Seeqpod, the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation.
At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days.
Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST)
Apparently, after going down Friday afternoon Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again 45 minutes after the notice was published and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night.
There’s still no 100% certainty that Seeqpod has in fact permanently closed shop. In fact, MP3 Newswire in a post says it has been in touch with Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks yesterday and that he reportedly stated the company is merely moving servers. Furthermore, MP3 Newswire quotes Franks as having said that the company is in acquisition talks with a “large media company that was a competitor to Apple”.
This could of course be a well-considered strategy to let people know it’s up for sale at all (which under the circumstances, would not be much of a surprise), hoping to squeeze a deal out of say, Sony or RealNetworks. In case this is all just talk and an acquisition never happens, things are not looking too good for Seeqpod, who despite the fact that it claims not to host any files on its own servers has become the target of multibillion dollar lawsuits by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.
The company has raised $7 million from undisclosed angel investors to date.
its always sad to see another company go to deadpool.
They facilitated copyright infringement. This is illegal. End of story.
Seeqpod is just a search engine tool. The files they were tracking are able to be found and free to download somewhere on the internet already. Thus, I know they facilitate, but at the end of the day people have a choice to either use it or not.
In the same way that any other search engine does. You fail at logic.
The site appears to be back up now with the maintenance notice, but horrendously slow.
fail….
It is a very nice site. I glad i found this. God Bless.
I think level 3 pulled the plug. That would corroborate with the “moving servers in a hurry” story.
If the didn’t proxy all the music they could save millions a year in bandwidth – my analysis at
http://blog.san...in-trouble.html which i did hours before they went down.
cool blog post man, really suprised their proxying the mp3s like that. also good inside on the id3 tags, my slow brain couldn’t put that together.
Still down.
What a shame about Seeqpd. It felt cheap but it was kinda cool!
I think the idea was an alternate search engine with more functions then you can think of. The comment left about copyright infringement isn’t not quite correct. They stream what’s available on the web period. You cannot download them. It’s a hub. Just like you tube but with more options. Nice people too!
Unless you spoof your browser’s user agent string to appear to be an iPhone. Then you can download the file. Not great quality, but sometimes that’s all you can get.
Seeqpod was/is just a search engine, though it did/does proxy the results too.
Try doing this search in Google, to get some beatles tracks.
http://www.goog...ription%22+snd+(mp4|mp3|avi)+-inurl%3A(jsp|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml|lyrics|mp3s|mp3|index)+-gallery+-intitle:%22last+modified%22+-intitle:(intitle|mp3)&btnG=Search
ok, same search as above, but shortened.
http://tr.im/jPeP
seeqpod.com may be worth $500 million. Get up, please. http://iamned.com/blog/
are seekpod better than Iphone fart app? i likes fart maker. good fart.,
I hope it hoes back up, it was my fav ipod site
Cuil theory gone wrong!
Butch Decossas
aww seeqpod was well cool
It’s 2009 and the startups from 2005 to present have taught us not to build start-ups around the music industry. They will exhaust you and your resources!
Well unless you have the capital to back you then go for it – little guys will get squashed!
Every time I go onto this site it says “Down for maintenence be back soon”. Are they really going to be back?
$&*&^%$#&*^&
this sux!
Bummer. SP was a great place to listen to an entire track before deciding to buy at the iTunes Store.
What the idiots suing Seeqpod fail to realize is that when people like me get to listen to various artists’ music on seeqpod, we make lists of music we want to purchase, thus most likely increasing their sales in the end! Fools! Long Live Seeqpod! Down With Record Company Capitalist Pigs! Screw Lawsuits and Lawyers!
I dont browse the net now without a anonymous proxy like http://www.surfshuffle.com, it protects my computer from the nasties on the net
See Wikipedia, they filed for bankruptcy
There is an interesting book out now called ‘Appetite for Self Destruction’ – cute little play on 1 of our favorite bands from the 80’s but it describes the recording industry and evolution of the music industry since the early 70’s. I think it highlights very well the depths that the RIAA has sunk to in the everquest to control the money in this industry.