Fwix

» see fwix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Darian Shirazi interned at Facebook as a teenager, early enough to be the first one they took, and left to start Fwix in Palo Alto in 2008. The product was a hyperlocal news aggregator with a URL for each place: fwix.com slash chicago, fwix.com slash baltimore. Every city got a page, and the page filled itself.

Filling it was the actual engineering. Fwix pulled from Twitter and Facebook, then from the local data vendors underneath them, Yelp and CityGrid and the address brokers Localeze and Acxiom, and worked out which item belonged to which neighborhood. What came out the other end was a real time feed of what was being said about a place, which Fwix then sold back to media companies as an API rather than trying to build an audience itself.

That was the business, and for a while it worked. Revenue ran in the low millions a year. The company raised 6.75 million dollars from Comcast Ventures and BlueRun Ventures. Then Shirazi did the arithmetic on who was buying, and found that the media industry was both too small a market and too careful with money to carry a company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Fwix belongs to the hyperlocal wave of 2008 to 2012, alongside EveryBlock and Outside.in, all of them built on the same bet: that the local newspaper was dying and whoever automated its beat would inherit the readers. Half of that came true. The newspapers did die, and then the readers went to Facebook instead.

Fwix went wider than most. The crawls of its site include an Auckland page and a Dublin page, so the ambition ran past the United States even if the business never really did.

~ the pivot ~

On 24 April 2012 the company announced that Fwix was now Radius. The local data stayed, the consumer product went, and the dashboard was rebuilt for salespeople hunting small businesses that were doing well enough to buy something. Shirazi's explanation to TechCrunch that day was unusually flat for a launch piece: "I've always wanted to build a large sustainable company and it turns out that this is very hard to do." Radius raised 12.4 million dollars from American Express and others the following January.

~ what got buried with it ~

The fwix.com homepage kept serving one page after the pivot, for five months, and that page is the death certificate. "Fwix is Now Radius!", it said, followed by a paragraph explaining that the technology and data had been ported over and the name changed to better suit the new market. In October 2012 the address started redirecting instead, and today it answers nothing at all.

The distance here is geographic in a specific way. Fwix was a product whose unit was the American city, and whose entire value was knowing that a particular restaurant opening belonged to a particular zip code. Istanbul and Ankara were never going to appear on it, and the reason is dull rather than deliberate: Localeze and Acxiom and the rest had no rows for them. A product assembled out of one country's databases can only ever cover that country.

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