This was one of the weirdest incoming pitches I’ve received in a while. Finnish startup Comeks, which I’d never heard of before, contacts us to tout its product, a nifty application that lets you generate funny cartoons based on the pictures on your phone and enables you to push them out to social networking services, and then casually lets us know they’re up for sale.
I got in touch with co-founder and CEO Arto Viitanen, who told me the startup simply ran out of money, after raising €400,000 from Accel Partners about two years ago when the outlook for internet and mobile startups was way better than in the current economy. With the seed funding, the company produced a tool called Comeks Shorts, which lets you send visual SMS messages for the price of a normal SMS message.
Last week, they added to that service “Fun Photo Blogger”, a tool that lets you create funny cartoons with available artwork (speech bubbles, add-on stickers etc.) in combination with your own pictures, both on the web and from your mobile device (with the help of custom applications for J2ME, the iPhone and Android).
I tested Comeks on my iPhone (App Store link) and actually liked playing around with it. It’s pretty fun to mess with pictures from your photo gallery, and you can easily share cartoonized images to other sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr, which basically turns it into a (free) visual microblogging application. You can see a bunch of examples of that on Viitanen’s Tumblr blog.
I have the feeling that the company was a bit too early for this type of thing, and that the story would have been different had they only started out now, even though it would have been virtually impossible to raise venture capital for it in the current climate.
The startup attracted about 170,000 registered users to date, but Viitanen admits that many of them are not active.
The team has been taking on other projects for the past 6 months to be able to keep paying the bills, but has no intention of pulling the plug out of the Comeks service just yet.
They’ll keep the servers running for the thousands of users that still make use of the application, and meanwhile they’re looking for a buyer to step in and pick up development where they stopped.
Hope springs eternal.
So… what’s their business model exactly? (except for selling t-shirts through Spreadshirt)
Premium add-on stickers, mobile payment solutions, customized virtual goods (think animated movie characters etc.)
I am sorry to sound harsh, but this company deserves to be deadpooled.
Absolutely no viable business model to speak of. The fact that Accel invested into this company ony proves that most VCs are herd following lemmings.
A job of a company is to make money. http://smartbab...ging-world.html
Anjali Sen
Since when are people not willing to pay for self expression? That’s what practically all virtual goods are all about.
@Smart Babes [?]
How do *YOU* make money? Your blog is the suckiest ever. Can’t read anything there, with the black background.
Please stop spamming TC.
Congratulations for the beautiful blog, here fell through Google searches and will return more often.
Abraços
All the best to Arto & co.!
I’ve actually tried the Symbian version of the Comeks app. It’s really fun to use, though I haven’t tried to _buy_ any of the add-ons yet. Great concept. Hope they get funded soon.
A post about an unknown, failed start-up headed for the dead pool? How is this worth an article on TC? Scraping the bottom in order to write about something [anything.]
Lame.
well still better than another twitter story or even better some deep troughts about the recession
for me this is exactly what TC should write about
If you like to read crap, maybe TC is not for you. There are hundreds of other blogs that would satisfy your needs…
peace
What is TC supposed to write about then? Just success stories? I found this post interesting and even tried the product. It’s a nice concept and nice app, too bad if they’re heading to deadpool.
well someone obviously did not get laid today
Comeks is really a good product in handphone device. We noticed it when we designed online comics creation platform (http://comiqs.com). Anyone who is interested in Comeks is also interested in Comiqs?;)
But Comeks is heading to the deadpool ??
For Android there is also PicSay to add speech-bubbles and create funny pictures. It was one of the winners in Google’s Android Developer Challenge so it got roughly half the amount of funding
http://www.tech...enge-announced/