Kiko Flatlines
Marshall Kirkpatrick
72 comments »
Online calendering company Kiko.com has decided to call it quits and put the site up for auction on eBay. They are also offering to export or delete user accounts. It looks like the Deadpool may gain another member.
The Massachusetts company was backed by Paul Graham’s YCombinator, offered some very cool features, an API and guts made of Ruby on Rails - but in the end it just petered out. We posted on them a number of times at launch, Robert Scoble also applauded them but warned of an uphill battle against entrenched calender vendors. Even beyond that competition the online calendering space is probably overloaded already. If you needed tangible proof, well here you go.
It looks like they just weren’t able to monetize their free consumer subscriptions and never actualized the enterprise solution they sought. The eBay auction asks for a $50k starting bid and reports that the site is currently getting about 40,000 visitors per month. We’ve been hearing about more and more companies put on eBay for auction lately, but this one’s got a particularly somber feel to it that seems to warrant a deadpool post. It’s a good looking service though, so perhaps some one else will pick it up and run with it. Kiko interface designer Richard White has a euglogy here.
Update: See this post on the acquisition of Kiko’s assets.
Read this in their blog today. Kiko is my favorite online calendar. Hopefully the new owners help it out a ton.
Wow. I’m sorry to hear that… its tough being an entrepreneur… they had a very nice product… but I always questioned the stand-alone calendar business model. Good luck guys in whatever you decide to do going forward.
Yea, it’s a shame because Kiko had the best feature set of all the online calendars I had tried (including Google’s).
But I think they “gave away” too much, and could probably have made it if they had charged a minimal fee for some of the features.
I really haven’t looked at Kiko before, but it looks great. I hope it says alive so I can get time to play with it. Does it sync with iCal? That’s be sweet.
Too bad: They were by far the best of the things I saw out of Y-Combinator.
Hey don’t be sad. –> We should be looking forward, to their next project.
Kiko brought together a great team, and helped launch Richard White (and team?) to internet stardom. The value is in their constant ability to execute & innovate, not the established product.
Knowing that they aren’t too proud to kill a project would only reassure me (if i had invested in their souls rather than the project, YC style.)
Why use a separate website for your calendar when there are so many services out there that combine your calendar with your other essentials such as email, tasks, etc. GMail, Yahoo! Webmail.us, Goowy, Outlook, Evolution, etc all do these tasks and integrate it into one cohesive product. An online calendar is simply not a unique or powerful enough application to stand on its own and i don’t see any others succeeding unless they are bought out by a larger company or made a part of a more cohesive communication and personal information management portal.
I’m curious, do companies really sell on eBay? How does one sell a company without any of the employees going as well? Seems like it would be difficult for a purchaser to take over the code base and keep it going…
This is a shame. I hope someone gets a good deal here and can keep it up!
Mentioning 40k visitors a month seems rather odd though, that’s not really a selling point
this is exactly why I use a better established (read: funded) calendar and other web utilities, I don’t want my many months of data input to get flushed down the toilet when a company can’t stay afloat. I actually liked Kiko’s interface the best, but when there are four hundred calendar sites out there, you just can’t rely on one besides the majors. That combined with all the value offered by combined services as commenter Chris mentioned.
Ashish : http://www.jux2.com sold on eBay.
I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time on this comment thread, so here we go
@other: We made sure to provide our users with an iCal export of their data as well as a way to delete their account. You still have a point, but as long as small companies are open to letting you keep what is yours (your data) and we have standards (like iCal) you can mitigate said risks.
@Ashish: On the eBay posting we mention that we’ll send our lead developer (in the true Mythical Man Month sense) out to whoever buys Kiko to help with the transition.
@Chris: I think you hit the nail on the head, integration is key in this space. 30boxes is doing a good job at that I believe, but noone as of yet has a solution for syncing with MS Outlook. Until you can free the data from that walled garden it’s really hard to penetrate the market of existing calendar users.
@darius: Holy crap, I’m a star!
Seriously though, I am very proud of the fact that we *do* care about our investors money and instead of just burning through the rest of the piggy bank we are trying to recoup their investments. I hope that pads any karma I might have.
@greg: Speaking for Kiko and my current project Slimtimer, I think its a mistake to plow resources into monetizing too early. Even if we had a premium account for a monthly fee it would not have sped up development or made much of a dent on the bottom line.
Thanks to everyone else for all your kind obits.. errr… comments
We’re looking at using Slimtimer corporate-wide.
How do I put this delicately… is our data going to be safe? For how long?
Maybe you should simply sell the software and allow companies to install it locally. We’d probably pay $25 per user plus perhaps $299 for the server license.
@Steve: Yes your data *will* be safe. I don’t want to draw a line between Kiko and SlimTimer because they are very different creatures, but the one thing that I hope Kiko’s demise shows is that we are faithful stewards of our user’s data and always allow you to retrieve what is rightfully yours.
The parallels between Kiko and SlimTimer stop there. SlimTimer has no investors that it needs to keep happy, no employees who need food on their table, you get the point. You could argue that all that is actually a negative but I’d say you’re better off with a service with little to no overhead than one with a lot of overhead that has cash in the bank.
In the end it’s your call, if you are really interested in your own version of SlimTimer that’s certianly an idea I’d seriously consider.
I just hope they get picked up by a suitable buyer, Kiko still has some potential in it.
This only shows how reliable these Web 2.0 players are… That’s what happens when you go all remote just because it’s got AJAX and it’s cool. Backup and buy an Excel license. LOL
What part of this is surprising? While I don’t mean to ‘rub it in’ to the individuals (who I genuinely feel bad for), maybe this should serve as the ‘eye-opener’ that’s sorely needed by a lot of other folks.
“Office 2.0″ without some very serious funding just isn’t going to make it. I recommend following Michael Kamleitner’s series on this: http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/tags/office-is-dead
@Skeptic: I agree with most of what you had to say, but I don’t know that anyone in the Web 2.0 crowd needs to be enlightened to the fact that permanance is a very difficult thing to attain. I think a lot of people of passionate people working on things that they believe in, but I don’t think they really believe that everyone is going to make it.
And yeah this announcement is not all that surprising, from a 10000 ft perspective. As many people have pointed out, when there are 2^8 options for every type of software imaginable theres going to be a lot of mergers or dives into the deadpool.
Also, if you feel sorry for us you shouldn’t (and I don’t mean that in a macho ‘I don’t need your hippie crap’ kind of way). We’re doing fine and this move actually helps us out. The people I feel genuinely sorry for are our users (such as my girlfriend who is very mad at me atm about this). We just didn’t get it done for them but we are trying, with iCal export and account deletion, to make sure they can transition effectively.
PS. Love your work ‘Skeptic’ I don’t think there is enough constructive criticism in our sector
No big surprise there. I imagine we’ll start to see other Web 2.0 companies start to fold. A lot of interesting ideas and some slick code can’t save one from the lack of a decent business model. Many of these companies feel more like a feature of a larger whole than a solid, stand-alone company.
-matt
Queue the sky is falling crowd in 3 .. 2…
Here’s a question. Would the technology be more “sellable” if it was written in a traditional popular technology like Java or PHP than if it was written on Rails?
@gazzle: Trick question. It couldn’t have been built in the first place on either of those two
Couldn’t? Care to elaborate?
It’s ironic that after all the Web 2.0 innovation in the calendar space, the service that I’m still using (and getting value from) is the much-maligned Plaxo. It’s achingly s l o w, but it syncs with my Outlook files.
It’s disappointg about Kiko — they had the best interface and feature set by far, and had promised outlook sync.
Hmmmm…evidentally the interweb *cant* support the business model for 500 new Ajax/RoR calendar apps - go figure.
@gazzle: Just a PHP/Java dig that’s all
@gazzle
Nobody cares one iota what technolgies were used to create a web service–or any other computer system–aside from the usual contingent of geeks, hackers and technophiles.
99.9999% of people who listen to music don’t care one iota how a CD player works internally.
Steve, your analogy about CD player is right. And at the same time if the purchaser intends to operate Kiko as a standalone business, it would not be an issue.
However, if Kiko was to be acquired and merged into another infrastructure, it would be different. Kiko looks like a good acquisition target for an enterprise or consumer company looking to add “calendaring” to their suite. One of the main concerns is whether the technology complements what they are already using in-house and Rails being a relatively new language in the scene might serve to hinder that.
I’m not here to diss Rails, having never used it… just to bring up some discussion on this issue.
@Rich and the guys at Kiko
Kudos to you guys for trying to make this a graceful exit and offering users a way to take their data elsewhere. Hopefully you guys will find a buyer who will keep this going. Personally, I’d like to see someone like 37Signals step in and integrate this into their suite of app’s.
I’m actually sorry to see Kiko end up this way — while we can all debate which calendar UI we like best, Kiko was a worthy player in a space that needs a lot of competitors and shake up. The bottom line for me is that NO web calendar has yet demonstrated success in reaching the mainstream — not Yahoo, not AOL, not Google, not 30boxes.
This is a market that is still very young — Comscore quotes the bigger players with 2-3M monthly users. This is nothing compared with something like 300M Outlook licenses, and billions of people in the world that need a good way to manage their time. It might not be viable to start an independent software company to just do calendaring, but I certainly hope that the presence of Google in the market doesn’t shut down innovation elsewhere as some people are saying.
Everyone in this space needs to do their part to shake things up, explore new directions, and figure out how to make calendaring relevant to 100s of millions of people. No one has really won until that happens.
So my question is, when is Windows Live Calendar going to show up?
http://jeftek.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F2042DC08607EF2!646.entry
It looks like the ebay auction has been pulled. Wonder if someone is buying it for big bucks outside of ebay?
Drats! I was about to bid 1 million dollars.
Wow, that was quick.