Vokle

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

~ the eulogy ~

Vokle was a virtual auditorium. A host went live from a browser with no plugin to install, the audience watched inside the same page, and anyone watching could raise a hand and get pulled up onto the stage on video, or send a text question for the host to read out. Robert Kiraz and Edward Dekeratry started it in Santa Monica in June 2008, showed a private prototype in March 2009, and opened the stable version to everyone on 11 December 2009.

It landed with people who already had an audience and no way to talk to it live. Musicians ran listening sessions on it, and a few American political campaigns held town halls there in 2010 and 2011. In July 2011 the company added recording with automatic chapter markers so a finished broadcast could be browsed rather than scrubbed, which was a good idea about two years before it became a normal one.

The money came in small pieces and never got large. A seed round in 2008, angel rounds through 2010 including one from Tech Coast Angels, then a $767,000 close in April 2011 that took the total to $1.26 million and put Imogen Heap and Rafe Furst on the cap table.

Then it stopped. In March 2013 a tech blogger named Binyamin Goldman published an open letter saying nobody had been able to broadcast since November, and that four months of emails and messages to the Vokle team had gone unanswered. No shutdown notice was ever posted. The homepage kept serving its Login and Go Live buttons for another three and a half years, and the last working capture of it is from 8 November 2016.

~ the dossier ~

~ from a long way off ~

I did not use this and would have had no reason to. The premise assumed you arrived with an audience already assembled and needed somewhere to put it, which in 2010 described American musicians and campaign staff more than it described anyone I knew. Live video that reached Turkey in those years was the watching kind rather than the hosting kind, and the hosting kind stayed a thing you read about on TechCrunch.

~ what it actually did ~

The interesting engineering was the call queue. Live video in a browser in 2009 meant Flash and a media server, and Vokle let a host see a lineup of people waiting to speak and promote one of them into the broadcast without dropping the stream. That is the shape of a Twitter Space or a Clubhouse room with a stage, arrived at more than a decade early and with much worse plumbing underneath.

The problem sat on the other side of the screen. A live event needs a crowd that was assembled somewhere else first, so every Vokle host had to drag people over from Twitter or a mailing list each time, and the product got nothing back from having hosted the last one. Sessions did not accumulate into an audience. They just ended.

~ nobody turned the sign off ~

There is a specific kind of dead startup that never announces anything. The team stops shipping and the support address stops answering, and the hosting bill keeps clearing on a card nobody has cancelled, so the site sits there looking open for years. Vokle is a clean specimen of it: a login form and a Go Live button on a page that could no longer take you live, from the middle of 2013 until some point between November 2016 and May 2017, when the server started returning a 503 and kept returning it.

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