Carsonified Puts Web App on eBay and Plays Hard Ball with Developers

Written on 18th December 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

Carsonified, creators of the chain of Web Expo’s “The Future of…” have placed Amigo the Newsletter Ad service – one of its oldest yet currently crumbling services – for sale on Ebay.

The company, lead by Ryan Carson, recently sold Dropsend, probably it’s most popular application, and also laid off three of it’s staff in a battle to maintain costs.

This time round it’s Amigo, a well designed app with a sensible business model but a lack of time/attention spent on it. The app has, according to Carson, “failed pretty badly”.

The idea behind Amigo was to allow advertisers to place ads on various newsletters and Carsonified would then share the revenue earned with the newsletter publishers. As I said, sensible and potentially a nice little earner. Carson elaborated on the failure in a blog post, “We were naive and we thought we could run it in our free time. You can build a web app in your free time, but you sure as hell can’t market it, grow it, maintain it and promote it.”

All is not lost however and Carsonified are putting there efforts into a brand new app called Truvay. Few details regarding the goals of the web app have been released, however oddly enough the development schedule and financials have been. (more…)

carsonified, FOWA Expo, Webapp

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Tactile CRM win Sun’s free stand at FOWA 08 in London

Written on 26th September 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

UK startup Tactile CRM were announced today as the winners of Sun Microsystems competition for UK startups to win an exhibition package worth £2500 for The Future of Web Apps Expo which hits London on October 8-10.

Sun, promoting their excellent free Startup Essentials programme, gave Tactile a stand in the Expo Space – Start Up Community, a delegate pass, an expo pass and a listing on the FOWA site. Not content with this generosity, they also awarded a runner-up prize to ‘Shopping without searching’ startup Veedow, who win space on the Sun Lounge to demo their new version to be launched at Future of Web Apps. (Veedow are hiring, by the way.)

Next week, Sun are running a competition to win full conference tickets worth £495 to Future of Web Apps, and also are offering startups who join Startup Essentials, and use the ref code (sssch) FOWA08DSC, a code for 15% off FOWA Conference passes and free EXPO pass tickets, so keep an eye on their blog.

The line-up at FOWA’08 includes Jason Calcanis, Kevin Rose, Kathy Sierra, Tim Bray, Blaine Cook and David Recordon, and FOWA Expo is a great opportunity to see what’s new, and what’s going to be next in the web. Our friends from Diggnation, who presented their show live from the Next Web Conference 2008 in Amsterdam back in April will also be presenting a live Diggnation show from FOWA – always an event to look forward to.

Blaine Cook, Diggnation, FOWA Expo, Kathy Sierra, kevin rose, sun microsystems, Tim Bray

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