http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cue
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-... (July 2013)
And a promising TC article earlier this year: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/too-much-email-please-stop-...
In general re: shutdowns:
If the economics aren't red ink or a white elephant, why not find a buyer or merge with a frenemy instead of throwing away value and customers?
Most shutdowns appear to me like putting 30 packs of $100 bills on a table, pouring gasoline over them and throwing a lit match while rationalizing "Everybody does it, so it's okay. Look at 'em go!"
For apps, building things that cost basically nothing[0] to run and letting them have sufficient time to grow on their own. Rinse. Lather. Repeat faster.
[0] auto-scaling & revenue covering costs.
--
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon
Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum.
Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.
I'll certainly remember their programming adventure challenge fondly. I hope they at least open source that, if they can't open source other parts of their software for whatever reason.
I liked Greplin and it really helped me several times to find 'missing' tweets and FB posts. When they pivoted and changed the name, the search part became below par. So I stopped using it entirely.
I do not know why they changed the previously good generic name and the original focus. I am sure they probably had more info than I do.
As we create more content scattered all over, personal search is becoming more useful. I hope something good comes again.
Best of luck to the team on what ever they do next.
They're very smart, I'm sure whatever they build next will be even better.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/why-did-apple-buy-cue-becau...
They were in my top 5 favorite startups. Were they killed by Siri and Google Now?
Cheers guys, there was obvious talent on your team! Interested to see what comes next...
The team is likely working on a new product.
Until I read the message on their homepage, I never realized they had a premium service!
Here's a screencast - search is towards the end: https://www.dropbox.com/s/04rrwxuuvkzpyrp/starthq.mp4
You can sign up here: https://starthq.com
Please use the Feedback form to let us know which services you'd like us to support and we will prioritize them for launch.
PS. For a bit of background on us, here's a blog post that was on the front page of HN on Monday http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/09/30/starthq-capitalizes-...
PPS. Sad to see Greplin go, loved the service but was too afraid to give access to my data at all times, so ended up building our federated search which doesn't require that. Would be very interested to know more about what happened.
