Kakiloc shut down.
This morning Martin Dufort announced that Kakiloc, the location-based service that he and Alain Lavoie built, is closed. From the mail he sent:
Alain Lavoie and I (Martin Dufort) started the service as an experiment in mapping your physical location while on the move in December 2005. We quickly recognize the need to deal and put extra emphasis on supporting mobile technologies because we knew this was the direction the industry was going into. Now look at all the initiatives out there : Google Android, Nokia’s new handsets, SkyHook Wireless, etc etc So we work for 2 years (full-time and part-time) refining the service and adding functionalities to both the web site and the mobile applications we were supporting. But in the end, the fierce competition within the social networking space and the service’s generic nature prevented us from actually gaining a sustainable user base. On November 6 th , I decided to close down the service. Now the servers are actually off-line. I would like to thank all our members for registering and helping out and providing feedback about the service. But a big thanks goes out to Alain for sticking with me and my crazy ideas and trying to push this further. Your partnership was invaluable. Thanks a lot. The Kakiloc core technology is still alive and is being evaluated for inclusion in a new service but nothing concrete yet. In the mean time, I’ve renamed the company’s blog to: The Mobile Location-Based Informant which is available at: http://location-based.blogspot.com
Please come and visit as I will continue to cover the mobile and location-based world both from the software and the hardware perspective.
We'll see more of you in the future, I am sure.
December 7th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
[…] you tie in evidence from other similar services- the recent shutdown of Kakiloc comes to mind- it seems possible that the in-location, mobile-based social networking space […]
April 8th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
[…] After a number of days of insightful introspection and discussions, my partner Alain and I decided to split. We made an agreement that I could continue to use and operate the Kakiloc intellectual properties. This was a very friendly split. However, the service quietly died as a consequence. It is impossible for a single person to handle everything. That’s the reason why, starting a company solo is 95% of the time a big no-no. You have no one to bounce ideas to, discuss issues, promote and demote stuff. Kakiloc was shutdown on November 6th, 3 days after the death of my mother. The official announcement was actually sent on November 29th to all our contacts [http://saunderslog.com/2007/11/30/kakiloc-shut-down/]. […]