RawSugar (the site is currently down), a company with offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, is closing shop (also reported by Steve Rubel and Rafael Sidi) and will enter the TechCrunch DeadPool. RawSugar can mosts easily be described as a del.icio.us competitor.
This is a company we’ve been tracking since August 2005. This is also one of the companies that I met with during my trip to Israel last year.
RawSugar never raised a big round of funding and simply ran out of money, it seems. And while this is a bit sad to see, the good news to come out of this is that the people working on the project can now move on to their next idea. It’s the way things go.
How does delicious makes money? How did any of these companies make money?
As an entrepreneur, how do you convince not only yourself but an entire team to delve into a business without any thought about how you’re going to get cash?
It would be tough to beat del.icio.us, I think they’re pretty dominant in their online niche. Terrible to see another go though.
The most valuable thing might be the domain name.
~67,000 links (rank 254) on Technorati.
~209,000 link on Google.
Hate to see any good site go belly up
What’s Hot Today.com
Think they are going to do the eBay thing?
I hope to see more companies that fail to innovate in the deadpool.
Eric- LOL failure to innovate
GREAT!
RawSugar’s has to be one of the worst homepage designs I’ve seen. Each section of the page seems equally indifferent – no focus.
-Zaid
Zaid:
that is called art
Paraphrasing Peter Drucker,
The only test for innovation is acceptance.
I like del.icio.us…anyway
Sad news to read. A lot of work was put into the project. Not every company will end up like a YouTube or in this category, a del.ico.us. There’s a lot of roadkill along the way. My heart goes out to the employees and their families.
Thanks Michael for the post even if we’ve known better days.
Indeed, I confirm, RawSugar’s owners have let all the employees go (including myself) and are now looking for a new home for the technology.
I just want to add to Michael’s post that we will keep the site up and running for a while and we will also provide a complete transition path for our users to at least one of the competitive services. Currently people can already get all their links back here (in delicious format):
Export my RawSugar links.
Several other options are available, see here for more info: http://web1.raw...c/api#apiExport
Thanks to all our users for their support and for their feedback, working at RawSugar was a great school for all of us and it was a lot of fun. It is clear that we did a few things wrong to end up in the deadpool
but, thanks to our top engineers; we also managed to build valuable tag-search technology that could definitely improve the ROI of tagging content on the Web if transferred into some other business context.
I’ll see you all on my next challenge.
Frank Smadja
VP Engineering RawSugar
http://smadja.us
One of the biggest barriers to adoption that social bookmarking sites in general face is their positioning: the “search” in “collaborative search” is too strongly associated with Google for most non-geeks for them to even try another service for info discovery.
Add to that RawSugar’s weak brand differentiation from the category market leader, del.icio.us, in an increasingly crowded market niche, and RS’s truly dismal UI (as Zaid pointed out) and you can see why they had a difficult time of it.
But, as Mike said, best of luck to the founders for a New Year and new adventures!
Must have lacked business confidence and enterprise.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
too bad..i had read about them but never had time to use them. Now that I see what they can do as far as embedding their tag search engine on a site, i may miss them…oh wait, what’s this cool innovativ site I just read about…!
There is so much parity with these sites. I am sure there will be more casualties. Reminds me of the “Lion King”….”the circle of life”….:)
Hmm…didn’t seem like del.icio.us to me…seemed more like some sort of tag cloud version of technorati. Very confusing design.
I am not happy to see any company fail. But…if they truly believed in this, they would not be quitting.
It’s online and lets me login and do everything. Maybe it’s not dead.
I am sure those guys who have provided the testimonials on the home page will want them removed as soon as possible………
People do need to learn how to survive if they want to.
- Vicky
http://india2.in/blog
site is up, just browsed it….someone forgot to tell them they were in deadpool ???
Dead.. for sure, site is still live for users to export their tagged links.(see comment # 13 from Frank – VP Engineering of Rawsuger)
People., don’t you read the comments before commenting.
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Payscroll.com – The answer to the “How much am I worth?” question. Coming Soon!
Any news on what on that next project may be?
I apologies for being a bit off topic, but this Snap java pop up message is quite annoying, you just move your mouse over the text and those pop-ups are covering the text you read anytime you mouse over a hyperlink…just my 2 cents
“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated” the site is actually live and well at the same URL (http://www.rawsugar.com/).
It is true that we are out of funding and might close it in the next few month but I guess that is where many start-ups are at. If and when we close it we will notify our users so they can export their data in time.
As for this post on TechCrunch, nobody from TechCrunch bothered to contact us or even send an email prior to this posting. When I talk to Michael he seems friendly and sharp but he does not write about RawSugar and when he does write about RawSugar he never contacts us prior to publishing his blog entry. I wonder if that is the experience of other entrepreneurs?
From someone who looked at them a while back while doing some DD on a competitive technology…
RawSugar is not at all like Digg, what they are is an automated tag-cloud organizer for large websites. Their key tech is algo’s that group related tags based on similarity and ‘closeness’. What they do is improve the ROI and usefullness of tagging content by automatically categorizing tags. This is helpful both in building a dynamic site index as well as providing the ability to suggest related content, so-called guided-search. Their business model should be licensing or selling their technology to large websites. Path to market could be partnership or acquisition to webservices already targeting popular blogs e.g. Eurekster
Use Case Scenario 1) web-page summary and index
Ofer and Smadja, best of luck I think you have an innovative product but the business model needs some work (which probably means just more time).
Addressing the accuracy of the post, the site is NOT down. Traffic is at an all time high, having sky’d upwards in response.
Secondly, to read that RawSugar as a competitor to del.icio.us is a sad reminder of the difference between perceptions and reality. We are a search company, providing faceted search for tagged content, whether that tagging comes from bloggers, bookmarkers, content collaborators, new sources, or what have you.
Two companies are close to finalizing offers because they feel their own sites will be greatly enhanced by the addition of our Faceted Search for Tagged Content. A migration plan for users, if required, will be posted on our blog.
Dan Seligson
President, RawSugar Inc.
Defining Rawsugar a delicious copy is completely wrong.
It could be not so easy to tell from the UI, but Rawsugar had and still has a lot of value. Its innovative, patent based, faceted guided search is one of the few innovations inside the social bookmarking field. A much needed innovation if we want to make tags scaling and if we bother about the user experience with folksonomies.
People continue to talk about delicious. Large user base, bad UI and user experience, few innovation, completely useless as a tool to refind o keep found a few hundreds (not to say thousands of bookmarks). Don’t think about using it to find links from other users if you don’t know the right tag.
I came to know Frank Smadja because I really loved Rawsugar. I loved it because it was the only solution to a real scenario of social bookmarking sites. I used their bookmarklet everyday to save, annotate and manage new posts found on the web and to use these bookmarks for my job, articles, etc.
Managing, for me, means having a way to make order into a chaotic bag of otherwise useless flat tags. Rawsugar provided this possibility automatically discovering tags’ hierarchies and helping in their navigation.
I’m completely sure that their technology will bring a competitive advantage to some company. Think for example to enteprise social tagging services like Cogenz and Connectbeam..
What are they waiting for?
I second Emanuele.
RawSugar has got a very good tag-engine.
They are IMHO the only ones that didn’t just copy delicious to add a new features. Their ideas with clustering and auto-tagging were just unseen in the whole tag-market (ok, Flirckr has got Tag-clusters too)
Yeah, probably they don’t have the nicest-looking UI, but I never cared. I used the site for daily tagging and *finding* my bookmarks later on. Who cares about UI, the functionality is/was all there!
It’s very sad that there company is closing. Cool to have the service still available for some time!
As a member of the RawSugar team responsible for the engine backend development I want to thank everybody for the good words about RawSugar. Even so the company now is in DeadPool it gave me a nice feeling about the work we did.
Daniel Feinstein
In the past: Lead Software Engineer at RawSugar.com
Daniel, Frank, etc.: I wish you luck selling RawSugar technology/IP!
LOL, I did a very small contract for these losers a while back. I never got paid for it, something like $400 for a blog plugin for Moveable. Good thing I obfuscated my code. Dealt with Bill Lazar, mainly. I briefly met the President at their Palo Alto offices. Never understood what their site did. It was a very disorganized company from my dealings with them, and in general they were very shady characters. I’ve mentioned this experience to a number of RoR developers. Anyway, what comes around goes around. Karma’s a bitch. Tell Billy Boy I said hi. I’ll see him at the next RoR meet (guess he needs a job now).
@William: You need to stop making these incorrect public statements about me and RawSugar. The fact is you never delivered anything close to working code, obfuscated or otherwise, and after threatening us with a lawsuit (over $400!!!) didn’t even bother to respond when we offered a reasonable settlement. Neither Ofer nor myself are in the least bit shady–we also hired Denis De Bernady, well known in the WordPress community to develop a similar piece of code for WordPress and had no trouble paying him because his work product actually worked.
I’m very tired of finding comments like this any time RawSugar is mentioned and would like to point out that you are not the only one with access to lawyers.
Hello,
RawSugar members now have an alternative. Netvouz has just added support to import RawSugar bookmarks, complete with tag hierarchy. This means that Netvouz can now convert a RawSugar tag hierarchy into folders on Netvouz.
So any RawSugar member who is concerned about leaving RawSugar and losing the convenience of a folder structure now have a powerful alternative.
Read more at our blog, http://blog.netvouz.com
Hello,
RawSugar members now have an alternative. Netvouz has just added support to import RawSugar bookmarks, complete with tag hierarchy. This means that Netvouz can now convert a RawSugar tag hierarchy into folders on Netvouz.