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Cue is Shutting Down
- citricsquid 13y agoFormerly Greplin. For those that don't know what it/they did: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cue http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cue http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-what-you-want-before-you-do.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-... (July 2013)
- stargate87 13y agoThanks for this - I has no idea it was the same team. It's a shame, but that smart of a team is probably doing it for the right reasons.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DanielRibeiro 13y agoThey had tons of Hacker News front pages too: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=greplin&sortby=points+desc https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=grepli... And a promising TC article earlier this year: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/too-much-email-please-stop-now/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/too-much-email-please-stop-...
- joeblau 13y agoThanks, there are so many startups, that I can't keep track of all of them. Once they die, it's like "we're dead" and I'm thinking "...Well what did you do in the first place again?"
- user-id 13y agoWow, I really thought their initial value proposition (originally as Greplin) was of great utility.
- mintplant 13y agoYeah, I was kicking myself for not have thought of it when I first heard of them. Sad to see the company go out like this.
- saumil07 13y agoThis is a real bummer - our company's first office was right next to Greplin and they were amazingly smart and quite nice. Good luck to the team.
- olegp 13y agoFor those of you that will miss Cue and Greplin, there is hope. We are about to release our cloud search feature at StartHQ. Here's a screencast - search is towards the end: https://www.dropbox.com/s/04rrwxuuvkzpyrp/starthq.mp4 https://www.dropbox.com/s/04rrwxuuvkzpyrp/starthq.mp4 You can sign up here: https://starthq.com https://starthq.com Please use the Feedback form to let us know which services you'd like us to support and we will prioritize them for launch. PS. For a bit of background on us, here's a blog post that was on the front page of HN on Monday http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/09/30/starthq-capitalizes-on-googles-change-of-the-new-tab-page http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/09/30/starthq-capitalizes-... PPS. Sad to see Greplin go, loved the service but was too afraid to give access to my data at all times, so ended up building our federated search which doesn't require that. Would be very interested to know more about what happened.
- miguelrochefort 13y agoThis has nothing to do with Cue/Greplin.
- olegp 13y agoDid you watch the screencast to the end? i ran a search and got personalized results from all my web apps like Gmail and AngelList. How is this not like Greplin?
- mbreese 13y agoI know you're just trying to promote your company, but it feels a little like handing out business cards at a funeral. Sure, you can do it, but it seems little tacky. This post is still in the mourning phase. It will probably move on to the post-mortem, what is a replacement for it phase tomorrow or Friday.
- olegp 13y agoSo it did come across as dancing one Greplin's grave - thank you for clarifying that. I'm sorry. Next time I'll refrain from posting comments when I've only had two hours of sleep the night before.
- orbitur 13y agoThere were Cue job postings here on HN close to a month ago. :/
- ratsimihah 13y agoAnd these were really attractive.
- Stately 13y agoI applied to one... their Jam Room looked amazing.
- ratsimihah 13y agoSo they've actually been acquired. I guess they didn't just look amazing.
- agibsonccc 13y agoThat's a shame, very cool concept. I wish them all the best. What was their actual business model though? Anyone know?
- rmrfrmrf 13y agoFreemium. You could get basic functionality for free, but certain tasks would cost money. I seem to remember thinking that the balance between what was free and what was paid was a bit off.
- agibsonccc 13y agoI see now. So they were trying to go off of in app purchases? That's not a bad way to do it. I think the problem is monetizing a service like that WITH competitors like google now is just a hard problem in general. I could see where it would be a good idea if they had some good lockin. It was definitely worth an attempt.
- element_4 13y agoIs this the company that had that cool terminal adventure programming challenge?
- snewman 13y agoYes they were, and yes it was cool. Seems to be down now though -- part of the rather sudden Cue-shaped hole in the Internet.
- rparet 13y agoah, how unfortunate! as a user, would love to see some / all of their stuff become open sourced, if possible.
- matthewbaker 13y agoWas sad to see what happened to Cue. It's another example of a great idea with terrible timing. How do you compete when the biggest players in the game join the race? Cheers guys, there was obvious talent on your team! Interested to see what comes next...
- flashblu 13y agoSad to hear, as I had discovered them recently and was interested in the problems they were tackling. I guess this isn't a complete surprise, with their Twitter account looking inactive as of late.
- flashblu 13y agoWow, not such a sad ending after all. It looks like they got acquired by Apple for between $40 million and $60 million; no wonder their shut down message on their website didn't state that they ran out of money or something. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-likely-by-apple-to-compete-with-google-now/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-l...
- oldgregg 13y agoWhy?
- miguelrochefort 13y agoWhy? They were in my top 5 favorite startups. Were they killed by Siri and Google Now?
- arthurcolle 13y agoWhy can't they open source their code?
- yesplorer 13y agoI'm curious. did they say they can't?
- dougaitken 13y agohttps://github.com/Cue https://github.com/Cue
- TinyBig 13y agoWow, sad to hear this. They had an outstanding service. Until I read the message on their homepage, I never realized they had a premium service!
- nathancahill 13y agoMuch sadness. Greplin was an amazing idea, but the execution was a little off for them to reach mass adoption (although I think it was ideal for a niche group of people). I think they tried to change that with their pivot to Cue, but obviously it was not successful. I'll certainly remember their programming adventure challenge fondly. I hope they at least open source that, if they can't open source other parts of their software for whatever reason.
- mmayberry 13y agoDid Cue every receive any buyout / exit options?
- gojomo 13y agoTheir initial product was impressive and useful. Hope we get more information about what went wrong, and that the team lands somewhere good.
- defen 13y agoMaybe they got an NSL - sudden shutdown, all data deleted...
- OmleteDuFromage 13y agoThat was my first thought as well.
- dingdingdang 13y agoNSL?
- adcuz 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter
- joshstrange 13y agoI thought that as well when I first read what they posted. Of course even with the NSA revelations I would have expected them to delete the data right away so maybe I am just reading too much into it.
- madisonmay 13y agoI'd be very interested in learning why Cue is calling it quits -- I really loved the concept behind their service. Has anyone managed to find their contact information?
- vingt-2 13y agoCuedown.com you mean ?
- dquail 13y agoCue (shutdown), Don.na (pivoted), Tempo, Sunrise, Google Now, others. Fascinating space with a lot of competition. But has any of these products gotten close to a revenue model?
- canistr 13y agoThrow in some of the mail clients and other apps like Sparrow, Mailbox, and Fantastical and from the outside, it seems more like acqui-hires to absorb the product and team into a bigger company is the way to go.
- priley 13y agoWe have essentially the same functionality coming out soon. Register at ark.com
- zmitri 13y agoInterested to know what you think about them shutting down then. Seems like they were quite far along... Any insight on what changed their mind or what you will do differently?
- ballard 13y agoIt's sad, I remember greplin had a lot of things going for them. In general re: shutdowns: If the economics aren't red ink or a white elephant, why not find a buyer or merge with a frenemy instead of throwing away value and customers? Most shutdowns appear to me like putting 30 packs of $100 bills on a table, pouring gasoline over them and throwing a lit match while rationalizing "Everybody does it, so it's okay. Look at 'em go!" For apps, building things that cost basically nothing[0] to run and letting them have sufficient time to grow on their own. Rinse. Lather. Repeat faster. [0] auto-scaling & revenue covering costs. -- "A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon
- imdsm 13y agoA man called Sir Bacon, if we can't follow him, who can we follow?
- mseebach 13y agoMaybe the product never fulfilled the promise of being "the other half of web search" (from a TechCrunch mention 3 years ago) and they realised it was never going to. Maybe they found that investors and potential buyers agreed. Maybe, more importantly, they found that customers agreed - we have no idea what their revenue numbers were. Maybe they found a buyer that would take over the project for a small sum, but required the founders/key staff to sign long employment contracts - which, in the face of the above realisation is a pretty unattractive prospect. Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum. Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.
- MaysonL 13y agoThen again, it has been reported that Apple bought them.
- jdross 13y agoFrom what I can tell, and what I've heard from friends of the company, they shut down Cue the product, not the company. The team is likely working on a new product.
- treskot 13y agoThey would have done a pivot if they were indeed working on a new product. Like they did with Greplin.
- treskot 13y agoTechCrunch posted this update: We are hearing from additional sources that they did raise that extra funding, so this is looking like a product pivot or a sale rather than a full shutdown of the company. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cue-greplin/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cue-greplin/
- afontaine 13y agoI think this is definitely a pivot, judging by the founder's YC experience (http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/03/05/greplin-founder-daniel-gross-on-his-amazing-story-behind-building-the-company-interview/ http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/03/05/greplin-founde...). They're very smart, I'm sure whatever they build next will be even better.
- OoTheNigerian 13y agoQuite unfortunate. I liked Greplin and it really helped me several times to find 'missing' tweets and FB posts. When they pivoted and changed the name, the search part became below par. So I stopped using it entirely. I do not know why they changed the previously good generic name and the original focus. I am sure they probably had more info than I do. As we create more content scattered all over, personal search is becoming more useful. I hope something good comes again. Best of luck to the team on what ever they do next.
- sudomal 13y agoIt would be nice when a company is shuttered or acquired for it to briefly state what it did in the announcement. I saw one business last night that had been acquired by Google with no mention of its purpose.
- bjonathan 13y agoI was using their product, I paid for their product and they shut it down without notice ? Classy move !
- joeblau 13y agoI find it weird that this company would be shutting down just as everyone is raving about Shel and Roberts book: Age Of Context. I might reach out to the guys at cue and see what they noticed that is leading them to shutdown/pivot to a new business.
- joshdance 13y agoI used Greplin quite a few times to find where I had heard something or seen a link. It was useful in that respect. But not useful enough to pay for. I never saw much of a monetization model going for them.
- romeonova 13y agoIs this the same Cue that Apple bought? http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/why-did-apple-buy-cue-because-google-now-eats-siris-lunch/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/why-did-apple-buy-cue-becau...
- aditij 13y agoYes, I believe so.