Pebble shuts down

 

Pebble, one of the best-known smartwatch brands, is dead. Rumors about the company’s demise have been swirling since The Information reported a potential Fitbit buyout last week. Today in a post on Kickstarter, Pebble confirmed that Fitbit was acquiring “key Pebble assets” and that Pebble would “no longer be operating as in independent company.”

This is completely in line with a Bloomberg report last night that claimed only chunks of Pebble were being sold to Fitbit, namely its intellectual property, software engineers, and testers. Designers and other staff will be let go and current products (and all other assets) are, according to Bloomberg, expected to be sold to pay the shuttering company’s debt.

And that leaves Pebble’s loyal customers out in the cold. While Pebble’s Kickstarter note ends on a happy note of gratitude to its many loyal customers, those customers are, in fact, royally screwed.

“One-to-one Pebble support is no longer available” and “any Pebble currently out in the wild is no longer covered by or eligible for warranty exchange.” This means, no matter when you purchased or received your Pebble device, you are on your own—and if your device dies, you’re simply out a device. Any warranty you might have been promised from Pebble directly is void. (If you didn’t purchase from Pebble, but from a site like Amazon, you may still be able to return the product for cash or store credit.) You can also expect to see zero software support (or updates) going forward, despite Fitbit’s acquisition.

If you took part in Pebble’s recent Kickstarter, which launched on May 24 and raked in nearly 12.8 million dollars, and you have not received your product, then you are, again, screwed. As of today Pebble will no longer be shipping devices. Pebble 2 backers who haven’t received a device won’t receive one. The Time 2, Core, and Time Round, originally intended to ship last month and later scheduled to ship in January 2017, are completely canceled.

Pebble promises those smartwatch-less backers will receive a refund, which is great! They deserve a refund! However those refunds will take place through the Kickstarter system and aren’t expected to be completed until March 2017, nearly a year after many backers dropped their cash on the project.

And that, more than the loss of cool tech and the the honoring of warranties, is the real kick in the pants. Pebble, essentially, bamboozled 12.8 million dollars out of its customers and then sat on that money for the last 6-7 months. Worse the company wasn’t up front about the rumors and its own reported demise, instead leaving backers twisting in the wind for the last week, surreptitiously updating the expected ship dates for products that it had good reason to know it might never be able to ship.

This isn’t just a major blow for the already dying smartwatch market, it’s a blow for crowdfunding in general. Pebble was one of crowdfunding’s most notable successes, and its continued reliance on crowdfunding for each product launch suggested that we were seeing the beginnings of a new kind of business plan, where companies could be supported by their fans rather than angel investors.

If Pebble, one of Kickstarter’s biggest success stories, can fail so spectacularly then why should a consumer put trust in any of the smaller crowdfunding campaigns out there? Just when it was looking like at least some crowdfunding could be trust, Pebble has proven that you jut can’t. Invest in the crowdfunding future at your own risk.

Four Food Startups Shutdown

 

India’s cab aggregator sector is doing well for itself. The same is not the case with the food aggregator sector. Four startups in the hyperlocal food delivery space have reportedly shut down their businesses in the last few months.

Online food delivery startups Cyberchef, Mealhopper and Bite Club have all shut down in quick succession. Foodpost, another startup, lasted barely six months.

All these startups were aggregators that networked with home chefs to deliver food to web or app users.

Cyberchef was founded in 2015 by Neha Puri. It was a virtual marketplace for traditional meals. The most recent to shut down, it apparently had an ugly closure with several home chefs as well as the vendors working with the company alleging it hadn’t cleared their payments.

“I worked with Cyberchef for around eight months and payments were always late. I kept writing to them and suddenly they stopped operations,” said Simran Bagga, a home chef working with the startup.

Bite Club, launched in 2014 by Aushim Krishan and Pratik Agarwal, was a mobile-first food delivery marketplace connecting local chefs to customers. They were backed by growX Ventures and angel investors from India. The startup closed its doors in July after it failed to raise another round of funding.

“The founders of the company communicated to us through a WhatsApp group that due to their failure to raise another round, they are suspending operations,” said Pooja Gulati, a home chef associated with Bite Club. “The owners of Bite Club went bankrupt,” said a person close to the development.

Venture capitalists currently do not see the food aggregator business becoming unviable but they do think that it calls for the revision of its strategy. The major challenges it faces are the need to expand quickly and maintaining a high quality of food and service. These two factors when combined produce a high burnout rate for startups.

Vikram Upadhyaya, founder of a GHV business accelerator said, “As an investor, I am still very bullish about FoodTech. However, I feel maintaining food quality through process standardisation and technology is very important to be successful and that can be challenging in a home chef-based space.”

In May 2016, Gurgaon-based food-tech startup operating in the daily meals segment, Yumist, stopped its services in Bangalore. Recently, restaurants associated with Swiggy and Shadowfax pulled back from having their orders delivered by the startups. They cited a sudden spike of 25% per order as commission charged, as one of the key reasons that led to the severing of the partnership.

Startup operating in Gurugram’s foodtech aggregator space has narrowed itself down with Innerchef and Dabbagul being the only two major players left in the space.

Readability Bookmarking Service Will Shut Down

 

The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016.

After more than five years of operation, the Readability article bookmarking/read-it-later service will be shutting down after September 30, 2016.

If you’d like to save your bookmarks, please follow these directions before September 30, 2016. You can export your bookmarks by visiting your Tools page, scrolling down to the Data Export section, and clicking the Export Your Data button. You’ll receive an email soon after that contains your bookmarks. Similar services like Instapaper will allow you to import your bookmarks into their service.

The Readability Parser API for developers will continue to be supported and will continue to function as always. We plan to put new energy and focus on the Readability parser, and further announcements will follow. If you’ve requested an API key in the past, you will have received an email with additional details.

Since it launched as a simple bookmarklet in 2009, the Readability project’s impact on reading on the web and beyond is undeniable. We appreciate your loyalty and support for the platform over the years.

AskMe Shuts Down, Thousands Of Employees Laid Off

 

In yet another sad chapter in the Indian startup ecosystem, e-commerce site and consumer internet search platform AskMe has shut down and is in the process of laying off its 4000 odd staff. The reason behind the shut down is being stated as severe cash crunch according to a report in The Economic Times.

While the AskMe.com portal is still live, none of the orders placed there are being accepted. According to sources who have spoken to ET, one of the reasons for the shut down is also being speculated as the unplanned exit of one of its principal investor Astro Holdings.

Astro Holdings, which held a 97 percent stake in AskMe Group exited after making its last cash investment of Rs 150 crore. AskMe had even written to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Registrar of Companies to prevent Astro Holdings from leaving without meeting its liabilities and commitments, but it was all in vain.

In recent times, around 650 employees had also resigned from AskMe. The site was formed in 2010 and it launched its online shopping site called AskMeBazaar in 2012 with small and medium enterprises. AskMe is associated with around 12,000 merchants in 70 cities. It also offered next-day delivery.

Recently, Ola also shut down its TaxiForSure division thanks to the latters integration with Ola Micro service. This has lead to around 700 to 1000 people losing their jobs as well, while some employees from TaxiForSure have been absorbed into Ola.

Ola shuts down TaxiForSure

 

OneReceipt is shutting down

 

OneReceipt will be shutting down August 24, 2016. You may not know it, but the OneReceipt team is made up of a very small dedicated and passionate group of engineers who have worked tirelessly to give you a free, intuitive service to organize your purchases. We’re glad you found us and hope our service was valuable.

SpoonRocket Closed, Future Uncertain

 

Sweet potato and black bean chili from SpoonRocket, which has not been in operation for several days. Photo: SpoonRocket

SpoonRocket, the food delivery service headquartered on Ninth St. in West Berkeley, has halted operations. A former employee and a contracted driver were both told by the company over the weekend that the business has closed down for good. No meals have been delivered since Friday, and SpoonRocket’s commercial kitchen, at 1725 University Ave., appears to be shuttered.

Anyone trying to order food for delivery over the weekend or on Monday was met with a notice on the SpoonRocket website that the site was “undergoing maintenance.”

On Sunday, Berkeleyside received an email from a tipster who said a friend, a SpoonRocket employee, had been let go. She was told that by management that SpoonRocket had gone under. Berkeleyside has not been able to confirm this. Several emails sent to SpoonRocket and to its PR representative, beginning on Sunday morning, have not been answered. The company is not answering phone calls.

The SpoonRocket website is showing a notice that it is undergoing maintenance. The food delivery service has not operated for an estimated three days. Image: SpoonRocket

A man who asked not to be named and who has worked as a delivery driver for SpoonRocket on and off since May 2014, was expecting to work this weekend. He said a manager at SpoonRocket told him on a phone call that the company was closing and that he should look for other work. Shortly afterwards, however, he received a text from the same manager saying things had changed and that they might not be closing. The driver said he wondered if the company was preparing an official statement and did not want the news to leak out prematurely.

SpoonRocket was launched in 2013 by UC Berkeley graduates Anson Tsui and Steven Hsiao with a mission to deliver cheap meals to customers rapidly via their smartphones. A typical entrée might cost $6 and be in the customer’s hands in under 10 minutes. Food is delivered by a fleet of contracted drivers whose cars often sport the company’s signature red flag. Drivers keep the food warm in special packaging and then respond to orders via an app and deliver until their supply runs out.

Tsui and Hsiao already had two startups to their names when they started SpoonRocket — Phở Me Now and Munchy Munchy Hippos, both of which came under umbrella company LateNightOption.com.

The Y Combinator-backed SpoonRocket raised $2.5 million in seed money in September 2013, and $11 million in venture capital in May 2014, according to CrunchBase.

In 2014, SpoonRocket expanded from the East Bay to SOMA in San Francisco. It launched in Seattle in February 2015 but shut that service down just four months later in June of that year. It also launched and closed a San Diego operation in 2015.

The food delivery market has bloomed in recent years, making for a highly competitive field. Other companies in the same broad market that operate in the Bay Area include: PostMates, Eat24, Blue Apron, Caviar, Munchery, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon Fresh, Good Eggs and UberEATS. All deliver prepared food, whether from kitchens, restaurants or grocery stores.

According to the driver, SpoonRocket operates different pay structures for its drivers — who are all independent contractors — depending on the time of day. The breakfast shift pays $11/hour not including tips, with a guaranteed minimum of $15, he said. Lunch and dinner on weekdays pays $2/delivery not including tips. And, on the weekend, drivers earn $6 an hour plus $2.25 per delivery, not including tips.

On Monday, speculation was beginning to be voiced on Twitter, with SpoonRocket fans bemoaning the lack of service and wondering what was going on:

Not least because of its competitive pricing, SpoonRocket has proved popular among the local student population. But SpoonRocket was keen to stress that it had expanded its market beyond its core student market. In 2014, it contacted Berkeleyside Nosh to say it had “come a long way since serving pho and burritos to Cal students at 4 a.m.” It introduced organic and paleo dishes, and other demographics did indeed appreciate the service. Road-testing food delivery services last October on Berkeleyside, Heather Flett, co-founder of parents and kids website 510Families, reported that her “favorite service for the fastest food in town” was SpoonRocket.

Berkeleyside will update this developing story as we source more information.