Quack.com

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

~ the last words ~

You could not dial Quack.com from Turkey. The whole product was a toll-free American phone number, and toll-free stops at the border. That is the honest reason this one never came near me, and it is also the reason the company was worth 201 million dollars for about a year: in 1999 a free phone call was the widest distribution channel in the United States, wider than the web itself.

Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici started it in Pittsburgh in 1998 and moved it to Mountain View the following year. The idea was a voice portal, which is a phrase that has aged into nothing but meant something specific at the time. Not a phone menu for one company. A destination, the way Yahoo was a destination, except you reached it by talking. Stock quotes, sports scores, weather, movie times. You could order a book from Amazon or a CD from CDNow by speaking to it.

The technology underneath was the serious part. Quack held patents across speech recognition, speech generation, constraint-based reasoning and computational linguistics, which is a lot of research for a company two years old. This was the moment when everybody believed the phone was going to be the second internet client, and roughly a dozen well-funded companies were racing to be the front door of it.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The race was short and it ended in acquisitions rather than customers. Tellme raised money on the same thesis. BeVocal, HeyAnita and a handful of others were building the same shape of thing. AOL announced its purchase of Quack on 31 August 2000, paying roughly 3.5 million shares of its own stock, which valued the deal at about 201 million dollars including costs.

Ted Leonsis drove it. AOL wanted voice next to its other properties, and Quack became AOL by Phone, sitting in the portfolio alongside MapQuest and Moviefone. Four and a half months later AOL merged with Time Warner and those shares became something everyone spent the next decade regretting.

~ the long tail ~

AOL by Phone survived as a paid add-on that read your email to you, kept running for years past the point anyone talked about it, and then went away without an announcement, the way most AOL features did. The 1-800 number stopped answering. Nobody wrote it up.

The domain came back in July 2010 as an unrelated AOL iPad search app, which was discontinued in 2012. So Quack.com died twice under the same owner, once as an idea that was ten years early and once as an idea that was three years late.

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