Wakoopa

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

~ the last words ~

in 2010 i was writing my last university project on a windows laptop. wakoopa's whole pitch was watching which apps you ran and telling your friends. that idea and i did not overlap much. the turkish undergrad computer-engineering peer group i was in ran msn plus vs and eclipse plus utorrent plus foobar, and none of us wanted to broadcast the utorrent hours.

wakoopa was founded 2007 in amsterdam by wouter broekhof and robert gaal. big bang ventures and henq invest funded them in 2008. the pitch had two halves. the small agent installed on your machine measured which desktop applications you used and for how long. the wakoopa.com profile then displayed your top apps to a friend network the way last.fm displayed your top artists.

the peak was small even for the european-tech-blog crowd. the readwriteweb and thenextweb dutch feeds covered it well through 2008-2010. the numbers never grew past a small niche of developers and early adopters happy to publicize their toolchain. that population was too narrow for a consumer product but interesting enough to a market-research buyer.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did ~

the client was a small tray application on windows and mac, later a browser extension on chrome and firefox. it kept a lightweight log of foreground-app time and posted a summary to your wakoopa page. you got graphs of the apps you spent hours in, recommendations of tools others in your peer group used, discussion threads about each app.

the interesting side effect was the app-discovery layer. wakoopa aggregated across its user base and produced a real ranking of what people actually used, not what marketing pages claimed. for niche categories (mind-mapping tools, twitter clients, screencasting apps) the wakoopa top-ten was a more honest signal than any download counter.

~ the pivot ~

by 2011 the consumer social product was flat and the passive-measurement technology behind it was suddenly valuable to a different customer. market-research firms wanted the same kind of tracker running inside opt-in consumer panels. wakoopa began pivoting toward b2b contracts through 2011 and announced the social service shutdown mid-2012.

the wakoopa social tracker stopped collecting usage on 23 june 2012, the full site went dark on 30 june 2012, user profiles were archived and then deleted a few weeks later. the announcement was posted on the wakoopa blog without much fanfare.

~ what it became ~

netquest of spain bought wakoopa in september 2014 for an undisclosed amount, keeping the amsterdam team and the tracker tech for cross-device panel measurement. gfk of germany bought netquest in 2017, folding wakoopa two levels deeper into a global market-research holding. the b2b tracker is still running as of 2026, embedded inside gfk consumer-panel software that most panelists have no reason to think about by name.

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