Posted on 08/22/2006 12:44:00 PM PDT by nickcarraway
An American online calendar company has been forced to put itself up for sale on eBay after the internet giant Google moved into its space with a rival product. The demise of Kiko.com, which has gone up for sale with a reserve price of $49,999, has raised questions about the growing threat posed by "Google-creep".
The company, based in Mountain View, California, is increasingly moving into areas only loosely connected with its core search engine product. As well as letting its engineers experiment with their own pet projects, Google has extensive financial resources that it can throw at new business areas.
This has generated several successful spin-offs such as the email service Gmail. The company has also started developing its own desktop applications, though it runs them as web-hosted services. Its own team recently launched a test spreadsheet application and, in March, it bought the word-processing application Writely. While strengthening Google's position against rivals such as Microsoft, the company's development power creates a headache for start-up companies. It only takes Google to experiment in a particular online area to kill off fledgling businesses. That appears to be what happened to Kiko. Google launched a test version of its Google Calendar application in April, and that seems to have rung the death knell for Kiko.
The founders of Kiko, which is one of the growing band of so-called web 2.0 applications, have put the site's domain name, web hosting account and its intellectual property up for sale on eBay in an auction that ends on Saturday.
On the eBay site, the founders, Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, say: "We are selling Kiko because we want to have time to work on other projects as a development team.""
(Excerpt) Read more at business.guardian.co.uk ...
Ping
"Google-creep" aka "competition"
When your product/service is copied, you need to innovate and make a better product/service to beat the copy. Capitalism @ work!
No wait, maybe they should have patented their online calendar so no one else can improve/copy it. /sarc
Danged capitalist competition, some good commie should put an end to this. < / sarcasm >
How DARE they provide a product that people want at a competitive cost!
Resistance is futile.
You will be a-Google-lated.
competition is good. I just wonder how many of the google fans are also the Anti-M$ crowd for doing similiar things.
Evolution. Adapt or die.
I had never heard of kiko.com until now.
What?!!!
An Interent start-up no one ever heard of going out of business?!!!
That's impossible!
It reminds me of AT&T / Bell Labs years ago. Lots of cash to throw around, groundbreaking research, pet projects....and look at them now.
If you go to academia, the whacko libs there who dislike MS seem to love Google and have wet-dreams of being them. Weird. To me, Google 2006 is like MS 1996.
I don't think they will beat Paypal.
I don't think its a good sign when Page and Brin are only selling off Google stock.
Wonder how that Ask Jeeves Calendar app is coming along?
It's not called "Google Creep". It's called "Competition." You may have heard of it. It's part of capitalism.
It's not like an online calendar is not an obvious idea or anything. For pete's sake.
I'm not sure what the Kiko product is or what the Google alternative is. If it's a on-line calendar for your appointments, etc., do you really want Google to store your data? These are the people that seem to want to control all information. Doing a transaction with them, such as their paypay alternative, requires you to give them your social security number, as far as I know. If they aren't storing your calendar information, why use an online version instead of a desktop app or, heaven-forbid, a paper calendar?
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