Friday Flashbacks: where do Seesmic, Jaiku and Mozilla Mobile stand now?

Written on 10th October 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us – “us” being tech bloggers in general – buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.

(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you?)

So where does last year’s buzz stand now?

October 8, 2007 – Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.

October 9, 2007 – Google acquired Jaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it.  As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.

October 10, 2007 – Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one.