Accoona, the highly suspect New Jersey based search/electronics retailer, has suffered what might be its final disgrace - the closure of its last business, Twing.
The company, which offered a search product, has a rich history. Founder Marc Armand Rousso has a shady past involving stock fraud, and former President Bill Clinton was a spokesperson for the company.
Most of Accoona’s $137 million/year in revenue came from distributing electronics after buying a number of retailers in Brooklyn. In 2007 they canceled a planned IPO. The reason? The underwriter pulled the plug, saying “After completing our due diligence review, we have chosen to disassociate ourselves with the company.”
Recently, the Accoona search business was sold to Masterseek, a Danish company, last month.
The company said in April they were deprioritizing all of their businesses except Twing, a forum search engine. But the Twing website is now offline, and a tipster says the technology is being sold.
Twing, which appears to be a separate corporate entity from Accoona, was said to be pitching for a small round of financing in the last few months at a valuation of $8 million.
The service had a surge in traffic this last spring, drawing, according to Compete, a peak of about 1.5 million unique monthly visitors. But much (or all) of that traffic was driven by advertising spends, says a source, and they struggled to get repeat visitors.
We’ve contacted Accoona and Twing and await a response. Unless they say otherwise, it’s deadpooled.
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Does sound really shady! Thanks for the write-up.
I stumbled on that site once, I found it to be useless.
“we have chosen to disassociate ourselves with the company”
Uh oh, that’s usually corporate-speak for: “Forget it!”; never a good sign when an underwriter uses wording like that.
I actually really liked Twing.
Yep, as an electronics industry insider, I can tell you that they are indeed shady. They sold off the electronics retailing business a few months back however.
interesting beginning of the month ..what we expect by end of it! two deadpool in one day pownce and twing … who can bet about half of social copycat will go deadpool before obama handles whitehouse ?
“The service had a surge in traffic this last spring, drawing, according to Compete, a peak of about 1.5 million unique monthly visitors.”
How did they do that???
Um,
“But much (or all) of that traffic was driven by advertising spends, says a source, and they struggled to get repeat visitors.”
I believe that a better question is “How much does that cost?” I could use 1.5 million uniques some month to get the word out about my site.
I have always been impressed by Accoona technology as I was convinced they needed a bit of luck and time to get better.
Yeah, sure.
I’m convinced! Where can I send some money?
I actually visited this useless crap heap of a company 2x trying to sell it services…each person was dumber than the one they replaced and their claim to fame was some ugly heap of art in the hallway that Michael Jackson would have never ever displayed in his neverland. These guys were bad bad bad news…there is a god! the deadpool.
I don’t have time now for all the gory details. I intend at some point to write up some more lessons from the Twing experience. I can’t speak to the Accoona historical baggage as I thankfully wasn’t at the company during those times. (Though I will say this much; I can see where a judgment could be made that such baggage had an impact on Twing.)
Twing was engineered to be a large scale tool for searching discussion based content. There were some others doing similar work, however none had broken out and it seemed from initial market planning none were ready to keep up with the massive growth in forum/community content. I continue to believe that this area is underserved. (In fact, it seems Google is itself enhancing search in this area.) I also believe that - as much as I enjoy Google and use it and other top search company’s tools - that many so-called “alternative vertical search engines” can provide a ton of value beyond the majors. (People like Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines fight an uphill, but important battle in this regard.) Most just haven’t as yet been able to garner any mainstream awareness.
In any case, the short of it was that Twing worked. It was growing an increasingly huge index with solid search results quality and had only just begun implementing grassroots marketing campaigns. (As opposed to the paid tests, etc. obviously responsible for initial traffic spikes.) I can’t say definitively why investors chose not to fund the company further. But I think any common sense observer could suggest that even if Twing were to have become as successful as it likely could be, that probably wouldn’t cover the years of failure in other efforts of the parent company. Perhaps the current investment environment suggested this was a good time to pull the plug.
It’s fairly clear that search is today’s critical navigation methodology almost regardless of content type. Whether it’s hash tags search on Web 2.0 Hottie du jour Twitter or new search at LinkedIn or whatever, vertical search matters. Why else are there tabs for arbitrary content types even on the majors themselves. After all, isn’t all online news and blogs presented in web pages? So why segregate them? Because there’s obvious value in doing so. (Even if that might often only be a user expectation regarding editorial voice.) In any case, sadly, Twing will apparently not be able to participate in enhancing the search experience for users seeking community based content. I’m sure we’ll see this search area grow at some point. I think it’s a great opportunity for whoever has the funding / staying power to unlock the value. Maybe someone will resurrect Twing even. I guess we’ll see.
Scott Germaise
Director, Produ… uhhh correction,
Former Director, Product Management @ Twing.com
“former President Bill Clinton was a spokesperson for the company. ”
That seals the deal… definitely sounds shady!
I am truly sorry to see Twing go. As an Alt search engine founder and CEO of Omgili, I can personally say that getting attention and returning users to a search engine (other than Google) is indeed a very difficult task that can take years to achieve. Big piles of cash helps of course, but long presence and brand building is even more important.
I think it is very important for entrepreneurs to keep creating alternatives for Google and invent new ways that will enrich the way we find information on the web.
Ran Geva,
Omgili CEO
Both Twing and Omgili are fine examples of vertical search. It is sad that Twing had such a parent company. It must have been very frustating to loose a good product because of this. Hopefully Twing may be resurrected under another name by someone better than these.
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The people who worked on Twing deserve to be recognized for what they are: a talented and passionate group of individuals. They built a great vertical/categorical search engine that was only just beginning to prove itself. In a mere nine months we had collected, and made searchable, more than 1.4 Billion comments from thousands of forums. Distribution and phase II functionality was just beginning when our ramp was cut short due to factors out of our control.
Without getting into details (maybe later), the corporate challenges that faced the product were significant to say the least. As GM of Twing, I did the best I could to keep the product sheltered. However, even in the face of those challenges, the group involved with Twing pushed on becaused they believed in what we were doing. They believed in the product as a useful application for searchers seeking to find forum-based conversational content.
We were not looking at our own success blindly. Almost every review of our product was positive.
Again, to those of you who worked on Twing, you should be proud of what you accomplished in the timeframe you were given.
Kevin Shea
GM - Twing.com (former)
shady…..
The reason this piece of junk failed is because it had no revenue model. None. The day of “let’s build something so we can sell it” are over unless it is truly innovative. It wasn’t. Scott and Kevin, it is time you realized that the reason it failed is because of your leadership. You two holed yourselves up in a dark room alone and made decisions that were detrimental to any potential success. Like little pack rats, you wanted the glory all your own and now you own the failure. I hope you take the lessons to your next venture and understand that the only way to innovate and succeed is by utilizing all of the talent around you. Try it next time.
amen.
Poetic:
Sorry you feel that way. Since it seems you’re a former co-worker, you should recall team meetings where we went over product feature/function/benefits, and the business models we were working on. (Which included not only advertising, but various forms of distribution and use of business intelligence analytics from the rich data set we were collecting showing online community behavior, etc.) I thought we were very open about that. Actually, one of the things that bugs me most about all this is that we can’t explore more of the data mining possibilities and sociological aspects of community. Anyway, I still have the team presentations we gave so I’m certain all aspects of the business model were presented to everyone. Though your apparent anger indicates to me that as a manager, I’ll have to be even surer in the future that everyone - even when they don’t work for me - clearly, clearly understands that input is desired and appreciated, though I’d thought we’d done that. And in fact, both Kevin and I frequently spoke with anyone with ideas from programming staff to whomever. And many of these ideas made it onto a product roadmap. In any case, on a personal level if you’d like to discuss, just give me a call. I’d like to hear more details on just what more you think could or should have been done. I promise not to reveal your id on here or elsewhere if you’d prefer to stay anonymous.
In terms of innovation… well the product certainly had some invention to it. The filtering technology and disambiguation by category added a lot of value to relevancy ranking in results. (Though true enough that modern concepts of innovation also suggest real innovation includes customer adoption and feedback with changes; cycles which we didn’t get to explore.)
Would the product have been successful or not with more runway? There’s no way to really tell. Maybe not. But I think another 9 - 18 months to adapt and grow with the exploding use of various online discussion venues would have been useful to find out if the business really had legs or not. Oh, by the way, there’s nothing at all wrong with building products that have a business sale as an exit goal. This wasn’t the case here though. It was a conceivable opportunity, but not the sole original impetus. The goal was to create something truly useful for a niche market. And good search is useful. We wanted something that had both initial novelty, but also ongoing core value. And we did that. It was a solidly “good” version 1 product. We just don’t get to make a “great” version 2, 3, etc. If we did nothing else, maybe we gained some exposure for the deep value in forum content. So at least maybe that’s some value added to the world; business failure notwithstanding.
Scott
Aaawh to bad the site is gone I wanted to see for myself what the fuzz where all about ….. “darned” . Accoona I knew watch it used it once and so and so. You know if it where not for the its an A.i search ”kinda” search engine back then I would buy that, Yeah great men whatitdo they could call it a semantic search engine if they dare hahaha funny.
Ask.com was nice to yip .?.?. Yipper? internet has its own trash heap does it. Still nice stuff out there do.
Wah…
Being at Accoona for only 6 months I got to see Twing open it sails and sail the internet oceans with Success. The product worked, it had clear path laid out ahead of it for future expansion. I am sure the past baggage lent it’s self to the drying up of investment funds but I believe the state of the economy was the biggest factor. As Scott and Kevin have both said above there was a plan and it was easy to show where future revenues would come from. Heck I even proposed a couple of them beyond the simple data mining.
I think the biggest advantage to Twing was not it’s search engine but it was our ability to Graph that information in usable charts. For those of you who did not see it, it was interesting watching the presidential polls and comparing it to what Twing was seeing, and you know the information lined up, When Mccain and Obama were going at it and showed Obama 3 points higher then Mccain, well twings’ Graphs showed the same. Go figure.
So the business model was there but it needed time to develop and be sold to the people that could use that information.
Remember Google did not become the premier search engine over night and they never made their money from search either. Google took years to beat out AltaVista, Yahoo,… and Google is now known as an Advertising Juggernaut who does search not the other way around.
So yes is it sad that twing is gone and if it was such a bad product why did someone buy it up. Twing is dead but the concept is still out there and being looked in to.
Most business owners say that you will fail more times then you succeed. But one success is all you need!
Ed
Oh, blimey! You didn’t just compare that nightmare of a company to Google, did you? Hilarious! Ed, I would wager that you didn’t make a red cent for your 6 months there while a select few made tons (and I mean tons). Maybe if you were there longer you would know a little more. I guess your right in one respect, that sham of a company was a success for at least one person.
Poetic, sounds like your a pretty bitter person. If money is your driving factor then please get out of the Start-up and internet companies cause you will loose more money then you will make.
And yes I did compare twing to Google, not as a business but that it took years for google to become a juggernaught of the internet. If you not aware when you compare something it is not necessarily equating the two. Twing was never going to be an internet super star like twitter, facebook or for a short time myspace it would have slowly crept up there but it was never something the mass public would have used or at least not something I would have envisioned telling my Mom to use it instead of google. But you would have seen Journalist, Entertainment, PR, political candidates and advertising companies using it as one more item in their arsenal
In the end, it is one of the many companies that are going to close because of the economy. Sandy, Pounce, Twing, and thousands more will go to the deadpool.
So sad.
As a former employee of Accoona I applaud Kevin’s and Scott’s effort. Just like any manager they could have done things differently and probably would if they could. They worked very hard for something they believed in under very difficult circumstances. Even though they were not successful with the Twing business model, the overall Accoona business model was a huge success. The Founder, Marc Armand Rousso a.k.a the Crocodile was able to milk millions out the company through his “management consulting” company, SPD not to mention flipping his 60 million shares (he paid $6000 for the shares); Event the CEO, Val Zammit received 300k for knowing nothing about the technology. Just read the quote by Val in the New York Times. Accoona and Twing will go down in history as a very successful pump and dump stock fraud and money laundering operation. The business model should be studied for future generation of fraudsters or (FBI investigators). Kevin and Scott and a lot of other hard working people unwittingly contributed to a huge success.
Actually, I have to defend my CEO here. Umm… former CEO that is. As I said in my first comment here, I can’t speak to the apparently dark history at the parent Accoona company. Had I known about it, I’d not likely joined. In any case, I can say that I appreciate Val coming in to take over and try to recover something out of what was - prior to his taking the helm - already a train wreck. The NYT quote was unfortunate. And as is sometimes the case, out of context. Val answered a question in what he thought was maybe a jocular, self-deprecating way. In it’s raw form as it was presented it was unfair. That’s not to say he’s a CEO that came from IT. He didn’t. He’s had a long and successful career in finance. At the risk of incurring the ire of Poetic, (big deal), I’ll compare him to some others just as examples. While Jack Welch may have had early career expertise in chemical engineering, do you think he knew all the inner workings of a jet engine? Of course not. Lou Gerstner, called a cookie salesman at the time, turned around IBM. These are extreme examples. The point is it wasn’t necessarily his job to be intimate with the tech. While it was his job to handle the CEO slot, there’s only so much a helmsman can do when dropped on a ship with so many leaky compartments. He’s to be commended for even making the attempt, regardless of the unfortunate outcome.
As a former employee of Accoona; I can tell you that the goose was cooked far before the economy tanked. Stop blaming it on the economy. I was basically told we had a given amount of time to show some revenue. The approximated amount of time would have meant put up by Aug 08 or we are done.
The place was such an utter disaster that the plug got pulled well before that.
Trouble was that this was an environment that promoted charlatans. It seemed to me that the worst characteristics that one can display in the corporate world and its respective social environment; where rewarded while openness and a desire to share innovation, creative thought and true intellectual approach where suppressed. i can tell you that the people I was surrounded with where the sorts I would not buy a tire from. There where one or two who made out like bandits and there where several more who thought they would as well. Tough shitt guys… aside from the crooked Frenchman and Val… everyone got screwed.
I venture to guess that there was an underlying lack of morale that encouraged many to sit around and collect checks until the ball fell. This was exasperated by backstabbery in all quarters including the HR department and the thuggish clowns at exchange place.
Trouble is that we where trying to be a media company that specializes in internet. Media buyers worth their salt have all been screwed at one time or another and simply put… we reeked really bad to our would be clientele.
Sadly, these comments show exactly the no-win situation that Twing was in.
It is very important to separate out Twing on its own merits from the nightmare that was Accoona. Discussions about Accoona’s fundraising efforts, hype in 2004, managment decisions, eCommerce division, etc., ought to be viewed separately from what Scott, Kevin and others did a great job of building. For all the morons that were hired, and all the shenanigans at the top, there were quite a few stellar people who did nothing but work hard on building something real. Sadly, it wasn’t enough.
Scott,
You don’t see the forest for the trees… Zamit was in on the scam. How many CEOs of struggling startup companies with no revenue make $300k in salary? No VCs would ever invest in a company where the CEO makes that kind of money and if Zamit was a good CEO he would know that. His main objective was to give the impression of trying to turn the mess around in order to keep getting money from the original investors a little while longer. Any legitimate and qualified CEO would never get in business with someone like Armand Rousso. He know what he was doing and you got sucked into his scam.
You worked hard and I feel sorry for you and the rest of the people there who thought they had a chance at making something great.
My recommendation is put this chapter of your career behind you, take your knowledge, hard work, dedication and next great idea and shop it around without the baggage of $300K CEO and a felon. Trying to defend criminals is a waste of your time.
I find it funny people are complaining about $300k/year as a CEO’s salary these days, especially with what’s going on on Wall Street.
I don’t have an opinion about this subject, however if Accoona employees all have nothing better to do except to argue with people in forums, that may say it all.
Get your resume out there, delete Accoona and hope for the best.
Agreed..it’s over with and done, had fun working on the project while it lasted. Good luck Scott
I don’t have much to add - except that I am NOT any of the anonymous posters.
I had a great time at Accoona. Scott and Kevin certainly made great efforts to keep us all aware of Twing’s plans as well as solicit our input.
The nameless flaming is ridiculous. We were a small group. Show some respect.
Thanks Scott Germaise and Kevin Shea for giving me the opportunity at Twing.com .
I met them at their NY Web 2.0 booth in September.
Uhm there is still future for the accoona concept so stif up a lip people. Comparison to google is not fair a resemblance , Look you just have to be lucky I recently discovered Feedjit the story how those guy’s build that is fucking awesome the live traffic the site does is fucking wicked. Get aggrevated build something you want and you’ll see the rest fills itself.
As an SEO, I was so excited about twing and still looking at this forum for over 2 months looking for an alternative. Any ideas.
As a former employee of Accoona; I can tell you that the goose was cooked far before the economy tanked. Stop blaming it on the economy. I was basically told we had a given amount of time to show some revenue. The approximated amount of time would have meant put up by Aug 08 or we are done.
The place was such an utter disaster that the plug got pulled well before that.
Trouble was that this was an environment that promoted charlatans. It seemed to me that the worst characteristics that one can display in the corporate world and its respective social environment; where rewarded while openness and a desire to share innovation, creative thought and true intellectual approach where suppressed. i can tell you that the people I was surrounded with where the sorts I would not buy a tire from. There where one or two who made out like bandits and there where several more who thought they would as well. Tough shitt guys… aside from the crooked Frenchman and Val… everyone got screwed.
I venture to guess that there was an underlying lack of morale that encouraged many to sit around and collect checks until the ball fell. This was exasperated by backstabbery in all quarters including the HR department and the thuggish clowns at exchange place.
Trouble is that we where trying to be a media company that specializes in internet. Media buyers worth their salt have all been screwed at one time or another and simply put… we reeked really bad to our would be clientele.