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Batch is shutting down
- dusing 14y agoWhat did batch do?
- veesahni 14y agohttp://www.crunchbase.com/product/batch http://www.crunchbase.com/product/batch
- sync 14y agoAlso see previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166496 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166496
- hv23 14y agoA fairly well-designed photo sharing app that let users organize their iPhone photos into albums, that could be shared over Twitter and Facebook http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/27/batch-may-be-the-perfect-mobile-photo-sharing-app-no-seriously/ http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/27/batch-may-be-the-perfect-mo...
- soofaloofa 14y agoI had the same reaction. I guess that may be a reason why they are forced to shut down.
- TamDenholm 14y agoThis is because AirBnB acquhired Dailybooth for their iOS team.
- nathancahill 14y agoSolid. I remember the app standing out because of the good UX and design.
- yesimahuman 14y agoSome more details in case you're like me and hadn't heard of Batch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/airbnb-brian-pokorny-batch-dailybooth/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/airbnb-brian-pokorny-batch-...
- dabeeeenster 14y ago8 days to download your content? Classy.
- dangrossman 14y agoGiven over 6 million people are still without power right now, and may be without power still in a week, that might be more of a concern than it'd otherwise be.
- unreal37 14y agoAlso classy is the "It's been real" signoff at the end. Kind of a stain on the startup team to end so abruptly and with so little respect for their users.
- morsch 14y agoI'm not sure this will be a popular sentiment here, but I think we might want some sort of consumer protection laws dealing with things like this. Have a sort of mandatory cooldown period for (paid?) web services after a notification of cessation (or maybe a major restructuring?) of services. Somewhat like an eviction notice. Of course people will argue that regulatory action is unnecessary: if sudden terminations are an issue, people will naturally flock to services which guarantee due notice through terms of service.
- bunderbunder 14y agoAn argument that rests on the assumption that people read and pay attention to the TOS? I would love to see someone make that argument and try to keep a straight face at the same time.
- georgemcbay 14y agoI'm so liberal I'm practically a socialist, but I don't see how you could have this sort of regulation without it having a chilling effect on new services. Generally when an event like this happens, the company behind the service is dissolved, so who is even on the hook for keeping the data available? This is a very real practical problem. I basically never use any SaaS app that isn't at least as established as, say, Basecamp and if enough people think like me you've got a horrible chicken and egg problem. I'm not sure how you fix it, but I don't think it is via laws.
- oxwrist 14y agoWhat would you do with the domain name?
- gm 14y agoDOS batch file programming reference and tutorials? Joke. Anyway, you would do anything with it. It's generic enough.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoThis is one of the worst shutdown announcements I've seen on HN. * no reasons/details * no apologetic tone * short timeframe to move your data Suck it users!
- dusing 14y agoAlso not even one sentence describing what the product was.
- rhizome 14y agoIf you needed to know, you would have already known.
- ericdykstra 14y agoIt kind of makes sense. It's a page targeted at their users, not hacker news commenters. Although it's not a very good page for their users, either.
- danso 14y ago"It's been real" In a situation like this, if you can't say anything professional, then don't say anything at all.
- logn 14y agoI would disagree. What reasons are needed? It's a startup: we know they ran out of money. The rest is probably personal or not worth delving into. Apologetic tone? Save your PR spin. Eight days to migrate? Well, the users probably all have copies of the photos anyway. I liked the note. Short and to the point.
- stretchwithme 14y agoHard to believe that they got $7 million in funding and are not even trying to sell the leftovers on ebay.
- batgaijin 14y agoThat money bought a lot of respect for their users.
- stretchwithme 14y agoRespect is free.
- rdl 14y agoI wish there were a service startups could use when they're setting up new products which will provide a 60-90-180-etc. day transfer period for users if the startup ever shuts down, runs out of money, etc. Maybe integrated with more mundane disaster preparedness for the startup, too -- a datacenter ready for them if theirs is flooded, etc. It would almost make sense for AWS or someone else already providing the infrastructure to do this for a few percent premium on every bill.
- zacharycohn 14y agoUnfortunately selling to "companies that have failed" is a pretty unprofitable market.
- rdl 14y agoThat's why you charge them before they fail. The idea being to make users more willing to trust random startups with data and business service. In the enterprise space, a lot of software contracts include source code escrow, etc.
- ericfrenkiel 14y agoI like the concept but it wouldn't work for the very reason people don't save for a nice funeral. Source code in escrow works because a large customer builds it into the contract; meaning you only get paid if you agree to the terms. Consumer startups work by removing payment friction for their users, which inverts the dynamic. Plus, most consumers aren't as tech-savvy as HN so it wouldn't enter into consideration when they use an application.
- rdl 14y agoYeah, it would have to be somewhat automatic and widespread, sort of like credit card warranty/travel/etc. insurance. It might make sense for b2b apps instead of consumer. b2b apps still aren't usually sophisticated enough to do source code escrow (and what does that really mean for SaaS apps), but a business would still be hurt if someone like Salesforce disappeared (or even a smaller product like a CRM gmail extension or whatever, if your workflow is built around it.) Also, developers are customers of sites with APIs, so some kind of promise that an API will remain available, non-throttled, etc. would be good incentive to adopt it.
- robryan 14y agoThe app filled a niche that no one really needed. It was well designed and worked well, the winners in the photos space are providing more than a sharing mechanism though. They are either attaching it to the rest of your social media (Facebook) or providing new ways to take pictures (Instagram) which even there has beat hipstamatic because they have built social around that and developed their own network culture.
- ceol 14y agoIt also looks like a considerable number of people on HN— myself included— had never heard of it. I mean, it appears the link to their site had never been submitted before.
- robryan 14y agoThere has definitely been an article submitted about batch before. Wouldn't really say they launched to a massive reception though.
- muratmutlu 14y agoI wonder how a app like this got through $7 million of funding or do you think they would be giving some back after deciding to shut down?
- waterside81 14y agoAlmost a year to the day: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/130875076110323712 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/130875076110323712
- qq66 14y agoI don't use a lot of new consumer web apps for this reason (I did use Batch just to test, but didn't start using it heavily because I was afraid of something like this happening). One way of reassuring me in using a product like this would be to have something in the app's settings menu that allows me to point to a different production server, and a commitment in the legal Terms of Service that in the event that the product is shut down, that the server-side code will be open-sourced.