Memonic

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

~ the obituary ~

Memonic launched in November 2010 out of Zurich with a pitch narrow enough to explain in one sentence. When you found something online worth keeping, you clipped the part you actually wanted. Not the whole page, not a screenshot of it. The paragraph you came for, or the two lines of a recipe that mattered. Everything else got left behind on purpose.

The company behind it was Nektoon AG, and the four people who ran it had already built local.ch, which was for years the search engine most of Switzerland used to find a plumber. Dorian Selz was the chief executive, Toni Birrer the technical half of the founding group, with Patrice Neff and Felix Hürlimann alongside. They shipped a free plan capped at a hundred notes and asked for money after that, which in 2010 was a reasonable thing to ask and by 2015 was not.

Memonic never had a Turkish moment, or much of a moment anywhere outside German-speaking Europe. The version of this idea that got everywhere was American and free, and that is the one people around me ended up with. Reading the dead site now, the thing that stands out is how carefully it was built for a market of a few million people who would pay a small amount of money for a tool that did one job properly.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

The clipper was a bookmarklet you dragged into your bookmarks toolbar, which was how everybody did this before browser extension stores existed. There were native apps for iPhone and iPad, and desktop builds for Windows and Mac OS X. It hooked into Click.to, a small German utility that intercepted your operating system's copy command and offered to send the clipping somewhere, so you could capture from applications that had nothing to do with the browser.

You could put notes into a group and share the group, or mail things into your own notebook from any address. One of the four feature lines on the homepage, left there untouched from 2011 until the site came down, promised that it would print efficiently and save a tree. The sample collections on that same page were real ones belonging to the founders: a list of the best brunch places in Zurich, saved by Toni Birrer.

~ the company that outlived it ~

Nektoon raised over a million and a half dollars in seed funding and used it to launch Squirro in 2012, which took the same core idea and pointed it at banks instead of at people saving recipes. Squirro grew into an enterprise insight business with offices in four countries and is still trading. Memonic sat beside it for a decade, maintained but not developed, the consumer face of a company that had found its customers elsewhere.

~ the day the page went up ~

The archive has the full marketing site serving normally as late as 7 October 2022, still with the 2011 copy and still with the beta badge next to the wordmark. The next capture of substance is a 1,448-byte page reading Memonic has been sunset, thanking customers for their support and pointing at Squirro.

That file is a static object on Amazon S3, and it still answers today with a last-modified header of 4 December 2022 at 11:42 in the morning, UTC, with the same version identifier it had when the crawler first found it in January 2023. Nearly four years of uptime for a page whose only job is to say the service is over. It is the most reliable thing Memonic ever ran.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »