Just a week after ReFrame It launched its service that lets people annotate Web pages, another startup that’s been doing pretty much the same thing since 2006, Fleck, is putting itself up for sale. Fleck is a Dutch company founded by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Patrick de Laive, the famous white-suited entrepreneurs who woke up Mike once at his house to pitch their startup. The duo also run the Next Web conference (disclosure: I was the moderator last year) and blog, which they will now be focusing on.
I asked Boris, why Fleck never really took off and why he wants to unload it. His answer:
Version 1 was too limited and version 2 was too complicated. Latest version is great. Now all it needs is another push and some attention. We can’t give it that because we have other interests now (Blog & Conference and our shares in Twones and Wakoopa) and we are out of funding. Time for a new owner!
The service started out as a way to add the equivalent of sticky notes to Web pages. So that when other Fleck members visit that page, you can see their notes. This idea has been appealing to many entrepreneurs (see, Third Voice, Stickis, Diigo, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) but has so far failed to catch on. Fleck has evolved to include bookmark sharing, tagging, and Friendcasting capabilities. Now Boris and Patrick are hoping to get back the one-million-Euro valuation that investors put on the service during its last round.
Good luck with that, because if they don’t sell it, this thing is going into the deadpool.
Update: Boris wrote a post about the sale.
Here’s a video of Patrick explaining what Fleck can do:
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Boris Veldhujizen van Zanten? But that is the same guy who created the iphone app which was profiled on TC yesterday. Does he hold shares in TC for all this attention?
No shares but it is a public secret that both Erick and Michael will write about anything if you promise them a free beer. You didn’t know that?
Good intro video.
Very sad. The interface for bookmarking looks just like delicious.
Having used fleck a fair bit, it always seemed a bit too simple and difficult to monetise.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Kampyle etc start utilising a slightly modified version of this at some point in a more enterprise style offering…
Better luck next time.
I hope they manage a sale, I like these guys and they posted http://deadpoolornot.com *cough *cough kinda apt these days…
I got 10 out of 10! w00t
wow erick — didn’t know you were a pimp! what’s your cut of the sale?
it seems that Diigo is often lumped with all these other dead or half-dead web annotation companies. The truth is that Diigo goes much beyond web annotation to provide a powerful personal research tool and a knowledge sharing network.
I know that may sound complicated, but users seem to like the mix and Diigo is alive and growing.
So true. Keep up the good work.
These were the same guys who turned up to San Francisco for Web2.0 Expo with 1000’s of stickers that said “blogable” on them.
Except… that the spelling of the word is “bloggable”. Haha
http://www.flickr.com/photos/t.....421117256/
Yeah, and that is probably why you STILL remember them right? How many other stickers do you remember from that conference?
Just because someone remembers it does not make it a good thing.
I remember Enron. I remember Lehman Brothers.
What does it mean?
Web annotation is something that really does need to happen.
But only Google is positioned to do it properly.
And they wouldn’t want to piss of their advertisers, by facilitating critical comments on an advertiser’s web site.
But maybe they could use this to measure the reputation of an advertiser, and drop the worst of them.
Anotation was done in Web 1.0 era and the site bombed. Why would anyone like Fleck would try again? Too much money to burn?
Is that a serious question?
There were 20 other search engines that didn’t really work before Google started. The telephone was made popular by Bell but there were 18 failed efforts before he gave it a shot. Youtube succeeded where about 200 other companies failed in the same market. Skype? I had my first VOIP client in 1996, which didn’t work.
Success is going from failure to failure without lack of enthusiasm.
Hell of a reply. Kudos.
just checked out fleck. it is full of dead links and bugs. I cannot believe anyone would want to buy this crap
If no one wants to buy the company, what will happen to the user data? Is it exportable? Can it be used in another annotating system?
It seems like the proprietary lock-in syndrome is one of the caveats the social annotation tools are suffering from. I would love to know what the Flecks have to say about that.
Great, another Delicious… Anyway, good luck
Fleck may be buggy or whatever (lots of sites are) but annotation and social bookmarking are not the same thing.
JumpKnowledge http://info.jkn.com/ seems to have temporarily disappeared, and is trying to reinvent itself.
I used JumpKnowledge a few times, and sent the link to people, who said ‘hey what were those funny lines in yellow, did you write that?’ they didnt get it at all, and they didnt sign up and use it themselves. Thus it did not reach critical mass. It’s all my fault. Sorry.