Canadian photo sharing startup BubbleShare will be shuttered on November 15, 2009. Users were notified via email and a notice on the site’s home page.
The site, founded by Albert Lai, first launched in late 2005 and we immediately liked it: “Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something…” Adding interface features like zoom just made it even more fun to use.
In early 2007 the company was sold to Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.
Some Kaboose assets, in turn, were acquired by Disney in April 2009 for $18.4 million.
No word on why they’re shutting down, but this may have something to do with it. We’ll always have fond memories of BubbleShare, but it’s now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.
t seems that there have been more than usual amount of companies hitting the deadpool as of late. I guess the economy’s toll has finally hit home for them.
*it seems…
gawd it’s like deadpool city around here lately
Why is that when TC likes a particular startup, the company ends in a dead-pool in sometime? I personally feel, whenever you glorify an instance it is destined to deadpool eventually.
lol. the kiss of death.
luckily our hit rate isn’t that bad, but there’s a reason why I’m not a venture captialist.
Cool. Do u mean that ur ‘hit rate’ is awesome at cost of these deadpooled ones? ‘Dracula’ kinda thing, eh?
ah, no. that’s not what I mean.
Heh. Glad it was Leena/Nik that covered Kontagent for TC, and didn’t recieve your kiss of death. =P
I have consulted and worked with a few too many photo sharing sites. They all come up with amazing flashy interface and stunning features. It all works fantastically in proof of concept, in front of an eager VC and well into and alpha. But in reality, when real people and companies entrust them with terabytes upon terabytes of their most important memories and assets – that’s when the beast pops up its ugly little head; Redundant, fast, secured, co-location storage and bandwidth comes with a staggering costs. It is amazing how quickly the margin disappears when the business model fails or the growth comes to a halt. It’s almost unsurvivable.
smugmug.com to the rescue soon I bet.
Are you referring to Smugglr? The dev is pretty on top of this kind of thing, but there’s a few speedbumps-
From the looks of it BubbleShare isn’t accepting new signups, current members probably can’t upload new pictures, and there’s not really a download API. Speaking as the developer of a similar piece of software (who’s tried supporting sites on their way to the deadpool before), these are all serious roadblocks that need overcoming before D-Day. The options basically go something like this:
-Beg Bubbleshare for a test account, either with photos in it, or with uploading enabled. Pray they haven’t made any exclusive auto-export deals with Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak or Shutterfly, which would prevent them from helping (or allowing) you to write a migration automator. From there, webscrape and pray the markup for the web interface doesn’t change between publishing the app update, and the service’s D-Day.
-Beg Bubbleshare users for account info to use as a guinnea pig for app development/testing against bubbleshare. Act quickly, as the user might get tired of waiting for you, download his photos, and delete them off the site. From there, webscrape.
-Learn to rollerblade. Hack the Gibson.
got to be in it to win it, good old man in the arena…
yeah
Hmmm….
now who can rescue? or it will be in deadpool ever after???
how can we ask them to shit their users to another photosharing service ????
it will be gr8 if they all shift to myn
Ironic that Michael would write a piece about it before I even got a letter up on my own blog about my good byes.
The truth is, when we launched the service — BubbleShare did kick total ass.
If fulfilled our vision of what would happen if Google and Craigslist got together to create a great photosharing tool.
BubbleShare was super simple, had “zero registration” (think craigslist style private email setup), Flash Multi-Uploader (first introduced via beta of flash8), use of AJAX for dynamic grid views, magnifying glass viewer, decorative scrap book like overlays, user audio captioning, and later video captioning — many of these were all industry firsts (or at least very damn close to it) back in 2005.
These innovations came in rapid succession as flickr was appleasing the high end of the alpha geek market (targetting bloggers), slide had come out with a similar desktop product that we had created — and then steered towards social widgets (targetting myspace users), and we had remained focused on elegant digital sharing for novice users (targetting “photo moms”).
Within a year of launch, we were entertaining a number of buyout opportunities and series-A term sheets, and it was clear where things needed to go. While financing was interesting, a number of buyout offers were starting to appear which became really attractive. Things didn’t go as smoothly on that front as we would have liked, but then the VC funding options also came, in our opinion, too late to really help take it to the next level.
But since the buyout from Kaboose in early 2007 (which really started in mid 2006 amongst a number of parties), the innovations have to a stop.
The incredible team that we we had at BubbleShare after the acquisition were diverted to some important strategic projects inside the parent company that needed BubbleShares technical DNA that we had brought to Kaboose (a strong marketing, and not a technology company). And BubbleShare languished as bits of its tech and DNA scattered across the Kaboose properties.
Since that time, after a relatively short earn out for myself, and then my peers — as expected, many of us are working on heading up new projects.
Myself on a new social analytics startup (Kontagent), our CTO on a new online/social ads startup (Chango/Tweekbucks), and much of the core team now involved in a number of other social media companies.
Perhaps one of the unintended legacy that BubbleShare will leave behind is an event that it helped spawned due to our desire to grow the local tech scene at the time with another tech community evangelist, David Crow. The event was the first “DemoCamp” which was in part setup and hosted by us to gain feedback from the tech community. Since then, DemoCamp has gone on for 25+ events in just Toronto, and spun out events as far as Austin to Dubai.
It was also super cool to see BubbleShare on TechCrunch – and be hosted to an adhoc mini-TechCrunch party at the BBC (bar) in the Bay Area by the “Early Mike Arrrington” (before his parties had dozens of sponsors and thousands of people) during an impromptu visit out west. Which lead to a series of interesting meetings with mike (who in all honesty, put bubbleshare on the map for us), including a trip to Taiwan (with him and ironically a professional innovation hero of mine, stewart butterfield/cofounder of flick ironically), then a crazy lunch with Mike, Bill Gates & Scoble, then him only writing about my deadpooled photosharing companies but never anything about my more sexy social analytics/Kontagent platform ventures (which has all the pleasing aesthetics but twice the geekiness!). =-P
Although I’m not sure I’m quite up for it, I’d sure am happy to see someone keep the BubbleShare legacy alive — and pick up where Kaboose and Disney has left off…
But until then, farewell my old friend… BubbleShare will be missed. =(
keeping legacies of people and pictures and whatnot is a big issue with all these sites shutting down…. Albert – we should talk
Those were the days, eh? Remember the CES ‘find a room in vegas’ unconference?
As the PR/marketer and head of sms-texting-with-albert-at-3-a.m. for BubbleShare pre-Kaboose, I can say BS did many things right in its race for traffic and user acquisition. Best Practices I recollect:
1) zero registration: For goodness sakes, remove the barrier to use. Let me use your service without giving you the names of my ancestors and hamsters, and if I like what you’re offering and want to do cool stuff, I’ll give you my hamsters’ names later. BS did this better than any other web 2 offering of its time.
2) slick UI with new revs pushed out weekly based on user feedback (and rounded corners!): Much like twitter today, BubbleShare ‘in the day’ rolled out new features (both those asked for by users + some surprise ah-ha! features) on an intuitively rapid and regular basis.
3) Know the CEO’s single most important goal: In BS’s case it was traffic.
4) Head of company must never sleep. (Except with Arrington).
Love you all–it was a fun ride.
Can we please realize that Compete tracks US visitors only?
BubbleShare was a Canadian company purchased by another Canadian company. While US visitors tend to be rather valuable, their Canadian traffic was really what mattered.