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FOR SALE: Fleck.com

Written on 16th October 2008 15 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Michael Arrington launching Fleck.com in New York.

The reason this blog exists is because we started a conference a few years back to promote our start-up: Fleck.com. Out of that conference grew this blog and a lot more beautiful stuff that keeps us occupied every day. Today, I want to give you an update on where we stand and announce some news.

We started Fleck.com in August 2005 and have been working on it ever since. We have a loyal, but small, group of users and great technology. Fleck is an Annotation Service with an important Sharing component. You can easily add notes to pages and share these annotated pages with groups you set-up or with Friends via email.

Our goal was to build a service that would make it extremely easy to share interesting content online within smaller, and bigger, companies. Sharing the “collective wisdom” is what we used as a pitch to the companies we talked to. It all works and it is scalable!

Current Fleck.com homepage

After three years however it is time for a change. Fleck needs a new home where it can flourish. It would be a great addition to a company that already has a loyal user group and would like to offer these users an exciting tool to tie them into their brand. We have talked to a few companies about such a deal but so far we haven’t been able to finalize anything.

So, now we are going public: Fleck is for sale! We know now that it won’t make us millionaires and our investors understand that they won’t see a great return on investment on this one. Our goal right now is to find a good partner and make sure Fleck gets another chance.

Interested? Contact patrick@fleck.com or leave a comment here.

Techcrunch wrote an article about it as well.

15 Comments »

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com & this Blog. Boris is also very active on Twitter: @Boris

15 comments/trackbacks to “FOR SALE: Fleck.com”

Oct 16, 2008: Fleck staat te koop
[...] ook: Fleck For Sale [...]
Oct 16, 2008: Fleck Headed To The Deadpool Because Nobody Wants to Annotate The Web
[...] Update: Boris wrote a post about the sale. [...]
Oct 16, 2008: TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » 誰もWebに注釈をつけたがらない現実を前にFleck、デッドプールの瀬戸際へ
[...] Update: Borisが自社売却についてブログに発表した。 [...]
Oct 17, 2008: Fleck.com (Annote The Web) Is Up For Sale!
[...] Thats right Fleck is up for sale. Here is the post by Boris at The Next Web. [...]
Oct 19, 2008: marshalsandler.com » Fleck.com - Annote the web
[...] FOR SALE: Fleck.com [...]

By Matt Harwood on Oct 16, 2008

Best of luck with the sale, Boris! Fleck is a nice product, I hope it continues (I’m now scared to use it incase my data disappears… is there any guarantee?)

Matt

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By Patrick de Laive on October 17th, 2008:
Hi Matt, don’t worry.

What is your user name on Fleck?

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By Rene Jansen on Oct 16, 2008

Actually, this sounds a litte bit sad to me… I think there is a future for Fleck in business environments, perhaps as an adition to our Winkwaves Kenniscafe… Mmm, time for a good Cappuccino together?

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By Patrick de Laive on October 17th, 2008:
Hi Rene,

I totally agree. I believe that there is business in a closed environment bookmarking service.
We’ve had talks with some banks to implement Fleck as their collective bookmarking service, all of a sudden their budgets froze (hmmm… wonder what happened :))

Coffee sounds good. patrick at fleck dot com

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By Sander van der Vliet on Oct 16, 2008

@Rene I just made the same remark in the office. Social bookmarking still has huge opportunities in closed environments like companies and schools.

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By David Petherick on Oct 16, 2008

It’s the sign of a truly mature business person that they know when to walk away from something they have sweated over, built, loved and nurtured. Too many people make the mistake of doing what the Brits call “flogging a dead horse”.

So, sad to see that Fleck’s on the auction block, but can’t wait for what’s next from the team that created it – and we might still be surprised by what a buyer makes of it.

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By Darren Stuart on Oct 16, 2008

Good luck guys.

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Oct 16, 2008

Thanks for the kind comments! :-)

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By Ruben @ Freep on Oct 17, 2008

Said to hear Fleck is for Sale.
If I combine the nextwebblog / your network/ Fleck in my head I see a nice service for Startups and Firstmovers.

Startups like Testers and Firstmovers like private betas.
You got the audience and a great service (Fleck).
So why don’t you transform Fleck to a closed private beta testing engine.

Just a idea ;-)
Goodluck with the sale.

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By Tim Ihezie on Mar 10, 2009

Hello–

My name is Timothy Ihezie. I am an engineering major at Drexel University and like the suggestion of implementing Fleck in a scholastic setting. If this is still possible email me. I know some contacts who would be interested in possibly purchasing Fleck. Thanks

Reply