2010 - 2016)
nexus was google's reference phone, contracted out to a different manufacturer almost every year, running android with nothing added on top and priced close to...
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2016-10-04
Beacon Reader (2013 - 2016)
five dollars a month, most of it to the one writer you chose, the rest split across everybody else on the site. beacon reader spent three years arguing that...
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2016-10-03
Microsoft Band (2014 - 2016)
microsoft band was the wearable everyone forgot. it shipped on 30 october 2014 with a sensor stack that beat fitbit on paper: heart rate, gps, skin...
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2016-10-03
Consensus Net (共识网) (2009 - 2016)
zhou zhixing spent seven years inside the communist party's own literature office writing about liu shaoqi, then nine more running its publishing house, and...
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2016-10-03
K2Kapital (1999 - 2016)
on 3 october 2016 the russian tax service removed ooo k2kapital from the company register, and the reason written on the record is that it was an inactive...
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2016-10-03
NhacSo.net (2005 - 2016)
on 3 october 2016 one of the largest music sites in vietnam stopped, eleven years and four months after it opened. nhacso was the one that tried to license the...
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2016-10-01
HotBot (1996 - 2016)
hotbot launched in 1996 with the loudest design of any search engine on the web and a back-end called inktomi that updated its index weekly when its rivals...
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2016-10-01
Grouper (2011 - 2016)
michael waxman and tom brown built it in 2011 out of new york. two strangers each brought two friends, grouper picked the bar and comped the first round, six...
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2016-10-01
Putlocker (2011 - 2016)
putlocker was the streaming index that inherited megaupload's audience. it did not host the files, it just pointed at the hosts that did, which made it...
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2016-10-01
Matchmaker.com (1986 - 2016)
matchmaker began in 1986 as a matching feature on a texas bulletin board running off an apple ii+, spread city by city as licensed local systems, and reached...
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2016-10-01
3DR Solo (2015 - 2016)
dji announced the phantom 3 on 8 april 2015 and 3d robotics announced the solo five days later, which is most of the story right there. the solo carried a...
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2016-10-01
Wawa-Mania (2006 - 2016)
a maintenance page in october 2016 said the reverse proxy was down and the forum would be back in a few hours. it never came back. wawa-mania was a french link...
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2016-10-01
PriceZombie (2013 - 2016)
two developers in tampa built a price tracker that did the thing camelcamelcamel deliberately would not: compare amazon's history against walmart's, newegg's...
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2016-10-01
Aukro.ua (2007 - 2016)
sixty four thousand sellers were carried off aukro.ua in the autumn of 2016 and almost none of them had to lift a finger: the goods and the hard-won seller...
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2016-09-30
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...
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2016-09-30
Lokalisten (2005 - 2016)
bavaria had its own social network for eleven years. lokalisten was the version of facebook that prosiebensat.1 spent twenty-five million euros on, watched...
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2016-09-30
Mxit (2005 - 2016)
mxit was south africa's whatsapp before whatsapp arrived. it ran on the cheap feature phones a teenager could afford in johannesburg or cape town in 2008. it...
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2016-09-30
LEGO Minifigures Online (2015 - 2016)
lego minifigures online was funcom's second try at a lego-branded mmo, announced in august 2013 as free-to-play and shipped on 29 june 2015 as a paid buy-once...
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2016-09-30
Marvel: Avengers Alliance (2012 - 2016)
the disney/playdom facebook game where you played a s.h.i.e.l.d. agent recruiting a roster of 166 marvel heroes into turn-based squad battles. launched 1 march...
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2016-09-30
Readability (2009 - 2016)
readability was one of the big read-it-later tools of the early 2010s, the button that stripped a cluttered webpage down to just the words and saved it for...
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2016-09-30
Zenryaku Profile (2002 - 2016)
six point three million people had a page on it in 2010, most of them japanese schoolgirls answering a questionnaire on a flip phone. zenryaku profile opened...
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2016-09-30
koebu (2007 - 2016)
947,287 accounts and 4,382,379 recorded voice clips, counted seven months before the plug came out. koebu was japanese and it was audio only, and it ran for...
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2016-09-30
Zaption (2012 - 2016)
workday bought zaption on june 30 2016 for the team and the technology, and named the closing date in the same announcement. the platform ran three more months...
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2016-09-29
Sudden Attack 2 (2016 - 2016)
sudden attack 2 launched in korea on 6 july 2016 as the sequel to the shooter that had owned korean pc bangs for a decade. twenty three days later nexon...
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2016-09-28
Narrative Clip (2012 - 2016)
a photograph every thirty seconds, roughly two thousand a day, and no shutter to press. memoto raised five hundred and fifty thousand dollars on kickstarter in...
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2016-09-28
Pogoplug (2009 - 2016)
eight days is how much warning cloud engines gave before it deleted everything. the notice went up on 20 september 2016 and the unlimited storage tier stopped...
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2016-09-22
Milk Music (2014 - 2016)
samsung shipped milk music in march 2014 as a galaxy-only free radio app with an optional paid tier. the whole catalog and the recommendation engine ran on...
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2016-09-20
Firefox Hello (2014 - 2016)
the video chat button that sat inside firefox itself. you opened a conversation in your browser, sent the link, and the other side joined with one click no...
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2016-09-19
Fairchild Semiconductor (1957 - 2016)
the planar process came out of this company in 1959 and made the integrated circuit manufacturable, which is most of the reason there is a silicon valley at...
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2016-09-16
Eye-Fi (2005 - 2016)
the wifi sd card that let a digital camera upload to a desktop server without a usb cable. founded in 2005 in mountain view by yuval koren, ziv gillat, eugene...
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2016-09-16
Digital Homicide Studios (2014 - 2016)
two brothers in yuma, arizona put around sixty games on steam in two years, most of them assembled out of bought unity asset packs. when people said so,...
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2016-09-15
Vesper (2013 - 2016)
vesper was the notes app from q branch, the small studio john gruber set up in late 2012 with brent simmons and dave wiskus. it shipped on iphone in june 2013...
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2016-09-15
Desura (2010 - 2016)
desura opened in december 2010 as an indie-first steam alternative from the moddb team. linden lab bought it in july 2013 and offloaded it to bad juju games...
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2016-09-15
TorrentHound (2007 - 2016)
the founder's explanation was less traffic and less revenue against bills that kept piling up, which is a rarer obituary for a torrent site than a raid....
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2016-09-15
Mode Media (2003 - 2016)
in 2015 the seventh most visited property on the american internet belonged to a company almost nobody could name. mode media, formerly glam media, had around...
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2016-09-13
Apple Game Center (2010 - 2016)
game center was apple's xbox live for the iphone. it launched with iOS 4.1, picked up sixty seven million accounts in its first year, then slowly emptied out...
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2016-09-13
Sunrise Calendar (2013 - 2016)
sunrise calendar was the new york via paris startup that briefly turned the calendar app into something people actually liked opening. pierre valade and jeremy...
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2016-09-12
Firefox OS (2013 - 2016)
mozilla's mobile operating system. the whole UI and apps were built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. the pitch was: every web developer is now a mobile-app...
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2016-09-12
NUfoto (2007 - 2016)
laurens verhagen, then editor in chief of nu.nl, told the dutch trade press in august 2007 that the reader photographs arriving at the news desk were too good...
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2016-09-02
Project Ara (2013 - 2016)
project ara was google's modular smartphone. the pitch was an aluminum frame called an endo with slots for swappable parts: a different camera, a bigger...
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2016-09-02
Stockfighter (2015 - 2016)
about forty thousand people signed up to trade on an exchange that did not exist, against an api that behaved like a real one, because three people believed a...
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2016-09-01
WAYN (2002 - 2016)
wayn stood for "where are you now", a travel and lifestyle social network built in london around 2002. the idea was to pin every place you had been and find...
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2016-09-01
BlogShares (2003 - 2016)
blogshares was a fake stock market for weblogs, written in manchester in early 2003 by one person as a side project. a blog's share price came from who linked...
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2016-09-01
TV Guide Plus (1995 - 2016)
a full week of television listings, on screen, free, arriving through the blank lines at the top of a broadcast picture that were never meant to carry...
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2016-09-01
Dipity (2007 - 2016)
newsrooms built election timelines on dipity and teachers built history lessons on it, and then one september it stopped answering and nobody wrote anything...
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2016-09-01
Genee (2015 - 2016)
ben cheung and charles lee started genee in 2014 to kill the email thread where four people spend two days failing to agree on a time. the public product...
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2016-09-01
Mr. Reader (2011 - 2016)
one line on a german developer's homepage ended it: "September 2016: I stopped iOS development and removed all apps from the App Store." mr. reader was an ipad...
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2016-08-31
Yahoo GeoPlanet (2005 - 2016)
yahoo geoplanet was the geographic-identifier api built around the woeid, a 32-bit number that named every country, region, town, and named place on earth. it...
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2016-08-31
AppFog (2010 - 2016)
appfog was the paas that started as phpfog, became a heroku competitor, then got swallowed by a telecom that did not know what to do with it. three years from...
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2016-08-31
Club Sunday (2008 - 2016)
two titles. that is what shogakukan opened its first webcomic site with on christmas eve 2008, both of them continuations of series that had already ended in...
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2016-08-30
Washio (2013 - 2016)
washio wanted to be uber for laundry, and for a few venture-funded years it was. you tapped an app and a driver in branded gear came for your dirty clothes and...
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2016-08-30
Chromebook Pixel (2013 - 2016)
google built a 1,299 dollar laptop around chrome os and then said out loud that it was a proof of concept. the 2013 screen ran 2,560 by 1,700 at 239 pixels per...
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2016-08-26
Zwinky (2006 - 2016)
zwinky let teenagers build a cartoon big-head avatar and then, in 2007, walk it around a virtual world called zwinktopia. the real business was the toolbar you...
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2016-08-26
Prostopleer (2009 - 2016)
prostopleer, later just pleer.com, was where russia listened for free. a music site that let you find and play almost any track, much of it pulled straight off...
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2016-08-22
Gawker (2002 - 2016)
gawker was a manhattan gossip blog that became a media company, then decided that publishing a hulk hogan sex tape was within its remit. the verdict came back...
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2016-08-22
Picturelife (2013 - 2016)
picturelife wanted to be the calm, safe home for every photo you ever took, back when that still sounded like a business. it got bought by streamnation in 2015...
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2016-08-19
AskMe (2010 - 2016)
askme was an indian local-search portal that scaled into a multi-category e-commerce roll-up through 2014 and 2015, buying askmebazaar for goods, mebelkart for...
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2016-08-18
EveryTrail (2006 - 2016)
on 17 august 2016 everytrail.com was still serving pages. by the following morning it answered every request with a redirect to alltrails.com, and the...
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2016-08-17
Legends of Norrath (2007 - 2016)
legends of norrath was a digital collectible card game sony online entertainment built into everquest and everquest ii, playable from inside either game or on...
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2016-08-17
Szánalmas.hu (2002 - 2016)
an anonymous administrator posting as bateman opened a link and picture blog in the autumn of 2002, and by 2005 an econet and medián audit called it the...
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2016-08-16
Tsū (2014 - 2016)
sebastian sobczak launched tsu in october 2014 with a 90-percent-revenue-share-to-users pitch that read more like an mlm than a social product. users got paid...
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2016-08-16
Kingsoft Kuaipan (2010 - 2016)
kingsoft kuaipan was one of china's big personal cloud drives, launched in 2010 by the software house better known abroad for its wps office suite. it grew...
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2016-08-15
Cobook (2011 - 2016)
riga built one of the better address books apple's platforms ever had, and denver bought it. cobook launched in 2011, replaced the stock contacts app for more...
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2016-08-13
Blab.im (2015 - 2016)
blab.im was a four-pane video chat app shipped from monkey inferno, the workshop that had bought back bebo. it caught the periscope-era live-video moment and...
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2016-08-13
Pokémon Uranium (2016 - 2016)
nine years of work by two people writing under handles, released on 6 august 2016 and pulled on the 13th. in between it was downloaded a million and a half...
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2016-08-12
Microsoft Project Spark (2013 - 2016)
microsoft wanted xbox one to be a creator platform, not just a console, and project spark was the most literal version of that pitch. you got a starter kit...
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2016-08-12
Project Spark (2014 - 2016)
less than three years after microsoft put it on a stage at e3, project spark was pulled from the stores. it was a game about making games, free by the end,...
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2016-08-05
Torrentz.eu (2003 - 2016)
torrentz.eu was not a tracker. it was a search-over-trackers, the layer above thepiratebay and isohunt and demonoid that let you compare seeders across sources...
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2016-08-05
Ku6 (2006 - 2016)
ku6 was the beijing user-generated video site founded by kevin li in 2006, the year after youtube. former sohu editor-in-chief li left to build it, took a...
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2016-08-05
Eyegroove (2013 - 2016)
eyegroove was a phone app for making thirty-second lip-sync videos with music and little visual effects, built in san francisco by an interactive-art guy and...
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2016-08-04
Togethera (2013 - 2016)
sixty-five thousand people is a respectable number of users and a terrible number of customers. togethera opened in london in 2013 as a private place for a...
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2016-08-02
Windows Journal (2002 - 2016)
windows journal was the note-taking app that shipped with windows xp tablet pc edition in november 2002. it drew on the screen. it saved handwriting into a...
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2016-08-01
Drupal Gardens (2009 - 2016)
drupal gardens was acquia's attempt to make drupal usable by people who would never read a hook_menu doc. it hit a hundred thousand sites at peak. dries...
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2016-08-01
Yahoo Toolbar (2004 - 2016)
a browser toolbar that mostly arrived on machines the same way spam arrives in inboxes: bundled inside something else, checkbox pre-checked, click next. it did...
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2016-08-01
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...
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2016-08-01
Fling (2014 - 2016)
fling let you take a photo and send it to fifty random people anywhere on earth, and the fifty could write back. that got it four million users and, inside a...
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2016-08-01
OpenCandy (2009 - 2016)
opencandy was the polite end of the bundling business. it did not hijack your browser or hide from add/remove programs, it just put one extra offer in front of...
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2016-08-01
Blue Coat Systems (1996 - 2016)
it started in redmond in march 1996 as cacheflow, selling appliances that made pages load faster for internet providers. the dot-com crash took ninety seven...
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2016-08-01
Bildirgeç (1999 - 2016)
on 30 january 2002 the front page counted 2,109 posts from 342 members, each one a link somebody had found and wanted to show in turkish. bildirgeç was the...
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2016-08-01
UKNova (2003 - 2016)
vhs tapes of eastenders, mailed across the atlantic after bbc america dropped the show in 2003, were the first version of uknova. the tracker that replaced...
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2016-08-01
Scion (2003 - 2016)
173,034 cars in 2006 was as good as it ever got. toyota built scion because its own buyers were getting old and it wanted a badge that twenty-somethings would...
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2016-08-01
Kifi (2014 - 2016)
google wanted the engineers and had no use for the product, which is the whole story. the kifi team announced on 12 july 2016 that it was joining the spaces...
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2016-08-01
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...
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2016-07-31
VHS (1976 - 2016)
dvd rentals passed vhs in june 2003, and the format went on being manufactured for thirteen more years after that. jvc launched it in tokyo in september 1976...
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2016-07-31
LoQUo (2002 - 2016)
ebay bought spain's craigslist in may 2005 and closed it on 31 july 2016, eleven years later. ubaldo huerta had started loquo in barcelona in 2002 because the...
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2016-07-31
Symform (2007 - 2016)
two former microsoft engineers, praerit garg and bassam tabbara, looked at the price of a data center in 2007 and decided not to build one. symform's deal...
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2016-07-31
Kagi (1994 - 2016)
kee nethery built the thing that let a one person software company in finland get paid by a stranger in australia, and he ran it for twenty two years. one...
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2016-07-31
Readlists (2012 - 2016)
arc90 built it as a side project off the readability parser: paste a stack of urls, get back an epub with each article as a chapter. no account required, which...
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2016-07-29
Facebook Paper (2014 - 2016)
facebook's first creative labs app, a magazine-style news reader laid over the feed. you tilted the phone to load photos and subscribed to sections one at a...
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2016-07-29
ぽこぽこ (2011 - 2016)
usamaru furuya supervised it, and the slogan in the corner of the logo said it was the kind of web serialization space that grows when you praise it, which...
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2016-07-28
Gmane (2002 - 2016)
163,643,204 messages from 15,119 mailing lists, and then the counter stopped. lars magne ingebrigtsen ran gmane out of oslo for fourteen years, mirroring the...
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2016-07-27
Sonic Runners (2015 - 2016)
sonic runners was sonic team's free-to-play endless runner for phones, soft launched in japan and canada in february 2015 and released worldwide that june. it...
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2016-07-26
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...
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2016-07-23
Spicy Horse (2007 - 2016)
american mcgee moved to shanghai in 2007 and spent nine years proving a western studio could be run in china for a western audience. alice: madness returns...
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2016-07-20
KickassTorrents (2008 - 2016)
kickasstorrents was the torrent index that took the top spot from the pirate bay in late 2014, on a cleaner interface and a stricter moderation policy. on 20...
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2016-07-20
WooYun (2010 - 2016)
wooyun ran from may 2010 as the place chinese security researchers posted the holes they found, in the open, where the company that owned the hole read about...
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2016-07-20
Exaro (2011 - 2016)
a london investigative news site funded by one man, the city fund manager jerome booth, launched in october 2011 under the line "holding power to account". the...
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2016-07-19
Bitstrips (2007 - 2016)
bitstrips was the 2013 facebook viral moment where everyone built a cartoon version of themselves and posted it as a comic strip. it lasted about ten weeks at...
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2016-07-15
Storehouse (2014 - 2016)
storehouse made the most beautiful photo stories on the app store and almost nobody read them. it had an apple design award and a former apple designer running...
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2016-07-14
Rhapsody (2001 - 2016)
rhapsody was the first all-you-can-stream subscription music service with a major-label catalog. listen.com launched it on december 3 2001 from san francisco....
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2016-07-14
Highlight (2012 - 2016)
highlight was an ios and android app that ran in the background, watched your gps, and pinged you when a facebook friend or a friend-of-a-friend was within...
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2016-07-14
Spreecast (2011 - 2016)
jeff fluhr sold stubhub to ebay then built a video product where four people could share a screen, an audience could watch, and viewers could raise a hand to...
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2016-07-14
FlightCar (2013 - 2016)
three eighteen-year-olds worked out that an airport parking lot is a fleet nobody is driving, and for three years they were right. you left your car, they...
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2016-07-10
Examiner.com (2008 - 2016)
the philip anschutz local news content factory that paid freelancers per click across two hundred thirty eight american cities. peaked at twenty million...
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2016-07-07
Microsoft Pinpoint (2008 - 2016)
seven thousand application listings from thirty thousand vendors, and the product was a sales channel wearing the clothes of a marketplace. pinpoint existed so...
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2016-07-05
THOMAS (1995 - 2016)
the library of congress switched thomas on on 5 january 1995, a day after the 104th congress convened, because congress had decided the public should be able...
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2016-07-01
PlanetSide (2003 - 2016)
planetside tried to be an mmo and an fps at once. the math worked when servers were full of subscribers. when the subscribers thinned, three-faction warfare...
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2016-07-01
The Toast (2013 - 2016)
the toast was a small independent feminist literary site that ran for three and a half years and built a defining voice in a corner of the english-language web...
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2016-07-01
DontStayIn (2003 - 2016)
tim aylott and the brophy brothers launched a uk clubbing site in april 2003 under the name yougotspotted.com and rebranded as dontstayin in 2004. through the...
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2016-07-01
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...
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2016-07-01
Google Swiffy (2011 - 2016)
swiffy took an adobe flash swf file and gave you back something a phone could render, which mattered because the iphone never ran flash and by 2011 that had...
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2016-07-01
Amazon Webstore (2007 - 2016)
amazon spent nine years renting out the software behind amazon.com, first at fifty nine dollars a month plus seven percent of everything sold, later at under...
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2016-07-01
Mon.service-public.fr (2009 - 2016)
the french state put every citizen's paperwork behind a single login in early 2009 and switched that login off on 1 july 2016. the account came with a digital...
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2016-07-01
GivesMeHope (2009 - 2016)
emerson spartz built mugglenet at twelve and had a company with thirty websites in it by his early twenties. givesmehope was the one that asked readers what...
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2016-06-30
Apple iAd (2010 - 2016)
iAd was apple's attempt to own the mobile ad layer the way it already owned the app store. steve jobs announced it on stage in april 2010 with a million-dollar...
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2016-06-30
NOTTV (2012 - 2016)
nottv went on the air on 1 april 2012, a subscription television channel broadcast over the old analog vhf band straight into japanese phones for about 420 yen...
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2016-06-30
Google Wallet Card (2013 - 2016)
the bancorp bank issued it and mastercard cleared it, which made this the most ordinary object google ever shipped. it existed because money kept arriving in...
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2016-06-30
Bluebottle (2002 - 2016)
"i now only get emails from mum," the founder said at the launch in august 2002. robert pickup's melbourne webmail answered every unknown sender with a...
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2016-06-29
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...
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2016-06-28
CurrentC (2012 - 2016)
a payment app designed by retailers who did not want to pay card fees or hand apple their customer data. it made you scan a qr code at the register instead of...
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2016-06-28
ninemsn (1997 - 2016)
in 1997 microsoft and kerry packer's pbl put fifty million dollars and their australian internet assets into one joint venture and named it ninemsn. for...
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2016-06-25
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...
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2016-06-25
Flipkart Ping (2015 - 2016)
punit soni came from google to be flipkart's chief product officer and put a messenger inside the shopping app, so you could send a friend a pair of shoes and...
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2016-06-21
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...
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2016-06-21
malariacontrol.net (2006 - 2016)
basel had a malaria modeling group and not enough computers, so in 2006 the swiss tropical institute put its simulations on boinc and asked the public for the...
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2016-06-20
蜂買 (BeeCrazy) (2010 - 2016)
a tvb supporting actor and two friends pooled seven figures into a hong kong coupon site in july 2010, and in december 2013 they sold it into an australian...
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2016-06-17
StarWipe (2015 - 2016)
starwipe was the onion aiming a whole site at celebrity gossip, with sean o'neal running it and tmz as the target. the problem was structural rather than...
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2016-06-12
BearShare (2000 - 2016)
bearshare was the gnutella client that lived on after napster died. december 2000 launch, riaa settlement in may 2006 for thirty million dollars, sold to...
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2016-06-09
iMesh (1999 - 2016)
imesh was the rare 2000s file-sharing brand that made it out of the riaa litigation alive by settling for 4.1 million dollars and rebuilding itself as a paid...
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2016-06-08
Facebook Notify (2015 - 2016)
facebook released a separate ios app in november 2015 that did nothing but ping you when cnn or vogue or weather channel posted something. 70 publishers,...
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2016-06-07
MSN China (2005 - 2016)
msn china was half microsoft and half a shanghai state investment fund, and it was the only national msn permitted to keep its own newsroom and its own page...
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2016-06-07
Firefox Tilt (2012 - 2016)
firefox 47 shipped on 7 june 2016 and the developer release notes carried one line about it: 3d view has been removed. tilt was the webgl thing that turned a...
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2016-06-06
Mafia Wars (2008 - 2016)
mafia wars was the zynga title that lived on neighbor invites. text-mode gangster freemium gameplay where you ran jobs, recruited mafia members from your...
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2016-06-06
Olympe (2007 - 2016)
ninety thousand accounts, seventy thousand sites, five languages, and no advertising anywhere on any of it. olympe was a french nonprofit association that gave...
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2016-06-04
MetaMind (2014 - 2016)
salesforce announced the acquisition on 4 april 2016 and gave users one week before deleting what they had uploaded. the free tier stopped on 4 may and the...
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2016-06-01
BitTorrent Sync (2013 - 2016)
btsync did the thing you would want it to do. two folders on two machines stayed in step over the internet, encrypted end to end, using the exact torrent-swarm...
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2016-06-01
Arto (1998 - 2016)
morten borg put a page of jokes online in february 1998, and by 2007 it was the largest website in denmark, with eighty thousand danes logged in simultaneously...
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2016-06-01
Poetica (2014 - 2016)
london, june 2014: twitter's first lead engineer launches a text editor whose one good idea is that a suggested edit should look like somebody wrote on your...
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2016-06-01
AppSurfer (2012 - 2016)
four school friends in pune spent four years trying to make android apps run without being installed first. they got funded on an indian television show by the...
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2016-05-31
Mobli (2010 - 2016)
israeli photo and video app founded 2010 by the hogeg brothers. leonardo dicaprio was the announced marquee investor, followed by serena williams, lance...
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2016-05-31
Nosgoth (2015 - 2016)
nosgoth started life as the multiplayer half of legacy of kain: dead sun, a single player game climax studios worked on for three years before square enix...
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2016-05-31
Darkfall (2009 - 2016)
darkfall was a greek-built mmo for people who wanted ultima online before it went soft: one world, no levels, manual aiming, and full loot on every death....
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2016-05-30
Dust 514 (2013 - 2016)
dust 514 was a free to play playstation 3 shooter wired into eve online's live universe, built by ccp shanghai and released on 14 may 2013. players on the...
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2016-05-26
DailyFinance (2009 - 2016)
february 2009: aol launched a business news site into the worst month the markets had seen in seventy years, betting that a wire desk crossed with a blog...
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2016-05-25
Blogdigger (2003 - 2016)
greg gershman launched blogdigger alone in march 2003, indexing about two thousand weblogs with a search engine he had written himself. it placed third in pc...
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2016-05-24
Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE (2007 - 2016)
shin megami tensei imagine was the mmo entry in the megami tensei franchise. cave and later gungho developed it under a license from atlus. you played a demon...
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2016-05-22
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,...
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2016-05-20
Bitcasa (2011 - 2016)
bitcasa promised unlimited cloud storage for a flat $99 a year. the math never worked. in 2014 the company killed the unlimited plan, gave subscribers 23 days...
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2016-05-20
MyHabit (2011 - 2016)
gilt groupe sold for a fraction of its billion-dollar valuation in january 2016, and four months later amazon closed the site it had built to beat gilt....
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2016-05-18
Coin (2013 - 2016)
coin was the kickstarter-style smart card that promised to consolidate every magstripe in your wallet into one bluetooth-connected piece of plastic. kanishk...
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2016-05-18
Time Warner Cable (1992 - 2016)
comcast tried to buy it first, announcing in february 2014 and spending fourteen months failing to convince washington that one company should carry more than...
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2016-05-16
Tvidi (2008 - 2016)
18 september 2008 is the date the russian internet got a social network for six-year-olds, and it worked: 2.1 million people a month by 2013, most of them...
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2016-05-15
Revolv (2013 - 2016)
revolv shipped a $300 hub with seven radios that promised to be the brain of your house. nest bought the company in october 2014 and shelved the product. in...
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2016-05-15
SPDY (2009 - 2016)
may 2016 is when chrome stopped speaking it, and by then there was nothing left to kill. spdy spent six years as google's experiment in making http faster,...
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2016-05-13
WebObjects (1996 - 2016)
webobjects was the apple piece of the late-nineties java web stack. next first shipped it in march 1996 for fifty thousand dollars a license, apple inherited...
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2016-05-11
Sqwiggle (2013 - 2016)
a webcam pointed at your desk all day, refreshing your face into a grid of colleagues every few seconds, was somebody's sincere answer to remote work in 2013....
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2016-05-11
PSharing (2007 - 2016)
at 17:49 on 11 may 2016 the server stopped answering, and by 19:34 both of its domains were pointing at the operator's webhosting business instead. no notice...
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2016-05-10
Disney Infinity (2013 - 2016)
three years of avalanche software trying to be skylanders for disney's ip vault. you bought a plastic figurine, dropped it on an infinity base usb dongle, and...
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2016-05-10
Disney Interactive Studios (1988 - 2016)
disney spent twenty-eight years trying to be a real games publisher. they were buena vista games, then disney interactive, then disney interactive studios....
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2016-05-10
Tlen.pl (2001 - 2016)
tlen.pl launched in october 2001 from grupa o2 in poland as a desktop instant messenger meant to compete with the already-dominant gadu-gadu. the protocol was...
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2016-05-05
SF Signal (2003 - 2016)
sf signal spent thirteen years as a science fiction blog with a podcast operation bolted to it, and it got good enough to win the hugo for best fanzine twice...
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2016-05-04
Katch (2015 - 2016)
a two-day hack built out of the sxsw 2015 livestream boom that turned into a real product with 1.3 million monthly users. saved meerkat and periscope streams...
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2016-05-04
Neon Alley (2012 - 2016)
viz media launched neon alley on 2 october 2012 as a twenty-four hour anime channel you watched through a playstation 3, english dubbed and uncut, for $6.99 a...
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2016-05-03
Tampa Tribune (1895 - 2016)
the tampa tribune was one of two competing daily newspapers in tampa, florida, from 1895 until its rival bought and shut it in may 2016. it was owned by media...
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2016-05-02
Freebase (2007 - 2016)
freebase was a crowdsourced structured knowledge base started by metaweb technologies in 2007. it described 44 million topics and 2.4 billion facts as nodes...
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2016-05-01
Picasa (2002 - 2016)
the desktop photo organizer that managed every digital camera dump for a decade. you plugged in the camera and picasa sorted everything into date folders...
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2016-05-01
Kuro5hin (1999 - 2016)
kuro5hin (pronounced corrosion) was a collaborative-edited news and discussion site founded in december 1999 by rusty foster as a slashdot alternative. members...
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2016-05-01
Copy.com (2013 - 2016)
copy.com was barracuda networks putting a consumer face on the storage it already ran for its backup appliances. it opened in february 2013 with fifteen...
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2016-05-01
Kliksa (2012 - 2016)
sabancı wanted an online retailer and built one from scratch instead of buying one. kliksa opened in 2012 and spent four years discounting against hepsiburada...
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2016-05-01
Mystery Seeker (2009 - 2016)
type anything, press search, and you got somebody else's search instead. that was the entire mechanic, launched on 2 october 2009 under the name mystery google...
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2016-04-30
CastleVille (2011 - 2016)
castleville was zynga's medieval-fantasy entry in the social-game wave, built at the zynga dallas studio, with art that aimed at a deeper online game feel and...
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2016-04-30
Xfire (2004 - 2016)
xfire was a free game-aware instant messenger that launched in april 2004 from a team led by quake legend dennis 'thresh' fong. it watched what game your pc...
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2016-04-30
Yahoo! Games (1998 - 2016)
the yahoo browser games portal. pool, chess, spades, hearts, dominoes, backgammon. each game opened in a small popup window. you got matched with random...
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2016-04-30
Pheed (2012 - 2016)
pheed was a paid social network founded in los angeles in november 2012 by o.d. kobo, tony deniro, and phil haus. it sold itself as a creator-monetization...
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2016-04-30
MyVideo (2006 - 2016)
myvideo was a german-language video portal launched in 2006 by magic internet and later absorbed into the prosiebensat.1 broadcast group. it ran the youtube...
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2016-04-30
Nook Video (2012 - 2016)
barnes and noble tried to make the nook hd into a general-purpose media tablet in late 2012 by adding a video store next to the ebook store. the video store...
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2016-04-30
My Tracks (2009 - 2016)
my tracks was google's gps recorder for android, shipped in february 2009 when a phone that knew where it was still counted as news. you pressed record, and at...
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2016-04-30
Softimage (1986 - 2016)
softimage was the high-end 3d animation package of the 1990s, the software behind the jurassic park dinosaurs, and then it spent twenty years being sold...
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2016-04-29
Lionhead Studios (1997 - 2016)
lionhead was peter molyneux's second uk studio after he left bullfrog and ea in 1997, set up in guildford with mark webley and tim rance. black and white in...
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2016-04-23
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...
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2016-04-22
Livemocha (2007 - 2016)
livemocha was the 2007 bellevue peer language exchange community. you filled in your native language and the language you wanted to learn, the site routed your...
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2016-04-22
Aniboom (2006 - 2016)
an israeli television executive worked out that there were thousands of animators with nowhere to be seen and studios with no way to find them, then built the...
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2016-04-21
Experience Project (2007 - 2016)
a place built for people who needed to say something they could not say under their own name. it started as a support board for one illness and grew into...
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2016-04-21
Empire of Sports (2007 - 2016)
a french studio called f4 built a persistent world where one avatar trained across six sports and met strangers from other countries in real time. empire of...
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2016-04-18
GamePolitics.com (2005 - 2016)
dennis mccauley started it in march 2005 to cover a beat nobody else was working full time: the legislation and the lawsuits aimed at video games in the united...
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2016-04-15
Shuddle (2014 - 2016)
one day of notice. shuddle emailed parents and drivers on 14 april 2016 to say the service would stop at the end of business the following day, which is not...
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2016-04-15
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...
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2016-04-14
QuickTime for Windows (1994 - 2016)
quicktime for windows was the price you paid for installing itunes. apple shipped it in november 1994, mostly so its own.mov format would play on the windows...
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2016-04-14
Phorm (2002 - 2016)
ttnet carried phorm from 2012 under a brand called gezinti, which is how a company already driven out of british broadband ended up reporting twenty million...
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2016-04-12
Al Jazeera America (2013 - 2016)
al jazeera america was a us-only cable news channel built by al jazeera media network to convert qatar's roughly five hundred million dollar purchase of...
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2016-04-11
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...
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2016-04-10
Nostalrius (2015 - 2016)
nostalrius was a free server that ran world of warcraft as it stood in 2006, patch 1.12, with none of the expansions on top of it. an unpaid french team opened...
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2016-04-08
GameMaker Sandbox (2007 - 2016)
yoyo games spent nine years letting anyone with a copy of gamemaker upload what they had built, and ended up holding more than a hundred thousand games, most...
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2016-04-07
Alien Blue (2010 - 2016)
alien blue was reddit's favorite ios client back when reddit did not have an official one. jase morrissey built it in objective-c out of melbourne. reddit...
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2016-04-05
Scarlet Blade (2013 - 2016)
scarlet blade was the western version of a korean mmo called queen's blade, localized by aeria games in 2013. it ran on the aggressive marketing angle that its...
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2016-04-05
OSVDB (Open Sourced Vulnerability Database) (2004 - 2016)
osvdb was an attempt to keep a vulnerability database outside anybody's commercial control. it was started at black hat in august 2002 and opened to the public...
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2016-04-04
Atmel (1984 - 2016)
george perlegos left intel in 1984 and built a company around putting flash memory on a microcontroller, which sounds like nothing until you remember that...
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2016-04-01
More (1998 - 2016)
more was meredith's magazine for us women over forty, a demographic thesis turned into a print monthly. launched with the september 1998 issue, peaked around a...
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2016-04-01
AbsolutePunk (2000 - 2016)
jason tate started absolutepunk.net in june 2000, at fifteen, as a fan page for blink-182 and mxpx. it turned into the place an entire pop-punk and emo scene...
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2016-04-01
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...
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2016-04-01
Kippt (2011 - 2016)
kippt was a place to keep links, built in 2011 by two finnish designers who wanted bookmarking to be shared and searchable instead of a lonely folder in your...
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2016-04-01
Soranet (1999 - 2016)
soranet began in 1999 as a personal link page and became the largest korean-language pornography site on the internet, with more than a million registered...
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2016-04-01
Letitbit (2007 - 2016)
registered in the seychelles and cyprus, hosted in the netherlands. letitbit opened in 2007 promising unlimited file size with a winking smiley, paid its...
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2016-03-31
Dropbox Carousel (2014 - 2016)
carousel was dropbox's attempt to be the place your photos lived without the social-feed noise. it was nicely built, paired with an app called mailbox that...
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2016-03-31
Tuenti (2006 - 2016)
tuenti was spain's facebook between 2009 and 2012, with fifteen million registered users at peak and an estimated fifteen percent of all spanish web traffic...
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2016-03-31
Yahoo Livetext (2015 - 2016)
livetext was a video chat app where nobody was allowed to talk. you opened the camera and your friend opened the camera. you typed at each other while staring...
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2016-03-31
Yahoo! Search BOSS (2008 - 2016)
boss was an api on yahoo's web index. you signed up, got a key, called the endpoint, got json or xml ranked-and-relevant search results back. yahoo imagined an...
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2016-03-31
Clearwire (CLEAR) (2003 - 2016)
craig mccaw's second wireless company sold home and mobile broadband over wimax under the clear brand, starting in portland in january 2009. sprint and intel...
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2016-03-31
Yandex.Slovari (2005 - 2016)
yandex spent a decade licensing the russian reference shelf and putting it behind one search box, the great soviet encyclopedia and dahl included, with most of...
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2016-03-31
Rise of Mana (2014 - 2016)
the eleventh mana game was free-to-play, japanese only, and lasted two years. square enix put rise of mana on ios in march 2014 with a story about an angel and...
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2016-03-31
PlayStation Broadband Navigator (2002 - 2016)
japan got a hard disk for the playstation 2 and a dashboard to run it, and nobody else did. broadband navigator turned the console into a media machine with a...
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2016-03-28
DarkScape (2015 - 2016)
darkscape was jagex's attempt to spin off a runescape variant where anyone could attack anyone almost anywhere. it opened on 16 september 2015 and closed on 28...
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2016-03-25
HuffPost Live (2012 - 2016)
huffpost live was aol and huffington post's streaming video newsroom, launched 13 august 2012 with eight live hours a day out of new york and four more out of...
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2016-03-25
Radikal (1996 - 2016)
turkish daily founded on october 13 1996 by doğan, on the web from march 1998. it stopped printing on june 21 2014 and carried on as a website only, then the...
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2016-03-24
Microsoft Tay (23 - 24 March 2016 (16 hours))
microsoft's twitter chatbot. lasted 16 hours. 4chan taught it nazi tweets within minutes of launch. microsoft pulled the plug before the next afternoon. the...
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2016-03-24
Skype Qik (2014 - 2016)
qik was the second life of a name microsoft already owned. the original qik was a 2006 live mobile broadcasting service skype bought in 2011, then sat on for...
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2016-03-22
Evolution Studios (1999 - 2016)
evolution studios spent seventeen years making racing games that looked better than they had any business looking, first the official world rally championship...
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2016-03-22
NutshellMail (2008 - 2016)
a social network aggregator that ran in the opposite direction to everything around it. instead of opening facebook or twitter you told nutshellmail when to...
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2016-03-21
Nokia MixRadio (2011 - 2016)
nokia's free streaming radio built on the ashes of nokia music. announced 26 october 2011 for windows phone at the lumia launch, rebranded from nokia music to...
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2016-03-16
Talko (2014 - 2016)
talko was ray ozzie's second startup after lotus and groove networks. it was a voice-first messaging app for work teams, built on the premise that conference...
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2016-03-16
Shelfari (2006 - 2016)
shelfari launched on 11 october 2006 in seattle, founded by josh hug and kevin beukelman as a virtual-bookshelf social network where readers tagged the books...
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2016-03-16
享樂團購網 (FunShare) (2010 - 2016)
hong kong got its group-buying wave in 2010, the same year everybody else did, and funshare was the local entry that never got bought by anyone bigger. it sold...
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2016-03-16
Wildcard (2014 - 2016)
ten million dollars from general catalyst and softbank bought a card-based iphone browser and a published card schema that publishers were invited to adopt....
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2016-03-15
SpoonRocket (2013 - 2016)
spoonrocket was the on-demand meal startup that treated lunch as a logistics problem. drivers carried insulated bags full of pre-cooked $6 meals around...
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2016-03-15
The Malaysian Insider (2008 - 2016)
jahabar sadiq had been a reporter in the region since 1988 and edited the malaysian insider until its last minute. it launched on 25 february 2008 as a free...
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2016-03-14
Hypertable (2008 - 2016)
doug judd built hypertable at zvents as a c++ implementation of google's bigtable paper, and baidu signed on as a project sponsor in january 2009 and ran it in...
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2016-03-06
Open Hunt (2015 - 2016)
on 15 december 2015 somebody published a post about how product hunt's front page actually got chosen. three days later there was a rails app with twitter...
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2016-03-01
Elance (1999 - 2016)
bernard sheth and srini anumolu founded elance in 1999 out of jersey city, moved it to silicon valley by the end of the year. the platform spent the 2000s as...
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2016-03-01
Betamax (1975 - 2016)
the story people reach for when they want to say the better product does not always win. betamax had the sharper picture and lost anyway, on recording time and...
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2016-03-01
Candystand (1997 - 2016)
candystand was a free browser games portal built in 1997 for the life savers candy brand by skyworks technologies, a studio run by two ex-activision game...
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2016-03-01
MicroMV (2001 - 2016)
sony introduced micromv in october 2001 and it is still the smallest videotape anybody shipped, seventy percent smaller than minidv and about the footprint of...
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2016-03-01
MyMajorCompany (2007 - 2016)
mymajorcompany opened in december 2007 asking ordinary people to put ten euros each behind an unsigned artist, with seventy thousand euros as the number that...
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2016-03-01
Darkspore (2011 - 2016)
darkspore was maxis emeryville's first game after will wright left, a squad based action rpg that borrowed the spore creature editor and demanded a live...
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2016-03-01
Rakuten Belanja Online (2011 - 2016)
rakuten belanja online was rakuten's attempt at indonesia, launched in 2011 as a joint venture with the media group behind MNC. the model was the japanese one,...
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2016-03-01
Zuula (2006 - 2016)
every other metasearch engine of the era mixed its sources into a single ranked list and asked you to trust the mixing. zuula would not do it. boris simkovich...
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2016-03-01
BBC Lab UK (2009 - 2016)
a national broadcaster with an audience of millions is, looked at from one angle, a recruitment channel no university could ever afford. the bbc worked that...
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2016-03-01
Ktunnel (2006 - 2016)
on 18 august 2008 milliyet counted a proxy site at number 37 among the most visited sites in turkey, twenty places below the youtube it existed to reach....
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2016-03-01
WDYL (What Do You Love) (2011 - 2016)
a search box with a heart on the button, and behind it a dozen google products answering the same query at the same time. wdyl.com went live on 27 june 2011...
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2016-02-29
Friends Reunited (2000 - 2016)
the UK's first big social network. you registered, you picked your old school from a directory of british schools, you saw the list of classmates who had also...
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2016-02-29
iG (Internet Group) (2000 - 2016)
ig was the brazilian free-dial-up phenomenon of the early 2000s. internet group launched on 9 january 2000 from sao paulo, backed by gp investimentos and banco...
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2016-02-29
Tales of Pirates (2007 - 2016)
in the last week of january 2016 igg posted a farewell and pointed everyone at its mobile games. a month later, on the leap day, the servers went off. what...
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2016-02-29
dotCloud (2011 - 2016)
the shutdown landed on 29 february 2016, a date that only exists every four years. dotcloud was the platform solomon hykes started in paris and relaunched out...
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2016-02-28
PlayStation TV (2013 - 2016)
playstation tv was sony's microconsole take on the vita, a hdmi puck that played vita and psp games on a television through the dualshock 3. it launched as...
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2016-02-26
Mailbox (2013 - 2016)
the iphone email app that taught a generation of people what "swipe to archive" meant. orchestra inc launched it on 7 february 2013 with a reservation queue...
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2016-02-25
Convrge (2015 - 2016)
convrge was a social vr hangout for the oculus rift dk1 and dk2, built by shawn whiting and hayden lee out of a nashville apartment after they met at virginia...
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2016-02-25
Mp3skull (2010 - 2016)
mp3skull was an mp3 search-and-direct-download aggregator that launched in 2010 and reached alexa's top 500 by 2013. the major labels sued jointly in april...
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2016-02-20
Fotolog (2002 - 2016)
the photo blog. one photo a day. comments and a guestbook. peak in argentina, chile, and spain around 2007. i never used it in turkey because it was not really...
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2016-02-19
Powa Technologies (2007 - 2016)
powa was a london fintech that claimed a $2.7 billion valuation and went into administration on 19 february 2016 with about $250,000 in the bank. its main...
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2016-02-17
Yahoo! Travel (1997 - 2016)
yahoo travel launched as a vertical in 1997. by january 2014 it was ranked the ninth-largest travel booking website in the world by hitwise. the same year...
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2016-02-17
Wat.tv (2006 - 2016)
wat.tv was the french broadcaster TF1's attempt to own online video, launched in 2006 under a name that stood for we are talented. the plan was a home for user...
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2016-02-10
Frankly.me (2014 - 2016)
frankly.me was an indian app built on a simple hook, you asked a celebrity a question and they answered you back in a short selfie video. it launched in 2014...
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2016-02-09
Lulu (2011 - 2016)
lulu let women review men behind their backs and called it dating intelligence. you looked up a guy by his facebook profile and saw what other women had scored...
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2016-02-09
Offbeatr (2012 - 2016)
offbeatr opened on 9 august 2012, run by a los angeles outfit called extra lunch money, and the press called it kickstarter for porn because kickstarter would...
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2016-02-08
GameTrailers (2002 - 2016)
gametrailers was the place you went between 2003 and 2010 to actually watch a game trailer in higher than 240p. youtube later made that a feature of every...
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2016-02-05
Rusty Hearts (2011 - 2016)
japan went first, in march 2014. then north america that september, then china the following january, and finally the korean original in february 2016, almost...
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2016-02-05
Fly Labs (2012 - 2016)
a former child actor who came back with a cornell math phd and taught himself ios on the side is not the standard founder story, but tim novikoff and laiyee ho...
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2016-02-02
Artizone (2009 - 2016)
dallas got it in 2011 and denver was still new when it ended. artizone was one website where roughly two hundred and twenty local butchers and bakers each kept...
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2016-02-02
Nolblog (2004 - 2016)
at 00:28 on 1 february 2016 three thousand hungarian blogs went dark, came back about eight hours later, and were switched off for good the next afternoon....
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2016-02-01
Shumway (2012 - 2016)
flash outlived the project built to replace it. mozilla research announced shumway on 12 november 2012, written up by jet villegas: a flash virtual machine...
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2016-01-31
Live365 (1999 - 2016)
live365 was the platform that let any random person run their own internet radio station. it bundled the licensing so you did not have to negotiate with the...
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2016-01-31
Songza (2007 - 2016)
songza launched in november 2007 from new york as a streaming service whose interface asked "what are you doing right now" and answered with a hand-curated...
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2016-01-31
BodyMedia (1999 - 2016)
astro teller co-founded it, more than a decade before he was running google's moonshot lab. bodymedia spent fourteen years in pittsburgh building an armband...
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2016-01-28
iTunes Radio (2013 - 2016)
apple's pandora response, baked into ios 7's music app on september 18 2013. ad-supported station radio with a buy-this-song button on every now-playing view....
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2016-01-28
Jolla Tablet (2014 - 2016)
jolla was built by people nokia released when it chose windows phone over meego, and the tablet was their attempt to prove that an independent european mobile...
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2016-01-27
Crazy Browser (2002 - 2016)
15 january 2002 is the date on the first release and 20 september 2011 is the date on the last. in between, crazy browser wrapped microsoft's trident engine in...
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2016-01-26
TTNET (2006 - 2016)
ttnet was türk telekom's retail internet arm, spun into its own company on 26 april 2006 because the wholesale line business and the shop that sold...
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2016-01-26
Avea (2004 - 2016)
avea was turkey's third mobile operator, which in a market where two networks already had the country is a permanent position rather than a starting one. it...
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2016-01-25
Google Code (2005 - 2016)
google code launched march 17, 2005 as a project-hosting service for open source code. it offered subversion, later mercurial and git, plus an issue tracker, a...
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2016-01-22
Skitch (2007 - 2016)
skitch was a mac annotation tool. you took a screenshot, drew a fat red arrow on it, the public skitch.com url was already on your clipboard. plasq previewed...
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2016-01-22
Corbis (1989 - 2016)
bill gates started corbis in 1989 to buy the rights to photographs, on a theory that people would one day hang screens in their houses and want something to...
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2016-01-21
The Why Files (1996 - 2016)
the national science foundation paid for it in 1996 to find out whether the web could be used to explain science to a general audience, and the answer came...
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2016-01-18
Cute Overload (2005 - 2016)
cute overload was a photoblog of small animals looking up at the camera, updated daily by meg frost from december 2005. it codified an internal "rules of...
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2016-01-15
Cryptsy (2013 - 2016)
cryptsy was the altcoin exchange people used before coinbase listed anything but bitcoin. paul vernon (big vern) ran it out of florida from may 2013 to january...
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2016-01-15
Oyster (2013 - 2016)
a new york startup pitched ebook subscription the way netflix pitched dvd subscription. one million titles, ten dollars a month, unlimited reading. the...
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2016-01-15
Mobile by Sainsbury's (2013 - 2016)
a supermarket and a network operator could not agree how to carry their joint venture forward, so 150,000 phone customers got three months of notice and then...
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2016-01-14
TouchVision (2013 - 2016)
chicago, 2013: a weigel-backed outfit put a news channel on spare broadcast subchannels with no anchors and no desk, cutting between field pieces the way a...
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2016-01-14
Stolen! (2015 - 2016)
a letter from a member of congress ended it. stolen! let you spend play money to own any twitter account, whether the person behind it had signed up or not,...
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2016-01-11
Madasafish (1999 - 2016)
madasafish sold internet access out of stornoway on the isle of lewis, which is about as far from london as a british isp could physically put itself. it...
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2016-01-08
Hacker Monthly (2010 - 2016)
sixty-seven issues, one editor, laid out in indesign in malaysia and mailed to wherever you lived. lim cheng soon read hacker news so that his subscribers...
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2016-01-06
iWon.com (1999 - 2016)
iwon was a portal with a slot machine glued to the front. every search, every page view, every login earned tickets toward a daily ten thousand dollar drawing,...
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2016-01-04
Yahoo Screen (2011 - 2016)
yahoo screen was the brand yahoo used between 2011 and 2016 to try to compete with netflix and hulu on original streaming video. the headline buy was the sixth...
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2016-01-01
Unity Web Player (2005 - 2016)
the plugin that ran 3d games inside your browser before that was a normal thing to expect. for about a decade, if a web page loaded a real unity game, you...
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2016-01-01
Elfwood (1996 - 2016)
the largest sci-fi and fantasy art gallery on the early web. hosted out of linköping university in sweden by thomas abrahamsson. ran twenty years, eaten by...
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2016-01-01
Milblogging.com (2005 - 2016)
milblogging.com was the central directory for the wave of first-person deployment blogs that came out of the iraq and afghanistan wars. jean-paul borda started...
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2016-01-01
Advogato (1999 - 2016)
advogato was the free software world's reputation lab, built by raph levien in 1999. instead of every account counting the same, members certified each other...
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2016-01-01
Clinkle (2011 - 2016)
clinkle raised close to thirty million dollars on secrecy and anticipation and almost no product. lucas duplan started it as a stanford student with a plan to...
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2016-01-01
Humortadela (1995 - 2016)
brazil got its own humor internet before most countries did. humortadela went up on 3 december 1995 and ran flash cartoons with recurring characters that...
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2016-01-01
Opera Mail (2003 - 2016)
opera mail was the email client built into the opera browser, known as M2, with one odd idea for its time. it did not want you to sort mail into folders, it...
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2016-01-01
VHS-C (1982 - 2016)
vhs-c was a small vhs cassette with the same tape inside, sold on a single promise: you would not have to buy anything else to watch what you shot. it slid...
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2016-01-01
Look At Me (2006 - 2016)
look at me started in 2006 as a moscow street-style blog and grew into the flagship title of a publishing house. for ten years it was where russian readers...
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2016-01-01
Bigfoot (1995 - 2016)
bigfoot sold a promise rather than a mailbox. you took a bigfoot.com address and pointed it at wherever your mail actually lived, so when your isp changed you...
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2016-01-01
Jiepang (2010 - 2016)
foursquare was blocked in china, so somebody built the same thing locally and for about three years it worked. jiepang had five million registered accounts and...
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2016-01-01
Universal Typeface Experiment (2014 - 2016)
the universal typeface experiment was an advertisement for a ballpoint pen. bic put a writing surface on a web page in june 2014 and asked anyone at all to...
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2016-01-01
Manjam (2004 - 2016)
two million registered accounts and twenty-eight languages, and it went without a notice or a buyer. manjam ran out of london from october 2004 and was aimed...
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2016-01-01
Asphalt Overdrive (2014 - 2016)
gameloft had a racing series that worked, and in september 2014 it shipped a spin-off that did not race. asphalt overdrive was an endless runner built for one...
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2016-01-01
Veetle (2008 - 2016)
a few stanford graduate students built veetle in 2008 so one person on a normal home connection could broadcast live video to thousands, by making every viewer...
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2016-01-01
McAfee SiteAdvisor (2006 - 2016)
a room of MIT engineers built robots that filled in nine hundred thousand signup forms with throwaway addresses, counted the spam that came back, and installed...
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2016-01-01
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...
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2016-01-01
Vostu (2007 - 2016)
zynga sued vostu in june 2011 for copying its games down to the bugs, and took a settlement in december that cost money and forced four titles to be redrawn....
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2016-01-01
Robô Ed (2004 - 2016)
a chrome cartoon robot sat on a brazilian government energy website from 2004 and talked to anyone who typed at him, in portuguese, about saving electricity...
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2016-01-01
夠Yeah (Goyeah) (2009 - 2016)
a hong kong reporter who became a national meme in 2000 for asking jiang zemin one question too many spent eighteen months building the city's first legal...
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2016-01-01
La Frikipedia (2005 - 2016)
the spanish collecting society sued a joke encyclopedia in early 2006 over one satirical article and asked for up to twelve thousand euros. la frikipedia...
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2016-01-01
LesMads (2007 - 2016)
jessica weiß and julia knolle started it in april 2007 as a plain fashion blog and had about 240 readers a day. hubert burda media watched for two months and...
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2016-01-01
BlikBook (2010 - 2016)
civitas learning of austin, texas announced the purchase on 21 july 2015 and let the name run for about another year. blikbook had come out of a research...
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2016-01-01
Tunepics (2014 - 2016)
justin cooke came out of topshop and burberry marketing and built an app that put a thirty second itunes clip behind your photograph, then asked everyone else...
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2016-01-01
Eyejot (2007 - 2016)
seattle, 2007: two founders demoed a way to record a video message in a browser window and send it like email, with nothing to download first. that was the...
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2015-12-31
Faceparty (2000 - 2015)
faceparty was the british answer to the youth social network, four years before myspace. it claimed about six million accounts at peak. in may 2008 it deleted...
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2015-12-31
Forum signatures (1995 - 2015)
the animated banners, glittery name renders, custom anime characters, and long quote collections that hung at the bottom of every forum post from 1998 to 2010....
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2015-12-31
MessageMe (2013 - 2015)
messageme launched march 12, 2013 from a san francisco team of four founders. it reached one million users in ten days and five million in seventy five days....
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2015-12-31
Pulse News (2010 - 2015)
pulse was a stanford class project that became one of the most-downloaded news apps of the early ipad era. steve jobs named it on stage at wwdc 2010 four weeks...
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2015-12-31
Word Lens (2010 - 2015)
word lens was the augmented reality demo that turned every iphone owner into a tourist in 2011. you pointed the camera at a spanish menu and the app replaced...
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2015-12-31
HP TouchSmart (2007 - 2015)
hp's touchsmart line started at ces 2007 with the iq770, a 19-inch all-in-one desktop you were supposed to poke at like a kiosk. it ran windows vista at launch...
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2015-12-31
iBibo (2007 - 2015)
ibibo launched in january 2007 in gurgaon as an indian social network funded by naspers, the south african media group. ashish kashyap built it as the local...
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2015-12-31
Yfrog (2009 - 2015)
the imageshack-run twitter photo host, launched february 2009, dead by the end of 2015. peaked at about 29% of twitter photo-sharing in 2011 with a yellow frog...
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2015-12-31
Sidecar (2011 - 2015)
sidecar was the original peer-to-peer rideshare app. sunil paul founded it in september 2011 with jahan khanna and adrian fortino, shipped before uberX...
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2015-12-31
MAIET Entertainment (1998 - 2015)
maiet was a seoul studio of five people that grew into the maker of gunz: the duel, a third person shooter whose players found animation cancels in the...
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2015-12-31
Nokia Xpress (2012 - 2015)
ninety percent was the number nokia printed on the box. xpress browser did not fetch a web page to your phone, it fetched the page to a nokia server and sent...
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2015-12-31
OpenFoundry (2003 - 2015)
the ministry of science and technology funded openfoundry on three-year cycles, and in january 2015 it decided to move the money somewhere else. that ended...
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2015-12-31
Woogi World (2008 - 2015)
a non-profit called children's way built a browser world in 2008 whose entire reason for existing was to teach eight year olds how to behave on the internet,...
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2015-12-31
The Witcher Battle Arena (2015 - 2015)
eleven months is how long cd projekt red stayed in the mobile moba business. the witcher battle arena shipped on android and ios on 22 january 2015 with eight...
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2015-12-31
Blue Hampshire (2006 - 2015)
ten thousand posts and a hundred thousand comments about the politics of one small state, which carried nationally because that state votes first. blue...
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2015-12-31
Reference Manager (1984 - 2015)
two beutlers wrote it in 1982, a hematologist and his son, and it shipped for cp/m before most researchers had a hard disk. thomson bought their company in...
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2015-12-31
The Dead Authors Podcast (2011 - 2015)
paul f. tompkins ran it in character as h. g. wells, hauling dead writers out of a time machine once a month on a stage in los angeles, and the money went to...
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2015-12-31
CyberFight.ru (2001 - 2015)
asus walked away in july 2012, and it took with it the one thing cyberfight.ru had that no competitor could copy: a quarterly tournament with a real sponsor...
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2015-12-31
Shutdownify (2015 - 2015)
on 19 august 2015 a company appeared offering startups a dignified way to announce that they were closing. the only page it ever served was the announcement...
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2015-12-30
Carrier IQ (2005 - 2015)
150 million handsets carried it and almost none of their owners knew the name until a connecticut android developer filmed it logging his keystrokes in...
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2015-12-30
Nodejitsu (2010 - 2015)
forever and node-http-proxy came out of this company and are still sitting in node projects today. nodejitsu was the first platform as a service for node.js,...
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2015-12-27
Tianji (2005 - 2015)
derek ling started tianji in 2005 to be the place chinese professionals kept their careers, and for a while the numbers said it was working. hundreds of...
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2015-12-23
Facebook Rooms (2014 - 2015)
facebook rooms launched in october 2014 out of the creative labs incubator. it let anyone start a topic room with a pseudonym, invite via qr code, and moderate...
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2015-12-22
Rdio (2010 - 2015)
the prettiest music streaming service of the early 2010s. founded by the skype co-founders. great design. paid model. real curation. lost to spotify on every...
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2015-12-22
Stratos Card (2012 - 2015)
stratos was the ann arbor bluetooth smart card founded in 2012 by thiago olson and chris bartenstein. across three funding rounds it raised about $6.63 million...
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2015-12-20
Prismatic (2012 - 2015)
prismatic was a personalized news reader built by bradford cross and aria haghighi, founded in 2010 and opened to the public in june 2012. instead of you...
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2015-12-18
Amazon Local (2011 - 2015)
amazon local was amazon's four-year attempt at the daily-deals business, launched in june 2011 first as a livingsocial-powered coupon feed and then as its own...
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2015-12-15
Topsy (2007 - 2015)
topsy labs spent eight years indexing every public tweet on the planet. it sold itself to apple for around two hundred and twenty-five million dollars in...
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2015-12-15
Metaio (2003 - 2015)
metaio was the munich augmented-reality spinoff from the technical university of munich, founded in 2003. the company licensed an ar software development kit...
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2015-12-15
Answerbag (2003 - 2015)
answerbag was one of the first english-language q&a sites, founded 2003 by joel downs. demand media bought it for three million dollars in 2006 as part of a...
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2015-12-14
Opera Link (2008 - 2015)
opera link made its desktop debut with opera 9.5 on 12 june 2008 and kept your bookmarks and speed dial identical across every copy of opera you were signed...
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2015-12-10
MUZ.RU (2008 - 2015)
six million dollars bought a catalog of more than a million licensed tracks, deals with universal, sony, warner and emi, and a place inside windows media...
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2015-12-10
YasakTube (2008 - 2015)
turkey blocked youtube on 5 may 2008. four months later a site opened calling itself yasaktube, which translates as bannedtube, and spent two years re-hosting...
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2015-12-07
Zite (2010 - 2015)
zite was the personalized news reader that learned what you read and adjusted what it showed you. it shipped on the ipad in march 2011, cnn bought it for...
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2015-12-07
Facebook Slingshot (2014 - 2015)
slingshot was facebook's second swing at snapchat after the 2013 poke flop. the hook was reciprocity, a sling sat locked on your screen until you sent your own...
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2015-12-07
Fuhu (2008 - 2015)
158,957 percent of three-year growth put this company at number one on the inc. 500 in 2013, and it went back to number one in 2014. the nabi was an android...
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2015-12-07
Facebook Riff (2015 - 2015)
eight months, start to finish, and no update in between. riff shipped on 1 april 2015 as a facebook app for making one video out of many people: you shot...
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2015-12-04
Hawaii Health Connector (2013 - 2015)
two hundred and five million dollars in federal grants went into hawaii's own health insurance exchange and about one hundred and thirty million of it was...
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2015-12-01
Cokemachineglow (2002 - 2015)
cokemachineglow was a canadian music criticism site started in 2002 by a rotating group of writers led by scott reid. by 2006 the washington city paper was...
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2015-12-01
Details (1982 - 2015)
details was the new york men's monthly that ran for thirty-three years across two different lives. it launched in 1982 as annie flanders' downtown culture...
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2015-12-01
Docstoc (2007 - 2015)
docstoc opened in october 2007 as somewhere to upload a document and embed it in a blog post, and it filled up with the paperwork of running a small american...
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2015-12-01
onGamers (2013 - 2015)
cbs interactive hired an esports team in 2013 and put onGamers into beta that november, betting that professional gaming was ready for a properly funded...
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2015-12-01
Cotonete (2001 - 2015)
portugal's own internet radio, opened in july 2001 by media capital rádios with ten themed stations and a catalog of more than 10,000 songs a listener could...
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2015-12-01
Trove (2011 - 2015)
graham holdings sold the washington post to jeff bezos in 2013 and kept the software department. that department was renamed trove, and it spent two more years...
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2015-12-01
Flytenow (2013 - 2015)
the faa did not fine flytenow or raid it. it wrote a letter. in 2014 the agency's chief counsel decided that a private pilot posting a planned trip on a...
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2015-11-30
Adobe Edge Animate (2011 - 2015)
edge animate was adobe's official answer to "what do you use now that flash is going away." it shipped a preview on august 1 2011 and hit 1.0 in september...
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2015-11-30
Beats Music (2014 - 2015)
beats music was the streaming service jimmy iovine and dr. dre launched on january 21 2014 from los angeles, with trent reznor as chief creative officer...
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2015-11-30
Soulcalibur: Lost Swords (2014 - 2015)
bandai namco put a soulcalibur on the playstation 3 for free in 2014 and took the other player out of it. every fight was against the computer, and you could...
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2015-11-30
Fanhattan (2011 - 2015)
the remote had no buttons on it, only a touch surface and a shape you could find in the dark, and that remote is the part of fan tv anyone still describes....
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2015-11-30
Pixable (2009 - 2015)
new york, 2009. three mit students built an app that read your facebook photos and worked out which ones you actually wanted to see. singtel paid 26.5 million...
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2015-11-27
Mastertronic (1983 - 2015)
mastertronic worked out in 1983 that a game did not have to be sold in a computer shop, and put cassettes at a pound ninety nine on the same racks as the...
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2015-11-25
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...
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2015-11-25
Sosh (2010 - 2015)
san francisco got a concierge app in 2010 that read like a well-connected friend instead of a directory, and for five years that was worth sixteen million...
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2015-11-22
EverythingMe (2010 - 2015)
thirty-five million dollars bought an android home screen that rearranged itself by the time of day and where you were standing, and never bought a way to...
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2015-11-22
IndexMaster (1998 - 2015)
in 2000 the american association of law libraries handed its best new product of the year award to a website that sold you the index of a book instead of the...
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2015-11-18
Carmen Sandiego (1985 - 2015)
carmen sandiego started in april 1985 as broderbund's first internally developed title and ran for thirty years as a geography-and-history detective franchise...
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2015-11-18
Zano (2014 - 2015)
zano was a palm-sized autonomous drone that promised to follow you around and film in hd, all steered from a phone. torquing group raised over 2.3 million...
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2015-11-18
Mega Filmes HD (2010 - 2015)
cerquilho, in the interior of são paulo state, was where the biggest pirate streaming site in brazil got its mail. marcos cardoso came back from fourteen years...
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2015-11-15
Wuala (2008 - 2015)
wuala was a swiss encrypted cloud storage service launched in august 2008 by dominik grolimund and luzius meisser out of eth zurich. the early version was...
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2015-11-12
MTV Iggy (2008 - 2015)
three cable channels died first, switched off together on 30 april 2007, and mtv iggy was the website that replaced them. from october 2008 it ran global pop...
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2015-11-11
Screenr (2009 - 2015)
screenr was a free browser-based screencast tool that ran on a java applet. articulate, the e-learning software company, gave it away as a lead product for its...
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2015-11-08
Dick Figures (2010 - 2015)
$313,411 came out of a kickstarter so that two animators could make a feature film about two stick men named red and blue, and it worked: the movie shipped in...
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2015-11-02
Valleywag (2006 - 2015)
valleywag launched in february 2006 as gawker's tech-industry vertical, edited initially by nick douglas and then through a rotation of owen thomas and ryan...
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2015-11-02
TextSecure (2010 - 2015)
an android app that encrypted your text messages, then stopped caring about text messages and encrypted your internet ones instead. built by moxie...
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2015-11-01
MOLOME (2011 - 2015)
an instagram clone that chose symbian first, which tells you both how ambitious and how stranded it was. one thai computer-engineering graduate built it and...
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2015-11-01
Crocodoc (2010 - 2015)
crocodoc turned a word file or a pdf into html and svg so it opened in a browser tab with no plugin and no download, which in 2010 was a thing almost nothing...
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2015-11-01
CNN iReport (2006 - 2015)
ireport was cnn's offer to the audience: send your own footage to the biggest news brand on earth, with no editor standing in the way. it opened in 2006 and by...
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2015-11-01
SingldOut (2014 - 2015)
forty percent of the chemistry of attraction, allegedly, legible from a cheek swab. singldout launched in july 2014 out of california, mailed dna kits to its...
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2015-11-01
PerfectMatch.com (2003 - 2015)
pepper schwartz spent thirty years studying how couples actually work and then turned it into a questionnaire, and for about five years that questionnaire was...
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2015-11-01
Mobile My Life (2002 - 2015)
1,174,811 registered members and 1,902,832 posts, which is what the counter at the bottom of the front page said in january 2010, by which point the forum had...
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2015-10-31
Ukash (2005 - 2015)
skrill bought it, folded it into the austrian competitor it had already bought a year earlier, and the last vouchers stopped working on 31 october 2015. what...
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2015-10-31
Windows Anytime Upgrade (2006 - 2015)
on windows 7 the home premium disc and the ultimate disc held the same files. the difference between the editions was a product key, and windows anytime...
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2015-10-30
Grantland (2011 - 2015)
grantland was a sports-and-pop-culture site bill simmons founded inside espn in june 2011. simmons brought in a roster of writers that turned it into the...
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2015-10-30
YIFY (2010 - 2015)
a computer science student in auckland started compressing movies in 2010 and named the releases after himself. by 2013 yify was the most searched term on the...
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2015-10-29
Karaoke Joysound (2008 - 2015)
on 29 october 2015 konami switched off the song servers and a karaoke machine turned back into a plastic microphone. karaoke joysound rented you tracks out of...
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2015-10-29
Idea a Day (2000 - 2015)
the last idea ever posted to idea a day was a home furnishings shop called man up, filed on 29 october 2015 under the name becky hamilton. before that the site...
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2015-10-28
Socialcam (2011 - 2015)
socialcam was a short mobile video app spun out of the justin.tv ecosystem in 2011, built by michael seibel and two co-founders. it made shooting and sharing a...
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2015-10-22
Deathswitch (2006 - 2015)
david eagleman wrote a short piece for nature in 2006 about email that fires after you die, and then he went and built it. deathswitch asked you for a password...
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2015-10-22
MUZU.TV (2008 - 2015)
a dublin company that tried to be youtube for music videos by doing the licensing first instead of the takedowns later. every video was cleared with a label...
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2015-10-17
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...
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2015-10-16
OneDrive Groups (2008 - 2015)
a shared calendar and fifteen gigabytes of storage held in common by a list of people, launched on 2 december 2008 as windows live groups and renamed twice as...
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2015-10-16
Ticker.tv (2014 - 2015)
119 west 72nd street in manhattan is the address on the only surviving profile of ticker.tv, a financial video network that opened in december 2014 and was...
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2015-10-15
XULRunner (2006 - 2015)
mozilla stopped backing xulrunner in july 2015 and shipped the last build, 41.0.2, on 15 october. it was the mozilla platform packaged on its own, so a...
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2015-10-13
Amazon Destinations (2015 - 2015)
amazon tried to sell you a hotel room for a weekend near home, booked the same way you bought everything else from them. it ran on travel.amazon.com and the...
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2015-10-10
Kanbox (2011 - 2015)
kanbox was the closest thing china had to dropbox, founded in beijing in 2011 and carrying more than fifteen million users when alibaba bought it in september...
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2015-10-09
HopStop (2005 - 2015)
hopstop was the canonical pre-google-maps-transit app in new york. you typed a from and a to, the site told you which subway line to take, where to walk, which...
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2015-10-08
Comcast Personal Web Pages (2003 - 2015)
home.comcast.net slash tilde your-username was a real address that millions of american households had and most of them never used. twenty five megabytes came...
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2015-10-07
Amazon Music Importer (2012 - 2015)
amazon music importer was a small adobe air desktop application that scanned your local itunes or windows media library and pushed the mp3 and aac files up to...
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2015-10-06
Mitro (2012 - 2015)
vijay pandurangan, evan jones and adam hilss built a password manager, sold themselves to twitter in july 2014, published the entire codebase on the way out...
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2015-10-05
Hellas Online (1993 - 2015)
athens, 1993: a company starts selling dial-up access to anybody who wants it, which in greece at that point almost nobody does. twenty-two years later hol had...
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2015-10-05
Endaga (2014 - 2015)
in a village in papua, indonesia, a box roughly the size of a microwave oven ran a cellular network that the village itself owned and charged for. endaga, the...
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2015-10-01
GameTap (2005 - 2015)
gametap was the turner broadcasting subscription that streamed classic atari titles and arcade ports to broadband households in north america. blake lewin and...
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2015-10-01
Gather.com (2005 - 2015)
gather was a boston community for grown-up conversation about news and culture, founded by tom gerace in 2005. its twist was reward points, small credits you...
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2015-10-01
Open Cobalt (2008 - 2015)
the andrew w. mellon foundation and the national science foundation paid for a metaverse that needed no servers at all. julian lombardi and mark p. mccahill...
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2015-09-30
Cyworld (1999 - 2015)
the south korean social network that nearly every twenty-something in the country used at peak. you got a minihompy, a personal page with a decoratable...
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2015-09-30
Yahoo Pipes (2007 - 2015)
yahoo's 2007 visual programming tool for wiring web feeds and apis together. you opened the editor in your browser, dragged modules onto a canvas, connected...
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2015-09-30
Club Nintendo (2002 - 2015)
club nintendo was the customer-loyalty program that asked you to punch the serial number off every nintendo game and console into a website. you got points...
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2015-09-30
StarBand (2000 - 2015)
before starband, satellite internet meant a dish that could only receive. you downloaded from orbit and uploaded through a modem on the phone line, which is a...
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2015-09-30
Evernote Food (2011 - 2015)
chris o'neill took over as evernote's ceo in july 2015 and started cutting almost immediately. food was one of the first out, announced on 26 august and no...
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2015-09-30
Timeful (2014 - 2015)
nearly seven million dollars went into an iphone app that read your calendar and worked out when you were actually going to do the things on your list. a...
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2015-09-30
Mozilla Appmaker (2013 - 2015)
the tool was made of bricks and the bricks were html tags. mozilla's appmaker let somebody who could not write code assemble a working phone app in a browser...
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2015-09-30
Mozilla Popcorn Maker (2012 - 2015)
brett gaylor, who ran the project, described it in one line: a web page that makes other web pages. mozilla shipped popcorn maker 1.0 at mozfest in london on...
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2015-09-30
Skillfeed (2013 - 2015)
shutterstock spent two years trying to sell lessons instead of pictures. skillfeed opened on 4 june 2013 with ten thousand videos and a nineteen dollar monthly...
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2015-09-26
This Is My Jam (2011 - 2015)
one song. that was the gimmick. you picked one song from soundcloud or youtube, posted it as your jam, it stayed up for seven days. the founders were...
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2015-09-24
Headweb (2007 - 2015)
24 september 2015 is the day headweb's customers opened an email telling them the website had been replaced by plejmo and their apps had been replaced by...
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2015-09-22
Quirky (2009 - 2015)
quirky was ben kaufman's crowdsourced invention platform. you submitted an idea, the community voted on it, and if it passed the bar the quirky team built and...
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2015-09-15
Looksery (2014 - 2015)
looksery was a face-tracking app out of odesa that could find and reshape your face in a live camera feed, back in 2014 when phones were barely fast enough for...
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2015-09-15
Clix (1999 - 2015)
the portal half of a portuguese internet provider, opened in october 1999 on free dial-up where the only bill was the phone call. it came with a mailbox and...
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2015-09-12
SublimeVideo (2010 - 2015)
on 26 january 2010 a small swiss company posted a link to a video player demo and the web spent a week arguing about it. jilion turned that demo into a hosted...
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2015-09-03
Face of Mankind (2006 - 2015)
face of mankind was a science-fiction mmo that cared more about roleplay and player politics than about combat. a german studio, duplex systems, built it, and...
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2015-09-03
Cink (2013 - 2015)
nick denton spent five minutes on the phone with szily lászló in september 2015, and that was cink. gawker media's only hungarian outlet had launched on 2...
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2015-09-03
Stypi (2011 - 2015)
google bought etherpad in december 2009, folded it into wave, and open-sourced the leftovers on the way out. eighteen months later jason chen and byron...
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2015-09-01
Gaikai (2008 - 2015)
gaikai was the cloud gaming startup that david perry founded in november 2008, a year after onlive launched. the pitch was the same as onlive's, stream a real...
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2015-09-01
NPAPI (1995 - 2021)
npapi was the netscape plugin api. it shipped in navigator 2.0 in 1995 as the way for plugins to load inside a browser and it stayed the plugin architecture...
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2015-09-01
reQall (2007 - 2015)
reqall started as a phd project about human memory and turned into a voice-note service you could phone. you spoke a task, it came back transcribed and timed....
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2015-08-31
Amazon Fire Phone (2014 - 2015)
amazon fire phone was bezos's bet that he could turn a phone into a shopping terminal and sell it at flagship prices. it shipped on 25 july 2014 as an at&t...
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2015-08-31
Adobe Edge Reflow (2013 - 2015)
adobe edge reflow was a visual layout tool for responsive web design that let you draw media-query breakpoints on a canvas and watch the layout reflow between...
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2015-08-31
Starbright World (1995 - 2015)
on 8 november 1995 four american hospitals switched on a 3d virtual world built so that children with chronic illness could meet each other without leaving...
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2015-08-28
Sellaband (2006 - 2015)
sellaband let fans put money into a band they believed in, buying "parts" at ten dollars each, and once a band hit fifty thousand dollars it got a real studio...
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2015-08-27
Lavaboom (2014 - 2015)
an insolvency filing in cologne ended lavaboom in august 2015, four months after its public beta finally opened. the premise was that lavabit's closure in 2013...
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2015-08-26
Agora (2013 - 2015)
for about a year agora was the largest illegal market on the internet, bigger than silk road ever managed, and it got there mostly by being the one nobody...
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2015-08-25
Rentboy.com (1997 - 2015)
rentboy was one of the longest-running gay male-escort classifieds sites on the open web, and it died on a summer tuesday in 2015 when homeland security...
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2015-08-24
Time Cube (1997 - 2015)
gene ray put one page on the web in 1997 and spent eighteen years making it longer. the claim was that each rotation of the earth contains four simultaneous...
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2015-08-24
Şehir Fırsatı (2010 - 2015)
a berlin clone factory started it and chicago closed it. şehir fırsatı launched in april 2010 as citydeal's turkish site, and groupon bought citydeal a month...
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2015-08-20
Blip.tv (2005 - 2015)
blip was the video host for the people youtube did not pay yet. independent web series, vodcasts, gaming shows. it ran from 2005 to 2015 with about 500 million...
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2015-08-20
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...
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2015-08-20
Zhuaxia (2005 - 2015)
xu yirong came back from stanford at the end of 2005 and built an rss reader that people in beijing were soon calling a disruptor of the four big chinese...
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2015-08-19
Microsoft Tag (2009 - 2015)
microsoft tag was a higher-density colored-triangle barcode that microsoft research thought could out-compete the qr code. it lost on two fronts: qr codes were...
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2015-08-19
Geoloqi (2010 - 2015)
amber case and aaron parecki built a platform in portland that let an application know when a phone crossed a line drawn on a map, without flattening the...
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2015-08-15
Frontback (2013 - 2015)
a photo-sharing gimmick that arrived a year before the front-and-back camera became a native ios feature everyone shared without an app. frontback launched...
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2015-08-15
Google Moderator (2008 - 2015)
google moderator was a box you dropped a question into and a list everyone else voted on, so the best question rose instead of the loudest asker. the obama...
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2015-08-14
Infinite Crisis (2013 - 2015)
one hundred and forty one days separated the launch of infinite crisis from the day its servers went dark. turbine, the studio behind asheron's call and the...
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2015-08-12
Xunlei Kankan (2007 - 2015)
it had one hundred and thirty six million monthly visitors and almost no recognition outside its own country, which is a shape the english-speaking web does...
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2015-08-12
Amplify Tablet (2013 - 2015)
rupert murdoch's news corp put something close to a billion dollars into selling technology to american schools, and the amplify tablet was the hardware half...
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2015-08-09
Google Flu Trends (2008 - 2015)
google.org launched it in november 2008 on a genuinely good idea: people search for their symptoms before they see a doctor, so the queries arrive about two...
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2015-08-04
Google Catalogs (2011 - 2015)
google catalogs launched on 16 august 2011 as an ipad app that reproduced the american mail-order catalog on a screen. nordstrom and l.l.bean shipped their...
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2015-08-01
Firedoglake (2004 - 2015)
firedoglake started as jane hamsher's blog in december 2004 and turned into something closer to a newsroom. it covered the plame affair well enough to win an...
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2015-08-01
glbtq.com (2003 - 2015)
a publisher named wik wikholm started the project in 2000 on the theory that the largest encyclopedia of queer culture and history did not exist and should. it...
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2015-08-01
Openfilm (2008 - 2015)
a video site for independent film, public from 22 july 2008, that refused to be youtube. submissions were screened before they went up and the stated point was...
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2015-08-01
AllVoices (2008 - 2015)
amra tareen was a venture capitalist before she started allvoices in 2008, and it shows in how the thing was built: a wire service where the wire is everybody,...
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2015-08-01
Indiagames (1999 - 2015)
five people in mumbai in 1999, around 300 by 2009 with offices on three continents. vishal gondal's indiagames made the first spider-man game for mobile phones...
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2015-07-31
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...
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2015-07-31
TeleFragged (1997 - 2015)
telefragged was where the first generation of quake fan sites lived. it opened in 1997 as a hosting network with a daily news page and a hit counter that...
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2015-07-31
.an (1993 - 2015)
the netherlands antilles got two letters in the root zone in 1993 and stopped being a country on 10 october 2010. the domain outlived the state by nearly five...
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2015-07-31
Kissing Suzy Kolber (2006 - 2015)
mike tunison was the last full-time employee of a blog that had once been six people writing for free, and on 31 july 2015 he published a goodbye and left. the...
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2015-07-31
Swefilmer (2011 - 2015)
roughly a quarter of everything sweden streamed online went through one unlicensed site, and the site was two men and an advertising account. swefilmer started...
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2015-07-30
T-Online (1995 - 2015)
t-online was deutsche telekom's twenty-year attempt to own the german consumer internet from the dial-up up. at 2001 peak it was europe's biggest isp, ten...
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2015-07-30
Emojli (2014 - 2015)
emojli was a messaging app with one rule taken to its silliest end: everything had to be emoji. your username was emoji and your messages were emoji, with no...
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2015-07-29
Windows Media Center (2002 - 2015)
windows media center was microsoft's bet that the family TV needed a beige tower with a remote control, an IR blaster, and a tv tuner card from a third party....
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2015-07-29
Microsoft Sound Recorder (1990 - 2015)
the small grey window with a tape-deck slider and a single red record button. it lived in every copy of windows from 3.0 through windows 7, ate sixty seconds...
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2015-07-29
Microsoft ActiveX (1996 - 2015)
activex was microsoft's bet that the web would run binary com components inside internet explorer with full local execution rights. it shipped in 1996 in ie...
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2015-07-29
Windows Photo Viewer (2001 - 2015)
the double-click default for a decade and a half on every windows machine. shipped inside windows xp in 2001 as windows picture and fax viewer, renamed to...
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2015-07-29
WinHelp (1990 - 2015)
before every program's manual lived on somebody's web server, it lived in a .hlp file sitting next to the executable. winhelp arrived with windows 3.0 in 1990,...
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2015-07-29
Windows Easy Transfer (2007 - 2015)
there was a special usb cable for this. microsoft shipped a wizard in vista that packed your documents and your account settings into an archive and unpacked...
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2015-07-28
Adobe FormsCentral (2011 - 2015)
adobe formscentral was adobe's answer to jotform and wufoo, released in 2011 and shut in 2015. it lived inside acrobat xi pro as a companion form-builder and...
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2015-07-27
Dapper (2006 - 2015)
in 2006 you could drag a box around part of any web page and get back an rss feed the site had never agreed to publish. yahoo bought dapper in october 2010 for...
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2015-07-23
Internet America (1995 - 2015)
internet america sold dial-up in texas from january 1995 and answered the phone on 1-800-be-a-geek. it went public in december 1998 and spent 1999 buying five...
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2015-07-21
Entitle (eReatah) (2013 - 2015)
entitle was the ebook subscription that let you keep the books. two a month for ten dollars, up to four for twenty. launched as ereatah in 2013, rebranded to...
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2015-07-17
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...
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2015-07-15
PlayStation Mobile (2012 - 2015)
playstation mobile was sony's attempt to put a playstation-branded storefront onto android phones and the ps vita at the same time. it launched on october 3...
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2015-07-15
Leap Transit (2013 - 2015)
leap wanted to make the city bus feel like a startup office on wheels. refurbished coaches with leather seats and cold-pressed juice ran between san francisco...
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2015-07-15
Darkode (2007 - 2015)
darkode was a password-protected english-language forum where malware and stolen card numbers changed hands, and europol called it the most prolific of its...
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2015-07-14
Need for Speed World (2010 - 2015)
need for speed world took the maps out of most wanted and carbon, put every player on them at the same time, and sold the shortcut. it went fully free six...
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2015-07-14
Battlefield Play4Free (2011 - 2015)
battlefield play4free opened as an open beta on 4 april 2011 and never left that label. easy studios in stockholm built it on the battlefield 2 engine and...
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2015-07-14
FIFA World (2013 - 2015)
fifa world was ea testing whether ultimate team could stand on its own without a sixty dollar game underneath it. free to play, pc only, aimed at markets where...
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2015-07-14
Battlefield Heroes (2009 - 2015)
stockholm built a battlefield game that looked like a saturday cartoon and started from a web page, which in 2009 was a genuinely strange thing to attempt with...
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2015-07-14
Streamus (2014 - 2015)
a twenty-five-year-old in california shipped a chrome extension in february 2014 that turned youtube into a music player with a queue, and three hundred...
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2015-07-10
Metroflog (2006 - 2015)
kohali, a small buenos aires operation, launched metroflog in 2006 as a fotolog clone tailored to the spanish-speaking web. one image per day with a guestbook...
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2015-07-10
SoundTracking (2011 - 2015)
steve jang had already helped build imeem when he started schematic labs in 2010, and the app that came out of it in march 2011 did one small thing: it posted...
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2015-07-08
The Dissolve (2013 - 2015)
the dissolve was a film criticism site that ex-av-club editors launched under pitchfork in 2013. it published long-form reviews of new releases and the...
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2015-07-08
GEMM (1994 - 2015)
a marketplace for second-hand cds and records that went online in 1994, a year before ebay existed, run out of la jolla by roger raffee and jim hall. it never...
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2015-07-08
Film4oD (2010 - 2015)
fifty pence bought forty-eight hours with a film, which in november 2010 made channel 4's rental shop the cheapest legal way to watch one in britain. the...
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2015-07-03
Wareztuga (2011 - 2015)
for four years the most used streaming site in portugal was an unlicensed one, and for a lot of that time it was not even accepting new members. wareztuga...
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2015-07-01
Urturn (2011 - 2015)
$13.4 million went into a lausanne startup in may 2013 to build templates that teenagers could drop their own photos into. urturn had already spent two years...
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2015-07-01
Fotoalbum.hu (2006 - 2015)
in july 2015 a hungarian photo site holding nineteen million pictures stopped answering, and the notice that went up called the problem temporary. the notice...
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2015-06-30
Yahoo! Maps (1996 - 2015)
yahoo maps existed for almost twenty years and ended on the same day as yahoo pipes, in a quiet june 2015 announcement. it was a north america...
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2015-06-30
Tempo Smart Calendar (2013 - 2015)
iOS-only smart calendar from tempo AI, an sri international spinoff in the same darpa-funded calo lineage that produced siri. launched 13 february 2013, raised...
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2015-06-30
BAM-Portal (2006 - 2015)
seventy million records sat behind one search box, and then they did not. bam-portal went online in 2006, built by a consortium of german state libraries and...
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2015-06-30
Destiny of Spirits (2014 - 2015)
on 25 march 2015, one year and five days after the japanese launch, sony gave the servers a closing date. destiny of spirits was a free vita game that decided...
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2015-06-30
Internet Public Library (1995 - 2015)
a graduate seminar at the university of michigan put its coursework on the web on 17 march 1995 and called it a public library. for twenty years library...
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2015-06-30
PledgeBank (2005 - 2015)
"i'll do it, but only if you'll help" was the entire product, printed under the logo in italics so nobody could miss it. mysociety put it online on 13 june...
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2015-06-30
ShopLocket (2011 - 2015)
toronto, 2011: katherine hague and andrew louis built an embeddable checkout for people who had exactly one thing to sell, and found their market among...
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2015-06-29
AfterElton.com (2005 - 2015)
afterelton launched in january 2005 to cover how gay men actually appeared on american television, at a point when that coverage did not exist anywhere else at...
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2015-06-24
Circa News (2012 - 2015)
circa was a mobile-first news app launched in october 2012 by matt galligan and ben huh, with arsenio santos as cto. it broke news stories into atomic pieces...
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2015-06-24
General Sentiment (2008 - 2015)
a letter to shareholders dated 24 june 2015 told them that general sentiment had terminated its half-dozen staff and suspended operations after failing to...
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2015-06-14
Friendster (2002 - 2015)
the first social network most americans signed up for. peak around 2003. by 2005 myspace had eaten its lunch. it pivoted to a gaming portal aimed at southeast...
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2015-06-14
Instacast (2011 - 2015)
instacast was a podcast app for iphone and later the mac, made by the small german studio vemedio. it arrived in 2011, back when apple's own podcast app did...
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2015-06-12
Umano (2012 - 2015)
dropbox bought the people who built umano on 12 may 2015 and the app was given thirty more days. for the thirty-one months before that, umano paid voice actors...
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2015-06-09
Pomf.se (2013 - 2015)
"this month a whopping 12 000 unique people used pomf and i made 0$." that line sat on the front page in march 2013, which tells you the whole business model...
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2015-06-05
The Button (2015 - 2015)
the reddit admin who built this went on to make wordle six years later, and the same instinct is in both: one action per person, no way to buy more of it. the...
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2015-06-03
Branch (2012 - 2015)
small new york conversation tool. you started a thread, invited a handful of people you actually wanted to hear from, the rest could read but not post. it was...
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2015-06-03
SodaHead (2007 - 2015)
jason feffer, who had been vp of operations at myspace in the early years, and his childhood friend michael glazer launched sodahead in 2007 as a poll-driven...
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2015-06-02
OMGTorrent (2009 - 2015)
on a tuesday morning in june 2015 the site simply stopped answering, and it took two days for anyone to publish why. the section de recherche in reims had...
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2015-06-01
Urbanspoon (2006 - 2015)
the slot-machine restaurant app for the early iphone. founded in 2006 in seattle by three ex-jobster engineers. iac bought it in 2009 and zomato bought it in...
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2015-06-01
Playlist.com (ProjectPlaylist) (2006 - 2015)
playlist.com started as projectplaylist in february 2006, a browser-based music site that let anyone build a playlist of tracks linked from anywhere on the...
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2015-06-01
Lucky (2000 - 2015)
lucky was condé nast's shopping magazine for women, launched by kim france in december 2000 as a monthly that treated the newsstand itself as a print rendering...
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2015-06-01
Gitorious (2008 - 2015)
it launched in january 2008, months before github, and it hosted free software the way free software wanted to be hosted, fully open under the agpl. then...
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2015-06-01
SSL 3.0 (1996 - 2015)
netscape shipped ssl 3.0 in november 1996 to replace a version that had been broken almost immediately, and it worked well enough that the web ran on it for...
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2015-06-01
Blogilista.fi (2005 - 2015)
twelve thousand three hundred finnish blogs were on it when sanoma bought the thing in 2007, and it had started two years before that as a spin-off from...
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2015-06-01
Adblock Edge (2013 - 2015)
824,411 firefox users had adblock edge installed in may 2015, and the listing they installed it from already carried a line saying the addon would be...
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2015-05-31
Codehaus (2003 - 2015)
bob mcwhirter registered codehaus.org on 26 february 2003 and turned it into a home for java open-source projects that did not want to live on sourceforge....
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2015-05-28
Adobe Photoshop Touch (2011 - 2015)
adobe tried to put photoshop on a tablet four years before the ipad pro existed. the result was a ten-dollar app with seven layers, jagged selection tools, and...
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2015-05-22
Mandriva Linux (1998 - 2015)
the linux you put on your computer in the early 2000s if you wanted to leave windows without leaving the desktop. mandrake started in july 1998 out of france,...
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2015-05-19
Gazo-ch (2002 - 2015)
on 23 may 2007 the police arrested the man who ran the servers rather than the people who had uploaded to them, and japanese image boards began closing...
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2015-05-17
Kids' WB (1995 - 2015)
it died on the same date twice. the saturday morning block ended on 17 may 2008 when the network under it had already been merged away, and kidswb.com, the...
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2015-05-15
Killfrog (1999 - 2015)
in 1999 kevin swearingen started it out of a basement in denver, on a power mac that was already out of date, and named it after his email address. the...
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2015-05-14
Samsung Gear Live (2014 - 2015)
june 2014: google put two watches on one stage at i/o and said android ran on wrists now. samsung's lasted eleven months in the store and then went away...
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2015-05-12
Foresight Linux (2005 - 2015)
ten years of chasing gnome upstream ended with one email from michael k. johnson, sent for the foresight linux council late on 11 may 2015 eastern time, saying...
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2015-05-07
Baidu Space (2006 - 2015)
baidu space (百度空间) was the search company's answer to the profile-network category that renren and qzone were dominating in mid-2000s china. it launched on 13...
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2015-05-05
oDesk (2003 - 2015)
odysseas tsatalos and stratis karamanlakis launched odesk in 2003 out of silicon valley as a remote-work bidding board with built-in time tracking. the...
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2015-05-05
Wattage (2014 - 2015)
a year of development and $250,000 of friends-and-family money went into wattage, and the thing its founder is still complimented on is the pitch deck. it...
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2015-05-01
Simfy (2010 - 2015)
simfy was the german answer to spotify from may 2010 to may 2015. it operated in dach only, never got the funding to keep up with major-label advances, and was...
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2015-05-01
Yandex.Kit (2014 - 2015)
19 february 2014 is world whale day, and yandex picked it to release an android with no google inside it. кит means whale in russian and kit means a complete...
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2015-05-01
IBM OfficeVision (1989 - 2015)
lotus notes killed officevision, and ibm bought lotus in 1995 partly so that it could. underneath the brand was profs, the mainframe office system ibm shipped...
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2015-05-01
RSS Graffiti (2009 - 2015)
sixteen point four million dollars, mostly in cash, bought demand media a facebook autoposter in august 2011. four years later the same product was pushing...
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2015-04-30
FrontierVille (2010 - 2015)
frontierville was the second huge zynga hit after farmville. it launched june 9, 2010 with american-frontier theming, lead designer brian reynolds at the zynga...
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2015-04-30
Grooveshark (2007 - 2015)
free music streaming, before spotify made it legal. you searched, found almost any song, played it for free. the catalog was built from user uploads. the music...
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2015-04-30
OnLive (2010 - 2015)
onlive was the right idea five years too early. the network it needed did not exist outside a handful of us metros, and even there the latency was a coin flip....
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2015-04-30
CityVille (2010 - 2015)
cityville was zynga at its absolute peak. launched on facebook december 2 2010, it grew faster than any app the platform had hosted to that point. by january 2...
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2015-04-30
Kalahari.com (1998 - 2015)
naspers pointed a bookshop at an entire country in 1998 and named it after the largest desert on the continent, because amazon had already taken the largest...
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2015-04-30
Moskva.FM (2007 - 2015)
moscow's fm band had about fifty stations on it and moskva.fm recorded all of them at once, continuously, then ran song recognition over the tape so you could...
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2015-04-30
Hiveminder (2006 - 2015)
on 4 july 2006 jesse vincent offered five beta accounts to the first five people who commented on his blog, and that was how hiveminder started. best...
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2015-04-29
Secret (2014 - 2015)
secret launched on january 30, 2014 from san francisco. david byttow and chrys bader-wechseler raised $34.6 million in fifteen months and shipped an anonymous...
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2015-04-28
Timbuktu (1988 - 2015)
the email went out on 28 april 2015 and gave customers ninety days to buy a last copy. timbuktu had been letting one macintosh drive another since the late...
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2015-04-28
Terra Nova (2003 - 2015)
edward castronova, julian dibbell, dan hunter and greg lastowka started a blog about virtual worlds on 11 september 2003, back when the serious open question...
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2015-04-23
JARING (1992 - 2015)
kuala lumpur got its first connection to the rest of the internet in 1992 over a 64 kbps satellite circuit to stockton, california, and the thing on the...
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2015-04-20
Google Helpouts (2013 - 2015)
google helpouts was a marketplace that connected paying users with experts for live video consultations through a hangout. it launched in november 2013 with a...
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2015-04-20
Google OpenID 2.0 (2008 - 2015)
tom hughes opened the bug on 11 february 2015 with a title that was also the whole story: google is removing openid 2.0 support on 20th april. thousands of...
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2015-04-16
2K Australia (2000 - 2015)
take-two closed its canberra studio on 16 april 2015 and 58 people lost their jobs the same day. it had opened in 2000 as irrational games australia under...
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2015-04-15
Carpooling.com (2001 - 2015)
carpooling.com started as a student project at TU munich in 2001 under the name mitfahrgelegenheit.de. by 2012 it was moving a million people a month across...
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2015-04-13
Yandex.Zakladki (2000 - 2015)
fewer than two thousand people a day were still opening it at the end. yandex launched zakladki in june 2000 as the first russian service for keeping a catalog...
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2015-04-13
Amazing Alex (2012 - 2015)
rovio spent 2012 trying to show it was a studio rather than a single hit, and amazing alex was the attempt. it reviewed decently, sold reasonably, and never...
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2015-04-11
LayerVault (2011 - 2015)
allan grinshtein and kelly sutton raised 535,000 dollars in august 2012 to give photoshop files a version history, something designers had asked for repeatedly...
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2015-04-10
Buttercoin (2013 - 2015)
april 2015 was a bad month to be a small bitcoin exchange. buttercoin had y combinator behind it, google ventures money, alexis ohanian on the cap table and...
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2015-04-09
FriendFeed (2007 - 2015)
the social aggregator that pulled together your activity from twenty other services (twitter, flickr, last.fm, delicious, blog rss) into one feed. small but...
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2015-04-08
Aperture (2005 - 2015)
aperture launched in november 2005 as apple's pro answer to adobe lightroom before lightroom existed. the price dropped from $499 to $80 over three versions...
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2015-04-08
iPhoto (2002 - 2015)
iphoto launched in january 2002 as the photo half of the digital hub strategy that itunes had started for music. for thirteen years it was the default photo...
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2015-04-01
xinmsn (2010 - 2015)
mediacorp and microsoft merged their singapore web presence into one portal in march 2010 and gave it a name that was half mandarin and half american. for five...
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2015-04-01
EZTV (2005 - 2015)
eztv started in may 2005 as a volunteer television release group and spent ten years as the default place a new episode showed up first. it carried no...
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2015-04-01
Tech Support Comedy (2000 - 2015)
a denial of service attack took techcomedy.com down in april 2015 and it never came back up. fifteen years of helpdesk workers writing down what customers...
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2015-04-01
CoralCDN (2004 - 2015)
michael freedman built a content distribution network at nyu, put it on planetlab in march 2004, and let anyone on earth use it for free by typing nine extra...
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2015-04-01
Nebula, Inc. (2011 - 2015)
the market was not there yet and the company said so on its way out the door. nebula was founded in march 2011 by chris kemp, former cto of nasa ames and one...
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2015-04-01
Wiki Spot (2006 - 2015)
the people who built davis wiki, a town encyclopedia for davis, california, decided in 2006 that every town should have one and started giving the hosting...
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2015-04
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...
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2015-03-31
PlayStation Home (2008 - 2015)
playstation home was sony's answer to second life, except attached to a console you already owned and a network you were already logged into. open beta opened...
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2015-03-31
RapidShare (2002 - 2015)
rapidshare was the link in the email forward and the link in the forum post. it was the url a friend on msn would send you because his cousin had ripped a...
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2015-03-31
Softcard (2010 - 2015)
the three biggest us carriers got together in 2010 and built a tap-to-pay nfc wallet inside a sim-based secure element. they called it isis. then isis became a...
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2015-03-31
ChatON (2011 - 2015)
chaton was samsung's messenger answer to whatsapp and imessage, free, cross-platform, preinstalled on every galaxy device from 2011 to 2014. it signed up more...
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2015-03-31
Multimap.com (1996 - 2015)
multimap was the UK online mapping site that defined "click this link to see the office on a map" between 1996 and the arrival of google maps in '05. founded...
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2015-03-31
Build-A-Bearville (2007 - 2015)
build-a-bearville was the online world for build-a-bear workshop, the mall chain where children assemble a stuffed animal at the counter. the bear you made in...
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2015-03-31
Little Printer (2012 - 2015)
berg made a palm-sized thermal printer that woke up and printed you a little newspaper, your weather and a note from a friend, all on a curl of receipt paper....
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2015-03-31
Poupéegirl (2007 - 2015)
poupéegirl was a japanese fashion community where you photographed real clothes you owned, uploaded them, and earned currency to dress up a little cartoon...
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2015-03-31
Taptu (2007 - 2015)
taptu started in cambridge in 2007 as a search engine for phones, back when a phone browser was a compromise and somebody had to build an index that suited...
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2015-03-31
Handbag.com (1999 - 2015)
handbag.com was a british high street chemist and a british newspaper group building a portal for british women, launched on 6 october 1999 with three million...
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2015-03-31
Trovebox (2011 - 2015)
a kickstarter in december 2011 funded the idea that your photo library should not be hostage to the company hosting it. jaisen mathai and patrick santana...
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2015-03-30
WiMP (2010 - 2015)
wimp was norway's answer to spotify from 2010 to 2015, first for nordic markets and then for audiophiles once the hifi tier shipped in 2013. jay-z bought...
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2015-03-29
Sony Music Unlimited (2010 - 2015)
music unlimited was sony's attempt to run a spotify-class streaming service through the playstation network. it launched as part of the short-lived qriocity...
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2015-03-29
Rara (2011 - 2015)
rara was a music streaming service that lived and died as a preinstall. it shipped on hp laptops from 2011 and reached 22 million tracks in the catalog by...
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2015-03-29
SETimes (1999 - 2015)
in october 1999 it went up as balkan-info. two renames later the masthead said setimes, and the us european command paid for every version of it. paid...
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2015-03-27
Blekko (2010 - 2015)
blekko was the slashtag search engine that rich skrenta launched publicly on 1 november 2010, with the pitch of fixing google's spam problem by letting users...
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2015-03-23
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...
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2015-03-23
The Hoopla (2011 - 2015)
the hoopla launched in july 2011 as an australian news and opinion site written for women over thirty five, a readership the rest of the industry had decided...
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2015-03-23
Aora (2008 - 2015)
aora went nationwide across indonesia in august 2008 with ten channels and the exclusive indonesian rights to the beijing olympics, four of those channels...
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2015-03-20
Industrial Property Digital Library (1999 - 2015)
at ten in the evening on friday 20 march 2015 the japanese government switched off a free public search across ninety-eight million patent and trademark...
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2015-03-19
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...
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2015-03-19
Place My Past (2013 - 2015)
upload the family tree file your genealogy program exports and this thing would plot every event in it onto a map, then tell you what the place had been like...
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2015-03-18
Evolution (2014 - 2015)
evolution opened in january 2014 and spent a year being the most reliable market on tor. the site stayed up and the escrow held, which was rare enough to be...
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2015-03-16
Al-Shorfa (2008 - 2015)
congress ordered the program closed in section 344 of the 2014 defense authorization act, and the websites responded by changing their names. al-shorfa.com had...
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2015-03-15
BebaPay (2013 - 2015)
a prepaid nfc card for nairobi bus fare, launched on 30 april 2013 by google with equity bank, tapped against a conductor's android handset instead of handing...
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2015-03-15
もっとTV (2012 - 2015)
japan's five biggest commercial broadcasters agreed on one video service exactly once, and this was it. dentsu wired motto tv into panasonic and toshiba and lg...
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2015-03-15
CloudOn (2012 - 2015)
herzliya, 2012: a team streamed a real copy of microsoft word into an ipad browser, pointed it at your dropbox, and handed it over for free. for two years that...
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2015-03-15
Google Business Sitebuilder (2011 - 2015)
between 2011 and 2013 google walked into nigeria, kenya, south africa, malaysia and indonesia offering every small business a free website and a free domain to...
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2015-03-13
TheFind (2006 - 2015)
facebook announced the purchase and the closure in the same sentence on 13 march 2015. thefind had spent nine years building a shopping search engine that...
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2015-03-13
Central Asia Online (2008 - 2015)
congress killed this one with a line in a budget. the defense bill for fiscal 2014 said no money could be spent on the trans regional web initiative, the...
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2015-03-11
Baidu Yi (2011 - 2015)
an internal business restructuring took it out, which is the flattest sentence an operating system has ever died of. baidu announced its own android on a stage...
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2015-03-10
Smush.it (2008 - 2015)
two engineers demoed it in boston on 30 september 2008 and yahoo ran it for the next six and a half years: you handed smush.it an image, it ran the good...
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2015-03-10
Favoor (2005 - 2015)
cem bozok and murat polat launched favoor in 2005 and kept it running for ten years. it was a personal start page in german, bookmarks and rss feeds on one...
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2015-03-09
GigaOM (2006 - 2015)
gigaom was om malik's long-form tech site, a sister to techcrunch and ars technica through the late 2000s and early 2010s. it had 6.4 million monthly readers...
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2015-03-09
Nokia Mail (2008 - 2015)
the webmail nokia carried into the microsoft acquisition and did not carry out. it started as ovi mail beta on 13 august 2008 with over 9 million users at...
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2015-03-07
Target Ticket (2013 - 2015)
target put a movie store on the internet in september 2013, priced it roughly like itunes, wrapped it in ultraviolet and aimed the whole thing at families....
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2015-03-04
Maxis (Emeryville) (1987 - 2015)
maxis was founded by will wright and jeff braun in 1987, shipped simcity, simcity 2000, the sims, and spore, and ran as the core ea simulation studio out of...
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2015-03-01
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...
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2015-03-01
Zooomr (2005 - 2015)
zooomr was a photo sharing site launched in 2005 by kristopher tate, then 17, and michael van veen of bluebridge technologies group. it was pitched as flickr...
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2015-03-01
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...
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2015-03-01
Indowebster (2007 - 2015)
indowebster started on 15 april 2007 as a place to put files that indonesian connections could actually reach, and grew into the country's own upload host with...
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2015-03-01
Brand.com (2009 - 2015)
a philadelphia firm that sold the removal of bad search results, founded in 2009 as reputation changer and renamed after the 500,000 dollar domain it bought in...
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2015-03-01
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...
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2015-03-01
Assustador (1999 - 2015)
16,899,217 visits in february 2004, every one of them through a front page that was half legal disclaimer and half dare. assustador was where a generation of...
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2015-03-01
DrivePop (2012 - 2015)
unlimited was the entire pitch, and in online backup that word has a habit of outliving the company that prints it. drivepop sold unlimited cloud backup on a...
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2015-02-28
EduCities (亞卓市) (2000 - 2015)
taiwan built a city on the web for its schoolchildren and kept it running for fifteen years. 亞卓市 opened on 5 january 2000 out of a learning technology lab at...
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2015-02-26
Computer and Video Games (1981 - 2015)
it was the first magazine anywhere devoted to video games, published in britain from november 1981, covering arcade cabinets and home computers before either...
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2015-02-25
Orange Wednesdays (2003 - 2015)
a mobile network promotion that turned into a national weekday habit. you sent the word film to 241 on a wednesday and the code that came back bought two...
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2015-02-18
Karotz (2011 - 2015)
18 february 2015 is the day the ears stopped moving. karotz was the third and last of the french internet rabbits, a plastic bunny with wi-fi, a swiveling...
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2015-02-16
Mecom Group (2005 - 2015)
the plan was to buy local newspapers across continental europe with borrowed money, on the theory that nobody in london much cared what a danish or dutch title...
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2015-02-13
Sun News Network (2011 - 2015)
eighty-nine thousand viewers, on one night in august 2011, was the best sun news network ever did. quebecor launched the channel on 18 april 2011 into a market...
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2015-02-10
Magharebia (2004 - 2015)
united states european command started a news website about north africa in 2004, and africom inherited it when africom was created. magharebia published in...
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2015-02-08
MegaSWF (2008 - 2015)
a swf file was a program wearing a video's clothes, and almost no host would take one. megaswf took them at 10 GB a file, for free, with a player on the page...
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2015-02-07
Muve Music (2011 - 2015)
cricket wireless was an american prepaid carrier running a cdma network, and in january 2011 it started bundling unlimited music downloads into a fifty-five...
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2015-02-06
CrunchBang Linux (2008 - 2015)
a british developer called philip newborough took debian, removed the desktop environment, put openbox in its place and shipped it with a black background and...
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2015-02-05
ReadWriteWeb (2003 - 2015)
readwriteweb was the tech blog of the web 2.0 decade. richard macmanus started it in new zealand in 2003 as a one-man blog about emerging web technology and it...
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2015-02-03
Joystiq (2004 - 2015)
joystiq launched the year wow shipped and died the year the polygon generation had already moved on. peter rojas spun it out of engadget because games needed...
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2015-02-03
Massively (2007 - 2015)
massively was the english-language mmo press during the genre's graveyard decade. it launched out of joystiq in november 2007, covered the death of star wars...
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2015-02-03
TUAW (2004 - 2015)
tuaw covered every apple keynote from the ipod nano to the apple watch reveal. i was on windows the entire time. when aol pulled the plug in february 2015 it...
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2015-02-02
Sony Online Entertainment (1998 - 2015)
sony online entertainment was the san diego studio that built the everquest franchise and ran the playstation side of sony's pc mmo business from 1998 through...
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2015-02-02
SkillPages (2009 - 2015)
skillpages was a dublin social network for finding people by what they could do, a plumber or a photographer, matched to whoever needed them. it started life...
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2015-02-02
GreenCine (1999 - 2015)
a mail rental company for the films the big mail rental company did not bother stocking. it started in san francisco in 1999 as a side project inside a...
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2015-02-01
Inkblazers (2011 - 2015)
two founders working out of boston and bangkok raised a million dollars in 2011 and built a place where you could host a webcomic for free, keep every right to...
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2015-02-01
Dawngate (2013 - 2015)
electronic arts put a new studio called waystone games on a moba in 2013, at the point when every publisher on earth wanted one. dawngate did not copy league...
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2015-02-01
Dreamfilm (2012 - 2015)
a prosecutor in linköping worked out that the cheapest way to close a streaming site is to let one of its administrators go home and tell him what happens if...
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2015-02-01
Spot.us (2008 - 2015)
$340,000 of knight foundation money went into proving that readers would pay a freelancer directly to go report one specific story, and it worked well enough...
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2015-01-31
Microsoft Surface RT (2012 - 2015)
surface rt was microsoft's debut consumer tablet. it shipped on windows rt, an arm port of windows 8 that could only run windows store apps and a desktop...
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2015-01-31
Transformers Universe (2014 - 2015)
transformers universe never launched. jagex announced it in 2010 as a browser mmo where you would build your own transformer. four years later it came back as...
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2015-01-31
Sky Active (1998 - 2015)
for sixteen years a british television remote had a button that opened a shopping mall. sky active was the walled garden bolted onto sky digital, where you...
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2015-01-29
Acompli (2014 - 2015)
acompli was an iOS email app from april 2014. microsoft paid more than two hundred million dollars for it in december 2014. six weeks later the brand was...
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2015-01-29
Space Heroes Universe! (2011 - 2015)
the closing notice went up on 21 december 2014, which is a hard week to tell children anything. an australian studio called bubble gum interactive had built a...
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2015-01-29
Railo (2004 - 2015)
a fork killed it, and the fork came from the same hands. on 29 january 2015 railo's original developer announced lucee, built from the railo 4.2 codebase, and...
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2015-01-28
MediaCrush (2013 - 2015)
375,595 files and fifty petabytes of bandwidth, and then the disks were full. mediacrush was an ad-free media host built in 2013 by drew devault and jose diez,...
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2015-01-26
Berniaga.com (2009 - 2015)
701search, a joint venture between norwegian and singaporean media companies, launched berniaga in december 2009 and spent five years running second to...
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2015-01-22
AyosDito.ph (2009 - 2015)
it launched in march 2009 and the name is tagalog for "ok here". by 2013 it was the second largest classifieds site in the philippines, owned through...
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2015-01-22
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...
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2015-01-19
Brace.io (2013 - 2015)
squarespace bought brace.io on 17 november 2014 and switched it off nine weeks later, on 19 january 2015, taking every hosted site and every redirect with it....
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2015-01-17
Tippr (2010 - 2015)
seattle had a daily deals company in 2010 that was really a patent company wearing a coupon site as a costume. martin tobias built tippr out of a startup...
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2015-01-15
Google Glass (2013 - 2015)
google glass explorer edition went on sale in april 2013 to a hand-picked group of $1500 early adopters. the device was a head-mounted camera with a tiny...
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2015-01-14
Windows Media Encoder (1999 - 2015)
microsoft renamed the netshow encoder to windows media encoder in october 1999 and then gave it away for fifteen years. the version everybody actually ran, 9...
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2015-01-12
NimbleTV (2013 - 2015)
nimbletv sold television you had already bought, delivered somewhere else. if you had a new york cable package it verified the account through the operator's...
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2015-01-12
Nokia Memories (2012 - 2015)
microsoft bought nokia's phone business in april 2014 and spent the following year switching off the parts with nokia written on them. memories.nokia.com was...
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2015-01-09
Right Media (2003 - 2015)
michael walrath founded right media in march 2003 with noah and jonah goodhart backing it, and built the right media exchange, an open marketplace where ad...
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2015-01-06
Adobe Buzzword (2006 - 2015)
buzzword was the flex-based online word processor adobe bought from virtual ubiquity in september 2007. it ran inside flash player and looked like a real...
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2015-01-03
CapGeek (2009 - 2015)
capgeek was a live public database of every nhl player contract that both team front offices and fans treated as authoritative, with the working press citing...
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2015-01-01
AsianAvenue (1997 - 2015)
asianavenue launched july 21, 1997 as one of the first identity-keyed social networks on the open web. it was the asian-american property inside community...
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2015-01-01
Nokia Ovi Store (2009 - 2015)
the ovi store was nokia's centralized app store for symbian s60 and series 40 devices, launched in may 2009 as the lineup's answer to the apple app store that...
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2015-01-01
43 Things (2005 - 2015)
43 things was the goal-list social network the robot co-op shipped out of seattle in january 2005. you wrote down up to forty-three things you wanted to do in...
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2015-01-01
Netlog (1999 - 2015)
netlog was the belgian social network that scaled across continental europe in the late 2000s and folded into a dating app on the way out. lorenz bogaert and...
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2015-01-01
Videolog.tv (2004 - 2015)
videolog was the brazilian video-sharing site that ran in portuguese while youtube ran in english. ariel alexandre and edson mackeenzy launched it from sao...
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2015-01-01
Bokee (2002 - 2015)
bokee started as blogchina.com in 2002 and coined the mandarin word for blog. it took ten million dollars from bessemer and ggv in 2005 and lost most of it...
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2015-01-01
Kaboodle (2005 - 2015)
kaboodle was one of the first working social shopping sites: a place where users clipped product links from anywhere on the open web, built themed collections...
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2015-01-01
Blip.fm (2008 - 2015)
blip.fm was a twitter-styled music sharing site launched in july 2008 by jeff yasuda and brian venneman under the fuzz artists parent brand. users would search...
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2015-01-01
Rediff Bol (2005 - 2015)
rediff bol was the desktop instant messenger built by rediff.com india ltd, launched in alpha in early 2005 and pitched as a hindi-friendly answer to yahoo...
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2015-01-01
Motribe (2010 - 2015)
motribe was a cape town mobile-community platform founded in august 2010 by nic haralambous and vincent maher. it let brands and organizations spin up their...
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2015-01-01
Roiworld (2003 - 2015)
roiworld was a south korean casual gaming platform founded in 2003, running high-quality vector flash dress-up games inside a community site with competitions...
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2015-01-01
Amazon Wallet (2014 - 2015)
a phone app from amazon that held your gift cards and store loyalty cards in one place. the catch was that it could not do the one thing people wanted a wallet...
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2015-01-01
Blurty (2002 - 2015)
blurty was one of the livejournal clones that sprouted after livejournal opened its code around 2002. it ran the same software, down to the friends lists and...
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2015-01-01
Cinemagram (2011 - 2015)
cinemagram taught a phone to make a cinemagraph, a photo with one small part still moving, and for a while in 2012 that was the most novel thing in an app...
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2015-01-01
Fropper (2003 - 2015)
fropper was india's first real social network, a product from the mumbai people who also built shaadi.com. it launched in 2003 and had its moment before orkut...
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2015-01-01
Google Wallet (2011) (2011 - 2015)
the original google wallet was google guessing, correctly, that your phone would replace your cards, and then getting blocked at every gate that mattered. it...
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2015-01-01
UberSocial (2009 - 2015)
ubersocial started life as ubertwitter, the most popular way to use twitter on a blackberry. in 2011 twitter caught it bending the rules, editing tweets and...
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2015-01-01
kahkaha.com (1999 - 2015)
kahkaha.com was one of the first turkish-language entertainment sites and it lasted sixteen years by never deciding what it was. it opened in 1999 as a...
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2015-01-01
Blubster (2001 - 2015)
a developer in his early twenties wrote his own peer-to-peer protocol in madrid in 2001 and put a music search box on top of it. seven years later the spanish...
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2015-01-01
Chipknip (1995 - 2015)
chipknip was a chip on the back of every dutch bank card that held money instead of pointing at it. you loaded it at a machine with your pin, then spent it...
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2015-01-01
NetObjects Fusion (1996 - 2015)
netobjects fusion let you drag boxes around a page and it wrote the html underneath, which in 1996 was worth a hundred million dollars of ibm's money. fifteen...
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2015-01-01
Toonlet (2007 - 2015)
toonlet was a webcomic site built on the premise that drawing was the thing stopping you. you assembled a character out of premade parts inside a flash editor...
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2015-01-01
Foinse (1996 - 2015)
pádraig ó céidigh started an irish-language weekly in carraroe in october 1996 and ran it for thirteen years before a funding argument closed it. it came back...
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2015-01-01
GotFrag (2002 - 2015)
the counter-strike news site, started in 2002, back when competitive gaming had no press of its own and no name anyone agreed on. it ran match reports and...
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2015-01-01
oneview (1998 - 2015)
a cologne advertising agency built a link saving site in 1998, five years before anybody was calling this social bookmarking. it took a german multimedia award...
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2015-01-01
Podcast Pickle (2005 - 2015)
gary leland launched podcast pickle in march 2005, back when finding a podcast meant somebody had listed it somewhere by hand. by march 2007 the directory...
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2015-01-01
JournalFen (2003 - 2015)
fandom wank was founded on livejournal in october 2002 and deleted for harassment complaints in january 2003. it went to blurty and was deleted again in march....
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2015-01-01
Passagen (1995 - 2015)
in january 1999 the second most visited website in sweden was not a newspaper or a broadcaster, it was passagen, with 1.46 million visitors and 400,000...
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2015-01-01
Bloggy (2008 - 2015)
jonas lejon, a swedish programmer, watched google buy jaiku and park it, so in september 2008 he put up a replacement close enough that the leavers would...
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2015-01-01
General Computer Corporation (1981 - 2015)
fifty thousand dollars a month for two years is what atari agreed to pay the students it had just sued, on condition they stopped modifying other companies'...
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2015-01-01
Clip.vn (2007 - 2015)
200,000 visitors came on the first day in february 2007 and 50,000 of them were on the site at the same moment, which the servers did not survive. clip.vn was...
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2015-01-01
MacTalk Australia (2004 - 2015)
two strangers met on an overclocking forum and started an australian apple forum on new year's day 2004, and inside two years it was a top ten australian tech...
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2015-01-01
Nakido (2004 - 2015)
doylestown, pennsylvania is not where you expect a file locker to come from. nakido ran from 2004 to the first weeks of 2015 and claimed 39.6 million people...
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2015-01-01
Kienu (2011 - 2015)
kie.nu reads in japanese as "does not disappear", and the whole pitch was that your files would never be culled to make room. on 11 december 2014 the uploader...
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2015-01-01
Gunshow (2008 - 2015)
900 strips between september 2008 and january 2015, and most of the world knows two panels of one of them. kc green drew a dog in a burning room on 9 january...